Profiles

'Do you want to know how to make an egg stand up?' R Ian Lloyd paused for effect, 'You lick the bottom of the egg and then you put it into some salt or sugar. Because the little crystals are square, when you put it down and blow them away, it will prop up.'


Evzone Guard at the Parliament Buliding, Athens, Greece

To the casual observer, getting an egg to stand on end may not have an immediately obvious purpose, but for generations of Rochester Institute of Technology photography students, Lloyd's little parlour trick would have been very useful indeed. Like every one of his fellow first year RIT classmates, the young Lloyd had to tackle the apparently straightforward task of photographing an egg. The challenge was to make a better egg picture than the other 199 students given the same task. Getting it to stand on end gave him the edge.

In a metaphorical sense, much of Lloyd's subsequent photographic career has entailed finding ways to make eggs stand on end.

'I think you do your best work when you're given a very tight structure', he remarked. 'If someone says, "go shoot Sydney...",  it's pretty open and pretty loose. But if someone says, shoot the islands of Sydney, then you're narrowing down and you're thinking, within this confine, I can do something creative here. I can actually tell a story and tell it in a really interesting way. I have to use light, I have to use the composition. I have to show peak moments, I have to show that moment in time with the subject and everything, but I'm also confined and not just sort of wandering around saying, "let's come up with an idea".

'The joy is not just finding a new subject,' he explained. 'It's easy finding a new subject. If someone says, okay here's a place you haven't been to, you're always excited. But the real skill, craft and professionalism in being a photographer is going to a place you know only too well and coming up with a new view. I love doing that.'

When we caught up at his Sydney home for this interview Lloyd had just returned from Adelaide. He'd been in the City of Churches as part of the promotional tour for his latest big project - a sumptuously produced volume entitled Studio: Australian Painters on the Nature of Creativity. To say he's a busy man is something of an understatement.

The Studio book, companion DVD and website have been five years in the making - and there is another year of associated exhibitions and talks still to come. At the same time, the photo library and publishing business Canadian-born Lloyd established in Singapore during the early '80s still requires his frequent attention. And, just to keep things interesting, his diary bulges with photographic assignments from the likes of National Geographic, Fortune and Time magazines. Indeed, a few weeks after chatting to Photo Review, Lloyd was off on photographic assignments in Spain, Morocco and the tiny pacific island nation of Niue.

As a cursory glance over his CV reveals, Lloyd's life has been like this for the last 30 years. Although he first moved to Australia in 1975, from the early 1980s to 2002, he operated primarily out of Singapore. His commission work took him all over Southeast Asia on editorial, corporate and book assignments. During that time, his work appeared in some 36 books (a number of which his company also published) and in numerous articles and exhibitions.

Lloyd clearly has an artist's eye for colour and composition. But the world is full of people with similar talents and yet there aren't too many who approach his sustained output of beautiful imagery. A great believer in the famous adage 'the more I practice, the luckier I get', Lloyd's formula for success can just about be reduced to two bullet points: be prepared; and know what you want to say.

For Lloyd, being prepared goes well beyond ensuring the batteries are charged and that there plenty of extra memory cards in the camera bag. It starts with being up to speed about the milieu you'll be working in. Years of living in the region means that whether he's photographing Buddhist monks or kick boxers in Thailand, Lloyd already knows the culture. He knows when a moment is both photographically and culturally significant. 'It's something that I really try to stress to young photographers,' said Lloyd. 'You're not going to pull the brilliant photograph out of the air without understanding what's going on.'

'I do a lot of research before I go,' Lloyd explained, 'I look at a lot of photography, I look at what's been done before. There's no point reinventing the wheel. I don't believe in that. I want to say "Oh yes, if somebody did that, that's great. Now I have to go beyond that".' By the time he arrives at a new location, Lloyd has done his research and he knows to a significant extent what he's after. He used a recent assignment in Samoa to illustrate the point:

'There are certain key elements in a story that you have to tell and one of the things about Samoa is tattooing - and the fact that the people are big. You want to sometimes get two or three elements into a picture to say something about what's going on.'

'I ended up getting a very big guy, a very loving guy. He had tattoos, but he wasn't Mr Athletic. He wasn't the ultimate model. I started talking to him and asked, "Do you have a family?" Yes, he had a son, so I said, "why don't you just bring your son?"' As Lloyd tells it, he told the man to come back around sunset. The idea was that by shooting in late afternoon, he would be able to control the light to ensure that the tattoos would be captured to maximum advantage.

'He came out a bit late, so we were really just past sunset.' But, said the well-prepared Lloyd, 'I'm working with a light sphere - which has a beautiful soft quality - and I've got someone on one side holding this very small Canon flash. It's mimicking a big studio setup and doing it quite well actually. There's this huge man with his hand down, holding his little boy who's a miniature version of his father. And there's all these tattoos. I do a lot of planning to make myself have happy accidents.'


Samoan father and son at the beach, Upolu, Samoa.

Knowing what you want to say
'You can bamboozle people with interesting cultural things', said Lloyd, 'with painted faces, unusual light, or strong colours and all the other sorts of things photographers use to say, "isn't this interesting?" But we live in a media-saturated world, and you have to ask "yes, but what are you trying to say here? What's going on here? Is there any statement about what you're seeing?" Whether it be with travel, or art, or advertising, I think that the clear idea is often lacking.'

The paucity of clear ideas, Lloyd observed, is all too common in photography. 'I run a photo library, I work with thousands of photographers and a lot of it I just look at and think "it's boring". When I look at it, my test is do I say, "wow, that's fabulous. I wish I had either done or thought of that." Which goes to another point; it's the thought behind the image. Was this a good idea? Did the person understand it? It's not only the practical work, but what is being said in this image. And a lot of imagery today can be decorative, but nothing is being said.'

'You have a duty as a photographer to take a picture that is so arresting, that says enough about what is going on in the subject matter, that leads people into either reading more or giving you an idea of what's going on.'

Lloyd also notes that changes in technology have made it all the more important for photographers to strive for images that embody a coherent idea. 'I think it's quite evident now with digital, that two things have happened: one is that a lot of photographers who made a living because they were, perhaps, able to filter for fluorescent lighting and could do indoor pictures where everyone else couldn't, have found themselves out of a job because everybody can accomplish all the technical things and do it to the highest level. We're all able to buy a Canon 1DS MkIII and so the technical bar has really been lowered. The other thing that's happened of course is that people take lots and lots of pictures but don't save them. They're done on mobile phone cameras, or they're done on small point-and-shoot cameras. They don't make prints from them. So it's all a bit ephemeral.'

While preparation and a clear concept are essential to the way he works, Lloyd in a sense is simply preparing the ground for serendipity. 'Often, strangely enough, you're not fully aware of what the idea is when you take the picture', he said. 'But, because you've had the background understanding, it's already there. So when you see it, you recognise it. You're not able to put it into words (if you were, you'd be a writer), but you're able to seize it and say, "That's it. And now I must take this or get this down on paper or I must paint it, because this is what I'm feeling".'

Thanks to the leveling effect of the technology and the vast abundance of imagery, photographers might be forgiven for thinking that their chosen profession is under pressure as never before. But Lloyd disagrees. 'I think at the end of the day, photographers really need to re-orient themselves and say, "well in actual fact, nothing has really happened". I think a lot of people feel threatened by this - certainly professional photographers - but nothing's really happened. Everybody's always had cameras. Everybody can go and buy paint and paint brushes, but people with skills, and talent, and ideas to communicate, are few and far between. And I think that has not changed, and won't change.'

See Photo Review magazine Issue 34 for the print edition of this profile which includes additional images.

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