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September 06, 2007
[ BEYOND REASONABLE DROUGHT ]
Whip out your copy of John Winston Howard–the biography and note the picture on the cover. Shot from below, it is a picture of a grave and wise prime minister. It is has been used as a Bulletin cover twice, once with the caption “Happy, John” and once “Not happy, John”.
The picture is the work of photographer Andrew Chapman and it appears again in his new book Campaign, a collection of images from political events over the past 36 years. The earliest photo in the book is from a Vietnam Moratorium rally in 1971 and the most recent was taken in July this year.
Campaign is Andrew Chapman’s second book. His first, The Shearers, is a collection of superbly rich black and white photographs taken in shearing sheds, also over a 30 year period.
The striking photo of the prime minister is reproduced in Campaign in monochrome because Chapman prefers black and white to colour. He says: “Black and white captures the essence of the photographic image. Colour is just photography with makeup on, most of the time.”
He says that he comes from the tradition of the darkroom where you get to know black and white materials and have only limited ability to “shape” colour. These days, using a Canon 5D digital camera, he shoots in colour but still prefers to convert the image to black and white in Photoshop, using the simplest of conversion methods – he desaturates the colour and then adjusts the tonality of the image. He prints on an Epson A3+ printer.
He says: “A black and white image tells you exactly what’s going on. It leaves no room for doubt.”
Right now Chapman is coordinating a nation-wide project, Beyond reasonable drought, involving about 80 professional photographers, to document the drought and the state of our water supplies. His group is called MAP – Many Australian Photographers – and the brief is to find and capture the images that don’t fit the prescription for a page one newspaper picture but are essential to documenting all aspects of the phenomenon of drought.
The paradox of making beautiful images from misery and death doesn’t worry him. “A couple of years back I was commissioned by Time to do a story on heroin dealers. I was in the back of a car with a couple of desperate addicts injecting into their necks. The light was right. Everything was perfect. I wasn’t forcing them. There was no ethical dilemma, it just happened and, for me, it’s a beautiful image. I guess it’s up to other people to judge.”
Chapman coordinated three previous group projects, The Ararat project, Making Hay (the town, not the straw) and Snapping St Arnaud. The photographers spent time in each town shooting whatever showed the essence of life in the place. He says: “The detail of day to day life needs recording so that people can look back and see what it was really like.” He credits the influence of the famous US Farm Security Administration photographic record of the dust bowl years of the 1930s on his early development as a photographer.
(Information about Campaign and The Shearers and other photographs is at www.bigcheez.com.au.)
Posted by terry at September 6, 2007 02:12 AM
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