10. ARCHIVE

I’m what they call a late bloomer. I didn’t love AC/DC until my 30s. I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. And I didn’t watch Round The Twist until I was proper OLD. In early 2018 a mate who I went to art history school with in Canberra got in touch to see if I was interested in working on an archiving project for the Australian Children’s Television Foundation.

Ahhh… YEAH!

The brief was to organise 40 years of the photographic history of the foundation and get it ready for digitisation and storage. I was pointed at a row of filing cabinets bursting at the seams with press kits, set photos, event photos, slides, brochures, flyers, contact sheets, staff and puppet portraits and original art works. My new boss said the best way to get acquainted with the contents was to watch the whole back catalogue of shows.

The plan was to pick a show, grab all the folders and loose bits and pieces associated with that show, put in my headphones and hit play. While I watched a show I would sort and weed and clean and accession all of the associated items. Many of the images were from set photographers who were covering all the action during scenes as well as getting shots of the actors all dressed up. Others were shots of famous faces visiting the office or a set. Some were shots of artists at work. It was such a privilege to see the creative machine behind the shows.

The closest thing to a problem were the duplicates. Back in the day instead of digital files we would expect today press kits and marketing images would be mailed out to promote the show so this meant many many copies of each item - usually slides - were made. Over the years those folders were raided for this or that image so many of the folders were not complete. I might have 1 copy of one image or I might have 23.

The most straight forward scenario started with contact sheets that I could use to put the collection back in order to reflect the photographer’s workflow on the day. Once I was satisfied I had everything straight I could easily identify the duplicates and prepare them to be destroyed. More complicated scenarios were mixed media items - so brochures, posters, slides, printed photos etc… that would take a little bit more thought into how best to order the items as well as house them. The next step was to clean, label and then send them off to Michael’s in Melbourne to be digitised. Once returned the images were housed in gorgeous black Mylar archive boxes and put on a shelf for easy access. Which is an incredibly satisfying thing to do. My toes are curling just to think of it.

It was absolute archive nerd nirvana.

9. MANRAY/DUPAIN

In my head I had filed Manray under ‘Greats’ and didn’t think all that much more about him until the Manray/Dupain exhibition at Heide in October 2025. I knew he was surrealist and experimental and I knew he was a bit of a diva and, of course, he did appear tangentially in the discourse around Lee Miller with the release of Kate Winslet’s extraordinary film. So the exhibition was an opportunity to have a look at his photographic work on what was probably the closest to his own terms as I will get.

Dupain I knew from my time at the NLA where a few of his works hung in the hallway into Pictures branch and in the archive drawers out back. I loved his Sydney nightscapes best. The water and the lights were incredibly beautiful. Perfectly executed long exposures causing lines of trailing light from a car here or a boat there. I’ve always wondered if Brett Whitely’s trailing lines arcing over Sydney Harbour behind birds and boats were inspired by Dupain’s nightscapes. Surely there was a connection?

It was a vast and highly curated exhibition. Thoughtful. Broken down into key themes where we experience Manray and Dupain’s works enhanced by being placed side by side. Commercial work. Portraits. Ladies in hats. There was only one of Dupain’s nightscapes and it reminded me how much I loved them. His work is elegant and considered. The whole frame is curated and the prints are meticulous. Beautiful.

Manray’s work was… there. I know the technical and academic value of his work and ideas but better people than me have written about that. I’ve now got the luxury of judging things based on how they make me feel. Perhaps because creatively my mind is turning towards the Australian landscape that Manray’s work didn’t really hit in the same way as seeing Dupain’s work again did. It left me thinking about lifting my own editing and printing standards.

And as often happens after such experiences I come away wondering why do exhibition shops not sell posters anymore?!

8. WOMEN IN TREES

Pinterest has been responsible for a lot of crimes in its time… introducing me to a small picture book called Women In Trees was not one of them. It only took one or two random pics to appear in my feed before I was obsessively on the hunt to find out more. A few clicks here and there led me to one of my favourite places on the internet The Marginalian where I found out the full story.

I ordered a copy of the second volume (the first was sold out at the time) and was delighted to find out how tiny and perfect it was when it arrived in the mail. The editor of the books had been gathering found vintage photos of women in trees for years and at some critical point decided it was time to share. The images rarely have names or dates on them and the books reflect this simplicity allowing us to imagine the stories that may have been behind images. This simplicity inspired me to start shoving mates into trees and seeing what we could create… but I’ll get more into that soon…

Published Autumn 2025

7. HANDS

Hands can be like sun flares.

Expressions of energy and want.

Conducting. Holding. Sharing. Mixing.

Foraging. Instructing. Plucking. Making. Protecting.

A mixer’s hands.

A gardener’s hands.

A musician’s hands.

The groom’s hands.

A mother’s hands.

A ring bearer’s hands.

A model’s hands.

A midwife’s hands.

A rider’s hands.

A forager’s hands.

A visitor’s hand.

My hand.

Published Spring 2025

Published Spring 2025.

6. GOOTS

I wasn’t kidding. I want to photograph everything. Which I admit can be a problem.

Do I need to narrow down my field in order to do good work? Do I just need to be a wedding photographer to earn an income? Could I work for a newspaper? Do I need to be an artist?! Do I need to..?! Over and over and over… the only place that gets me to is anxiety island. Every time I end up chasing my tail on that topic I always arrive at the same conclusion… I need to photograph everything that interests me and somehow it will all work out.

Anyway enough about me… back to goats. In late 2022 I made a new friend while I was in the middle of moving house and she was telling me about her beautiful gran and her herd of goats. It didn’t take long before we were making plans.

It was such a gorgeous afternoon. You can see the love and the energy in the pictures. When I enter someone’s space the camera is the least important thing in the room. I want to chat to you. I want to know what’s important to you. I want to see you light up when you introduce me to your pets or your people. That’s where the magic is. K x

Published Spring 2025.

5. DOUBT

Around a decade ago I was walking through one of the backstreets of Abbotsford one evening and came across what was probably the single most impactful piece of graffiti or street art I’ve ever seen in my little life. It was very simple. Just three words. Spray painted about 10 inches high. Nothing fancy. FUCK YOUR DOUBT. It was perfect. I snapped a pic with my phone so I wouldn’t forget it and went on my way.

Reader, I never forgot. These three words have rolled around in my head all that time. These three words will roll around in there forever and they will pop out in my work every now and again. The poster above popped out in time for International Women’s Day 2025. More on that another time… because this post is about those messages from our past selves to our current selves. It’s about those messages to each other that we can find everywhere. It’s about chewing on ideas for years until they pop out and become beautiful little artworks all of their very own.

We could say this is the lesson from street art and graffiti - that we are all in this ongoing monumental beautiful conversation with each other about how to be a good human and live a good life. K x

Published Winter 2025.

4. FOLK

Morris Dancers?! Yup! Internationally renowned musicians?! Yup! Astonishing musicians from all over the world who just jam together over whiskey and cider into the wee hours?! Yup! An actual sword swallower?! Yup! Unbelievable! Nope.

Held on Easter weekend the National Folk Festival marks the start of autumn in Canberra every year. It has a phenomenal program of music, food and art and is powered by a horde of volunteers. Electricians, bar staff, construction, security, recycling, production crew, sound engineers and even photographers!

In 2023 I put my hand up to join the photography team and it was a blast. You get free camping and full access across the festival in exchange for your best shots. My main purpose that weekend - other than catching up with Canberra mates and enjoying the music - was to throw myself in the deep end with a new camera. It went pretty well!

Billy Bragg and the Waifs were headlining. Other highlights were the 25 or so bands and solo musicians, the street performers and the dancing, the Riff Raff Marching band and the Raio De Sol marching band and the Session bar.

Truth be told the Session bar is probably my favourite spot. The fun begins around 11pm when the festival program winds down for the night. All comers are welcome to bring their instruments and jam along while drinking buckets of whiskey, Guinness and cider. As a photographer it was a feast for portraits and action shots of people doing what they love. Volunteering is a fabulous way of throwing yourself in the deep end and seeing how well you can float.

K x

Published Autumn 2025.

3. PLAY

“In rare moments of deep play, we can lay aside our sense of self, shed time’s continuum, ignore pain, and sit quietly in the absolute present, watching the world’s ordinary miracles.”

A year or so back I ran across an old edition of Brain Pickings on the Evolutionary and Existential Purpose of Deep Play and it was just the slap up the side of the head that I needed. I wrote a whole paragraph after this but I was essentially just repeating myself so delete delete delete… the point I was trying to get to is that it can be really good to get thrown out of your own head sometimes. I was having a rough time mostly because neurodivergent burnout had left me feeling very useless and the Brainpickings post facilitated the revelation that I needed to go P L A Y. Being consumed with worry about not being able to work as hard as I needed to was eating me alive. So I jumped into a new tab and found myself a copy of Ackerman’s book Deep Play and got reading. (You should definitely do that too. It’s a very good book but I won’t go into that now) 

It was time to play. I made an effort to lay on the floor with my dogs. I made an effort to go look at things that were bigger than me. I made the effort to go look at the sky. I made the effort to go look at my new lake and watch the water and the wind do cool stuff. I joined the library. I looked at What’s On flyers and newsletters from around my new town and I started turning up for things. One of those things was Ballarat Creative City Ballarat’s Creative Coffee Catch Up and it was fucking great. Not just like really great vibes from connecting with good humans kind of great I mean brain exploding holy shit great. It was something along the lines of everyone brings a bottle of their favourite booze and we pour it all in a bucket and it actually turns out to be a really fucking great cocktail but for creativity and ideas and energy. 

That first day we heard about the cool shit Ballarat Creative City was up to and then we heard about all the cool shit it was helping cool people do and then we heard from all the cool people in the room tell us about all their cool projects and cool ideas and it was really fucking great. Two of the cool as shit creatives I met there were Olivia and Genevre we all decided pretty quickly that we needed to creative coffee catch up a bit more regularly… so we did! 

One of those coffee catch ups led to Olivia and I making plans for a kind of play date… Olivia knew a costume shop and I knew where to find some weird interesting textures so we met at City Oval late one afternoon and got busy making some bloody great photographs. 

Of course we have continued to play and philosophise about creativity and power and brains and I promise I will post about those adventures in good time. In the meantime please go start daydreaming about playing and making and doing cool stuff. 

We won’t grow if we don’t play.

Life is short. 

We may only live until we’re 120 we do not have time to fuck around. 

K x

First published Summer 2023

2. HORSES

I’m a little ashamed to say I did not discover the song Land by Patti Smith until I heard it performed by Jen Cloher at the Melbourne Town Hall in 2015. It was a one off Patti Smith Tribute show featuring Adalita, Cloher, Gareth Liddiard and Courtney Barnett. It was definitely in my top 3 best gigs I had ever experienced in my whole life and Cloher went off. I just now did a wee look about for a review or something to link to and discovered the whole show is available on Milk Records YT!

So right this minute I’m experiencing the show for the second time. If you’re a fan of beautiful noise then I urge you to drop everything and watch it. 

Anyway… back to the point of this post… HORSES!

Of course I used to ride and of course I had a life changing crash that meant I couldn’t ride again. I gave away my beautiful mad paint gelding Sir and got on with not being a horse person. I spent many years missing their big stinky selves and their dirty hooves and the water drops running off their chins after a drink. I missed all of it. I can’t remember when but one day I had the bright idea that I could still LOOK at horses even if I couldn’t ride anymore. As often happens looking eventually lead to photography and suddenly HORSES HORSES HORSES HORSES COMING IN IN ALL DIRECTIONS…

First published Summer 2023.

1. BOOP

Once upon a time in the western district of Victoria there lived a small potato... 

How far do you go back with these introductory things? I’m really not very good at that linear grand narrative stuff. It’s pretty much all happening all at once in my head so trying to organise it would be the quickest way make it boring. So maybe it’s probably best to live in the moment hey? 

This post is the first entry of my photography journal. Just a wee introduction to mark the start before I get to all the good stuff. The good stuff will be about photo projects I’m working on and cool photo stuff I’ve done in the past as well as stories about the people I meet while I’m poking about with my camera. 

The bottom line is I am into photographing anything but I really love taking photographs of people. Doing what they love. Hanging out with people they love and having mad adventures. Like many people I am not very good at being photographed so I know how hard it can be. I seem to morph into a refrigerator or something. It never feels like I’m looking at myself. So it is super important to me to make sure that the people I work with know for sure we’re working together to make something beautiful.    

K x

First published Summer 2024