Today or this evening where we're going to start with Lee's book, Velco Pride, and some
background, some information about, I guess, your history, how you started photography
and the likes, and I actually did prepare a few questions, which are no good over there.
So feel free, everyone, to just, like, participate, like, it's a small, little gathering, but
I think this is a really good opportunity for people to ask questions they may think
are stupid, things that they don't realise or don't know, or have always wondered about
how you do something, how you approach some, how you talk to people, how you organise
a project, how you actually get it to become a book, how to realise it, how to know when
it's finished, how to know if you're in the right direction, so on and so forth.
There's no such thing as a stupid question, ever, even though we think that, and please,
let's make a conversation rather than at me talking at you, much nicer.
So from my knowledge of Valie, she has released a book, Belco Pride, this year or last year?
Well, it came out late last year, and I got some advance copies sent just in time for
the opening of the exhibition at Belco Art Centre, but it didn't really officially get
launched in Australia until January.
So it's a pretty new book, I guess if a book is launched in that year, it's new for the
whole sort of year, so a freshly published book.
I'll give you a bit of a rundown of Leigh, please tell me if it's incorrect.
Leigh is a member of Oculi, which is a group of documentary photographers, concerned documentary
photographers in Australia, who work on both personal and professional commissioned work.
She's a photographer in residence with the Nishi Group, based here in Canberra.
She is the co-founder of Light Journeys, which is a website dedicated to Australian women
photographers.
Co-founder of Time Machine Magazine, an online magazine featuring a series of works of long
term projects by Australian as well as international photographers.
And I think the crown of the cap in 2010, she was the winner of the William and Winiford
Bowness Prize for Photography at the Monash Gallery of Art.
And that's when I think I first heard your name, winning that competition.
So perhaps you could just give us a bit of a background, how you started in photography,
and not necessarily like your first camera experience, because we've all got that, but
I guess when you first started to become serious about photography, or concerned, like when
you started to think, actually this is what I'm going to concentrate on.
Well, there's actually two stages for that.
I'm very boring story, like a lot of other kids, you know, got handed the mum camera
and became totally obsessed.
And that was definitely without a question what I was going to do.
I've always kind of known it, it was a gut sort of thing.
But life throws you googly's and I found myself, you know, having a family very young and photography
just got put to the side, and you know, I actually had to sell all my cameras to pay
bills.
Oh, right.
Yeah, I remember having this thought when I was having a nap one day with my infant son
at the time he's now nearly 17, going, oh, well, there goes that pipe dream, you know,
like, what a shame.
But as, I don't know, you know, as time goes on, there was this kind of need to see things
visually, and it wasn't necessarily with a camera at that point, I was drawing a little
bit, well, trying to, I'm not very good, but trying to express myself in some sort of visual
and creative way.
Well, it was being a state her mum.
And it wasn't until I decided to go back to uni, the kids got older, they were at school,
and I went back and did anthropology, and finished that degree, got a job, thinking it was sort
of like the dream job.
I was working in the aid sector, and hated it, hated every second of it, but did a few
monitoring trips overseas, and during the period where I was actually not photographing, there
was this digital revolution, and I knew nothing about it.
I mean, this is how dumb I was, I went into tears, with a bit of money, I went, oh, I
want to get one of those digital cameras, can I get one that also shoots film?
And they just looked at me like I was a total retard, like, where have you been for the
last 10 years?
I was like, oh.
I don't think I've ever asked anyone to ask me whether like a film takes film and digital.
And digital.
Well, I thought it would be kind of a cool idea, but obviously it didn't exist anyway.
I didn't end up buying this little happy snappy digital camera, and took that overseas with
me.
And while I was meant to be there doing an exposed evaluation, I ended up ignoring it,
and left that to my colleagues, and was taking pictures pretty much the whole time, and that
was actually my report.
And I just fell in love again with the whole process of seeing, you know, sort of through
a thing that was in front of my face.
It was kind of, it was very different to seeing without the camera, so that was pretty exciting.
And the second trip I actually resigned after that, so didn't kind of see eye to eye with
my boss about things, and thought, oh, yeah, you live once.
Was that because you were having a personal direction with photography in particular,
or was it other?
I think it was a lot of other things, but it just coalesced with the photography again.
And I'd sort of, you know, looked up the art school, and I knew Martin Joey, I don't even
remember how I met Martin, but I knew him from around the traps, it's Canberra, it's
a small town.
And I went and had coffee with him one day, and said, oh, you know, I'm thinking about
coming back and studying, and I looked at CIT as well, but realized it wasn't really,
for me, it was more commercially oriented, and I wanted to think more about the theoretical
and historical aspects of photography, so I met with Martin, and he had a look at some
of really old work that I'd done, and just said, look, we'll take you, but you need to
do your honors, because I'd only had a three-year undergrad degree, and I said, no, I'm not
doing that.
I'm in time, I've got to work, I've got kids, I want to do something part-time, and I don't
want to have to pay hex fees.
What have you got?
And it turned out to be a master of philosophy.
So I applied, and very luckily got in, and that was that, that was 2005 in July, I resigned
in June, and I was unemployed for four months, which was awesome, because I just was able
to kind of unwind from the stress of the job, and sort of put my head back into photography.
And for me, surprisingly, the art school was an amazing experience, like I didn't think
it was, it would fit me, because I'm much more interested in documentary, and sort of
the real world, and events that take place in the world, so I thought, well, art school
may be not so much for me, but it was a venue to maybe just get things moving again.
I mean, I went into art school with the idea of, if I could come out with a bit more confidence,
because I'd lost a lot of confidence, you know, hadn't been photographing for about
ten years, other than, you know, family photos, for a deal, and a good portfolio, I thought
I'd be happy, plus a degree on top of it, why not?
And I think I achieved all those things, which was great, and the five years that I was there.
Was it a supportive environment from the start with other students, or did we be more working
on your own?
It was a bit of both.
I think with postgrad, the annual, at least in my experience, it's definitely self-led,
if you have to be quite disciplined, I certainly didn't get the opportunity to learn technical
things.
I'd bug people like Peter Fitzpatrick, how do I do this, how do I do that, and it was
really learning things the hard way.
I'd just go and shoot it, figure it out, and if it worked, I'd figure it out, okay, that
works for me.
This is the sort of look that I'm interested in.
So, you know, it was literally kind of like starting again.
I think it's actually interesting and important that a lot of photographers will want to work
out a style without actually working out a style.
They want something without working out things for themselves and realising what doesn't
work.
And I think from personal experience, doing so much is actually to do it to realise that
you don't, it doesn't work for you.
And then you find out, as you said, your own way through.
Well, it's amazing though too, because when I entered the school, I mean, I went to Narrow
Undercollege and was taught by an old guy called Liz Kovats, totally old school.
And his idea of documentary was Magnum, that's old school black and white reportage.
So that was my idea of photography.
And so my portfolio that I went into the art school with was all black and white, 35 mil,
a little bit of 120 medium format.
But when I started, I remember Martin saying something like, why don't you shoot in colour?
So I started mucking around with colour trannies, which I'd done a favourite of work with when
I was working as an assistant pre-family life in Sydney.
And I've always been nervous with transparencies, because they're not very forgiving.
And I kind of went, oh, no, I don't want to, it's too expensive.
And he said, well, what about colour neg?
So I gave it a go and that was it, totally hawked.
And it actually totally changed, you know, just a fly by comment in a Crete class.
And I said, oh, okay, maybe I could give that a go.
And that was it.
I don't think I've shot much black and white scenes.
Because all of your work is in colour.
I do have some black and white stuff, but I haven't actually shown it.
Okay.
So yeah.
Quick question.
Two and a quarter.
Is it film and scan?
Or is it no two and a quarter camera?
This is a camera.
No, no.
It's film and scan.
Film and scan.
Yeah.
C-type.
Well, these are pigment prints, so these are inkjet.
So what I do is I shoot analog.
So I use a Hasselblad and 120 film, Fuji colour 400, if you must know.
And I scan though everything just because I can work from home that way.
Yeah.
It was just one of those things, how do I juggle kids and work without going into uni
to the dark rooms?
And in fact, to be honest, the colour dark room just gives me a headache.
It certainly does if you put your head over the bleep.
Well, yeah.
Well, you know, even just the process wasn't for me, there wasn't as much control, and
I really like to kind of work quite closely with my negatives, so the computer was perfect
for that.
Yeah.
It was a good sort of balance of the old and new.
So is that where Bellcode Pride started as your master's work?
Yeah.
Can you tell us a bit about that?
And how basically, I guess how you came to choose photographing Bellconn as a subject
and I guess how, what influenced that and how that evolved?
Well, the first year, because I went part-time, the first year I just spent sort of feffing
around really, photographing things that I thought was interesting.
So I've got this thing for people who dress up for fun, but who take it really seriously.
I find that endlessly fascinating, so medievalists or circus people, ballroom dancers or whatever.
I was photographing a lot of that, and I was also photographing some unusual hobbies, weird
hobbies, which to me aren't that weird, but I guess to the general layperson was kind
of bizarre.
So I kind of was sort of leading myself in that direction, then by the same token I was
also shooting things like Vietnam veterans and their families.
I have a personal connection with my dad's return servicemen, so is my ex-husband.
So I kind of thought this could be an interesting trope, and I was kind of exploring a bunch
of different, I guess, stories and trying to figure out how to tell a story that was
reading what I was working on, but none of it made sense, like, you know, I'd have meetings
with Martin and Helen Annas, and who are my supervisors, and they just kind of got the
word and go, look, nice pictures, but what does it all mean?
You know, it's not cohesive, what are you going to do with these pictures?
And I kind of spent the first year a little bit stressed about that, actually, you know,
just, but compulsively going out and making pictures, and it wasn't until probably about
a year in, I was driving to my sister's place.
I was living in Fraser in Belcon at the time, she lives in Spence, which is right next door,
and I drove past this sort of weird government council building, and someone had sprayed Belcon
pride on the wall, which is actually, oops, that first, oh, not that one, the first image,
anyway, of the brown brick wall, I don't even look for it, and I saw that and went, oh my
God, that's my thesis.
It was like this epiphany moment where I just went, oh, that's it, and I remember driving
really fast to Kim's house going, oh my God, I know what I'm doing, and I told her and she
kind of went, oh, yeah, right, that sounds really interesting, whatever, but it actually
made total sense, and when I pitched the idea to my supervisors, they got a bit worried
and went, oh, it's a bit late in the game, you know, blah, blah, blah, and I said, no,
no, no, it's all good, I know what I'm doing, because at that point, funnily enough, I'd
actually photographed a lot of stuff in Belcon and already, just because it was there, you
know, it's on my doorstep.
So what were you actually late to change from then, just pretty pictures of Belcon and?
No, it wasn't so much pretty pictures of Belcon and just a whole bunch of different images
of all kinds of things.
From that area though?
No.
Okay, from all over?
From all over.
Okay.
But some of those images had been made in Belcon just by chance, and then suddenly, when the
idea of Belco came into being, I just went, oh, that makes sense, and I was looking at
themes of, you know, I mean, all my work is around the idea of belonging and identity
and how we kind of communicate and express that identity, I'm interested in the idea
of community, and so that kind of just boom, just made sense, and it was about placing
those ideas in the context of a physical space, which was the suburbs, and happened to be
where I was living and I had issues about returning to the suburbs, I mean, you know,
when I left Canberra, I was 18 and I thought I'd never come back, and I came back 10 years
later with my own kids, living in the house that I grew up in, which was even weirder,
but kind of cathartic in a weird way as well, so yeah.
A quote that is often put with this work is a quote that is, I think, from someone, is
it in the book?
Yes.
No, it's, I actually pinched it, of some of the Belcon and High School website, like
Bebo site, you know, as you do, I was trawling.
But it does speak of a pride, doesn't it?
Absolutely.
So the quote is, Belco is a hole, but it's our hole, and I just think that's interesting,
and why you use, I guess, that quote saying it's a hole, and I guess what is a hole?
What is the view of Belcon and, I guess, that you feel that Canberrans have, and people
in Belcon and who live there, and your own view?
What is it that makes Belcon a hole, so to speak?
Well, I guess for me personally, definitely up the middle class called for cringe, like,
I grew up in Belco from the age of eight, but prior to that, I grew up in France, so
I came back, apparently, with a French accent, you know, and my parents sent me to the French
school over here, Tilopia, so already I was sort of punching above my weight, and when
I was back at home, it was kind of like, oh, but I'm different to everybody here.
But it was this stupid assumption that I had about myself, or about the way we were brought
up, that I was better somehow than everybody else in where I lived.
But coming back to the place where I thought I would never, ever return, that was it.
I would never come back to Canberra, but sort of a boomerang town, you know, like a bean
bag town, even.
Easy to fall into how to get at it, it's kind of one of those, you always come back.
Well, I came back, and, gee, lucky for me, I ended up back in Belco, so it was this weird
kind of like, oh, hang on, you hypocrite, you know, you had all these sort of cultural
cringe about where you grew up, and it was actually where you grew up, and going back
to it was a little bit scary, I was kind of like, oh my god, it's a step backwards, what
have I done with my life, I'm a loser, you know, but I realised there's a lot of people
in the same boat, we've all, you know, you come full circle in a strange way, and grips
with the fact that actually I came back to Canberra because I chose to, I needed to be
close to my family, and you know, a house came up, the house that I grew up in came
up, my mum still owned it, she's happy to rent it out, cheap rates, and the kids wanted
to move in because it was a pool, so you just kind of go with what life throws at you, and
I just made the best of it, and actually realised that I was wrong, I actually kind of really
liked the space, and I saw it differently suddenly.
The spell con in the general terms, or where you were living, in the optical suburb, was
the...
Well, because it was also in here, I mean it's hard to explain, like, it's one of those
things that, you know, when you're from somewhere or you're very familiar with something, you
can say it's a dump, or, no, it's a crap hole, because I know I'm from there, like I have
the authority to be able to say so, but I think there was also that element of, I don't
know, like, other people's perceptions of Canberra, and other people's perceptions of
Belconn, and sort of rub off on you a little bit, like everyone goes, oh, Belco, especially
where you live, it's running sort of charmoid, and that's like the black town of Canberra,
it's really dodgy, you know, but in fact, it's actually not really, it's no more dodgy
than breadon, and breadon somehow can command a million dollar price tags, but charmoid
doesn't.
But charmoid's got a really amazing community there that lives there, and they do amazing
things as a community, and yeah, there is a dodgy element, but nothing too weird or
unusual, I mean, it's the same sort of thing that you find in Ainsley, or back at breadon
or whatever, so it's funny how these sort of urban myths can pop up, and you can actually
become a party to that, and I think I was guilty of that.
The Americans, everyone familiar with the Americans, the Robert Frank book?
A lot of people criticised, and it's a cliché in itself to refer to that book in any conversation,
but what I see as a parallel is that the Americans was seen as something which was offensive
to America.
The Americans was an attack on America from a foreigner, and I can't help but imagine
that when people see this book, they could have a laugh at Belconnen, they could have
a go looking down their nose, and I guess especially people who aren't from Belco,
or without generalising wanting to generalise, perhaps I am, but that person of the suburbs
is the typical suburban Belconnen person, if there is one.
There are.
There are.
They're in the book.
It seems, though, from what you say, it comes from actually a love of the place, or a rediscovering
love of the place, rather than a desire to say, you know, it is actually a whole.
There's something else that is very positive and affirming.
Well, I guess it's a verting that I did, too, because I don't know, my work is very
closely aligned with who I am and how I feel about my life, so my work develops along with
me, and it sounds kind of a bit spiritual and out there, but, you know, I have to be
honest about that process, and I'm not interested in making work that I have no connection to
in any shape or form.
I mean, look, I have my people who can do it, and there's definitely a role for that
in the world, but it's just not a role for me.
I need to make work that somehow connects to me and means something to me, or that I
have a keen interest in.
So, you know, all my work is about me in some kind of off way, I suppose.
I mean, I don't know, that makes more sense to me, and I guess the idea of that cultural
cringe initially, Belconnen, is a dump to me in some level, you know, I kind of hated
it growing up, glad to leave, I cringed at the idea of going back, but there I was back
in that same house, you know, in my parents' room, and suddenly I just, the colours changed,
you know, like the idea of it changed, and it just became a little bit more possible
rather than impossible.
You know, like when I grew up as well, it was very Anglo, very 80s.
I was sort of a cultural phenomenon, being mixed, you know, mahali, so, you know, it
was very different, whereas today, you see, it's very multicultural, and the total, the
landscape, social landscape and the cultural landscape has totally changed, and in some
ways I guess it was that revelation of seeing and understanding and realising that people
in places, whilst it kind of feels like it's the same, it isn't, and yet it is, and I
was kind of interested in teasing out some of those ideas.
And the idea of actually making the book the way the book eventuated, was that something
you always had in the back of your mind, like you would like to publish it as a book, or
was there something else we, how you thought you would actually show it?
You know, to be honest, I think it was always a book, but I don't think I was actually conscious
of that at the beginning.
It wasn't really until maybe further down the track where I'd started, I'm an obsessed
book buyer, I have a lot of books, and Moving House has held, because it's mostly books,
not usually photo books, but so I have this love of books, but I guess, yeah, it was this
subconscious thing that I thought, this could be a really good book, and I didn't quite
know how it was going to look, and then, you know, things like Blur kind of appeared in
Australia, and then Memento books, and I did make a couple of dummies for uni, and just
for myself, just to see that I could do it, and then I got a bit of interest from one
publisher that didn't quite work out, and then I just decided to self-publish in the
end, but I was lucky right at the end, as I was designing a book, another publisher
came on board, and that kind of helps, helps, and it returs all at the same time, I don't
know, it depends who you ask, yeah.
On the actual photography in the process, you have a very straight, full-frontal style
square format, the portraits in the book are all posed, or maybe are they all posed?
I'd say yes for them, well, not just holding people still, they're often doing what they're
doing, but I'll just get them to stop, you know, just stop what you're doing, just can
you hold that for me, and sometimes I'll direct, actually, and it depends on the situation,
some of the images of the young guys on the BMX bikes, I mean, I just found them on the
street, I was actually looking for some graffiti, and I saw them, and they were just cruising
around as you do, BMX bikes, the same as boys used to do when I was a kid, it's kind of
weird, it's like this weird flashback, and I was madly looking for this graffiti, and
then as I was walking off, because they kind of went, oh, I think it's down there, lady,
I sort of walked off and went, oh my God, what am I doing, go back, because the kid,
Nathan, was wearing a Rolling Stones t-shirt, I mean, you know, that was literally like
maybe a couple of minutes, I'm gonna shut a roll film of these guys, and they were great,
they just kind of posed, and of course at the back of my mind, I'm sort of worried about,
oh God, they're underage, I need to get consent form, I've signed off on all the ethics stuff
for uni, blah, blah, blah, but then I just kind of went, I'm gonna stop that from making
good photographs, they're on the street, they're old enough to say no, and they didn't, and
we conversed, you know, there was an exchange, we kind of talked a little bit, and that's
the thing that's really interesting about the encounters as well, that to me is so much
part of the process, it's not just about the image, it's about, you know, this sort of
shared moment, you kind of fall in love a little bit with each other, I mean, I do, in
a way, I fall in love with them a little bit, probably not, but maybe I don't know, but
it's amazing what people have shared with me, it's actually sometimes scary, because
I think, oh God, do I really need to know that, like, it's some of the stuff that people
have shared with me is major, and I kind of worry about the burden of that sometimes,
and think, oh God, maybe I need to talk to somebody who knows about that sort of stuff,
not me, but you know, you share back as well, and I don't know, you meet people for a reason,
and you share stuff, and I think even if you can walk away, you know, giving something
back, or taking away something, you grow as a person, and I like to think that you can
give of yourself so that the other person can grow just a little bit as well, I don't
know, maybe it's not conscious, but yeah.
Do you think as a photographer, once you become more confident and comfortable with what you're
doing, then that will exude something of a peaceful nature?
Well, I guess that's what I feel, that if you are comfortable about working, then people
aren't going to feel that you're actually maybe a bit dodgy, or taking something a bit...
If you're always taking something.
Yeah, if you're a bit more open, and so was that towards the end, or the start of the
project?
That was sort of like a third of the way in, maybe, yeah, sort of around the beginning,
but it was funny because I kind of knew, as soon as I'd sort of mentally kind of gone,
okay, Belco, it's this umbrella thing, and I'd sort of, I guess, what's the word, figured
it out, I knew the things that I wanted to find, I had lists of stuff that I'd written
down, one of the things I definitely wanted was kids on BMX bikes, I knew I wanted the
bottle shop up the road, I knew I wanted a Sudanese family, but how to find it, you
know, it was like this impossible list, there was an easy list, a medium list and this impossible
list, and I'd say, I got nearly all of them.
