Profiles

'As soon as I finished school, I went overseas', says Jess Brown. In 1998 at the tender age of 18, she was off to Europe. 'I was using film and not shooting digital. I took a pack of film with me overseas and travelled around Europe. I just travelled and took photos for a year, which was great. I wouldn't really walk around in my own city and take lots of photos, so it was good to be in a foriegn country where you didn't have any inhibitions. I really started shooting.'


A young muslim girl at the opening of the donated Community Hall, Talalla.

Her interest in photography had blossomed only a few years earlier when she took a photography course in High School. Very quickly she knew what she wanted to do. 'I think I was always determined to make a career out of it', she says. 'Everyone tells you it's so difficult and so competitive, but you can't listen to what other people say, and I said, "no that's what I love and that's what I'm going to do." I feel really lucky because of it.'

While travelling around Europe, Brown received news that she'd been accepted to do Fine Arts at New South Wales University. She came back to Australia, started at uni but after a time found that it wasn't what she was after. 'I loved the course, but I really just wanted the technical background to photography and [the course] wasn't giving it to me. Without trying to sound too egotistical, I needed to know more about photography as a tool (as opposed to creatively).'

By this stage her photographer-assistant work had begun to take off and she was picking up a few jobs of her own. 'A friend of mine started working at New Woman, so I did their backstage Fashion Week beauty shots for them one year. Through assisting I met the right people and when some of them were moving on to different jobs, they would give me their old clientele.' Along with fashion work, she also branched out into weddings. It's a field she finds particularly rewarding and one in which she expects to do more work in coming years.

In late 2004 Brown was dividing time between photographic assignments, assisting and a TAFE diploma of photography course.

Then the tsunami happened.

In early January 2005, with the tsunami story still big news, she was on a ten-day fashion shoot with photographer Grant Matthews when she had what she describes as an epiphany. Matthews, she explained 'said to me "do you want to do fashion?" I'd been with him for two and a half years and I turned around and just said "no, I don't." I'd learnt so much from him but it felt like I was just assisting, I wasn't pushing myself.'

And then came a call from her cousin Hayley Maynard, a journalist who had become involved with a small charity that was setting out to help in Sri Lanka following the Tsunami. 'She asked me if she could take a camera and I said "can you take me?" She said "yeah, for sure!" I'd never been to Sri Lanka. All I'd heard about was civil war, but that didn't scare me at all. I just thought it was fate.'

The charity in question is called Australians for Asia and Brown was joining its Talalla support group (http://www.talallasupportgroup.com) as one of a small number of Australian volunteers. Talalla is located on a bay of the same name at just about the southernmost point of Sri Lanka. Maynard writes on her weblog of the first day:

'We arrived in Talalla Bay on the 3rd February, five weeks after the tsunami had hit. The site that took hold was one of pure ruin, most houses knocked down completely or damaged beyond recognition, few remain unharmed. People sit around and sift through broken piles of rubbish adjacent to their homes - or what is left of them - to see what can be salvaged, scrambling for anything they can find.

'Clearing the massive debris left from the effects has been our first objective. A tumultuous task in itself as devastation is still rife. We employ up to 25 workers daily so that they are able to earn an income, this eventually might see their lives returned to some level of normality while we ascertain who needs help.

'It is predominantly women who arrive to work each morning and their sense and undertaking of the task in hand is overwhelming. With inappropriate tools - sticks, broken brooms and gloves - the women scrape and tear at rubble. At first glance morale seems very low but you only have to speak or gesture with universal actions and their beautiful smiles take hold. It really is astonishing to hear their stories, told through gracious faces that mask incredible suffering.'

'I went over as a photographer but I did everything', says Brown. That included going into peoples' homes and sitting down to record the missing people and lost belongings. 'We visited 150 houses in our area over a three-day period. I think because I became like one of the people who run the charity, that's how I got so close to everyone.' She laughed as she described how worried friends in Sydney warned her to get her injections and not to eat anything she hadn't made herself. Instead, she ate with Sri Lankan people in their homes and lived the way they did. 'That's how I got the images I could get. I wasn't just popping in and popping out.'

Brown took two cameras with her, a Nikon D100 and her beloved Nikon FM2. The film she put through the FM2 was sent back to Sydney for processing and scanning. The scans were returned to her so that she could share photographs with her subjects and add some of the pictures to the Talalla Support Group's website.


Dancing at the Refugee Camp, Talalla Central. 

The Buddhist people in Talalla enjoyed having their photo taken to such an extent that Brown sometimes had to be a little mysterious in her approach so that she could capture candid moments rather than for-the-camera grins. For the most part she photographed in and around the village. 'But one morning I woke up at five and drove to Hambantot which is not on the east coast but going toward that way, and that got completely flattened. I think 6000 people died there. There was nothing but a few tents and these Muslim women came out of their tents dressed so beautifully, immaculately. They were just wonderful women. They didn't mind at all. I think they really understood that I wasn't just a tourist coming to take their photo, I genuinely wanted to know how they were, what was being done for them.'

In the end, Brown spent seven months in Sri Lanka working with the local people and her fellow volunteers. In August of that year a foundation stone was layed for a new community hall. Again, to quote Hayley Maynard from the website:

'Our charity, headed by Lawrie Rose, a Jewish man, is funding the Hall, to be built by a Muslim man, Mr Uwaiz, on a Buddhist site for the benefit of local Talalla people of many varying religions and backgrounds. This has brought so much joy and optimism to everyone taking part in the project, as an area of such a diversity is brought together in such unity, proving we can all work and play together with a little respect and understanding.'

When she returned to Australia, Brown staged a fundraising show of her images at Sydney's Blender Gallery in Paddington. When the show was over in late December 2005, she was off overseas again, this time to London where she'll be working both as an assistant and a photographer. Asked if she felt her experience in Sri Lanka had changed her photographic work, she said 'I think I've definitely developed and grown, I am far more comfortable with shooting people now. It was always something that I loved but I don't have as many inhibitions now.' And, she adds in her positive way, 'I don't have to think so much, I work a lot more naturally. And that I think is from working under pressure in Sri Lanka - and from making mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes and you learn from them.'


See Photo Review magazine Issue 27 for the print edition of this profile which includes additional images.

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