Stories

A year ago, photographer Melinda Kerr was a different person. But that was before April 2007…

Some people travel the world to find meaning in their life. Some climb mountains. Some create works of art. Some take photographs. Martin Hill does all these things.

When she was a girl, Susan Fowler would spend hours on her stomach in the grass, examining the clover patiently in a search for those plants with the famously elusive four leaf pattern.

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.

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”…’

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.

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.

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.

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