Four years ago, Grant Swinbourne put me on Landscape Photography World and asked who I was. This week, he had me back.
Grant Swinbourne first had me on Landscape Photography World in February 2022. Episode 28. I had a practice I could describe and convictions I hadn't yet tested.
Four years later, he had me back for Episode 273. Seventy-three minutes. The Master of Arts. The Hasselblad. Lake Eyre. Fifteen burnt-out camera sensors. IRID Gallery. Ken Duncan. Film. Failure. And the only question that has ever really mattered in photography: the difference between seeing a place and recognising it.
Some of what I said surprised me.
I used to shoot between 20,000 and 50,000 frames a year. Last year: 6,000. At a location, I often hold off lifting the camera for the first 20 minutes. The urge arrives immediately — it's trained into you, the reflex toward productivity. Waiting through it forces a question: do I want this image, or do I want to have been here? The answer changes what you make.
The RMIT project — Connection — used drone-mounted lights to paint symbols over landscapes. Long exposures of 3 to 8 minutes. I burnt through roughly 15 camera sensors across four years of shooting. The sensors were the easy part. Writing the artist statement was the hardest thing I did in the entire degree. I could make the work. Articulating why it needed to exist — that gap took two years to close.
The turning point arrived late. I'd been shooting the project obsessively and had made it about the light. A landscape photographer who'd forgotten the landscape. An RMIT lecturer I went back to specifically to have my work torn apart saw it immediately. The images were technically extraordinary and emotionally flat. I drove to the Blue Mountains, stood on the pagodas in the Valley of the Dinosaurs, and shot a self-portrait with the light painting above me. Most of the original images got cut. Twelve to fifteen strong ones remained.
The first year of the Masters, I had no mentor — the ones the university suggested stepped back because they didn't understand how I was making the work. We talk about that in the episode, and about what it meant to seek the person willing to be brutal rather than supportive.
Film came to me as a correction, not a nostalgic exercise. I was in a creative block and needed a constraint tight enough to force a different kind of attention. Twelve frames a roll does that. Every frame carries weight. The decision about what belongs inside it — and what stays out — must be made before the shutter fires, not in Lightroom at midnight. My strongest work came from that shift. The Lake Eyre images, shot on a Hasselblad 500C/M. At the exhibition I placed the original film transparencies beside the prints. The audience could look from one to the other — the material evidence of the moment beside its final form. Film doesn't permit the sterile perfection digital makes so easy. The grain is there. The imperfection is there. I stopped trying to remove it.
Perfectionism is a form of cowardice. The flaw is proof something real happened.
IRID Gallery came out of art-fair invitations that arrived after the Masters. Five photographers: me, John Wiseman, Simon Ray, Gianluca Corretta and one of the RMIT lecturers who shaped the project. The model I learned watching Ken and Pam Duncan: a partnership where each person's weakness is the other's strength. IRID runs the same way. The first showing was the Affordable Art Fair in Melbourne. The work is to make the case — to buyers standing in front of the prints — that photography is as collectible as painting or sculpture. That an edition, archivally printed, framed, scaled, with documented provenance, holds the same long-term value as any other serious medium on a wall. Not just to sell. To shift how the room reads photography.
Grant asked for advice, best and worst. The best: refuse to be afraid of failure. At my Masters exhibition, I showed the fifteen attempts that preceded the final image. Every wrong turn, visible. That choice — to make the failure part of the work — came from understanding that the failed attempts were not embarrassing. They were the argument. The worst advice I was ever given: professionals don't fail. Close behind it: only take a few photographs. Beginners need volume. The eye develops through accumulation, not restraint. Restraint comes later, once you know what you're restraining toward.
Episode 273 covers the full arc — from early practice to the Masters to film to IRID to the question of what photography is for in a world where everyone carries a camera. Grant asked good questions and let the answers sit. The part about cutting 80% of the Masters project two months before the exhibition is in there. So is the conversation about standing in a location for 20 minutes before deciding whether to make an image. If you have a practice, or you're trying to build one, something in the 73 minutes will land.
For anyone who listened to Episode 28 four years ago: the difference is audible.
