a shot at perfection DEVELOPING OUR CITY \ CLARE KENNEDY flies high with photographer John Gollings “You don’t take a photograph, you make it” – Ansel Adams
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’m tied in on a harness, hooked to a D-ring on the helicopter and I put my feet on the skids and lean out. The helicopter is bucking and the tail is whipping around. It’s so noisy and so hard that you can’t stop and concentrate, so you’re just going click-click-click the whole time.” At 70, John Gollings is a giant in architectural photography, and his aerial shots have become something of a signature. “I pioneered a new look of getting down really close and using wide-angle lenses, which is now something that everyone does. Before, you got in a Cessna at 3000 feet and just took a look-down shot. I energised the shot by getting in closer at a wide angle. Essentially, you are using the helicopter as a tripod,” he says. In the past 40 years, Gollings has photographed many of our national landmarks. Parliaments, houses, schools, hospitals, highways, galleries, churches, skyscrapers. The list goes on. Some are long gone, but the images remain as potent reminders of our history. Gollings is a private man, softly spoken and erudite. We meet on a wintry morning at his Barrie Marshall-designed studio in St Kilda. A big silver door and wide stairway lead visitors up to his light-filled studio. It feels far removed from the clanging traffic on Chapel Street below. A handshake and Gollings disappears to fetch a tray of glasses and water. But his gentle demeanour masks a singular vision and heroic capacity for work. Gollings quietly agrees he is driven, compulsive, a workaholic. You have to be to do this kind of work, he says. Gollings has a place in the lineage of great photographers who learnt from their predecessors. In 1976, a day session in California being tutored by Ansel Adams turned into a week learning the technicalities of the large format camera. In turn, Gollings has been a great mentor to upcoming talent, though not every aspiring photography assistant has been able to stand the pace. “I like them to do two years with me, otherwise it’s not worth it. They’ve got to work hard, travelling with me non-stop and often there’s no respite on the weekends. The ones who have lasted have all turned into good photographers,” he says, naming Dianna Snape, Isamu Sawa, Emma Cross and Sandy Nicholson. Aside from the commercial work, Gollings has personal projects on the go. Since the 1970s he has travelled extensively in south-east Asia, photographing ancient ruined cities such as Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Vijayanagara in Southern India and Borobudur in Java. He has also walked the 40 kilometres from Paradise Point to Coolangatta and photographed every high-rise – 620 buildings. Why? “It’s just a bizarre art project and I like the title, Every High Rise on the Gold Coast. The project was mostly shot in 2012, after the global financial crisis halted construction on the holiday strip. “It was like a marking point for the Gold Coast, the end of an era. It’s a great critique of modern design and architecture; it can be read in a million different ways.” Gollings studied architecture, then began his career earning lucrative money as a fashion photographer, flying to places such as Milan. He shot buildings for architect friends, as a sideline. “I wasn’t all that interested in charging them much, but at the same time felt as if I had licence to interpret the buildings,” he says. When the bottom fell out of the fashion industry in Melbourne in the 1980s, suddenly there was no work.
30 THE WEEKLY REVIEW \ APRIL 29, 2015
“my aim is to find a single picture that defines the building”
FREEDOM CLUB \ 1976
MENDING WALL HOUSE \ 2009
By then, Gollings says, he had realised the significance of architectural photography. He seized the opportunity to carve his own niche. “There was Mark Strizic, Wolfgang Sievers and Ian McKenzie. The four of us had the whole town. Wolfgang was doing these perfect black-and-white shots and Mark was doing reportage for Robin Boyd in high contrast black-and-white. I was the only one working in colour and interpreting the building,” he says. Talking to Gollings is like taking a master class. “Every single shot of mine is based on a very strong formal composition and that can be quite subtle. It may well be just a balance of negative and positive spaces, and the balance won’t be immediately apparent, but it’s there.” What makes a good architectural photograph? It’s a question he’s been asked before. “My aim is to find the single picture that defines the building. At the same time it’s got to be a memorable image. That’s a crucial thing.” What makes an image memorable? “If the composition is so strong and defined and obvious, it justifies the contents because the viewer trusts the picture. But if there’s a little bit missing
off the top or it’s a bit skewy or a bit out of focus or underexposed, the viewer says, ‘That’s a snapshot, that was rushed and done in passing’, and so they don’t give credibility to the contents.” We are leafing through Beautiful Ugly , Joe Rollo’s extraordinary record of Gollings’ 40-year journey as an architectural photographer. One of its memorable images is Freedom Club, a haunting photograph of a youth centre designed by architects Maggie Edmond and Peter Corrigan. Gollings’ young daughter Polly flies above, wearing a red gypsy dress he had just brought home from Vijayanagara. The early-career shot, inspired by Peter Pan, is emblematic of his distinctive way of embedding story in his photographs. “That was expressing the freedom of flying,” he says. “It is bizarre and I’ve always been a little troubled by it.” Gollings’ famous aerial photograph of the Marshall House by architect Barrie Marshall in Kitty Miller Bay, Phillip Island, breaks every rule. The sky is dramatic, the rocks are stark and the house, buried in the sand dunes, is a just a line on the horizon. “It’s about context and the importance of showing how a building relates to the site. Some of the art photographers do embellished romantic shots, but this was genuine. It breaks the normal mould, where you would expect glistening aqua water and blue sky and sunshine,” he says. “That’s a case where the architect pushed me to be more expressionist. Barrie is probably the only architect in Melbourne that appreciates looking at his stuff differently.” \ ckennedy@theweeklyreview.com.au » Beautiful Ugly: The Architectural Photography of John Gollings, by Joe Rollo. $120 (Thames & Hudson) » John Gollings photographs feature in Site Seeing: a decade of landscape architecture through the lens, at the Gallery of Australian Design, Canberra, until May 15.