Profiles

From the Archive: Photo Review Feb/Mar 2003:

Simon O'Dwyer's earliest recollection of the Great Ocean Road was as a five-year-old coming home from Melbourne. "I remember for the whole time thinking that the car was going to go over the cliff", he said, "back in those days they didn't have any safety rails."

Fortunately the childhood fears were short-lived. Growing up in Warrnambool, near the western end of the famous road, ensured that over the succeeding years he would cover its sinuous length many, many times.

By the time he picked up a camera for the first time, the teenaged O'Dwyer had already begun to notice the road's moods, to absorb its light and shadow and to feel that it was somehow part of him. In a very real sense, his Great Ocean Road photo series began a long time before the images on these pages were created.

"My first moonlight picture was taken when I was about 18. I shot it on 3200 ISO 35mm film. It's a beautiful picture, but the grain in it...", he chuckles at the recollection and continues, "I was so proud of that picture. Emmanuel Santos, an amazing humanist photographer who has been a great mentor to a lot of young photographers [including O'Dwyer] around the world, saw the print and loved it. He said ‘you have something here. You just now have to develop it. Technically you have to perfect it and find your own story in it.'"

When he showed that first picture to Emmanuel Santos, O'Dwyer had already been out of school for a year and was working as a photographer for a local paper in Warrnambool. In time, his exceptional skills behind the lens landed him a position on the staff of The Age.

The life of a working documentary photographer is intense, hectic and demanding. The mobile phone is rarely switched off and when he's not holding a camera to his eye, O'Dwyer is probably sitting in front of his Apple Mac, doing the digital darkroom thing with Photoshop. And yet, relentlessly busy as he is, O'Dwyer still makes the time to work on his Great Ocean Road series.

Sometimes, when the moon will be in the right place at the right time, he packs his Mamiyas and leaves Melbourne straight after work. It takes a good three hours to reach the particular stretch where most of his images have been captured. And once he's there, it could be several hours before he has what he wants and is ready to make the long return journey home for a short sleep before the next work day.

It is an interesting dichotomy but, says O'Dwyer, there is an almost yin and yang balance at work between the two sides of his photographic career. "I see them as being completely connected. As human beings we live with the landscape, and the landscape lives with us. Both of them are connected and can't get away from each other. I think I'm in the privileged position that I get to see and experience more in a year than most people experience in a lifetime. And I get to take my craft and be completely at peace and alone in the landscape...for me it's all about keeping balance."


Lake Ayre

Two winters ago, at the age of 31, O'Dwyer decided to devote himself to the Great Ocean Road project for an extended period. He took a five-month sabbatical from The Age and moved to a house in a tiny Great Ocean Road settlement called Kennet River. Working mainly with 120 format cameras and black and white film, he set out to pay homage to the spectacularly rugged seascape that is such a part of who he his.

"It requires enormous respect this coastline and anybody who underestimates it will feel the full power of it," he warns. "As beautiful and sensual and mysterious as it is, it's equally vicious and deadly." Particularly, one might add, when you're photographing from the edge of a percipitous cliff above a sweeping sea in the middle of the night."If you just sit and wait for all the light to disappear, you see this enormous landscape - and it's silver," he says. "It is so powerful and so still and it's massively subtle but so overpowering at the same time. It's the most incredible light."

O'Dwyer is cautious about going into the detail of his moonlight technique, but this much one can say: the exposures, being at night and nowadays being made mostly to transparency film, are anywhere from five minutes to more than an hour long. Just how long depends entirely on his feeling for the light. The only guide under these circumstances is experience. No metering system can accomodate such long exposure times. It is a way of photography that produces few images in a session and leaves much to serendipity.

"You can go and spend four nights and you might have a couple of photographs that have achieved what you wanted. There are so many factors in play. If it's all cloudy, you get this sort of green tone through. If there's no cloud, you get lots of blue. If [the moon is] low, you get these reds and oranges, if it's sitting up high, it's colder. And the angle of moonlight is important as well."

"For me a time exposure is about gut feeling - watching what the clouds are doing, watching what the ocean is doing" he explains.

"When you're sitting out there by yourself then it does talk to you. I know that sounds really weird, but actually it does talk to you, so you can have this sort of visual conversation with it."

"I approach landscape the same way I do when I'm working for a newspaper or when I'm dealing with people. Photography for me is all about emotion so I'm trying to transform the landscape into emotion. And I feel I've done that in this body of work."


See Photo Review magazine Issue 9 for the print edition of this profile which includes additional images.

To subscribe or order back issue(s):
1. Click here to pay online by credit card, or
2. Order by phone  (02) 9948 8600  (02) 9948 8600 , or
3. Mail or fax - click here

To see more photographer profiles, click here