Profiles

Anthony Browell's darkroom looks fairly conventional on the 'wet' side; enlargers, easels, trays, sink, boxes of photo paper and bottles of chemicals occupy the small and tidy space where all his developing and printing happens. But the 'dry' side could as easily belong to a woodworker as a professional photographer. Row upon row of beautiful carpentry tools hang on the wall adjacent to the door into the darkroom proper. Overhead, a laundry line is bowed slightly from the ceiling by the dozen or so 10 x 8-inch black and white negatives from his latest photographic foray.

Swirl

In his hands is one of the cameras from which those negatives may well have come. But it doesn't look like a camera at all. Instead, it appears to be a rather solidly crafted plywood box, roughly the size of a couple of fat telephone books. It's a bit scuffed and nicked, there's a heavy tripod mounting plate on the base, and it has a handle made from a short length of  braided steel hose of the sort plumbers use behind the scenes in your bathroom.

The handle is the highest tech part of this exceedingly low tech camera. 'All my cameras,' says Browell, 'are just wooden boxes. But they are very strong because I use them on beaches and rocks and parks.' The only moving parts on his sturdy box are four eccentric cams on the back. Their job is to keep the big 10x8 film holder in place. Around front is a slightly recessed panel, in the middle of which is fixed a small piece of sheet metal which has a single, very tiny hole at its centre. The box is of course a pinhole camera, and this particular wrinkle on the standard design allows Browell to change the focal length simply by flipping the front panel around.

Astonishingly, Browell made his first pinhole camera only a few years ago. He belongs to the group of photographers that calls itself Works in Process and which numbers among it members none other than Tim Hixson, whose work is also featured in this issue. 'Somebody set a project on pinhole cameras,' says Browell, 'and I'd never done a pinhole camera. I'd never made one at school - unlike everyone else. When I made it, I couldn't believe it. That was three-and-half years ago now. It changed my photographic life completely.'

This is all the more remarkable because Browell's photographic life began at such an early age. 'My father was a keen amateur photographer', says Browell. So as a boy he had ample opportunity to make and process his own pictures. At 16 he went to Brighton Art College and then on to Ealing School of Photography in London, where he did another year before leaving to take a job as an assistant. 'This was about 1961 in London and that's when I really started learning stuff. When you work for other photographers is when you actually learn photography.'

Dark Frazer

Before long, he was working as a freelance photographer, mainly shooting for the London Times' various supplements. It was a heady era and he could regularly get two or three pictures published a week. At 12 guineas a shot, it was more than enough to get by. In 1967, his family upped stakes and emigrated to Adelaide. And, after visiting them, he realised that he could make a living with his camera in Sydney, so he too emigrated in 1970. He quickly found work in the advertising and fashion industry where he worked for the likes of Sunbeam, Qantas, POL and Vogue.

After 10 years, he says, 'I gave myself a break and went away and built a paddle steamer on the River Murray for five years. Then I came back and started doing corporate, architecture and editorial all the way through to portraits.' These days, he spends about a third of his time shooting for articles about design, architects and architecture with his writer and ceramicist partner, Jan. The other two-thirds of his life is devoted to his passion for the pinhole.

After the Burn Off

'I've never been a gear freak,' says Browell, 'I always regard the technical side of photography as risky and uncertain. And so to discover the pinhole where there's no knobs, no focus, no nothing. You just need a light meter and bingo, that's it. That was of great relief - and a great restriction too. You're hugely restricted in the way that you photograph things because of the exposure time,' he explains, adding, 'you have to get used to the thrill of unpredictability.

'You never get what you expect, I frame a picture and I'm pretty sure I know what I'm getting in the frame. Then I develop it, and when I pull it out of the fix it's all completely different. But of course that's what I mean, you've got to surrender to the laws of chance. You've just got to let that go. And having had a life of taking sharp pictures, which fulfill all kinds of different criteria and have been totally predictable exercises, this is like a breath of fresh air.'

Rosy at Elkington Park

Pinhole photography is by nature a risky process. With assistants' and models' fees and film that costs anywhere from $4 to $10 per sheet, it's an expensive calling as well. 'I only ever do about four sheets of film with anything. You might lose three completely and the last one might be an amazing thing - or, I have lost shoots altogether.

'And,' he adds somewhat ruefully, 'I think "if I just had an ordinary camera... Why do I make it hard on myself?" But I never take an ordinary camera with me. Never, never, never.'

There are two main reasons why pinhole photography is so challenging. First, it is not possible to precisely frame a picture because there is no viewfinder or ground glass. And second, because the aperture is so tiny, the exposures have to be quite long. If he's using film under bright conditions such as at the beach, the pinhole may be uncapped for two to five seconds. But if he's making a negative by using photographic paper, the time can blow out to a minute or more. And naturally those times blow out when the he's working in shade or otherwise subdued light. Long exposure times, however, are of fundamental importance to many of Browell's images.

'With a lot of my pictures, I compose with time. The length of the exposure is the main compositional element,' he says.

Time as a compositional factor is evident in most of his pinhole images - but sometimes at a more subtle level that at others. He has for instance been creating a series of portraits in Hyde Park and the time element comes into play because his subjects (collaborators is perhaps a more accurate description) must cope with exposures that can take up to 20 seconds.

'People have to work out how they want to look - whether they want to look happy and approachable, or whether they want to look unsure,' he says. 'But in most of those pictures, people have got strong expressions, they're not po-faced or blank faced, they've decided who they want to be and they're happy with it.

'It's an encounter that we have,' he adds. 'And the photograph at the end of it, is the result - I have to say most times - of exciting, thrilling collaboration with strangers. An encounter in the park is what they're about. That's what's in it for me.'

Harmony, Genevive and Sian from the Hyde Park Series

The Hyde Park series is not simply about portraits, it is about portraits in the context of the park itself, a park which as many Sydneysiders will know, is losing its glorious canopy of fig trees to disease. When he approaches people to see if they would be interested in collaborating with him, Browell shows them a little poem he has written which poses the question: 'Who will you be in front of the tree?'.

This deliberate placing of the figure in the landscape in a meaningful way is a distinct theme through Browell's work. You also see it powerfully in his nudes, photographed at remote coastal locations. It's therefore not surprising that he should have embarked on a new series that takes this idea yet another step.

'I'm calling it Headlands,' he says. ' It's sort of about intimacy without personality. So it's not a question of love, or desire, or sex or anything like that. We've all been with people and have looked past a little portion of their body into the scene. It's the way the human form fits into the natural environment I'm after. I'm really interested in the human form within the landscape. I'm not a landscape photographer. The landscape doesn't hold everything for me, until I've introduced something else into it, some kind of proof or evidence of being there.'

'I've had a fortunate life,' Browell says, 'but it has been a life of glimpses, that's very true. You're not a participant, you're an observer and recorder.'

And does pinhole photography open up a way to step out of this? 'Well, it's a change in my outlook towards photography.' And he asks himself, 'What am I going to leave behind? What are my children going to throw out and what are they going to want to keep? At least I'm doing stuff that I can say to them confidently, "don't worry about the rest, but keep the pinholes".'

[Note: Anthony Browell's images published in Photo Review Austalia Issue 32 were not printed correctly. The above images provide a more accurate representation.]

Portraits in the Park Exhibition: an exhibition of pinhole camera portraits by Anthony Browell will go on show for three days - 20 to 22 November 2008, inclusive - in Sydney's Hyde Park. Click here for more details.


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