A shot in the Dark: Part 1
28-January-2010
I’ve got a drinking problem, and its my problem not alcohols’. The issue is an intolerance which means even small amounts are potentially fatal. It was quite a process realizing this. As a sixteen year old I indulged in my first teenage drinking session and ended up being given the last rights.
My sweet father-in-law thinks it’s the worst affliction imaginable and most people have a “bummer, glad it’s not me” reaction, but really in itself it’s not a bad thing and arguably a blessing.
A short time either side of that event my elder brother Jim and eldest sister Christine died suddenly after drinking. Only with hindsight have doctors been able to finger the culprit though the chemistry is still not understood. All three of us shared whatever it is that causes a few drinks to be lethal. My elder sister Deb escaped that throw of the dice.
Drinking lubricates most socializing, and when you’re young there’s the peer thing too. In my youth I felt a little sidelined and became more of an involuntary observer than participant.
I wasn’t cynical, but fascinated with something I wanted to be in on, but couldn’t.
After leaving Art College in ’87 I began to record what I’d been looking at for the previous 10 years, by documenting drinking culture, mainly on Friday and Saturday nights in the Brisbane CBD. I wasn’t looking for the unusual or spectacular but the typical and mundane. I attempted to be as objective as possible usually shooting from the hip so as not to be noticed. The wide angle lens and camera body was taped up to lock its focus and hide its shine.
Often there was too little light to see and I never knew exactly what was on the negs until they were developed. Sometimes it was like randomly sending a remote camera to the depths of the ocean to see what was there. Technical excellence ran a very distant second to content; I cared only a bit about the zone system and zilch about the golden mean.
After a while I displayed thirty photographs at McWhirters Art Space in the “Valley” in a solo exhibition I called “A Shot in the Dark”. The exhibition ended up on the ABC’s 7.30 Report which was then state based, and once a week they closed with a story on a current exhibition. The comments book in the gallery was active. Entries ranged from “If someone told me I was looking at the work of the best photographer in the world, I’d believe them” to “not art, f#cking sh!t”.
The experience was in some ways cathartic and afterwards I had an “I’m done” feeling. Apart from plotting some personal stuff, for various reasons I put away the camera for nearly a decade until a few months before the turn of the century.
Brisbane Street Photography, Art Photography
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