John Gollings first picked up a camera at the age of nine, falling in love with the process of photography. He continued snapping, Nikon F in hand, throughout his time at the University of Melbourne, where he formally studied architecture during the 1960s. After graduating with a Masters degree in Architecture, he decided to pursue his self-taught hobby full‑time, stepping into the world of advertising and fashion photography.

Meanwhile, his former architecture classmates gradually began to design and construct significant projects. ‘I was their go-to photographer’, explains Gollings. ‘I was really starting to shoot some pretty major architectural work in the late seventies. By the mid‑eighties, I had firmly committed to just photographing buildings.’ In 1976 Gollings received private tuition from Ansel Adams in his darkroom in Carmel, California. His catalogue of work quickly grew to include commissions from some of the world’s most recognised architects, including Le Corbusier, Glenn Murcutt and Harry Seidler.

Alongside his well-known commercial work, Gollings engages in personal projects concerned with architectural history and heritage. This fascination is apparent in his documentation of places such as Melbourne and Surfers Paradise, where he has recorded the evolution of the built environment over extended periods of time, and case studies of ancient structures in China, Cambodia and Libya. One of his most recent projects focuses on capturing Nawarla Gabarnmang, an Indigenous rock shelter located in Arnhem Land. Dated at over 45,000 years old, the structure is the oldest human construction photographed by Gollings, and was created by tunnelling into a cliff face to form a pillared interior space.

Characterised by strong formal composition but with a didactic, and wider, contextual viewpoint, Gollings brings technical resources and craft skills to a discipline which often lacks either a point of view or the ability to express it.

John Gollings operates from a collaborative design, photography and 3D rendering studio in Melbourne, Australia.

John Gollings specialises in the documentation of cities, old and new, a lot of it from the air. He has had a particular interest in the cyclic fires and floods, which characterise the Australian landscape. These have been documented with aerial photography.

Gollings was Creative Director, with Ivan Rijavec, of Now + When for the Australian Pavilion at the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibition compared the existing state of Australian cities, with their counterpoint in the mining holes of the west, to the possibility of a radical, new, paradigm city of the future. This was all photographed from a helicopter in 3D or rendered in 3D using CGI techniques by Flood Slicer, part of the Gollings collaborative studio, along with Design By Pidgeon, who designed the graphics.

Gollings has taught the use of large format cameras, and lectured on architecture and advertising photography at Prahran College, Melbourne and Sydney universities and Philip Institute amongst others.