A mere 29 years have passed since I held my first ever photographic exhibition. It was in the small historic town of Cossack in the northwest of Western Australia. I attended the annual Cossack Fair with a display of 20 images, all beautifully framed, and sold 16.
Typical of the Pilbara, it was easy to capture bold images of red rocks and earth dotted with white gum trees, all against an incredibly blue sky. Most photographers did this.
Instead, my images were creations of adverse weather conditions – rain rendered red by the setting sun; wet spinifex with distant hills shrouded in mist, darkness interspersed with a series of lightning strikes; golden fields under a double rainbow; and so on.
They were images that people living in the Pilbara region saw on their journeys, yet nobody had really captured. My images blew people away, mentally. They were in awe of my exhibition, and I sold ice to Eskimos, at 400 dollars each.
Until my few years living in the Pilbara, I had been perhaps an ordinary photographer. The earlier years in my wilderness of lesser vision suddenly cleared, and I emerged with newfound creativity. I was still using a fully manual camera and slide films, yet I was making art, and printing on expensive cibachrome paper.
My love of incredibly stunning atmospherics hasn’t waned, and I sometimes manage to be in the right place at the right time. I hope you agree.
