Collective Vision: Oculi 

A group of 10 Australian photographers are making a significant mark on the national and international photographic scene - and even photographic history - through their dedication and commitment to the process of making pictures. Collectively called Oculi they have more than 20 world-class awards between them and a massive wealth of working experience as photojournalists. They seek process over outcome, and their work reminds us that creative excellence is about dedication to one's craft while allowing the spirit of discovery to lead the way. Oculi is showcased on their website, where the photographers post a changing gallery of images of daily life. 

The great thing about being in Oculi is that it's unedited and unfettered,' says freelance photographer Jeremy Piper. 'Being part of it forces you to go a bit further all the time, motivating you to produce different images. I'm proud to be a photographer, to be documenting daily life that's happening around us right now, and in the most honest and artistic way possible.'

It was this desire for honesty in picture making that inspired founder members Dean Sewell, Trent Parke and Narelle Autio, all World Press Photo winners, to invite a select group of photojournalists to form Oculi.

'At the end of 1999 I was approached by the web company Sapient who offered to create a site for me pro bono,' says Sewell. 'Instead of me doing it alone, we saw it as a chance to form a collective, and we ran with it. The criteria for who we invited was that they had to be prolific and committed, and feel the same dissatisfaction with what was happening to photos in the media that we did. We'd been maturing in our craft and wanted to progress photography, but felt our industry wasn't keeping up with that progression. Editors were still looking for contrived and literal images while we'd moved on.'

Parke 'moved on' to become Magnum Photos' first ever Australian photographer, while Sewell, Autio and Piper, along with Glenn Hunt, Nick Cubbin, Nick Moir, Tamara Dean, Jesse Marlow, Warren Clarke and Tamara Voninski continued to build Oculi to its current profile. Recognised as a collection of exceptional talent, Oculi was picked up by European agency Agence VU in 2003.

'They were impressed by the vibrancy and the different vision,' recalls Marlow, who was Oculi's representative in Paris at the VU signing. 'It was a coup for us, as we've become their Australian photographic pool. In Paris and London, photographers were telling me they hadn't seen anything like our photos before. They talked about us having a view that was almost hyper-real, and a style they described as "dreamlike".'

'We have a cult following on the website,' says Voninski. 'We get hits from all over the world, from people of all walks of life. They check in regularly because the photos change every month.Oculi has been described as a photographic movement. It's been noticed that what's happening here in photojournalism is quite unique. I'd say the European tradition has poetic images of daily life while the American tradition is more storytelling, but Australian photography is a cross between the two.'

'We've created something that's brought attention to our type of photography in Australia,' says Hunt. 'There's been a big gap since Max Dupain and David Moore in the 1960s. We've all grown through press photography and in many ways grown beyond it. People like Michael Amendolia and Russell Shakespeare were producing inspiring, uncontrived work in the 1990s. They supported exhibitions like Reportage, but until Oculi there wasn't anywhere we could really band together to showcase and strengthen photojournalism as we can now.'

Oculi's mission statement is to 'reveal the beauty, wonder and struggle of everyday life without contrived photo shoots or art-directed aesthetics,' so just what is the image of Australia that emerges from their 'unflinching gaze'?

'What we aim to do is show a truly contemporary picture, from the bush to the city,' says Dean. 'In the past, a lot of images from Australia have been contrived, centred on famous landmarks, all very predictable.'

The environment of Australia is beach, bush and city and these are reflected in the Oculioeuvre, but with a fresh take. Instead of Bondi surfers there is the edgy abstraction of Cubbin's kite flyers, or Autio's lyrical water pictures. Instead of Aborigines with didgeridoos, there is the joyous warmth of Marlow's football community in 'Centre Bounce', or Hunt's hypnotic 'Arnheimland'.

A window is opened on our city dwellers as never before in Sewell's stark pageantry of Newtown festival, the honest intimacy of Dean's 'Fringe dwellers' and the soft surrealism of Voninski's 'Angels on escalators,' while our landscape is revealed in all its force in Nick Moir's fires and storms. Moir says, 'Oculi is showing Australia through the eyes of Australian photographers who are sick of stereotyped pictures. It's showing the rest of the world that Australian photography is growing up.'

'A lot of photographers go overseas to shoot stories,' says Cubbin. 'In some ways it's probably harder to see what surrounds you all the time, but we want to show that there are these pictures, this energy, coming out of Australia, and our collective brief challenges us to look at things here as if for the first time.'

'The feedback I've had from overseas is that Australian photographers are hard working and inventive,' says Autio. 'Because there's not so much hard news here, we tend to search out good photos. I've met a number of European editors who love how we work to get something out of every situation.'

Sky Sight

It was the early 1950s and the young Dutchman, then working as a painting contractor, was flying from Perth to Derby on business. When it's up to cruising speed, a DC3 plods along at fairly sedate 300 kph, so Woldendorp and his fellow passengers would have had a good five or six hours to gaze at the scenery.

Sand dune, Windorah, Queensland 1994. Late light falls on the drifting sand dune south east of Queensland.

 Woldendorp had come to Australia almost on impulse. Having been too young to serve during World War II (he was 13 when fighting started), he nevertheless joined the army shortly after the war ended. For three years he served in Indonesia, but when he returned to Holland he says, ' there was still not a lot happening after the war. I was used to being away and they had advertised Australia a lot while I was in Indonesia. So, I thought, well, I'm used to the heat and used to being away, I'll have a go at Australia.'

Although he'd originally planned to settle in Sydney, he decided to stop in Perth for awhile first. ' I'd never done a day's work in my life when I got off at Fremantle. But I knew a bit about colour so I started painting houses. I wasn't very successful, but I hung in there, sort of got the hang of it.' After living and working in Western Australia for about four years, he decided to return to Europe for a holiday.

He bought a camera for the occasion and after some initial practice in Perth, he travelled by boat to Europe, photographing along the way. 'When I got all the photographs processed in Holland, I thought, that's what I'd love to do.'

On his return to Australia, he discovered that there really weren't any photography courses as such. But he did discover a group of knowledgeable photographers (both amateur and professional) in the Cottesloe Camera Club - and before long he had assembled a portfolio. Still planning to settle in Sydney, he travelled to the east to see if he could find work as a photographer. ' I got in touch with a lot of book editors, publishers and editors of magazines.' he says. 'And they all said, we can give you a lot of work if you go back to Western Australia, because we haven't got anybody there that will take photographs for us.'

Determined not to be one of those photographers who did all their work in a studio, Woldendorp instead decided to be, in his words, 'a true freelancer' and to go out on assignments. Initially that meant editorial work for the magazines, but with the arrival of the mining boom, it soon entailed commissions for the likes of Hammersley Iron, Transfield and what was then called the Department of Industrial Development.

'Those people all wanted photographs from the outback and from the new developments. And that's how I started to travel and,' he adds, 'also became aware of how important the aerial perspective of the landscape was. There are whole areas where there are no roads, so how else are you going to see it? We don't have high mountains you can get overviews from. So the moment you get up [in an aeroplane], you see the strength of the landscape - how it evolved, and how repetitive it is sometimes, like the ridges in the Simpson Desert.'

Four decades, 18 photographic books and many exhibitions and magazine articles later, Richard Woldendorp, now just into his 80s, is still taking photographs from the air. These days he uses three different cameras, a Pentax 6x7, a Fuji 6x9 and a Canon 5D. He likes the speed and ease of use of digital, but while he is happy with the Canon's image quality, he says ' there's no two ways about it that digital will win out over anything else. But the 6x9 Fuji with fine Velvia film will give you an extremely beautiful image.'

Top of Curtis Island, Cape Capricorn, Queensland 1997. An estuary with sand banks.

To capture his images, he prefers a high wing Cessna or similar. Depending upon the aircraft design, he may shoot through the perspex, or out an open window. He may sit in the co-pilot's seat if the side window is suitable, or he may take a seat behind the pilot and shoot over his or her shoulder. Finding the right pilot is of course tremendously important. 'Some pilots are difficult to photograph with because they don't see it,' says Woldendorp. 'You almost have to fly the plane yourself. But others anticipate what you want when you show them the landscape that you're interested in.'

Landscape photographers of the earth-bound variety are frequently counseled to shoot during the magic hours just after sunrise and just before sunset, but Woldendorp says that he generally shoots during the middle part of the day. This makes sense when you think about it. If you're looking down on a landscape from an aeroplane at noon, your subject is perfectly front-lit.

Given that his immaculate compositions are created from a fast moving aircraft, it is something approaching a marvel to learn that he does no significant cropping and no 'photoshop-ing'. Asked his secret, Woldendorp says, ' It's years and years of practice. In the beginning it was a lot more difficult. I also know how quick it is to position a plane.' The plane moves relatively slowly in relation to the subject, 'but you only get one shot – and that's it.

Sometimes you can circle a subject when it's particularly good, but generally I don't for two reasons. One is that we fly long distances and you can't muck about too much because the plane needs to cover that distance for re-fueling and what not. We have the occasional time where we have 5 or 10 minutes to make a circuit. And the other thing when you make a circuit, you never get back into position. It's not like it's a road... you think you can get back but there's drift and so on.'

Burnt trees in snow, Victorian Apls, Victoria 2007.

When he began taking aerial photographs in the early days, for clients, he used black and white film, but in the last 30 years or so colour film has been perfected and become more important. '[My] training was always about form and design,' he says. 'And in [landscape] painting it is always about selecting something with a strong element of design in it.' His early experience in mono photography re-inforced this approach.

'You depend on form in black and white photography, so that definitely helped me when it came to using colour.' But he emphasises that while he shoots in colour, his goal is to capture the tonalities accurately and, as he puts it, 'the reality of what is out there'.

'Nature has very little colour, it is always either blue as the sky, green as the bush or maybe red as the earth. Colour is informative [and] it helps [us] to understand the landscape. I wouldn't like these aerial photographs to be anything but in colour – although some of them would stand alone in form. It's the colour that gives you the information. We are conditioned by the colour in nature.'

'In the man-made world, when you go into the street you see all that advertising and the brightest colours are usually expressed by subjects you are least interested in. We've used colour indiscriminately, but in nature it is totally informative and at peace with itself. You get a sunset, it's the highlight of the day if it's a flash of red or pink colour – and then it's gone.'

Forest River, Kimberley WA 2003. At low tide, drainage lines form a pattern against the mangroves.

While Woldendorp says that people often remark that his photographs look like Aboriginal paintings, he says that the radical difference in intention means any such resemblance is coincidental. Aboriginal people, he says, are not copying the landscape in the way his photographs do, but are creating something more akin to a multidimensional map of everything in a region from waterhole locations to local myths and 'Dreamtime'.

This isn't to suggest in any way that Woldendorp's work is intended to be some sort of abstract, academic exercise. His acute sensitivity to form and the skill he brings to capturing it arise from his own abiding appreciation for the natural world.

'I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Nature, the great provider. As a species our survival depended very much on us tuning in to the landscape. We've reached the crucial point that with global warming the natural environment needs extra care for its survival so that we can survive. I always hope that by pointing out the beauty of what is there, people will be inspired to look after the environment.'

All images in this article are from Richard Woldendorp's new book Abstract Earth, A view from Above (published by Fremantle Press). An exhibition will also tour Australia over the next two years.

Creature Discomforts 

Visitors to Peter Strain's gallery in Broome, Western Australia, typically react to his macro photographs of mangrove tree snails with laughter and amazement. These Creatures of the Giant Tides, as he has called the series, are startlingly colourful, varied and ˜alien'. 

For this shot of a coloured mangrove crab, Peter Strain predicted the trail it would take when he made a slight movement and it scurried back to its hole. 'I set up with red cliffs and a green mangrove tree as background, then ran a three-frame burst to get the picture,' he says. 'This was taken with a Sony Alpha 100 and an old Rokkor 50mm prime lens with adapters and extension tubes.'

 'They're the barroom scene out of Star Wars really,' says Strain, who was recently visited by the writers of a children's television series who have it in mind to use them as animated characters in a dream sequence.

The fingernail-sized snails (below) live on the tidal flats of Roebuck Bay, immediately south of Broome. Since discovering their bizarre visual appeal a few years ago, Strain has spent countless hours observing, selecting and photographing them. Or part of them. What most people anthropomorphically assume is their head popping out of their shell is in fact their foot.

'They spend some of the time under the water and some of the time out of it, on the mangrove trees,' says Strain. 'I pluck them off the branches when the tide goes out. Then I find a suitable background, use a wire frame to steady my hand while I hold them in front of my macro setup, and wait for them to pop their "heads" out. With the macro tubes, I need a terrific amount of light - bright sunlight - which brings out that intense colour.'

Roebuck Bay's huge tides aren't the only reason Strain has limited his shoots to a maximum of four hours at a time. 'It's a very hard environment to work in - sandflies, crocodiles and mud,' he says.

The mud has accounted for half a dozen lenses in recent years, which is why he buys 20- to 30-year-old Rokkors on eBay and uses a series of adaptors to attach them to his camera. 'My choice of equipment is about stuff I can afford to work with rather than what I have to spend time trying to protect,' he says, although he can't avoid having to be careful with his professional-grade Sony Alpha 900 cameras.

'Initially I used a Canon EOS 30D. Then Sony brought out the Alpha SLR range with antishake in the body. Other brands have antishake in the lenses, but having it in the body has made a big difference. I can shoot down to around a 40th of a second.' 

The snail shots have generated a lot of interest, and Strain will return to them in due time, but his current fascination is with the tidal flats' equally colourful crabs. 'Can we talk about crabs?' he says. 'It's a bit like being a musician. Everyone loves your old music, but you want to play your latest song.'

Making photographic music with the crabs presents a whole new set of challenges. 'If you get one good picture a week, you're doing well. There are millions of them, but they don't like humans at all. Their eyesight is better than ours and if they see a human, they vanish underground. You have to sit very quietly and wait for them to come out of their holes to feed. They always plan their escape route, so I have to ambush them when they scurry back. 

'There's no accidental photography with crabs. You have to learn about their behaviour - which applies to the tree snails as well. I don't do accidental photos. I think about the picture, then work out how I'm going to get there.' 

Stills and movies 

Strain grew up in the Cape Naturaliste area in southern WA and moved to Broome about 20 years ago. In the 1970s he started working in television while also getting into underwater stills photography with rigs he built himself and the Nikonos system.

While living in Broome, he has also managed the core creative team that developed the successful musical, Bran Nue Dae (recently made into a movie), and was producer and director of the first series of the TV comedy, The Mary G Show.

While continuing to take photographs for his own projects, and while running his studio/gallery/theatrette in Broome, he travels regularly by four-wheel-drive, boat and light aircraft to remote parts of the Kimberley coast to film for television, industrial and advertising projects.

'It's a personal point that stills and movie camera pictures sort of merge together for me,' he says. 'I do a lot of time lapse stuff, and it has taught me that stills cameras are really the same as movie cameras but with a slower frame rate and extremely high resolution. When I go out on a job, I'll take both kinds of camera and generate a lot of the TV material by shooting stills on a tripod and converting them to TV's 25 frames a second. For example, time lapses of the tide or people building a jetty.'

His nature photography has featured in Australian Geographic three times in the last 18 months: the snails, the crabs and the boab trees found only in the Kimberley region.

'One of the big keys in this photography for me is that most specimens in the wild are photographed by scientists for taxonomic reasons, to classify and count,' he says. 'If you've done any science studies, one of the things your lecturer will impress on you is that you have to avoid anthropomorphic [human] values and interpretations. But I go straight for the anthropomorphic. Initially I had a few scientist friends saying

shouldn't be doing that, but they changed their view when they saw the results.

'My point is that I think I can draw attention to the environment in a way that taxonomic photography can't. It encourages people to appreciate the animals we've got, particularly those in Roebuck Bay.'

A high-level government scientist Strain invited to his gallery ended up spending a fascinating hour there. 'He said to me, "As a scientist, you can spend all your life working out the numbers, how one species relates to another and that sort of thing.

But at some point you have to say you could do this all your life and never reach the end of it. You become in awe of nature. But what you do is jump straight to the awe." I thought that was really nice and we had a chuckle about it. I look at the snails and crabs as a sort of visual celebration and unashamedly go for it.'