Profiles

From the Archive: Photo Review Dec/Jan 2003:

Mark Rogers' career began with an extended period of itinerant work and travel around Australia and Europe. He picked fruit, took jobs on building sites and in mines and worked on prawnboats and in canefields. Along the way he developed an interest in the dramatic arts in general and acting in particular.


Richie Benaud - FHM Magazine

Through it all, photography was a constant. "From my teens I'd always taken pictures as I travelled," he says. "I'm self-taught, I never studied photography." After a year living in France, he returned to Sydney and over the next few years worked as an actor, director, cabaret and performance artist, while shooting short films and music clips.

"Eventually, I got sick of living on arts grants and the dole, of being dependent on bureaucrats. I wanted to live in Europe again, so I moved to Barcelona. Photography offered artistic and commercial rewards, so I made a pragmatic career choice. I had a Nikon and a few lenses and I just started shooting things I wanted to see - live music and dance and theatre. I'd sell the shots to companies. I'd do portraits of actors and models' portfolios. I made friends with a German fashion photographer there who shot fashion, and I found myself assisting him while building my career. And that's how I learned about studio work and shooting fashion."

Along the way, he also assisted Annie Leibowitz when she was in Spain shooting for American Express.

After five years in Europe working mainly in fashion photography, Mark and his partner returned to Australia so that she could study post-graduate film in Melbourne. Rogers, by now an accomplished photographer, quickly found work shooting fashion and portraiture. These days he is based in Sydney and his commercial work is divided almost equally between portraiture and film stills photography. Along the way he also finds time to shoot a few landscapes and to work pro bono on "for the love of it" projects such as a book on asylum seekers in Australia's detention centres.

"Basically, I'm a people photographer," says Rogers, but he adds, "Australia is such a small market that you have to be flexible. And I really enjoy the flexibility going between the different demands of the different genera. I love shooting people, whether it is for advertising, celebrity portraits or film stills."

With his background in the dramatic arts, Rogers is in some ways the ideal film stills photographer. He understands the special, almost familial culture of a film crew and he knows his place in it. "The bottom line is that on a film set, I'm the only one who's not there contributing to getting the film in the can," he notes. "In that sense I am slowing down the film-making. At the same time, everyone knows you're part of the crew, of the team."

Apart from anything else, being part of the team means working unobtrusively, very quickly and decisively. "I've got to get the guts of the performance. I shoot the rehearsal because after the scene there may not be time for a setup. But if it's an important scene, I try to get the setup. It may be thirty seconds to two minutes and then the first assistant director will get very itchy feet. I get in - and out. I know my way around a set and they know that I do, and that I'll be as quick as I can. You have to take command with the actors and direct them very clearly so that they give you the juice of the performance and they're not doing it half-heartedly or joking around."

"I love the fact that performance is driven by ideas and emotions - humans doing things. Drama is conflict and that's really vital stuff to be around, to be recording, to get the decisive moment. I've got to tell a story in a still [what the director can say] in a whole scene which has dialogue and movement. You have to get the frame. It's the same with anything live or ongoing, you don't really know what exactly you've got until you get the film back. I find that quite exciting."

As the stills photographer, Rogers does not see it as his role to emulate the framing decisions of the director and cinematographer. "I work very freely," he says. "I don't even use the same filters and I often don't use the same stock. Nor the same angles. I'm kind of interpreting the film as well, in a sense." And while this can occasionally mean making a request to the gaffer for a change to light levels or to the makeup people for a touch-up on an actor resting between takes, Rogers is very careful to ensure he reciprocates.

"Sometimes at the end of the day, I'll help them pack the equipment and load the truck. There's a give and take because it's the whole way a crew works. And that's one thing I like about doing film stills. Your're part of a family for a month or six weeks. Whereas my other [commercial] assignments may go for a week at most or more often two or three days or even half a day. Then you get the team together and you're The Man. You're the director, and the director of photography, making the shots, making the calls, giving final approval for makeup or whatever, and lighting it. I suppose my ego needs both!"

With portraiture, commercial work and film stills photography taking up much of his time, Rogers says that he doesn't shoot as many landscapes as he'd like. "The power for me in landscapes is that I/the viewer is the only human presence. It's a real contrast to my peopled dramatic work."

Landscape work also provides a kind of respite. "The other thing about shooting landscape is [that I do it] when I get away from my ‘normal' ongoing life and the business."


The white house

Asked why so few of his landscapes contain people, he responds, "I'm uncomfortable shooting people who haven't agreed to it. I couldn't do photojournalism or papparazzi, or travel in the third world just sort of ‘taking' pictures," he says, emphasising the implication of theft: "It feels like you are taking something when taking those kind of photos."

Although, he adds, "some of those photos are incredibly useful for propaganda or to get money [for a cause]."

Just as his film stills often run as close to portraiture as they do to story- telling, so Rogers' portraits frequently have something of a theatrical or dramatic flavour. "A portrait is contrived," he says. "The challenge is to breathe life into a setup through direction, through rapport, through establishing an atmosphere, an understanding and working together with a subject."

As he photographs, he seeks to establish a rhythm in which he and the portrait sitters are both participants, both dancers, both almost performers. He aims to make the subject the protagonist. "I want them to be able to stop, and look away. I don't want them to be like a rabbit caught in the headlights."

As a film stills photographer, a commercial portraitist, a lover of the performing arts, a teacher (he has conducted a number of specialist courses for the Australian Centre for Photography) and a man with deeply held views on social justice issues, it isn't always a simple matter to contend with all the disparate strands. "I see my work as an ongoing thing. The struggle to find meaning in my work is to find the connection between the jobs I'm asked to do and all the other parts of my self. But I think that's a struggle for everyone.

"David Bailey said that you're only as good as your last photograph," he says. "You have to be constantly on the ball and that's what keeps it interesting. That's why I haven't lost my enthusiasm," he adds.

"I don't have an intellectual approach to shooting. A lot of photography is problem-solving and getting conditions as perfect as possible for the next frame and working intuitively."

To see more of Mark Rogers' work or to contact him, visit his website at www.mrogersphoto.com or view photos from a recent show at www.bias.net/byronmappgallery.

Mark has also contributed to the Children Out of Detention site, www.chilout.org . He can be booked through his agent, Ruzenka Pavlik at www.eyemanagement.com.au.


See Photo Review magazine Issue 8 for the print edition of this profile which includes additional images.

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