The article the following extract is from was originally written for a photography magazine, and it is interesting to re-read it in the light of the present day.
Some aspects of professional photography in Western Australia have changed since then, and some have remained the same. There is the remains of a hierarchy based on the amount of equipment you own, but it is no longer quite as rigid.
One of the most successful from then is reportedly teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. The others still seem to be at each other’s
throats, especially when seen at public gatherings. The many photographers who do not manage to break into the system continue to leave, and in some cases build stellar careers in New York and London.
And some of the best photojournalists I have come across turn out to be former Western Australians, as I discovered at the inaugural FotoFreo photography festival earlier this year when a number of them flew in for the occasion. That’s remarkable, given how there are no venues for this kind of photography in this state. So where did the incentive come from, I wonder?
Richard Avedon: A Flower in the Desert
I first encountered Richard Avedon’s photography in a tiny bookshop in the middle of nowhere, deep in the uttermost west.
It was 1976. I had started in photography several years prior having neither seen books of photographs nor shows of them, and stumbling across Avedon’s book Portraits had a profound effect. It was as if I had discovered an alien flower in the middle of the desert.
This was at a time when the only live photographers I knew were hopelessly in love with their motor-driven Hasselblads, giant Strobe flash packs, expedition-equipped Land Rovers and massive studios with all-white psyche walls as they misnamed them more accurately than they realised.
Their obsession was for photographic technology and rarely the photographs themselves, though each secretly harboured a copy of South African erotic photographer Sam Haskins’ book Cowboy Kate and spoke of him with a reverence more appropriate to God.
“… and massive studios
with all-white psyche walls
as they misnamed them more accurately
than they realised.”
Until Avedon, photography as a life among people and not just technology, based on making photographs as the expression of personal experience, seemed like rank self-delusion. Yet, here was an artist at the heart of America’s corporate world, knowing all there was to know of his medium, and with no shortage of funds to use in expressing a vision so uncompromising as to border on the brutal.
The photographers of my early experience subscribed to either the romantic myth of the artist starving in a garret but creating masterpieces out of nothing, or the hero of advertising reaping a fortune out of blandly uncreative pack shots. Avedon showed up both clichés as the fabrications they clearly were. [...]
12:20:47 PM 
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