LightVision

This month Wildlight Photo Agency shakes up an unusual cocktail of odd cordials for you to digest at your leisure…

Turning back the hands of time - old bromides make cool reading

As Summer rolls into frame we’ve reprinted for your reading pleasure the second edition of the original lightVISION magazine published at the end of 1977. Download it here. It proves that photography is not bounded by time, as the material was just as fresh and interesting then as it is now. Thirty-odd years ago, Beatrice Faust was ruminating about the state of visual awareness in Australia (a country of 13 million people); William Clift contributed an engaging collection of photos in his US Court House series and film maker Paul Cox is interviewed by Paul Turner in conjunction with his exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography. It’s great to turn back the hands of time; we know you’ll enjoy this snapshot of the business as it was over three decades ago.

The greening of Ernie

Our resident Pug and highly paid photographer’s assistant Ernst Graf von Schmeckle, is always looking for alternative avenues to fame. This month he’s become particularly attracted to our new studio green screen, especially when it rains down juicy bones. The good news is there’s no carbon emissions and no waste (well almost none). The virtuosity of virtuality. How green can you get Ernie!

Kill Bill collection

Kill Bill! is  the momentarily unkind sentiment we photo-editor types tend to whip up when Bill Bachman, our stalwart contributing photographer from leafy Camberwell, Victoria, sends us a folio of over 800 new images that need to be prepped and published for your use. But we know you appreciate great new material representing a smorgasbord of pan-Australian subjects; you have them in spades here, in his latest montage of everying from portraits of smiling young women and miners to grapes and vineyards, some quirky aerials and abstracts and dazzling close ups of native plants. Thanks Bill, we got over it and of course we love you!

Is Uluru receding from view?

It depends where you stand. The new Talinguru Nyakunytjaku sunrise viewing area for tourists erected at a cost of some $20 million, which opened recently at Uluru, reminds us that we at Wildlight have had a close eye on the famed rock for what seems to us like eons, even though we count in years rather than millennia.  Grenville Turner took this shot of the south face in 2008 from the exact site of the new vantage point, which marshals visitors to a place well back from the monolith. We thought you’d like to see it with and without the coaches. David Moore, more famously took the images below in the 1960s, long before the trampling down gathered pace and when Uluru was called Ayers Rock. Appropriately, Wildlight was once again up close and personal we can report, as Parks Australia contracted Grenville to shoot the October 8 opening ceremony with The Hon. Peter Garrett AM, Federal MP and Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, many Australian Aboriginal traditional owners, other dignitaries and local Anangu people.

With over 40 photographers located all around Australia, Wildlight is fortunate to have a network of bureaus acting as photographic listening posts in the four corners of the country. Here are some reports from our photographers on what’s happening photo-wise across Australia.

Rodney Hyett, who maintains a shutter eye from wave height for us down on the Mornington Peninsular of Victoria, brings us news that he’s returned to his original theme with a just released “The Great Ocean Road” Calendar 2010, after focusing on “The Surfer’s Coastline” for 2009. Plus, he has produced another new calendar called “Above Melbourne“. Buy them here.

Colin Beard, a perennial ray of sunshine for Wildlight up on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, tells us that following the success of his exhibition ‘Rock’n'Roll Odyssey’ at the Orange Regional Gallery in July, he is now puttng on a new one called ’Icons of Rock’n'Roll’ at the Main Street Gallery in Montville, South East Queensland. The photographs were taken between 1966 and 1968 for Go-Set Magazine and include pictures of The Rolling Stones taken on their 1966 tour of Australia, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 as well as The Who, Cat Stevens and The Hollies, taken in London in 1967.
Colin has also started a school of photography on the Sunshine Coast. It offers a series of courses, one session per week, over a number of weeks, similar to the courses run by the Australian College of Photography. These courses are intended to provide an alternative to courses at TAFE and other educational institutions for busy people with the intention of maintaining highly professional standards of photography, surpassing the aspirations of TAFE. There’s more info on the following website, including informative newsletters on photography that Colin puts together every month: www.photolearning.com.au