Mark

The occasion of Gavin Blue’s earliest foray into photography was a parade in his native Canberra. A float came into view carrying Mickey Mouse and Goofy perched on a set of steps of the sort once commonly wheeled out to airliners. The young Master Blue made a bid for the shot with a Kodak Instamatic. ‘I just couldn’t get to a front row, and when I got to the front they’d passed me. I got this shot of the backs of their heads going away from me, and all I was thinking was, “missed the shot, missed the shot”…’

Photographers Trent Parke and Narelle Autio were living in a Cairns caravan park when the good news arrived. They’d been there for weeks, after writing off their four-wheel drive when they bogged it in a crocodile-infested saltwater creek. The loss of their vehicle appeared to have brought to an abrupt end a year-long photographic expedition into the outback. It was a trip they’d spent years saving for and their sojourn in the caravan park was, in part, an attempt to trim sail financially while they looked around for a way to raise the necessary cash to carry on.

Canyon de Chelly is a vast network of sandstone formations on the Navajo Reservation in northeastern Arizona. Its walls are eighty stories high in places. Minerals in the rocks have gradually washed down the smooth walls of many its cliffs, forming waves, red and purple ribbons that seem to ripple in perpetual wind.

Whether she’s at home with friends or meeting strangers while travelling the world, Flavia Schuster’s photography is about her personal interaction with her subjects.

For almost as long as he’s been taking pictures, Sydney Morning Herald photographer Steven Siewert has been fascinated by sub-cultures.

Damien Bredberg won the Open Class Category in the 2006 Australian Professional Photography Awards. But he says that he became a photographer almost by accident.

When he was a child, Stephen Berkman recalls, there was only one photographic book in the house, which was The Family of Man. ‘I was five years old’ he says, ‘there was this mysterious photograph I was obsessed with. It’s the one by Wynn Bullock of the young girl lying naked and motionless in a field of ivy. There was something inexplicable about that image, that would cause me to return to it endlessly and conjecture all sorts of scenarios, I would think about what had actually transpired here? What were the moments prior that led up to this, and what happened after…?’

‘Will Hine hovers above a backside lipside on a dark Melbourne night,’ says one.’A switch kickflip to switch frontside crooked grind,’ says another.

It was the early 1950s and the young Dutchman, then working as a painting contractor, was flying from Perth to Derby on business. When it’s up to cruising speed, a DC3 plods along at fairly sedate 300 kph, so Woldendorp and his fellow passengers would have had a good five or six hours to gaze at the scenery.

Asked if he’d describe himself as a photojournalist, Roger Garwood hesitates for an instant – but only an instant. ‘Yes I would.’ he says. ‘It’s a word I always found rather pretentious. Frankly, these days there are lots of people out there calling themselves photojournalists, some of them can barely read or write. But I’m a little less cautious about using the term now. It’s become more acceptable, whereas years ago it was one of those trendy things to call yourself.’