Profile – Stuart Spence
It’s all about instinct and emotion, contends Stuart Spence as he talks to Bruce Usher about his multi-faceted career from surfing, music and fashion photography through freelance editorial work and on to individualistic fine-art imagery.
Helmut Newton’s seminal book Big Nudes set Stuart Spence on a course of exploring distinctive photographic styles which has taken him all the way from surfing and rock-and-roll to fine-art. Interview by Bruce Usher.
I’ve known about Stuart Spence for decades, but only finally met him recently to do this interview. But here’s the tricky part – there are three parts to him and they all cling to each other. Images, writing and performance.
“It was a mixture from the beginning,” Stuart says. “I had performance in my soul. They tried to get me to do drama at school, but we all thought it was uncool so peer pressure pushed me out of that. Writing was always bubbling away with imagery. I should have gone into film-making.”
Stuart Spence grew up in the Sutherland Shire (better known simply as ‘ The Shire’) south of Sydney during the 1960s. He believes a strong sense of symmetry is inherent in his DNA and emerged in late high school. It manifested itself as “the need to capture things”.
However, he didn’t study art at high school and was, he recalls candidly, “… shithouse at maths and science, but up to year ten I was really good at composition. I recall writing a composition and the twenty-something teacher triple-ticking it and commenting, ‘ Very funny’. That made me think there’s something going on here. I was pretty annoyed that it wasn’t encouraged later”.
He says he felt cloistered and trapped in high school, “…as if wearing a suit that didn’t fit”. His brother was a teacher in the country and keen on photography. On one occasion when he returned to Sydney, they took his SLR into the city to take photographs and then Stuart stated to get interested in the darkroom at school… and magic started.
The first photography book Stuart bought was Helmut Newton’s Big Nudes. “Those Amazonian women,” he recalls. “That grainy, contrasty feel and those plush locations. The surreality. It was irresistible.”
Developing The Passion
Stuart started working with Peter Simons at the Grace Brothers Camera Bar on Thursday nights and Saturday mornings. A few years later, Simons became Tracks magazine’s staff photographer. Stuart remembers him as a very understated boss.
“We were situated next to the hosiery counter and, every now and again, he would show me an extraordinary surfing picture taken from the water.”
Stuart says he became obsessed with both surfing and rock-and-roll photography, but the first 400mm telephoto lens he owned was a shocker so he then upgraded to Peter Simons’s old 380mm Century lens. “It was divine and I felt like I’d joined the big league.”
Peter Simons contends that the Camera Bar was actually opposite cosmetics, and not the department store’s hosiery section. He recalls Stuart as, “…a very tall young man with a squeaky voice and the girls on cosmetics were enamoured with him. He constantly sought knowledge, not only in surfing and rock-and-roll music, but everything. I remember telling him that he had to learn to crawl before walking and then maybe he could run, but his passion for photography was impressive”.
The day Stu turned 18 and so was legally allowed go into a pub – even though far from being his first time – he had his camera with him and photographed Ross Wilson fronting Mondo Rock.
In the early days he used flash, but then started to experiment with push-processing at ISO 1600. However, getting it right under the contrasty stage lights was a challenge. At the same time he remembers obtaining a fantastic 24mm f2.8 wide-angle lens for his Pentax K1000 and shooting rock concerts with it.
“I’ll never forget the feeling I had when developing those first images… the singer from The Radiators kicking right into my lens… everything pin-sharp from the tread on the shoe to the grotty tiles on the ceiling, I suddenly had a visceral connection to my ‘bibles’ – Rolling Stone and RAM magazines. It was the feeling that I’d entered their secret world.”
As it happens, Stuart never had any pictures published in his rock-and-roll ‘bibles’, but in 1980 Tracks published his first surfing photograph. Years later, he received a call from an ex-editor of Tracks asking if he would give his permission for the advertising agency Mojo to use the image in a collage of stills created for a beer ad featuring Greg Norman.
“I said, ‘Sure! I’ll buy you a beer one day’. The editor paused, and then said, ‘ Well, I actually take a commission’. It was my first experience of dealing with the middle man.”
On The Payroll
Back in reality, Stuart’s academic father – a civil engineer who had gone back to teaching – was questioning his son’s early career choices.
“He was an old socialist who believed he should give back and was very concerned about me, as many surfers’ parents were. What the hell is he going to do? I had no burning ambition to do anything at all, except going surfing and taking surfing pictures. And unless you’re a surfer, no one really understands that.”
However, Stu did sign up for a course in television production, on the strength of showing some rock-and-roll and surfing photos in his interview. Upon completion of the intense one-year course, he moved to Noosa Heads and fell in love, but then came back to Sydney and did a few interviews… mainly just to prove to his Dad that he really couldn’t get a job. One of those interviews was at Australian Consolidated Press (ACP) and Stu went in with 12 black and white photos – of Mondo Rock and The Radiators concerts – which were stuck on dog-eared pieces of black cardboard. After hearing nothing, he headed back to being a drinks waiter at Noosa Heads, but then got a call for a second interview at ACP.
“I flew back and saw Keith Barlow who was Head Of Photography. He was sitting smoking at his desk – as they did then – and said, ‘Show me those pictures again’. That was it, so I went back to Noosa again. I’ll never forget the day that the postman arrived on his motor scooter with a telegram which read, ‘ You are hereby required to start work as a cadet photographer on April 5’.”
I had no burning ambition to do anything at all, except going surfing and taking surfing pictures. And unless you’re a surfer, no one really understands that.
Stu went straight into the Women’s Weekly darkroom and did a lot of work with lith film for the finished artists, but he says it felt like “…I’d been caged. I’d come from the beach at Noosa – and we weren’t wearing clothes on the Sunshine Coast in those days – and suddenly I’m in a darkroom in the city and having to catch a train to get there. I was the caged bird who was so despondent, he had no idea of the opportunity he had been given”.
Consequently, every three weeks the caged bird would flee the coup with his earnings and fly to Noosa for the weekend to see his girlfriend, returning at 4.30am on a Monday morning to be back at work by 9.00am, already completely exhausted.
The next challenge was to complete the Diploma Of Photography that the company required him to do, even though, he recalls, ACP’s photography department was very behind the times in terms of the latest technologies.
“However, on the plus side we could walk upstairs to the Women’s Weekly photography studios and be given film and printing paper to use.”
Stu bought a 6x4.5 cm medium format camera and began making 16x20-inch enlargements. He started creating a style of high contrast printing using Grade 4 B&W papers.
“I can recall being in the darkroom and watching the old press photographers such as Ern McQilllan, Kevin Brown and Neville Waller making prints… rubbing prints with hot water to bring parts up, and at the same time as smoking. These guys were masters. There was a certain dance in the darkroom of how you would burn-in and hold things back, you really had to concentrate.”
Eventually Stu moved upstairs at ACP to another darkroom, working for another set of magazines. Mode magazine was next door and, when it became a broad sheet, it needed triple the amount of pictures. In evenings or on weekends, he started doing test shots of models wearing next season’s clothing borrowed from the fashion room.
“When I was a cadet, Kerry Packer would make appearances at the senior farewells and make a speech. He used a plastic placebo cigarette, and I would have to get a photo of him, but the word was that you should never shoot him with the plastic cigarette.
“One day in winter I skived off early and photographed a girl in Neilson Park and, as I had always done, I showed them to Mode’s art director. This time, he said, ‘Leave these with me’. The next minute, I get a knock on the darkroom door and somebody tells me that my picture is going on the front cover of Mode. Then I get a call from my boss upstairs – who’s never called me before – who says, ‘Get up here now’. He’s smoking and has got Mode magazine in his hand. He throws it down on the desk and says, ‘ What’s this?’ I timidly replied, ‘ The cover of a magazine’. ‘Right, you start up here next week’. I asked, ‘As a…?’ ‘Photographer. Now get out’.”
Stu explains exactly what his new position was really all about.
“Mode, Dolly, Women’s Weekly and Cleo were bleeding money to the freelance ‘rock star’ photographers of the era. They were just raking in the money because none of the photographers on staff were fashion photographers. They saw me as a way to reel some money back in.
“So they got this 23-year-old kid from the darkroom and put him out to work. It was incredibly hard. Photographers now have assistants and make-up vans, but I would turn up with just a reflector. Ninety percent of the time, someone would say something like, ‘ There’s a castle over at Cremorne, a great location. Martha’s sister’s brother’s got it. I need to get 26 shots’. When I got there, there’d be just one nice wall, and three models getting ready. I’d have to come up with 26 backgrounds.”
Nevertheless, Stuart says he loved the graphic nature of fashion photography and used lots of blocks of colour and linear aspects to his pictures, but always disliked busy backgrounds. He went as far as travelling to Singapore to get a 300mm f2.8 telephoto lens (for shallower depth-offield) when it first came out.
He recalls the models he worked with at the time.
“A lot of them were fabulous and funny characters, but as soon as you picked up the camera, they went into these stock poses. I could never understand it and, of course, these were the pictures the magazines would use. I suppose it was a subliminal thing, but there was a part of me wondering what had happened to that girl last night who was telling that funny story about a dog. A lot of designers in that era didn’t want the models to overshadow the clothes. It became too phony for me,
and didn’t make sense. I did fashion from 1984 to ’89 and then burnt out. I’m not really a fashion guy anyway. I’m not into the clothes at all, and it was more about the stories. During the 1980s I was also doing freelance music photography for Warner Brothers and Mushroom Records. I pretty much photographed everybody and used the studio at ACP after work or the weekend. The bosses turned a blind eye.”
With The Grain
I asked Stuart Spence when he thought he arrived at the next level. The first thing that came to his mind was a 1986 assignment for the band INXS, “…and I fucked it up!”.
“It was a big shoot on a Sunday afternoon and they were just about to be huge. I shot Tri-X black and white film and pushed it two stops. I had seven rolls in the steel developing tank. Normally you agitate every 30 seconds – and I had always been good at agitating – but for some reason this time I didn’t agitate the tank, walked away and came back after about 15 minutes. The film was supposed to be processed for nine or ten minutes and, as the negatives came out, I was shitting myself. They were
Photographers never saw themselves as having any connection to words. These days you have to be part of all of it.
very contrasty. I thought, you don’t really want to mess with Chris Murphy [the band’s manager]. This is INXS. Then I started printing and they were fantastic… really grainy. There was a Dutch photographer called Anton Corbijn who did the album cover for U2’s Joshua Tree. I loved his work which was really, really high contrast and hard with no mid-tones tones. I was getting into this and my INXS pics accidently came out just like them. I saw the publicity girl later that night and she told me everybody loved them and they were used on the back cover of Listen Like Thieves. Those guys had worked with everybody, and so it was then I started thinking that I’d just gone up to another level.”
Freelance And Beyond
Eventually Mode started to hire great feature writers – such as Nikki Barrowclough and then Ros Reins – who produced long-form, hard-core interviews. Stu started being employed to do the portraits, and that’s when things started to change.
“You would sit in on an interview, so I bought a portable Norman [battery powered] location flash. There has to be a soul to the image, you have to connect in some way. I used to hate the photo reportage style of portraits. I wanted the theatre and the drama that was often a part of what the story was about.”
Stuart Spence went freelance in 1989, and his first job was for Gourmet Traveller magazine.
“It was pretty funny in a depressing way,” he relates. “I created a portrait of a foodie with his head framed within 30 different loaves of bread, but of course, the magazine cropped all the bread out, leaving just the head!”
Most of Stu’s clients in these early months as a freelancer were still ACP magazines, but as time went on he started picking up different clients. He remembers photographing Judy Cassab for ITA magazine. Cassab was one of Australia’s most acclaimed portraitists and the first woman to win the Archibald Prize twice.
“She was getting on when I photographed her and clearly the boho had left our Judy, leaving a lovely, wellto-do Eastern Suburbs Euro lady in her place. She was really nervous and said, ‘I suppose you want me with the paintbrush?’ I said, ‘Not if you don’t want to’. ‘I hate it,’ she said, so I asked what was something fun that she liked doing? ‘I like drawing,’ she answered. ‘ Well, draw me,’ I said and so she picked up this big white pad and suddenly she changed from a little old women into to this young 20-year-old. I didn’t have to do anything. I could have shot it without looking. Every image was gold and I remember how youthful and dexterous her hands were when she was sketching me. They were flying all over that big drawing pad like a puppy on lino! It was a total contradiction to her usually conservative appearance.”
Talking And Listening
Back then, Stuart Spence observes, there was a huge gulf between photographers and journalists: “Photographers never saw themselves as having any connection to words. These days you have to be part of all of it, writing and videoing. I’m very much about talking, listening and adapting to create my editorial portraits.”
The Chief Of Staff at the Sunshine Coast Daily got Stu involved in training and, when
the editor moved into the Group Trainer’s role, he upped his involvement from workshops to mentoring a whole host of photographers across the entire Australian Provincial Newspapers Group.
“I’d go to a regional town like Lismore and all the newspaper photographers from the neighbouring towns would come in for a day. I would organise actors from the local acting school and I would write out scripts for them to act out. I’d get the photographers to interview my actors. Stu would ‘plant’ photographs within the scripts “…to make photographers eke it out”.
Sydney-based freelance photographer Wendy McDougal sought out Stuart to be a mentor in a time she needed some help.
“I knew I made the right decision after just one meeting. He’s encouraging, sensitive, and more than once has made me dig deep inside to drag out the person he obviously sees and knows is inside.”
Wendy initially became aware of his work during the 1980s.
“At that time magazines were the best canvas for our work, and then the landscape changed with the digital age kicking in. Everyone had to diversify, but Stuart’s work has never waned. It’s just taken new turns and now we find him making fine-art images that are completely his style and his style alone.”
Wendy also recalls that, in the early 1990, Stuart said to her more than once that he would love to make photographs that were not in focus… “Maybe initially out of the frustration at how he saw the advertising world operating, as much as a form of self-expression. But look what he does now; his images are beautifullycrafted mood pieces full of narrative and drama with dashes of humour… he has followed up on his word and instinct and, by doing that, he is also inspiring beyond words.
“I think Stu himself delves deep within and sometimes is on uneven ground, but this all adds to his continual challenge to express himself in the ways he wants. I honestly don’t know why his images and artworks are not more widely received, they’re fantastic. But one day the world will sit up and see his contribution and kick themselves for not paying more attention earlier.”
“I still love commercial assignments,” he states, “But I’m much more choosey these days. I won’t be screwed on price, which seems to be an epidemic right now. I ain’t playing that game. I’d rather do assignments on my terms.”
Stu notes that he was finding it difficult moving into the fine-art world, as the powers-that-be have decided that artists must have fully researched ‘concepts’ which he describes bluntly as “nausea making”.
His brand of intuitive image-making is simply not in vogue. However, instead of calling himself a fine-art photographer, he thinks he’s better served calling “…a spade a spade, and referring to myself simply as a reportage photo artist.”
“Irrepressible, like instinctual... it’s where all the good stuff lives, I believe,” Stuart concludes. “Thinking is the enemy.”
Stuart’s photography blog – When A Man Snaps – appears in the Huffington Post online, visit www.huffingtonpost.com.au
I still love commercial assignments, but I’m much more choosey these days. I won’t be screwed on price, which seems to be an epidemic right now.