Ingvar Kenne

- So without further ado, let's get underway. These Thursdays, these Thursday programmes, we've been featuring photographers, professional photographers, from around Australia, but who also happen to be good friends with the National Portrait Gallery and today's programme is no exception. Ingvar Kenne, has been a friend of the Portrait Gallery for very, very long time now, and we'll hear a little bit about that during the programme, but we have no less than 23 portraits of his in our collection, but also his portraits have featured in the National Photographic Portrait prize for many years, including winning one of the National Photographic Portrait prizes, so, Ingvar, thank you so much for joining us today.

- Oh, thank you for having me. Good night. Thank you.

- No problems. Should we just dive in? Should we just--

- I think yeah.

- Sounds great. All right. Well, we've got, we were talking earlier at our tech discussion that we've actually got one of the first photographs that you shot for what has now become The Citizen project that we'll hear a little bit about during the talk. Do you wanna just give us a little bit of background into this first portrait that we're looking at now?

- Yeah, that came about when I set out on a global motorcycle trip in '94 and then ended up going on for two and a half years, and I've travelled with a friend. And we started finish together, but we kind of separated, so there's a lot of my own time and I, up to that point, I've been taking photographs for quite some time already and I studied at university, and I felt like it was nothing. I sort of felt like, I'd started things and never finished them and this, this trip became quite crucial and important and, you know, start of something that's now going on for 27 years, is it? But I realised, that the context of travelling, which ended up being 35-40 countries, in order to make these images that you take during that time relate to each other, it became important to have these strict parameters. You know, same, same format, same lens, same film, and same approach, and I was lucky to have a friend in, back in Stockholm then. Every, so often, you send 10 rolls back home that got developed a set of context sheets for sense to some poster standard address. Three months down the road, so you kind of got an update, three months delay back then. And very clearly and very early on, I realised that the, the thing that kind of gelled the trip for me and both as a person, but visually was the portraits. So, with kind of the help of these contact sheets, it became this narrowed focus on how I would approach these meetings that was all random and how to do them, make them sit together in a cohesive format. And this was the first, well, I'd like to call it the first, I think I've taken one or two putters before, but this is after arriving on an oil tanker from Norway and being offloaded onto the, in the Harbour there in Halifax, Canada, and this guy, Wendell, worked at the dock and immediately, we were invited to his house and ended up staying with him for, I don't know, four or five days. And he took us out on a boat and I kinda liked it, it kind of, it's kind of the first portrait I felt like, this is, this is where it is at, and this is the parameter I will continue with, and I kind of liked that he photographed me while I photographed him, and that kind of kicked it all off in '94.

- That's incredible. Should we have a look at a couple of others from the chasing summer series?

- Yeah, there's a few there, I think. Yeah.

- This wonderful girl Carina.

- Yeah, she was a delight. I didn't meet her for long. This was in the, on the outskirts of Lima, and she helped her mother, you know, running this roadside cafe, where you got some, some quick snacks, and a refreshment drink. And we, we had this, you know, Ramona theatre. I need to say my Spanish was pretty bad. It got, got pretty good at the end of six months in South America, but the conversation, I don't know much about Carina, but she went a bit of fun with my helmet and playing again. Yeah.

- And this format, which as we move through, I think people will start to, to see the uniqueness of that format, were you saying that the contact sheets, that kind of, that were being sent to you, that sort of, that focused it into this sort of square format that has now become, sort of signature for you.

- It was in square format camera. It was not a house of blood but it was my mere six. So it's kind of, it's sort of the negative you get is square. So yeah. I kind of had a liking to that format for a while before this trip so I'm comfortable within those equal sides.

- Yeah.

- But yeah, no, I remember cutting out and just do a little diary thing of these contact sheets, and normally I don't like to look back at what I do too much, I like to kind of, keep it fresh, but this trip kind of needed this consistency I felt, in order for me to make sense of it and not try to experiment through this two and a half years. It felt like I needed to just, stay in this little tiny space, that is my space and, and keep going. So, you know, the way that, I mean, this is portraiture, they look back at camera, is pretty straightforward, but the context around it was always, as important, if not more important sometimes to find that first and then place the person in that context. That's kind of how I've worked since then I think, and this, this project is called Chasing Summer, but I feel, to me now, it's part of Citizen, 'cause it's, you know, Citizen kind of later became another book, but it's the same, you know, same approach, same everything.

- Yeah. We have to give a shout out to this awesome portrait of a cow, as well as a human being. It's fantastic.

- Yeah.

- And another one from the Chasing Summer.

- Yeah. Sort of the homecoming. I was kind of spending nine months in Australia, on this trip and, I ended up meeting my wife. We married very quickly and I left very quickly after, and not for any other reason but I needed to finish this trip, and so I spent nine months travelling back through the sub-continent and Iran, and this is, again, a random encounter on the top of the paths. I think Gachsar, in Iran, heading towards the Black Sea, and she is a traveller with her, with her husband. They were going on a holiday trip to the, to the, to the, to the inland sea themselves, so, a random portrait. Don't know much more than her name. I liked it though. I was gonna hug his nappies in the boot and all very strangely normal at the time. Yeah.

- Brilliant. Should we have a little jump now to some of the works, the portraits that you have, you haven't made a selection of those that we have in the portrait gallery collection, and then we'll come back to have another chat about this mammoth Citizen project. The first one we wanted to have a little look at is Annaliese Seubert.

- Yeah, that. That, yeah. So when I landed in Australia in '90, back in Australia in '96, after this trip, there was no in, so I ended up waiting tables for three or four years in Melbourne and slowly, slowly, getting in touch with magazines trying and it took a long, long time, but I did get a break with Australian style at the time to take a portrait, and the next gig was, "Oh, hang on, we like how you take portraits." because all I had to show was the box of Kodak prints from Chasing Summer. That was my, the extent of my pitch document. So, this editor Mark Mordue took a punt, I think, and just said, "Let's just have you do a fashion story with this model analyst, Seubert" So I've got, I had no idea what I was doing beyond taking portraiture, but it was a portrait fashion story over 10 pages and yeah. That hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, and I think this image's here, so, yeah.

- Yes. Oh, yeah.

- Yeah.

- So...

- So, that's kind of how it started for me here, I think.

- And this was one of the first early portraits that you took when you came back to Australia, is that right?

- Yeah. I think it was two years when I did nothing more than waiting tables, and then, I think I had a different aspiration then of wanting to do, cause I had... In Sweden, I've had a couple of work grants, co-arts grants and exhibitions, and I kind of wanna stay in that world, but reality set in that no one really wants to know about, that here, what I've done. It was like, I could not get anywhere with that kind of, kind of starting, "Okay. I better take photographs again and approach magazines with these box of prints." And that's kind of how it so started.

- Mm hmm. And another famous face in the National Portrait Gallery collection.

- Yeah. He's, probably, one of my favourite subject over. We hang out for four hours, at his manager's office in North Sydney and they didn't have a water view in Mossman, so they painted it, and that became one of the portraits that day, but yeah, a lovely, lovely experience. And, for the, for the first 10 years, a lot of my portraiture were assignment, or, you know, the bulk of it. You know, I took portraits of random, encounters, like Chasing Summer style, but a lot of the work came out of assignments, shooting musicians or models or, you know, priests, I don't know, prime ministers, all sorts.

- Yeah.

- And then kind of, and it was never meant to be pro... Like Citizen was never meant to be, I feel like, the advent of digital, I don't know when that was, kind of like mid 2000, when it was not, when I couldn't fight for the reason of shooting with this camera anymore. When they all wanted digital files, and I kind of, I kind of gave up on editorial then. 'Cause it felt like, I can't take the photographs I wanna take and I don't wanna put my name on this. And so that's when I started looking back on the work that, then became Citizen. So it was 15 years of work there that became the book and so forth later.

- Well, that's a good way to segue into that Citizen project, but we couldn't, couldn't go without showing at least one--

- Oh, yeah.

- cameo of yourself with Angus.

- Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was a good day. Yeah. I just want you to know that I love Frisbee. So...

- That's awesome. Should we have, would you like, have brought along the Citizen book, that was published and was also, had its book launch at the National Portrait Gallery along with an exhibition. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about that?

- Yeah. So yeah. So I said, you know, like I started looking back, sort of 2010 roughly, I don't know, and just kind of, well this is sort of, this is something here again, like this kind of continuous way of approaching people, regardless if it's a commission or if it's me, sort of meeting someone randomly, and obviously, I was kind of aware of it, but not in the context that I wanted to put it out there in the world, but it felt like a natural end. When I stopped working with magazines,

- Mm hmm.

- and yeah, I started going through the work and several rounds and in 2012, you kind of had a show at the National Gallery and we launched the book there. I have it here, do you wanna?

- Yes, please.

- It's this one here. And then you, you know I decided from now on, I'm just gonna show work for Citizen that is produced after 2012. So none of that in the book is, is part of this conversation, but it's an ongoing project.

- And we'll get Matt to drop the link into the Citizen book too, so that if anyone's interested, they can go and have a look at that. On your website... But shall we dive into some of the more recent Citizen works that people won't have seen published this early?

- Yeah. This is the first portrait after, well, it's actually at the printer in China, so you can see a sheet of the book, being printed in China. So I guess that's, Yuan Yuan Zhou, the first portrait after the book was published and yeah, it started the next chapter. It's not really a chapter, but it just started the continuation of the project.

- And we had more?

- This follow here.

- We have a whole series of images that we can work our way through now, but we're not going to do them in chronological order or necessarily even in the various different countries that they were taken. So, and this is something that you do in your Citizen book, isn't it? It's not necessarily in a particular order or categorised in any particular ways, that deliberate?

- Yeah, totally. Yes, it is. I mean, it's kind of a visual, visual sequencing, you know, with the sign at the time, Marcus Piper was like, I don't know. We did that for three years. Just laying it out, redoing it, and it's just the flow of the images, I guess, was what dictated how it fell on the page rather than anything else. But I guess to me, it's like, I think I just follow my own precept. You know, like it's this manual in my head that is just impossible to ignore. It's like a tick. And that the purpose is, it's almost the purpose, is the obsessive doing and continuing this body of work and, you know, the photographs of these incidental moments and spaces that we've sort of just happened to converge on. And, and from that, is this elevated, you know, it becomes this elevated human connection between us. You know the camera is such an enabler in that way that you can, you know, I would never approach these. I would never have had a conversation with these people or even, like we'd never crossed paths, but the camera is kind of the reason we are crossing paths in the sense, and it becomes this, is it taxonomical, in some ways? The whole, it's just almost like speech species or specimens, you know specimens?

- Mm hmm.

- Sorry that, that are being documented I think, and I find it, almost a democratic equaliser. There's like no borders, no issues, no sides to take, and, you know, seeing eye to eye with people. And for me, it's being a Citizen of the world, just being out there and connect with people, strangers.

- As we move through these images people will see, you know, complete strangers, different nationalities, different faces, but they'll also see famous faces as well. Is your approach for everybody pretty much the same, or do you tailor your approach depending on, you know, the particular shoot that you might be at or how you actually see the people?

- I don't pilot it now, like they get the same treatment, you know? Technically, it's very simple, I won't give it away, but photographer, you probably know there is nothing to it. I think with an assignment, the addition is that you get thrown into, you've gotta meet a such and such musician or, in this hotel room or, it could be anything. I mean, that's been a while since that's happened. So if it's a famous person, but is this, the approach is the same, like I need to find a space to, so I was there earlier and it's always about the space that I need to fill, and so by the time comes that this person, this famous person turns up, I kind of already know what I wanna do, and where I wanna place them. But they're not long shoots. Once I, once I have, once I've found my thing, I don't really care beyond that, and the shoot is very quick.

- Mm hmm.

- I shoot the same photograph over and over, over a couple of rolls and then, they can go and I can go, and I'll pick one out of that. It's really that simple. Yeah.

- And do you mainly work with natural light or do you take much other equipment with you when you're sort of roaming around or is it basically just the camera and work with what you have?

- The light is important. It's available light and then I will fill flash and you can see this in this portrait. It's stronger because I am shooting into the sound, so you can see the front flash, but it's just a simple flash on top of the camera. So the click one is small, and I just try to balance that lift there, lift the subject off the page a little bit, and then, all the way back in '94, I start, that's what I travel with. A little, little pop flash and yeah, it's that simple.

- We got--

- Yeah. Bob Hawke was... I met him, he's the face of a beer company. So that was quite recent, obviously before he passed away. But yeah. That, that was five snap, five shots, and then he had had enough. So, that's it. Yeah.

- And here are a couple of subjects that are very familiar to you.

- Yeah. It's my dad, Boossa Bo. Quite a, quite a big time in his and mom's lives. This is the family childhood home, where I was, where I lived since I was eight till I left home. So they moved, they were moving out in 2018, so I went back to just help move some boxes around and it was very stressful for them, I think because they've been there for a long time and downsizing and yeah. I can see it on my dad's face and my mom too. Yeah. But you know, special place. That's the backyard, I roamed around in.

- Is there, last week when we spoke to Nikki Toole, she was talking about this concept that she had, where she asked people to actually think about a particular thing when she took the photos. So there was a certain expression that she was aiming for from that. When you approach your subjects or when you photograph your subjects, do you ask them to... Do you have a particular conversation, style, or ask them to actually think about particular things or is it basically just trying to capture them as they are, in their environment?

- Yeah. I don't ask them. And when I ask them, I wanna know who they are, and if we have a shared language which I didn't have at this moment in life. I do it, it's a conversation, but in this case there was no conversation. Lifting the camera and she realised I wanted to take the photograph and she paused.

- Mm hmm.

- But yeah, like, I don't know. I like people. I'm really interested in people, but I don't think if I, I don't think I can portray something particular about people really. I think it's mostly in the eye of the beholder of the person who ends up looking at the photographs and, myself included. Because in a lot of the cases, I can't claim to know anything about most people I've photographed. I do have a great human interest, but for me, the photograph is the, it's all about the photograph. And it does not mean that I'm, I'm rushing in to take something from them. I think, you know, we're gentle with each other and I often send pictures, if I can. If I get an email address, it's always an exchange after the fact, but for me, for me the photograph is the absolute. And, and I don't, yeah, I don't know how to say it really. Let's move on to the next picture now.

- Sure. Well, this is a familiar environment to a lot of Australians after 2020's events.

- Yes. Quite a horrendous couple of days. I was camping down, not far from there, in the Mercer Rock National Park, and I heard a wrap at the tent. We heard a wrap at the tent, two in the morning, "Get out." You know, the fire, I think it was the fire and yeah, packed up everything and rushed and was sort of, was pushed towards Eden sports ground, I think. And it was 4,000 other people there, coming from all over. And this is David, and his wife, Margaret was next to him, and yeah, we just ended up being neighbours on this, this day New Years Eve, 2019.

- And fellow evacuees?

- Yeah. That's earlier that morning and trading stories, like Emily and Dan was on a holiday on the coast, as well. It wasn't a great holiday for anyone but, he also that morning had got a call from his dad that the farm had burnt down. Everything was gone. Livestock and, and he's priced car collection that he'd been tinkering with. I can't remember where it was. It was across the mountain towards, you know, west of there. So, this is 10.00 in the morning when he was telling me this story. That he'd lost everything really.

- Yeah.

- And then he was on holiday and nowhere to go. So, it was, it was tough times.

- And there's no way of mistaking that sky. So familiar to so many of us.

- Yeah.

- So, we'll head to, jump around a little bit more. Some others.

- This is Gosta. He's a publisher. A journal publisher in Sweden. And he is the one who ended up publishing The Ball, which we'll get to later. Which is the, the last book I published in 2018. Yeah. So that's a printer in Denmark. A friend, Isabella, she's a photographer in Sydney.

- I think for me, and this is what struck me when I was looking through your images is your eye for detail. As you say, you sort of picked, almost picked the environment before the person happens to wander into the shot. There's just so much detail in these images, and some of them, some of the detail is really, quite bizarre, or odd, or intriguing. I mean, for me, the first thing I saw was the tiger in the cage. And then there's a sign, and there's air conditioning, and the fan, it's only the things that kind of combined to, almost, it's almost like a film set in some strange way.

- Yeah. And then it's kind of, nothing is, is added or the, it is what... But I guess, I'm in that space, and I see those, these things coming at you. This fan and, and then it's literally, in this case, it was like, who's around.

- Yeah.

- Jiya was standing next to me with her husband and kids and I just did, do you mind if I just take your portrait? And she just shifted a step, and, was happy to have her portrait taken. And they come like that. I feel like there's been times when I try to force a portrait or like, oh, you know, that, that person looks so interesting, I should really make sure I get a portrait of them, and they almost, you start, call them up, "Do you wanna do a portrait?" And I'm thinking this, and they never work.

- Yeah.

- For me they always fall short because there's so much thought prior, and they just become this, just Hebrew hybrid things I'm not interested in. So, I've come to realise that drop all preparation. Just don't think about anything. And if it doesn't happen for a month, you don't take a portrait for a month. But if you have the camera with you constantly, the moment, the moments will come, and they are the portraits that I end up... The conversation with those portraits are ongoing for me, and they're, they interested me, they became stayers in my project. The longer, the bigger picture. Yeah, this is, yeah, this is emotional. This is Billy Boxhead. He was my dog, our family dog. But through circumstance, I had to re-home him and I knew Margaret, vaguely, but she also, she also is the owner of his brother. And I called her up, sort of, asking for tips, I needed to find a new home, and then the next day she calls me up and said, "I'll take him." So, the slight problem was she was living in Kalgoorlie during COVID, and we tried, attempted last Christmas to, to kind of meet up and it fell through, and then in February I went across and she like, her and her partner came across from Kalgoorlie and we met in Nullarbor Roadhouse, and that was the last, last day with Billy, my dog. And yeah, that's how that portrait came about. So, the 6,000 kilometre trip to find a home for Billy.

- Billy has a good home.

- He has. Probably a better home, let's be honest. And then on the way back, I decided to travel the longer way back, through the guts of Gawler Ranges into South Australia and Coober Pedy, and this is a portrait of a lovely couple in Kingoonya, a town of 10-15 houses, and they run their caravan park. I mean, some of them, there are some other, I don't know, I don't wanna, there's some great stories, but I think I'll keep them probably more to myself because I don't know for me, it is about hope for you, for everyone else it should be about the photograph. I don't think, I want them to be less personalised, I don't want people to know too much, because they should have the same value.

- Yeah. And for me, that is what's so absolutely breathtaking and intriguing about them. I get drawn into the thong line marks on his feet and things and that how did that car happen to be there? But it's the details and the, the picture setting that is just so intriguing and draws you in so much. So, this beautiful couple with the slightly wonky sunglasses, I just, I absolutely love it.

- Yeah. It's, it's a story behind that one too, but yeah. Me, the kids and my ex, were travelling around Cambodia, Vietnam, and I kind of rented a motorbike or, Vesper thing, and every morning I was out for two, three hours, just trying to meet people and take portraits while they slept in, and yeah, these are two guys I came across in this very random place. Yeah. There were lovely.

- We do have a question from one of our zoom participants. Wondering if it's hard to get people not to pose in an unnatural or a self-conscious way, for example, like a selfie pout or a cheesy grin.

- No.

- Not.

- I don't know. As I said I lock up for me, if you, even if I look at other people's work, if it's too, if the subject matter is emoting, is emoting too much, I feel like that, that shuts the image down. You see nothing but that smile, you see nothing but that frown, or whatever pose they take. So, for me, these are slightly glorified passport photos, and that's all I ask for them. You know, I don't, it's, it's very, I want them just to look back and not emote if possible, something will come back towards the camera. But what that is, I don't know what that is, but I want... Again, it's about repetition and it's, it's about being able to line these quarters up somehow, after the fact down the road next to each other, where they have this neutral meet with the camera. Sometimes not, sometimes you grab these, these other moments, scratching your eye. That's a good mate in Sweden. We studied together university. Boat captain. why I was in this dog park, it's another long story. This is kind of daycare centre for dogs in Bangkok.

- And then some, a series of a few from Japan.

- Yeah. I was lucky to do a couple of jobs there, end of 2019 and 2020. I've never been. Always wanted to go to Japan, and ended up staying back a couple of weeks at the time and just travel around a little bit myself. He is just a gardener at the hotel I ended up staying in Hiroshima. We had a bit of a conversation and she's the lady who managed the guest house where I was staying. Trying to ski. But again, like, it was, it was, I was there for two days with the previous lady, staying and skiing, and then one afternoon, it was just, yeah, the snow is so heavy and the, oh, that cone is there, well, just rap on the door, "Can you come out for five minutes?" And she thought she wanted, she thought I wanted her to take my portraits so she was perplexed. But anyway, that's how that came about.

- And Rose, who's joining us on zoom was wondering if there is a sense in which your images are also self-portrait.

- I don't know. I don't know. What I think about portraiture. I think like, I, I'm not interested in the audience at all, in my work. During the process of doing work it's, I think it's the most selfish and kind of beautifully selfish thing to be able to do. And, being in this world of images that are, that I'm interested in, and that's why am I doing these choices that I do, and why do I have this urge to keep taking this portraits. It's a very personal thing. And then yes, at the end of the day, when you decide to say stock and put them together and you make a book or exhibition, obviously then the audience is gonna be involved. But for me, like if I need to, I need to reach my own conclusion with the work and be satisfied. It's almost like I have to make my work iconic for myself. But they need to, they live with me for long time. You know, this project goes on for a long time, and if they keep, staying with me, you take a portrait 10 years earlier and you look at it, oh, and you still kind of get these. I get something from that. Well, it's a stayer, and I don't know why it stays with me. But then, once you done putting it together, put it out in the world. It's kind of, yes, it's out there, but I don't think about the audience until that point. And even beyond that point, I don't, I don't know what I'm trying to, is there something I'm trying to say. I don't, it's no. I'm just trying to do what I do, and if people react to it is probably less of myself put on more of their. I mean, it's their relationship to the work, that is their thing. My relationship to the work is completely different and both are okay, I think. Yeah.

- You did say when we were asking you to bring along a series of images for this particular chat, that it was a bit hard to choose which ones, cause they were all like your children so.

- Yeah.

- All have significance centre power.

- Yeah.

- This is another image that appeared in one of our Photographic Portrait prizes, good old Brad.

- Yeah. Brad Gallagher. Bagsy Gallagher. Yeah. So I was, we'll get to that. But the next project we'll look at is the Ball, where I went to a series of BNS balls around the country and he took me to 10 of them and it took me to number nine to realise, oh my God, I haven't even brought my Citizen camera along. So, I don't have many portraits from that time, and that, excuse me, that was, one of the last two I went to grab a portrait of Brad's. Yeah.

- We'll have a quick look at these last two in the Citizen set, and then we will move on to The Ball. So, this is Reg, and what the most recent Citizen image, which hot off the press, Delma.

- Delma, yeah. Can I talk about Reg 'cause it is--

- Yeah, of corse.

- He wasn't, no, was he? No, it was a different trip. But anyway, he's coming back and sort of hitting sunset and he arrived at this, just check in on the spot and he came straight up to talk to me, Reg and the light was fading, and before he had time to say much more, I said, "Reg," and this is how he approached me with his camouflaged long Johns, and I said, "I really like your portrait Reg." And he was so pleasant to deal. And you know, we photographed, we've got six frames out of it before I ran out of film, no time to reload, the light was gone. But he, then afterwards we talked at length and he he'd never been asked for his portrait to be taken in his whole life. He was, he was deaf, disability pensioner, just out of a lung cancer, lung cancer operation, his mother just died in this town, Narromine. He'd inherited some money. He was buying a house for that money in the same town, and he was staying in this motel. And like, it was this amazing story out of this gentle character who'd approached me. And, you know, I find that, that's what I take away privately, those, those extra. Like I remember everything from every portrait. You know, I remember how I felt that day. I remember the weather, I remember the smells. All the senses. When I take photographs and meet people, my senses are just hyper-alert and you know, in between not so much. And it's just this kind of memory bank, it's almost my own little personal diary and it's sort of, it's, I don't know what comes first. It's sort of part of my life so much that it's, I don't know if the photography or life is so intertwined, those moments of meeting people. Anyway, I've digressed.

- No. Not at all. I'm just, we should, we should have a quick look at the, the next series, The Ball. I reckon, for most of these, you can almost, it's one of those kind of evocative series that we'll just move through as you talk about the series, we won't actually pause on any of the photographs because it's something that has to be seen almost as a series, as a whole, and it feels, I can smell this experience. And when you first sent the images through, I was like, oh, it's like one BNS Ball that Ingvar has gone, and he shot. Turns out it's like, how many, nine BNS Balls?

- 10 I believe. Yeah. Yap.

- I defy anyone to be able to tell which one is which, because they're almost, dear dear. Let's just, let's just dive right in BNS Ball.

- That was the first one actually, that's from the first one in Goondiwindi Queensland. So that's a 12 hour car drive from Sydney. Sleep somewhere along the way, arrive at midday, and then it started and it... This is the first one and it came about... I have, I did a book called Hedgehog and the, the hedgehog and the foxes, which was 48 hours with this adult film star, Ron Jeremy. With very similar nature this, he was going from party to party with bottles of rum that his face on and similar approach. This is shot digitally by the way, because of the nature of it. But, and I had done karaoke shots. So sort of, sort of dabble in images that are on where alcohol is involved and my friend Simon Harrison said, you should look into BNS Ball, and I'd never heard of them. Never came, I've been here a long time, but never heard of them, and so I looked up the first one and it was mind-blowing in every sense. And, it was an idea of doing drunk Australia project, but this felt so uniquely separate, and so it became its own thing called The Ball. Yeah. And they were strangely repetitive. It is like you're, like, you're relieving. I've been to 10, and they're all very similar, in structure and how they go about things, and I felt like I was going back in the past, every time I went to one.

- They certainly feel very Australian. It would be interesting to see if this is something that other countries have this sort of subculture going on but--

- I don't think. Like I had a conversation with Tim Winton who ended up writing it, 'cause I approached him about writing forward to the book and he wrote a very nice letter back of rejection and said no thank you. But I included the letter, my letter to him and his letter back to me, and he sort of talking in this letter, but you know, we have mid summit parties in Sweden, that little crayfish parties they're similar. Youth totally out of control and you have, I don't know spring break in America and what it is, I don't know what it is that... I don't understand why, I mean, I do understand why they go on and then I feel like previous generations had possibly more rituals that was passed down from previous generations. Whereas now youths have to still grow up and still become men and women, and through the process of these parties, I think is almost like an initiation into adulthood. A modern way of doing it rather than being passed on this knowledge from previous gen, to be quick and kind of vague about it. But I don't know. I don't know why they're going but... In this case, you have people who live on farms for 11 months of the year, never seeing much more than their folks in other farm hands and they get a shot at going to a party, five hours drive away. They'll take it, and they'll do the most of what they can in that 48 hours. And that's what happens.

- And we'll just, we'll leave the BNS Balls on this delightful shot. But we probably have just enough time, another five minutes to talk about your move into movie direction Ingvar.

- Yes.

- Would you like to show the trailer first before we start talking about it? Should we do that?

- Let's do that. Yeah.

- Okay. Hector, would you mind screening that short trailer for people to have a sense of the land?

- When's the last time you went to the land?

- He's really come into his own, you know. He's not the guy you used to know.

- I miss you.

- You should go. Into the land you should go.

- Be good for you. Both of you.

- You're the one who ran off to Hollywood to become a superstar, right? How'd it go?

- Jess you can talk there's no one else here. Jane Phillips. You'll never think about her. She's never getting away from me. She's up in here. She was scared. She went to the cops. She was scared. And if there'd been a case to answer then why didn't we.

- You fuck my wife and bring her to my fucking door, this piece of shit own everything nothing's mine.

- I get goosebumps watching that trailer. It's such a powerful, powerful imagery, powerful stories. Can you tell us a little bit about how the project came about?

- Yeah. Like two friends of mine, Steve and Cameron, who I have known for quite a long time. These two guys, they are the writers, and actors in the film. They came with me to this talk I had with my, me and my partner at the time, up in Walcha National park. Just as a boys weekend and things, spun out of control a bit and it was a fun boys weekend. And then three months post that trip they came back to me with a script and said, look, we have this script floating around for two, couple of years. They've been working on and we decided to rewrite it to sort of take place mainly up, where we were like on the land, and do you wanna direct it and it's, that's how it happened, that's 10 years ago. And then we would come, back and forth for three years, developing the scripts. They wrote it and we had sort of script developing chats, and then a fourth person, Greg Ferris came along, who we all knew, or they knew more, but I met him and he, he knew everything about filmmaking, and he became the sort of the, the possibility, like he, with him came the possibility we can actually make this film because he knew about cameras and what we needed to shoot something, to look cinematic and be able to screen on the big screen and all these other things. So together, we set out to shoot this film over a year and a half. You know, around family life and everything else that goes on, so the shot process was 35 days over the course of that. You know, it could be a two hour shoot in the morning we have people that go to work or we shot a long weekend up on the land and it's just plotted along. And then after that, it's been a five-year process of doing the post-work because we never had funding. So we'd been doing it with a lot of help of people who, you know, editors and colour graders, some sound designers. It's all come on board and helped us with this film to get it to where it's at.

- And do you think that after this experience you'll be moving into that filmmaking area with your career? Or is this something--?

- I don't know. It was, it was hard because there was no money, but it was also brilliant because there was no money. 'Cause you don't need to answer to anything except the creative chapter between four friends in the sense. So, it was, it was an amazing experience and you know, I'll be, I'll be happy to look at something, but sort of still feels like I'm working on this film, trying to now after some festivals, trying to get it out the streaming and now you sort of, the producers hat is on and you try, together we try to find ways of, giving it life, beyond the festival. So, we're still working on this film and yeah, I'll be, I'm doing motion, commercially, ads and, and short documentaries and yes, I still. It's reality, you need to do both, but I'd say my love is photography and this is a great way of spending my time when I don't do photography. I do like it. It's a totally different thing. Obviously it's a collaboration on a massive scale compared to being you with a camera and both have its place.

- I knew it. I think that might be all we have time for I'm afraid. Although I could sit and listen to stories and look at your photography for hours. It's just, there's so much that I take from it every time I have a look at your work, Ingvar.

- Oh, great.

- Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon.

- Thanks for having me. It was great.

- And Matt, the wonderful Matt who's been managing our chat in zoom and on Facebook, we'll be dropping links for The Land and various other, The Citizen book and The Ball book and the website. Ingvar has a website, so if you'd like to check out more of Ingvar's work, please do jump on the website and have a look, and yeah. Until next time, we've got plenty more virtual programmes coming up throughout December, and then we're gonna take a short break over Christmas. So please, a block back in your diaries to come back to us late in January, early February, when we bring, kickoff our next round of virtual programmes next year, until then please jump on our website, portrait.gov.au, or follow us on socials @portrait AU, and you'll be able to keep up to date with all of the other programmes that are coming down the pipeline. Thank you so much once again for joining us and we hope to see you online again soon. Take care. Bye bye.