WEBVTT
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The most important things that can happen to you,
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standing in front of whichever painting it might be,
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can only happen with a painting.
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It's the experience of whatever the hell a painting is,
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and the most important and profound
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and life-changing things that can happen to you
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when you look at a photograph
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can only happen with a photograph.
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It's a photograph.
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They're totally different things.
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(soft music)
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Usually I start with,
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at the very beginning, and talk about your childhood,
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but we might work our way back to that.
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And, if we could maybe start with
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the story of the Simone Young commission.
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I went to watch Simone in rehearsals
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at Hamer Hall in Melbourne a couple of times,
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and I had the same problem I had
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when I was doing the commission for the Paris Opera,
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which was that I didn't want to make pictures
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which were just a document of something else.
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I wanted to make pictures
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which were a thing in their own right,
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if you know what I mean.
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And so, by photographing her in the pit,
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with an orchestra, rehearsing, whatever it was at the time,
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I just thought, it's just never going to look as interesting
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as in its own right, as,
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so the picture becomes the subject,
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rather than the event that's being documented
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being the subject,
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which is one of those great conundrums for photography.
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And so, I organised for Simone to visit me
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in my studio in Northcote,
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and we'd met and discussed things briefly,
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at rehearsals, but she came along,
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and she said, "I've brought my shoes."
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I said, "It's from the waist up."
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She said, "I need my shoes."
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So she put the shoes on,
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and I'd constructed this couple of crates in my studio
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that I wanted her to stand on.
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And then I, we had a conversation.
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I said, "Well, you know, what have you,
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"what are you working on at the moment?"
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And she was preparing to conduct "Der Rosenkavalier,"
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the Richard Strauss.
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And I said, "Oh, well, you know, why don't we put it on,
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"and why don't you, you know, conduct to the music?"
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I said, "You know, it's strange, of course."
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And she said, "It's very strange, because I lead.
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"Whereas if I'm listening to a recording and try to conduct,
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"I'm following the recording."
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And I said, "Well, it might be interesting for you.
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"Let's give it a go."
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And she said, "Well, you know,
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"the only recording that I really
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"have been listening to carefully is by Erich Kleiber,
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"and you're not going to have that."
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And I go, "Well, here it is."
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So I pulled out the Erich Kleiber recording,
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Carlos Keliber's father.
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Great conductor, and we put that on,
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and she started, she got into it,
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and she started conducting,
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and I was just taking pictures, and everything else,
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and we kept going, and we kept going,
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and we both got quite a good sweat up.
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And in fact, in the end,
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she conducted the whole opera.
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And like, we were having a lot of fun.
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Like, she was like, going off,
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and I just kept shooting it and shooting it and shooting it,
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and at the end of it, like a normal session
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that I would do with one of my models,
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it's like both people are kind of exhausted and perspiring.
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And that was that, and it was like...
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And I said, "It seems, it's interesting to do." (sighs)
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So that was the end of it.
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And then she packed up, and caught a cab,
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and I went back to the lab
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and started working on the pictures.
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(classical music)
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I shoot film, old-fashioned negative film,
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in a camera, you know.
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So just, you know, what we used to all
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take to the chemist and get developed.
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And I still use film for a number of very important reasons,
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but I just had all the film processed,
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standard C-41 process, you know.
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Standard and variable, I think the scientists call it.
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So that's a standard process.
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And then I make those contact proof sheets.
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Six rows, times six, 36 shots on a roll of film,
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and I make those myself,
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and then I sit there with some on my desk,
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with a white Chinagraph pencil and a magnifying glass,
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have a look, and I just take my time.
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And I go back and forth through them,
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and of course, because they contact the film,
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you can see the film grain,
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and I've always thought of the film grain
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as part of the actual image.
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That's probably why I'm still,
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mainly the reason I'm still shooting film, so.
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(classical music)
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So, over the process of weeks, or months,
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or years in some cases,
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you narrow it down to those few images
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and start making larger prints from those.
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Scanning the neg in.
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Well, at least for analogue, when I made them,
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so putting them in the enlarger,
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and my heat proofs in the darkroom processing machine.
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And yeah, I narrowed it down to three.
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I couldn't get it down to one.
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And that's how the process worked.
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And the actual prints are the main thing for me.
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The object, and having that kind of,
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the scale and the presence of the object
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is the ultimate part of it for me.
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That's why I often say to people
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that I make objects that happen to be photographs,
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because, I mean, I know that if I can find something else
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that was more, just fell less short for me,
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I would move to that medium.
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Some other medium that brings you closer
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to things you don't even understand, and you go to that.
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So, I can't remember the question. (laughs)
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That's fantastic,
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you answered the question perfectly.
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(classical music)