Profiles

From the Archive: Photo Review June/July 2002:

Anita Mathews Pollard's poised and slightly cinematic photographs are for the most part small objects, often no larger than a postcard - and that's exactly the way she wants it.

"The first thing I ask myself when I get my proof sheets is ‘where's the postcard?'", says photographer, Anita Mathews Pollard. "I want something that is instantly appealing. It needs to be clean and to be something people can immediately relate to. I don't see my work as six by seven foot prints mounted on a wall. Instead it's something I would prefer you put on your fridge and when people walk in, they say ‘isn't that a great shot!'"


Bedroom Eyes, Melbourne, 2000.

Mathews Pollard grew up in Perth and says that her first successful photograph came at age eight. The family was on a caravan holiday and had stopped in Sydney when she took a shot of the Harbour Bridge from Circular Quay. It was one of those pictures that earned more than its share of praise from family and friends. It was also a harbinger.

As she moved into her teenage years, Mathews Pollard was surrounded by photography books (her late mother taught art) and aspiring photographers. At around 12 she got her first camera (an Instamatic) and for the next few years she and a girl friend would often get together to create amateur fashion pictures. In her mid teens her mother Mary discovered a latent talent for landscape and colour abstract photography that led eventually to exhibitions and private sales.

"Between my mother and my friend, there was a lot of photography in my life as a seventeen year old", writes Mathews Pollard, "but I still knew very little about it." So after finishing high school and spending a year overseas, she returned to Perth and embarked on a Bachelor of Arts in film making at Curtin University. "I was blessed to be one of the last students to have the luxury of studying the art of filmmaking using real film", she says. "I fell in love with the look of cinema and specialised in cinematography." Along the way she picked up an award from the Perth Institute of Film and TV and was Director of Photography for a 45-minute film based on Elizabeth Jolley's short story Two Men Running.


Sydney Harbour Ferry, 2001.

After University there followed a period of several years working as a camera assistant in the West Australian film industry. But Mathews Pollard found she was gradually becoming disillusioned by a process which invariably diluted the original creative idea. "The concept of conceiving my own ideas and shooting them seemed very appealing. I suppose I wanted to be the writer and the director and the director of photography."

Thinking she might have more control as a screenwriter, she moved to Sydney to explore the career prospects. And along the way she also started taking night classes in black and white processing with Bruce Hart at UTS.

"I was blown away by week two in the darkroom. I knew that's what I wanted to do."

Her first paying photography job followed shortly thereafter and in the ten or so years since then she's worked in fashion, corporate, advertising, wedding and portraiture. These days Mathews Pollard says that she doesn't spend as much time as she'd like in the darkroom, but she has a good working relationship with a specialist photographic printer who understands the way she likes to work.

While she often does colour work for commercial assignments - and uses digital cameras from time to time - her real love remains the black and white image captured with a 35mm camera and a 50mm lens. Mathews Pollard says that, for her, the 50mm lens is the most natural and ‘human' of all focal lengths. Her subjects, as these pages show, range from quiet, almost meditative still life studies to portraits of her children, of friends and neighbours and the locals in her home suburb of Balmain.


Julia's Gibson, Perth, 1991.

"I think beauty for beauty's sake is underrated these days", writes Mathews Pollard. "It's been abducted by the commercial world and if it doesn't have a label attached to it there's a tendency to want to put it in the Hallmark cards camp. Not that I have a problem with greeting card images, but I think there's a place in the art world for beauty. I can't relate to much of the photography I see in galleries. If it's modern does it have to be so esoteric that it leaves people scratching their heads?"

Borrowing a term from her days as a cinematographer, Mathews Pollard says of her approach, "my shooting ratio is very high". This is particularly the case with her child photography. She likes working with a shallow depth of field and focusing manually - two things that are intrinsically difficult to manage when your subjects are active and unpredictable kids.

Although she has used digital cameras for adult portraiture, the shutter lag makes it too difficult to use them for the kind of candid child photography she loves.

"35mm works well for me because it's light and quick." This isn't to say she might not one day change to digital when she finds an equally responsive camera. "At the end of the day, it's what's in your head, what you see, and your ideas, that matter." 

To see more of Anita Mathews Pollard's work, you can visit her website at www.anitaphoto.com


 See Photo Review magazine Issue 5 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 
3. Mail or fax - click here

To see more photographer profiles, click here