A Beer in the Hand

“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” but a beer in Justin’s hand is nothing unusual. I found this memento of his 2005 birthday on a roll of film I processed today (yes, yes, a year-and-a-half later). While I like to think my blog is a little more high-brow than happy snaps of my husband, I think this picture will please my mother-in-law. Speaking of birthdays, mine is coming up soon and Ma is in charge of the birthday present purse-strings….

Cool Hand Luke: Shooting Everyday Life

Canberra-based photographer Luke Wong grew up in a migrant family, but with a rural twist — his family runs a Chinese restaurant in Orange, a regional city about three-hours drive north of Canberra. In keeping with what he calls “rather clichéd” photographic tradition, Luke started taking pictures at the start of high school when a relative gave him a camera. He began with portraiture, bugging his friends to pose, but the apparent lack of job opportunities deterred thoughts of becoming a professional photographer. Ironically, he chose an even less employable career — television!

Luke thinks of photography as a hobby, but his images are anything but amateur. I’m a big fan of his work, especially when he uses a wide-angle lens and front-on approach. While bucking broncs sprayed our cameras with dust at the recent Yass Show and Rodeo, I reminded Luke that he’d promised me a blog profile….

What’s your approach to photography?
When I was in high school, I read a quote that basically said, "The photographs you don't take are the ones that end up haunting you", which sums up my approach now. I used to take very few photographs of my family and home life, but now I pull my camera out every time I go back home to capture scenes that were mundane in the past, but are now foreign and exotic.

What about photography really gets you going?
In today's media overloaded culture, I think photography’s brevity is a powerful advantage in getting a message across.

What projects are you working on?
I’ve started a series on the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. It’s easy for locals to turn a blind eye to the Embassy because we drive past it all the time — it’s just another familiar element in the political and physical landscape. I’m interested in what the residents have to say and why they’re so committed. Our views are not necessarily the same, but I’m eager to hear their stories and truthfully capture what’s happening.

I’m also on the last leg of processing film for a project about a couple, Graham and Rosie, who are sheep farmers in the south-west of New South Wales. I’m exploring how two people cope with laborious work in a relatively isolated environment, with only each other for emotional support. I feel the series is unfinished, but my experience with Graham and Rosie has been invaluable.

What's your favourite camera and why?
Definitely my little rangefinder camera. It's not the world’s most renowned brand, but I love its compact size.

How has photography changed your life?
Photography gives me an insight into how other people conduct their lives — how they relate to others and use their time. It also forces me to venture into places I normally wouldn't visit and to talk to complete strangers, which has broadened my worldview and gets me questioning my existing attitudes.

See Luke’s work on his blog, Cool Hand Luke, at www.luke.lumanation.com.

Sweat, Sacrifice and Fresh-Faced Decency

My most recent article for the National Library of Australia News (the library's monthly magazine) has been published in the March 2007 edition. Entitled "Sweat, Sacrifice and Fresh-Faced Decency: The Drouin Collection", the piece explores representations of rural Australian life through 88 photographs taken of the small Victorian community of Drouin. Award-winning war photographer Jim Fitzpatrick snapped the collection for the government in 1944, which used them as part of an international propaganda campaign during World War II. Fitzpatrick's take on country life is refreshingly positive — he shows an energic, intelligent and happy community.

You can view the story online at www.nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/2007/mar07/mar07news.html.

My previous article on former Australian prime minister Andrew Fisher, "From Pit Boy to Prime Minister: Andrew Fisher", was published in the June 2006 edition and can be viewed online at www.nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/2006/jun06/jun06news.html.

Domestic Goddess

I have a junk-collecting gene, which makes foraging for found still-life irresistible. On a March 2004 Canberra Photographic Society excursion to the Lachlan Valley in New South Wales, my friend Marion and I stumbled on two disheveled buildings that begged for a theme of domestic goddess gone wrong.

We found Finn’s Old Store on Gaskill Street in Canowindra (pronounced k-noun-dra). Once a general store run by TJ Finn, the building is now an “antique shop” — a labyrinth of dust and long-forgotten kitchenware, workshop tools and collectible enamel signs. I felt more like an archeologist than a customer when I discovered a naked female mannequin in a corner, surrounded by canisters of buttons and shelves of ceramic urns.

Ironically, a real life domestic goddess emerged next door at Finn’s Old Store Coffee Shop, where the owner’s home-made melting moments dissolved in our mouths with a zing of passionfruit.

In Gooloogong, we snuck through the unlocked door of what seemed to be a derelict rural supply store. Two pianos languished in wood shavings in the showroom, while a vacuum-cleaner sat beside a print of a female saint in the wreckage of the living quarters.

I’m tempted to call the resulting images kitsch, but the subjects are only bad taste in the context of their neglect — a vacuum cleaner that cannot possibly clean up the mountains of rubble before it, a saint with no-one to watch over and a pretend woman who, made of fibreglass and without limbs and a head, can never use the symbols of domesticity around her.

Instead, there’s a sadness in the dereliction of the images. Women and domesticity seem to exist in a disintegrated past that now seems overwhelmingly futile and absurd.

Buy Me Gold

Racehorses are a better investment than gold, if you believe the owners and trainers at the Yass Picnic Race Club. While other girls donned plumed hats and one plucky man wore a frilly maid’s outfit for the 106th annual race meeting, I headed to the stables in search of photographic treasure.

All trainers swear their horses will romp into the winner’s circle, I learned, which makes getting betting tips straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, somewhat fraught. But someone must inevitably win and in Race 1, the Maiden Plate, it was almost Buy Me Gold, trained by Joe Cleary of Queanbeyan. Above, Buy Me Gold is tacked up with a tiny racing pad and mask, looking like an equine super hero, on the way to a respectable second place. I took this image with a plastic point-n-shoot Pix Panorama.

After a day at the races, I’ve decided the adage about never working with children and animals is only half true. There’s a reason attention-seekers are called “show ponies” — horses simply can’t resist gazing directly into the camera, making them fun and alluring subjects.