Steven Cutts 21/07/2018 Steven Cutts 21/07/2018

East Kimberley

I recently spent some time in the East Kimberley delivering some photography workshops. Due to the fact I was working with young people I am unable to share those images online. However, here’s a few behind the scenes shots and impressions from Wyndham that I have compiled into this short clip.

Steven Cutts 21/05/2018 Steven Cutts 21/05/2018

We all leave marks

After accidentally erasing my first attempt of processing black & white film, I loaded the same type back into the camera and went photographing immediately after work the following day.

With the shots lost, there was one that could be replicated easily; an outlying column of sandstone rock at Reddells beach that has been engraved with names and initials over time. I've seen similar engraving on the walls of remote caves in Cambodia, the insides of which were emblazoned with the names of hundreds of tourists. Cedar Falls outside of Brisbane is a small waterfall and bush walking area where people have sprayed tags over the rock-face. I've even seen a small fishing boat that had sunk in the shallow, clear waters off the dive island of Ko Tao in Thailand, that was totally covered and tagged by people that had dived there.

I'm pretty unforgiving and puzzled as to why people feel the need to do this. To me, it's about as imaginative and seems as compulsive as a dog pissing on a lamppost. I was speaking to a friend about this recently and she was less scathing. She said if she saw the initials of a couple in a tree, than that added a story. A mystery. It conjured up a narrative about who they were, when they met, did they eventually get married etc? And in cases like that I get it. The photos and examples above feel different though,

Bundy, The Ord River, The KImberley, Western Australia, 2018

And look I used to do it. When I was about five or six I wrote '"Steven's Garage" (minus the apostrophe presumably) in green marker pen on the garage wall of my parent's home in big, scrawling writing. Dad had been out and I wanted to surprise him on his return. He pulled up in the drive way and as he stepped out the car I proudly showed him my addition to the pebble dashed wall. He was surprised alright and instead of the kindly praise that I was expecting, I got an absolute bollocking for it.

And at secondary school, I would occasionally engrave the names of my favorite bands into the wooden desk tops during class which were already covered. However one day I tagged the wrong desk. Mrs W, who had thick glasses, a soft voice and a keen temper, kept me after class one day, where she had found one of my latest additions. Strategically it was a flawed decision on my part because these were new tables, plastic coated with a mock wood grain underneath and pristine. She worked out it was my work because a) we all had designated seats for the whole year and b) there had been no other lesson in that room since our last class , so she didn't exactly need a qualification in criminology to deduce, correctly, that I was the culprit. At the time I couldn't' believe she traced it back so quickly but before my lame attempts at denial were over, I had a cloth and spray firmly placed in my hands.

So I put my hands up, but in this context we're talking about the natural environment where people, adults apparantly, have engraved their names into delicate sandstone rocks that can't be wiped away. I get we all want to leave our mark etc but really?

Here’s a few shots from that afternoon, the last being a dinosaur print from about 135million years ago.

Steven Cutts 18/02/2018 Steven Cutts 18/02/2018

Three Quotes

“There are too many images, too many cameras now. We’re all being watched. It gets sillier and sillier. As if all action is meaningful. Nothing is really all that special. It’s just life. If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and maybe photography isn’t an art anymore. Maybe it never was.”

Robert Frank

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph. Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

Susan Sontag

"It's pretentious for photographers to believe that their pictures alone change things. If they did, we wouldn't be besieged by war, by incidents of genocide, by hunger. A more realistic assessment of photography's value is to point out that it's illustrative of what's going on; that it provides a record of history, that photograph's can prompt dialogue. What we can do as photographers is to carry viewers into the lives of others... so hopefully viewers will be more understanding and sympathetic. But even if they are, that's a long, long way from outright change."

Eugene Richards

Steven Cutts 16/02/2018 Steven Cutts 16/02/2018

An Experiment with Composition

Early in March of last year, I started reading Larry Fink’s book On Composition and Improvisation, part of the aperture photography workshop series. There are some stunning black and white photographs chronicled in this volume presented with a mixture of the photographers insights, compositional techniques and other photographic processes. It's a book I refer to regularly.

On page 26 there is this photo of a boxer training before a fight

Below this photo he instructs:

“Do a little experiment with this picture. Cover that little corner of the table in the bottom left with your hand so that it’s no longer in the picture and look at what happens. The picture flattens out. No longer do you see the boxer embattled inside the context of space. It doesn’t become a bad picture without the table but it becomes infinitely less good because there is less tension. The picture becomes more two-dimensional, rather than sculptural or volumetric.
”

At around this time I was on Roebuck plains towards the tail end of the wet season. My intention was to get some dramatic storm fronts cutting across the salted, treeless plains just outside of Broome. The earth is chalky white, spread with clusters of spear grass, rough spinifex and pale termite mounds. Even though it looks landlocked this area is within an eleven metre inter-tidal zone where you often see hermit crabs marching along deep 4x4 tracks.

Down the end of one of these dry and weathered track I came across a friend of mine and we spoke through the wound down window for a while. The horse took the initiative and came in to inspect and as it did I took some photos and framed it with the recent advice still fresh in my mind, using the wing mirror to give it the effect of adding depth to the composition.

Most of the photos I took used this effect. The mirror is brash and bright, unlike the delicate placement of the table corner in the boxer photograph but was useful to use a compositional technique days after reading about it.

You can buy On Composition and Improvisation here.

Steven Cutts 09/11/2017 Steven Cutts 09/11/2017

Cable Beach Storm

It was late afternoon in February and I was on Roebuck plains trying to find an interesting composition of the storm that was enveloping Broome. Looking up it was hard to find much drama or scale since the clouds were mostly spread out across the sky in one mass vortex with sporardic tentacles of rain. I took a self-timed selfie to start the photographic process while illustrating some of the dramatic lighting and clouds.

When the first drops of rain landed, moments after this was taken, I knew that the photographic opportunity was gone. I walked quickly back to the car getting wetter with every step as the rains fell harder, disappointed that I didn't get out there sooner. However, driving home and heading west I did see the vaguest break in the clouds and figured it would be worth heading to Cable beach, just to see what the conditions were like. Broome is a small town but it never fails to surprise me how different weather can be a few minutes drive from one area to the next.

Cable Beach Estate | Broome | Steven Cutts

Five minutes later I was walking the 50metres up to the surf club and I could sense the opportunity. Sometimes there is a moment; a palpable suspicion of photographic potential and that was lingering in air. The first thing that I noticed was the contrast of light between the foreground and background. Then there was this calm, awe filled silence that was intermittently broken by the flash of lightening and deep rumble of thunder on the horizon as people faced west.

But with the sun already below the horizon I knew I didn’t have long to capture something interesting. I wanted to make the couple in the foreground, who were taking photos, the focus of the shot. Then it was a case of shoot, recompose and hone in on the composition. I did take a lot because I tried, unsuccessfully, to land a lightening bolt.

I never knew what I had until about five months later when I reviewed the files. I came away from the afternoon annoyed because I felt I left it all too late. Also I tend not to look and edit the photos until months later. Time passes and objectivity replaces emotional attachment to an image, which in my experience is vital when reviewing and selecting your own work. Now, not only am I really happy with the photo as in ties in with many ideas I have about technology and our relationship to the environment, but it was awarded the photographic prize in for Shinju Matsuri, Broome's annual cultural festival, where the judges said:

'We thought the artist created an image that went beyond a mere photo. The photo is glamorous in its presentation of light, landscape and individuals.'

This photo also made Capture Magazine's 'The Annual' which is Australia's leading publication for pro-photographers. I think it is one of my strongest images to date and there is a line of enquiry that I am pursueing further with this.

Cable Beach Storm | Broome | Steven Cutts

Steven Cutts 29/10/2017 Steven Cutts 29/10/2017

Los Bagus #3

It was great to have been invited to showcase some work with five fellow Broome artists recently. It's always good to link up with locals both familiar and new to myself and be inspired from their artworks, processes and philosophies. As well as art we had live music and customers were treated to a three course Indonesian meal courtesy of Bim and Andre.

This invitation gave me the chance to print up some photos from two different series, most images printed for the first time. With the weeks preceding up to the two night exhibition I thought it would be kind of cool to print some photos taken between 2010/11 on my 18 month road trip around Australia before I arrived in Broome. I chose a small selection from this larger series called 'Not the Rock,' which was shot on 50 rolls of medium format film documenting anonymous landscapes.

This Los Bagus mini edition was printed as an 8"x8" unmounted print with two available for each image. Some are still available priced at $25 each.

I also printed a selection from the 'Details' series which have been shot around Broome and are photos of the subtle details that make up this harsh and beautiful landscape. These are giclée (pronounced jee-clay) archival prints on hahnemühle fine art paper and the texture and tones are top quality. Size, edition and pricing is the same for each photograph with all photos from both editions, signed, numbered and dated.