[News/People/Arts] [Australia/East Timor] Photo sensitive
Stephanie Stevens
Photo sensitive
Sharon Verghis | The Australian | May 14, 2011 12:00AM
IN a tiny darkroom off bustling Crown Street, in Sydney's Surry Hills,
Billy Maynard hovers over a row of prints bathing in trays of
developing fluid.
Heavy blackout curtains enclose the narrow space and the air is acrid
with a chemical stink. It's an old-fashioned scene in this digital
age, but 19-year-old Maynard -- skateboarder, chef and emerging
photographer -- is an acolyte of the old ways. He pulls a safelight
cord and a fine-boned, pale face swims out of the reddish murk. He
looks around the space, lent to him by Sydney photographer Patrick
Jones. "Yeah, it's pretty good. I have it all to myself."
Stepping outside, he blinks in the glare. Maynard speaks -- mumbles,
more accurately -- so softly you have to lean in close to catch his
words. It's difficult to picture him as the intrepid young
photographer who spent more than four months immersed in a Catholic
community of transsexual prostitutes in a shanty town in Dili, East
Timor, last year. While documenting its transient inhabitants for his
debut solo exhibition, Trans/Tender, opening this month at Sydney's
Damien Minton Gallery Annex, he contracted dengue fever and was
bedridden for weeks. It certainly has been an unlikely creative
journey, and one forged on equal measures of 19-year-old naivety and
"a lot of guts", says bemused gallery owner Damien Minton, a family
friend.
"He's this pretty loose, casual person, kind of slippery and elusive,
he just comes in on his skateboard and you jump, you don't even know
he's there." He shakes his head. "Who ever would have thought of
embedding themselves with transsexuals in a deeply reactionary
Catholic Third World country?"
Who indeed? It's certainly not the usual creative trajectory for a
young artist, let alone a well-connected, inner-city Sydney teenager
fresh out of school. You get the sense, however, that Maynard, son of
veteran film producers John Maynard and Bridget Ikin (An Angel at My
Table, Look Both Ways, Romulus, My Father) has always marched to a
different beat. The seeds for this exhibition were sown in 2008, when
the then 16-year-old first travelled to Dili with his father, who was
scouting for locations for the shoot of Robert Connolly's Balibo,
taking with him a battered old Nikon given to him by artist John
Lethbridge.
Enthralled by the country, the novice photographer shot 10 rolls of
film. Returning to Sydney, he discovered he'd fallen in love with East
Timor and photography, and returned to Dili for the second time last
year after finishing school. Following some dispiritingly "crap"
results snapping street scenes, he spotted a transsexual one day and
asked the woman, Emmy, if he could take her picture. She agreed.
Through her and then another transsexual called Peppe, a charismatic
figure with whom he formed an intense bond ("she grew me up and made
me an artist"), he was introduced to the rest of the community in the
shanty town, home also to vagrants, gay men and pretty much anyone
else rendered an outcast under East Timor's strict moral and social
code.
Fascinated by this subterranean world, Maynard rented an apartment
nearby and would venture into the community in the late afternoon when
the women would start waking up for the night's work (eventually he
reset his body clock to mirror theirs, sleeping all day, then spending
all night with them). He didn't take his camera at first, he says, but
slowly won their trust by just spending time with them and listening
to their stories, often harrowing, sorrowful histories of abuse and
trauma. He even picked up the local dialect and drove them around in
his car when they went cruising for clients. Eventually he started
photographing them: "When you're so close to someone, after a while
nothing gets hidden," he says simply. But still, it took time. One of
the most intimate images in the series, a close-up of someone's hands
masking their genitals, took about three months to capture.
Maynard's experiences certainly give a new slant to the "embedded"
concept. In an interview this year with culture and photography
website American Suburb X, he wrote of seeing things "that no one one
I know has, let alone people my age . . . prostitutes, underground
sex, transvestites all strapped up, fights and serious poverty. I went
there knowing nothing. I left not only knowing all these things but
having been centrally involved." Two incidents are seared in his
memory: witnessing a policeman come by for sex and a teenage girl
ushering her two little children out of a room so she could entertain
a client on their bed. "These little kids were just waiting outside.
It was just . . ." he stares blankly. "That really shook me."
His 17 images hint at all kinds of stories, but at Minton's gallery in
Redfern he offers uncomfortable, gnomic utterances when asked about
the experience. You get the sense he's still struggling emotionally to
digest what he saw and lived through. He talks disjointedly about
wanting to photograph a certain emotion, perhaps to do with feeling
alone and anxious; he's described it as "like a river running deep,
and I know it when I look at someone who has it, as do they". Central
to this whole experience, he finally says, is his own deep
identification with outcasts, stemming from having felt like a misfit
from an early age. These women felt like family (they even nursed him
with herbs when he was seriously ill with dengue). Then there's a
visceral identification with East Timor. He describes his first visit
there as "slipping straight into a slipstream. It was just this
feeling you get of being somewhere where everything is out of your
control, it's liberating." He returned to Australia feeling "more of
an outsider here, to tell the truth", and also more ambiguous about
morality. Witnessing the deeply intimate role that Catholicism plays
in these women's lives -- he describes shadowy environments of statues
and candles, "rooms lit like nativity scenes, like the manger, waiting
for the lambs" -- has also made him examine issues of faith, "and how
the church ostracises her mob. I think about God a lot now."
Shot on black-and-white film, these small, puzzling images are often
grittily beautiful. In small, ramshackle rooms, decorated with movie
posters and holy images, blurred figures smoke cigarettes, curl up on
beds, stand frozen against a wall, weep with hands steepled as if in
prayer. A thin ghostly figure in white high heels is caught in a car's
headlights, a cemetery burns, a woman smiles in strangely bridal garb,
an androgynous face nestles against an American flag.
For a young photographer with no formal training (Maynard learned much
of his darkroom skills from Sydney photographer Philip Morris and New
Zealand photographer Laurence Aberhart), it's an impressive body of
work, Minton says, citing the dense saturation of mood and atmosphere
in the images and Maynard's deft use of chiaroscuro, among other
things. Maynard, who was part of a small group show in Sydney in 2009
and who has also shot stills in Tasmania and Thailand for a
documentary on child sex slavery, is helped, rather than hindered, by
his lack of formal training, he believes. It has resulted in work that
breaks the mould of "sameness". Also distinctive is his "almost
anti-cultural" use of photographic film. "To me, it's refreshing to
see this young kid wanting to get back into that sense of the skill
and the art and the alchemy of actually developing these things," says
Minton.
Born in Auckland in 1992, the Surry Hills-reared teenager found early
solace in the creative, rather than academic, side of life (the camera
aside, he draws daily with textas). Sensitive about accusations of
nepotism, he's reticent about his high-profile parents, saying only
they've always been supportive, but Minton adds that "he does come
from really interesting, culturally aware parents, so there was an
early awareness there. There are people who are brought up in amazing
environments where they're taught to really look, be able to discern
things and develop an aesthetic really quickly, and Billy has been in
one of these incredibly fortunate positions."
Maynard says he was drawn to photography because "it's instant. It can
only capture what's really there. If it's the truth, now that's where
I get my buzz. I go somewhere and bring back faces and moods and
life."
Creative loves range from Patti Smith to Iggy Pop, while Aberhart has
been a formative influence. He saw no need for formal training, he
says, because he knew how to use a darkroom by the time he finished
school, and "I've always had ideas and images anyway". He cites a
photograph by W. Eugene Smith, part of his acclaimed Country Doctor
series, as "a revelation, that one image could say so much without
saying directly what he wanted to say".
He's drawn to film because "I love being in the darkroom and I love
the process". Another passion, surprisingly, is cooking: "I find it a
lot like being in a darkroom actually . . . you're standing at a
bench, you put the prints in the water, you put the pasta in the
water, you add more light, you add more salt or vinegar. You're
tweaking it all until you've got it perfect." His plans include saving
money for a photographic trip to North Africa -- he leans forward,
thin face animated, and confides that once again, "a certain feeling"
is propelling him forward creatively. "There's definitely something
there, you know what I mean? And I think it's probably got exactly the
kind of feeling I want to get out of my work."
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Trans/Tender opens at Sydney's Damien Minton Gallery on May 21.
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Copyright 2011 News Limited
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