FACES IN FOCUS

SNAPSHOT OF SOCIETY

A photographic exhibition features everyday people of Glenorchy in 1995

P hotographer Rob Walls has stepped back in time with an exhibition entitled Ordinary Heroes, Glenorchy

Portraits 1995, and he hopes to prompt viewers to identify and connect with the black-and-white subjects.

Walls was commissioned by the Glenorchy Council way back in 1995 to photograph a cross-section of residents, but ultimately they were photographs that never received public exposure. He is now giving them an airing at a new gallery for photographers that has been established at Tom McHugo’s bar and restaurant at the junction of Macquarie and Argyle streets in Hobart.

Walls, 75, is a photojournalist of long standing, and is not used to seeing his pictures hung on walls. All the same, during his career he has adhered to a philosophy of looking beyond professional possibilities to mirror society itself.

“I once heard the great Magnum photographer David Hurn say that if a photographer really has something to say, the best venue for that work is in print, not on a gallery wall. The reason he gave was because in print the audience will be so much broader than in a gallery,” Walls says. “I took this to heart, but having now reached 75 years of age, I think I can afford the luxury of retrospection.

“I believe that committing to the expense of putting ink to paper – or even pixels to a screen – carries with it an obligation to make coherent statements, that should, as much as one can, benefit society.”

With this in mind, when he was originally commissioned by the Glenorchy Council in the mid-1990s to photograph local government in action he convinced council officials that they had nothing to lose in photographing individual ratepayers rather than road works, new buildings, sewerage treatment plant improvements, and the city engineers’ new computers.

“I suggested that a document showing a cross-section of the faces of Glenorchy residents, the ‘ordinary heroes’ who make up the council area, would be a useful expenditure of ink and paper, and this was accepted,” Walls says.

“Part of my pitch was that it would be a documentation of ‘the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker’, and that is exactly what it became.”

And so the exhibition not only features a butcher and a candlestick maker, but two bakers, and a policewoman, a postman, some vets, a GP, a gardener, pensioners, the unemployed, a refugee family, an athlete, a musician, a fireman, high school students, a jockey, a pharmacy assistant and a greyhound trainer.

Walls’ hope that individuals in the portraits would be recognised were realised on the opening night, when one of the staff members of Tom McHugo’s posed for a selfie alongside a portrait of her uncle, a landscape gardener.

In recent years Walls has been working on a long-term project, crisscrossing Australia to record the lives of everyday workers – This Working Life – and he hopes to make this his next exhibition.