PROFILE – SEAN IZZARD
The desire to provide other working photographers with support and a source of creative inspiration led Sean Izzard – along with Simon Harsent
– to establish the POOL Collective, which is very much a response to the way the industry has changed in the transition from film to digital. Sean’s career in advertising has spanned this transition and, in this candid interview with Bruce Usher, he talks about his philosophies, styles and working as a photographer of, shall we say, more mature years.
With a career spanning 35 years, Sydney-based Sean Izzard started out as a darkroom assistant and has progressed to become one of Australia’s premier advertising photographers, while always remaining true to his personal ideals and philosophies about how to tell a compelling story with images. Lesson number one – always be willing to learn.
I’m sitting in the POOL Collective office at Enmore in the inner suburbs of Sydney. On the walls around me are displayed images by Sean Izzard, Ingvar Kenne, Simon Harsent, Juliet Taylor and several other long-standing Collective members. Sean walks in with a glass of water for me as I ponder whether Simon Harsent’s portrait of John McEnroe is toned or black and white? However, I’m not here to discuss that.
I first noticed Sean Izzard’s name in the first Fuji ACMP Australian Photographers Collection published in 1995, and he had images in all of the nine subsequent books. Sean was inspired by the images in Richard Avedon’s book, In The American West, Sebastião Salgado’s An Uncertain Grace, and by Helmut Newton and Irving Penn. He has a love of India and of very early mornings on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Sean grew up in Bundeena, a small beachside village on the southern outskirts of Sydney, adjoining the Royal National
Park. At the time, his dad was working at Murray Publishers and would often bring magazines home. Sometimes in the school holidays, Sean went to work with him. The printed page engaged Sean and he used to muck around in the art department, designing and laying out pages.
“It wasn’t photography then,” he tells me. “It was drawing, but it was definitely an introduction to design and what looked good. I remember dad talking about the ‘flow’ of a magazine.”
When he was 10 years old, Sean took some photos out in the country using his dad’s old Hanimex camera. The blackand-white film was processed at Murray Publishers and they also produced some 8x10-inch prints. His dad said the pictures were far better than anything he could have done, and right there he saw there was ‘something’ there in the young boy’s eye. Except that Sean wasn’t really all that interested in photography back then.
The Start
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I left school,” Sean recalls. But he did know that he didn’t want to go to university, and so his dad told him that if he wasn’t going to uni, then he was going to work with him. By then Murray Publishers had become The Federal Publishing Company (FPC) with a host of specialist magazine titles including Two Wheels, Revs, Modern Boating, Golf Digest and Overlander, plus it was also a part of Eastern Suburbs Newspapers with a number of local mastheads such as the Wentworth Courier and the Weekly Courier.
Sean started off wearing a suit-and-tie for two days a week when he worked in the accounts department, and for the rest of the week he was in shorts and a T-shirt, working in the storeroom. He drove a forklift and dispatched the magazines to the distributors while also dropping off copies of Two Wheels to all the bike shops.
“After about a year, I’d lost a bit of energy and I think I was about to get the punt,” Sean openly admits. However, one of the photographers got sick, so the darkroom operator covered for him, and Sean was given an opportunity to work in the darkroom. He underwent a twoweek crash course and, a short time later, became a cadet photographer, working in the darkroom.
At the time, there were three photographers working at Federal Publishing – Greg McBean, John Knight and Helmut Mueller (who was in the darkroom until Sean started). All were great all-rounders as you had to be as the staff photographers of a big magazine company. Glen Cameron arrived soon after as the photographic manager.
Another young photographer, Brett Cochrane, came over from News Limited. Brett was also running up and down the sidelines at the footy for the ACP title Rugby League Week. Sean shot a few games to get some experience, and then also started taking photographs for Rugby League Week. He remembers comparing the work of the pros with that of the magazine editors and journos who would shoot on weekends.
“The difference was stark, and it was a great initial education into what a strong composition looks like… as well as what a well-exposed neg looks like.”
Right Place, Right Time
Almost a rite of passage for a young 20-year-old, Sean and his friend Brett
Cochrane, were shooting rock bands playing at pubs around Sydney during the week – among them the Hoodoo Gurus, Cold Chisel and the Sunnyboys. Back at work they would sneakily process and print their black-and-white film – always with the darkroom door firmly locked. Whenever the boss tried to come in, they would call out, “We’re loading film for processing”, and then quickly dump all their prints from the wash tank into the bottom of the bin so they could take them out later when the coast was clear.
Trucking Life magazine sent him out on a shoot after a transport company had recently closed down. The location was basically a brick building with a yard full of rubbish. Sean assumed it was vacated, crawled through a hole in the fence and started taking photographs. After getting back through the same hole and into his old mustard yellow Ford Falcon XY, he heard a phone ringing inside the building and then heard dogs barking. There were two mean-looking Rottweilers in the backyard.
“I just went for it,” Sean recalls. “I had a story if I was asked what I was doing; I was a TAFE student doing a project… and Trucking Life loved the pics.”
Greg McBean – who was Federal Publishing’s chief photographer – recalls a young Sean coming on board, firstly as a cadet in the darkroom. “He was the only one I was happy to have process and print my black-and-white work… and he was like a sponge, he just wanted to absorb every aspect of photography that he could.”
In 1987, Simon Harsent had just arrived in Australia and was working out of a shared studio in St Leonards on Sydney’s lower north shore. Coincidentally, Sean had just met Phil Hayley – the studio’s owner – who invited him over.
“The day we met we became fast friends,” Simon remembers. “I think we drank the best part of a slab of Coopers and played about 30 games of pool.”
Later, over a beer, they realised that they shared the same birthday – born about six hours apart but on different sides of the world. Simon says that what struck him most about first seeing Sean’s work was that, “He had – and still has – an incredible natural eye and an intuitive nature that puts him in the right place at the right time”.
Greg McBean adds, “By the time Sean moved on from his beginnings in magazine editorial photography, it was obvious he had a great eye and the conceptual smarts that could take his career in whatever direction he chose. Our loss was the advertising world’s gain”.
Gaining Confidence
After a couple of years freelancing, Sean travelled overseas for two years with his then girlfriend (now wife), going first to the US, then arriving in the UK with no money. Subsequently, he worked as a waiter, barman, doorman and on a building site.
“I did a whole bunch of stuff that I never would have thought of doing in Australia and, consequently, I became a lot more confident in my ability to do anything.”
Sean took three months to travel home through south-east Asia and that’s when he started to take photographs again, but this time it was different. He didn’t have a lot of film, so was very selective about what he shot. One day he would shoot in landscape format only with just a 35mm prime lens using Kodak Tri-X B&W film, the next day he would shoot only portraits. He took the motordrive off the camera so it was a lot more inconspicuous and only shot a single frame at a time.
While away, Sean decided that, upon return, he was going to throw himself headlong into advertising photography. He started visiting art directors, showing them his travel photographs – mostly B&W portraits taken in India, Turkey and Nepal – that also demonstrated his printing skills in the darkroom. It was no surprise that he subsequently became known as the ‘black and white portrait guy’. He had complete control over black and white.
Keeping It Real
Sean arrived in advertising photography when clients wanted it to be much more real and gritty… and that’s exactly what he did. Even when retouching became a thing, he knew exactly how to shoot the different elements that would be comped together later. The key was knowing how to
For me to do a job, it was very much like taking the brief, then really working backwards, deconstructing it enough so that it still looked real even though it needed to be planned to within an inch of its life.”
light and match perspectives so it all came together seamlessly and didn’t look retouched. As he’d started out in editorial photography, that was still the look that he aimed for.
“For me to do a job, it was very much like taking the brie,f then really working backwards, deconstructing it enough so that it still looked real even though it needed to be planned to within an inch of its life.”
A major campaign he photographed for Dunlop Retro fashions ended up winning a number of key awards. It involved building a full set at the old Pioneer Studios on Broadway in Sydney and shooting in colour, but this job launched him into mainstream advertising, subsequently shooting for big international clients such as Levi’s, Nike, Johnnie Walker and Canon among many others.
“A lot of younger art directors now like to ‘Frankenstein’ a picture… so they’ll use three or four images from the same series, picking the eyes from that image, the arm off that image and so on. For fuck’s sake, can’t you just pick one frame! Then it’s usually stripped into a background and something else will likely be added too”.
Sean started to find it all a bit soulless. It wasn’t about making money either. He had been happy up to that point. While putting his website together, he noticed that his commercial work and personal work were like two quite different people. Simon Harsent suggested that he should try and get the two closer together. Consequently, he decided to remove all the images from his website that were either heavily worked on in post-production or a one-off. What he wants to do now is tell stories, mainly in the form of photo essays. His site now features groupings of 10 images on a theme, including the Palau Pledge. Palau is a Micronesian island that was being destroyed by tourists.
“The Chinese middle class were chartering flights to go there, doing dive trips and, of course, nobody knew how to swim, so then they’d traipse over the reefs and leave crap everywhere.”
The campaign was about raising awareness so, when you arrive at the airport, you sign a pledge in your passport that you will look after the island. The agency was shooting an animated TVC for the campaign at the same time as Sean was shooting the stills. After each day, he went to the hotel bar with his laptop to review the day’s images. The agency creatives came in and started looking at his images too, and the eight-day pro bono job ended
up winning awards for both concept itself, and for the craft as well.
Sean has also done a lot of photography for various Australian Defence Force recruiting campaigns. He says he likes working as though he’s making a film, and so he gets the subjects to actually do something, making them move around as he shoots.
“Sure, there’s always an idea behind it, but it’s more about creating a documentary style than anything else.”
He’s used this same approach for other clients such as the Red Cross and Charles Sturt University.
Seeing Differently
“Over the last 10 years there has been a proliferation of photography, due to social media having a voracious appetite for imagery, but there’s also a lot of shit pictures out there,” Sean states. “It’s now definitely a lot harder in the commercial photography world and, when you get older, there is ageism. Plus, in these Covid times, it’s impossible to meet young art directors… no one is working in an agency anymore.
“Of course, there are many good photographers still working who have been around for a while. People like Ian Butterworth and Michael Corridore in the ad world. And Simon Harsent is still the best in my opinion. He’s had a huge influence on me over my whole career, and I value his opinion and friendship more than anyone’s.”
Sean says he was also inspired by Craig Golding and Rick Stevens, the leading sports photographers from The Sydney Morning Herald.
“Craig used to shoot the footy at the same games that I was at. But in the paper the next day you would see this incredible shot where he has climbed up the back of the grandstand or somewhere – there are shadows coming across the ground and there is this lone figure in a shaft of light. He was always able to find an angle that was different… always telling a story. I really felt that was where I needed to get to. All I was doing was shooting people playing sport. I didn’t even think of the pictures that Craig or Rick were getting, but it was that kind of inspiration that got me starting to see differently.”
In The POOL
The POOL Collective evolved in 2008 out of the demise of the ACMP (originally the Society of Advertising, Commercial And Magazine Photographers), and was based on the idea of creating a dropin centre where photographers could share and show new work. With so many photographers now working alone, it was also somewhere they could socialise and communicate with each other. The idea
was also to stimulate personal work as much as commercial assignments.
Simon Harsent had stayed at Sean’s Enmore studio between his trips to New York and subsequently suggested that he should think about starting a production company. Sean was initially unsure, but soon realised that he actually already had a producer and two other photographers working out of his studio. The idea for
POOL became based on the tenet of sharing – ideas, resources and equipment – and for the older photographers to open doors for the younger ones, while the younger photographers could share their energy and enthusiasm. Importantly, the photographers themselves would run the show. Cameron Gray came onboard 10 years ago as managing director, and the business hasn’t looked back since.
The five initial members were Ingvar Kenne, Danny Eastwood, Chris Ireland, with Simon and Sean. Each had an exhibition in a shipping container and the combined containers formed the POOL logo. It was a massive undertaking, but it put them on the map. Juliet Taylor became a member in 2012, Krystle Wright in 2017 and Mathew Thorne in 2018. He comments, “I’m so lucky, these guys are like another family”.
Another serious undertaking is the POOL Grant. The initial grant of $10,000 went to Bridget Mac in 2010 for a project of portraits and interviews completed in Germany. Subsequent recipients have been Brodie Standen, Mike Reid, David Maurice Smith, Kate Disher-Quill, Lyndal Irons, Alana Holmberg, Sinead Kennedy, Dani Pearce and Rob Farley. Noah Thompson is the latest recipient, but the Covid pandemic kept pushing his plans around. The grant is now worth $15,000 ($10,000 in cash and the balance in mentorship and advice).
Krystle Wright was working near Mount Isa with JY, an indigenous elder, when I contacted her for some comments for this article. She tells me that Sean has always been extremely generous with his time and knowledge, and his photography continues to inspire her.
“It has an iconic feel that is often entwined with the Australian landscape,” she comments.
Up Front
Remember Sean’s mustard yellow Ford Falcon XY from back in the Federal Publishing years? Well, a tree fell on it when it was parked in a storm. The tree was removed and the car just bounced right back up to normal – no dings or anything. And the illicit climbs of the Sydney Harbour Bridge happened another 10 or more times. Good friend Brett Cochrane was apparently responsible for the bridge climbing, and it usually happened sometime after midnight.
Sean recalls that Cochrane had great ‘front’ and taught him to be ballsy too.
“We’d walk straight in through the side door of The Tivoli [then a live concert venue] with our cameras over each shoulder – but with no film in them – to see a band that we liked. You just had to act like you were meant to be there and no one questioned you.”
Once they ended up above the stage, watching Icehouse play. Another night they blagged their way into the Split Enz farewell party, which was being held in a terrace house.
Remembers Sean, “I ended up sitting at the piano between Tim and Neil Finn for a big sing-along.”
Over the last 10 years there has been a proliferation of photography, due to social media having a voracious appetite for imagery, but there’s also a lot of shit pictures out there.