A FEW OF MY FAVOURITE THINGS
TIM HIXSON
This series takes a peak at the other things that are important in a professional photographer’s life besides camera gear. In this issue Tim Hixson talks about his passions, influences and the aftermath of a life-changing illness. Once again, Bruce Usher was behind the camera and the audio recorder.
What do professional photographers get up to when they’re not behind the camera?
We take a look at the personal side of a photographer’s life as expressed through some of things they value most. In this issue, Tim Hixson – widely known for his creative photography with cheap plastic cameras – talks about his passions, influences, and a life-changing illness.
I’ ve been swimming all my life. I grew up on the coast at Collaroy in northern Sydney and then moved to West Pymble where I damaged my leg playing rugby – and the doctor advised me to swim. So began training and had some success with competitive swimming.
Now, five decades later, I’m living in Avalon and I’m not working anywhere near as much, I go bodysurfing at South Avalon most mornings… there’s six of us on a cold day, 15 on a good day.
“I sometimes use a fibreglass hand
board for body-surfing, made by Dave Archer, a local guy. I also have another smaller foam hand board made by Don McCready. Don makes a lot of the training fins for swimmers and surfing fins called Repellor. They’re a new design and fantastic to swim in. You have to be careful and know your limits, because a hand board can add a lot of destructive power if you do it wrong. At different times I’ve wrecked my shoulder and that’s the worst thing that can happen to a surfer or body boarder. If it happens, you’re gone for a while. But hand
boards give you more speed, and you can see what you’re doing and where you’re going because it’s gets your body up out of the water. Also by extending the length of your body you can go faster. There’s a good respect for body surfers at Avalon.
I’m still a surf club member and conduct the ’Sunday Swim’ at Avalon Beach every Sunday of the season.
“I lost half my trachea to cancer. It’s about 11 centimetres long and made of cartilage, and looks like a slinky. My cancer was in the middle of my trachea and my surgeon had to cut out the middle and join up the end bits. So, in a stressful situation like being hammered by big wave, I have trouble getting air in… I can’t seem to be able to hold my breath. Not a relaxing fun thing anymore, so I avoid it. I spent most of my surfing career on a body board and, before that, on a blow-up surf mat.
“I hitch-hiked from Chicago to California in 1970. It takes a couple of days and you became an extra driver, so you’re able to drive into the night. One time, my friend and I had one ride from St.
Louis to Newport Beach just south of Los Angeles, which is about 3000 kilometres. Then got out of the car and went bodysurfing. Newport Beach is the home of the notorious ‘Wedge‘ wave and, later on that summer, I cracked a rib body-surfing there. I hitched across USA a few times – hitchhiking was considered a rite-of-passage in the 1960s. I spent the summer swimming competitively in long-distance events at the Southern Illinois University; I was there on a swimming scholarship.
“My favourite photographer is Harry
Callahan who was born in 1912 and he started to teach himself photography in 1938. In 1941, Harry the budding amateur went to a camera club talk given by Ansel Adams, and that night changed his life. He saw in Ansel Adams’ images that there was more than meets the eye. A photograph can be artistic and can have a lot more meaning than the initial surface meaning. From that day he changed and became an art photographer. But you wouldn’t have called him an art photographer in those days. In the 1940s and 1950s photography didn’t have the popularity, and there wasn’t a lot known about it. It was a new art.
“Callahan was the guy for me; his images are graceful and elegant. He photographed his backyard weeds and made them look beautiful. It seemed to me that Callahan was looking for answers through his photography. Like the way he photographed women. Always respectful, but with a curiosity… like he was trying to understand women. Over the 15 to 20 years that he photographed his wife, Eleanor, she became a metaphor for beauty and love. Either half were in a double-exposure, or Eleanor was placed in the corner of the frame as if the composition was only complete with her presence. He was always experimenting and finished up teaching at the Institute Of Design in Chicago, and my professor at Southern Illinois University, Charles Swedlund, studied under Harry Callahan. I guess it’s a line of thought… everyone is influenced by everyone else in photography, and I had this direct line of influence.
“The classical approach to photography doesn’t appear to be here at the moment. It seems like we’re more interested in software or some new invention, rather than the nuts-and-bolts of it. But I think we will come back to that, and Harry Callahan was the centre of what defines photography from my point-of-view. The original prints I saw were a disappointment – small, with a few blemishes here and there – but in my mind they were much better. He experimented a lot. His street photography was ahead of everyone else. He would push the film eight stops, fix his focus on a long lens and set himself up so when the head filled the frame of his camera, he took the shot. It was unplanned and adventurous and a lot of them didn’t work, but he wanted to photograph people’s faces when they weren’t thinking, just being themselves. I think he thought of it as an experiment. It’s how you learn about yourself and whether you’re willing to fail. The whole notion is that we should succeed with our photography! You don’t succeed unless you have buggered up something in the first place. For me, personally, that was a really important issue with the plastic cameras because, again, you’re on a hiding to nothing. Your chances of success are very slim, but that’s the challenge.
“I’ve had more time to listen to music.
In a shared studio you can’t be listening to way-out jazz music with clients coming in and other photographers working away. But now I’ve got plenty of time to explore and listen to some jazz and blues that I really like… and listened to when
I was in America. I find it’s still very fresh, like the be-bop era of the 1940s and ’50s. Like photography, it was when a lot of important things happened musically. I’ve nowhere near tapped the end of that from a learning point-of-view… finding out about the individual instruments, who was playing them and how they influenced each other. It’s like photography except it’s more immediate and more emotional. You either like it or you don’t, or you have to understand it and learn to like it. I was too dyslexic to play an instrument.
“I was lucky. I went from a really big studio to my own studio, then to work from home. It was time for a change and the operation to remove the cancer in my trachea has allowed me to change my life from 100 percent revolving around photography to it not being such a great part of my life, but still there. I know the parts I don’t want to mess with, and I guess I know the parts I still want to explore, and I’m working on that with a more mature eye.’’
The whole notion is that we should succeed with our photography! You don’t succeed unless you have buggered up something in the first place.”