John Gollings, March 2020

My mother maintained that I was three months premature at birth but I suspect she was three months late getting married. So much for the social mores of the forties!

At nine years old I was a photographer. By twenty three I had finished studying Architecture at Melbourne University and was offered a photography assistant’s job at Orpin and Bourke, a small and very creative boutique advertising agency. Kevin Orpin, an energetic autodidact, taught me design and marketing whilst Bob Bourne, freshly returned from London’s swinging 60’s, taught me lighting. “Never add a second light till you have exhausted the first one”.

I was to assist Peter Gough, who in turn was Norman Parkinson’s former assistant back in London. He tired of me after three months but the studio decided to launch me as a photographer in my own right. My folio was eclectic but I was offered a job reshooting a Marlboro cigarette campaign when a week‘s shoot by a famous photographer didn’t satisfy the art director. For $250 for a day’s work my career was launched and the agency landed three huge billboards.

Remarkably I picked up a succession of big national accounts. I was an untrained nerd who loved the technology but had sleepless nights before each shoot, petrified of not knowing what to do.

A brilliant art director, Barton Gole, taught me everything about what made a photograph really work. It was always the outtake, the shot I took intuitively that I had thought a failure. Eccentric cropping, wrong exposure and maybe blurred or out of focus. He had the wit to find one and produce amazing ads that sold product and won awards.

I stumbled through the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s shooting fashion and advertising, including Get Wrecked on Great Keppel, Dunk Island, Sportsgirl, Levante Hosiery, Bri Nylon, Sitmar Cruises, Jag, Prue Acton, Air Lanka, Air Nauru, Oberoi Hotels, Hyatt hotels and many more. Many of the travel accounts took me to exotic locations that it turn gave me the opportunity to further my personal photographic projects.

Along the way I was mentored by a clutch of remarkable photographers; Ezra Stoller, Ansel Adams, Wolfgang Sievers, Mark Strizic, David Moore and Max Dupain.

Meanwhile I had discovered dead cities and started my own projects in New Guinea, India, Cambodia, Western China, Indonesia, Turkey and Libya. This urban documentation has become an obsession with return visits annually to various sites. None of it has had much exposure, as it’s been hard to find a publisher. In some ways I’m better known in India where whole museums have been built to house my work on the Vijayanagara Empire.

With the growing realization that an old fashion photo has no immediate value I started to concentrate on architecture photography exclusively from the 80’s on. I’m extremely proud of an archive of significant buildings right across South East Asia; all of it digitized and stored on a massive server with millions of images.

I was an early adopter of digital capture and post production. It enabled me to control both the image and the architecture. In 2010 I was the co creative director, with Ivan Rijavec of the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale showing images I had created after discovered a way to make hyper stereo pictures from a helicopter at night using a single camera. The documentation of Australia’s cities and mining pits in large scale 3D projection images attracted much attention with over 95,000 attendees during the course of the Biennale.

It’s been a different trajectory since Venice. I’ve been more experimental and expressive. Serious still photography has been liberated by video and social media. From a career of technical perfection using large format cameras and correct perspective I’m now able to explore and play with the very qualities of photography that I thought were sacrosanct. Focus, exposure , sharpness, colour rendition and meaning are all at my mercy.