GREECE TO AUSTRALIA TO FRANCE
Hello Neale,
Like so many others I’ve been listening to your podcast on my morning walks along the farms and forests of the Côte d’Or in Burgundy, France. Your soothing voice and audio selections as well as the wealth of information, yours, your guests’ or fellow listeners’ is a pleasant and very welcome break from the politics and misinformation-laden news of our time. Not an episode goes by in which there is not something that resonates with my photographic journey and/or philosophy. It is nice, in a way, to know that there are others out there who share my passion and photographic worldview and who are not just after the ‘Likes’ of the fickle Internet audience.
Every photographer has a personal story to tell when asked how he ‘got hooked’. I am the son of Greek immigrants to Australia so I spent my early childhood between an island in the SE Aegean where my family is from and inland rural Australia. As a young boy I had a couple of ‘snappy’ cameras but my photographic passion didn’t awaken until I was 16. Specifically it was when I discovered an old Pentax Spotmatic in mint condition belonging to a late uncle hidden away in a trunk at the family home. At age 28, Uncle John lost his life in a tragic car accident in 1965, one year before I was born. Stored with his Pentax were hundreds of slides he had taken on his travels by ship around the South Pacific. I was intrigued by the fact that I was able to get a glimpse into someone’s life whom I had never met. A preserved record, as it were, which was all that was left of my uncle since he had never married or fathered any children.
A couple of wasted 35mm rolls and I managed to figure-out how it worked... this of course was the time before internet and I had no-one in my immediate circle to ask for guidance. When the first prints came back from the lab, one photo ‘spoke to me’. It was a photo of my father, cigarette in hand, chatting with some friends under an olive tree and clearly enjoying their company. Without knowing, I had opened the aperture to f/1.8 on the Takumar lens and had managed to capture a nicely blurred background with my father in perfect focus. I was hooked!
When after a few years I returned to study in Sydney, I was able to explore B&W developing and printing by turning the garden shed into a darkroom. It wasn’t 100% light-proof and it would get incredibly hot during the day so I ended up spending countless night hours developing and printing. With the help of books and the chaps at the camera store, I explored the whole process from film to print. Anyone who has done any darkroom work would agree with me, that you never forget the first image that ‘magically’ materialises in that developer tray. Mine was a magpie which I shot at close range as it was standing on a park picnic table. If anything, my print, sorely lacking in contrast, did a disservice to the arrogant demeanour of its pose, but to my eyes it was amazing.
Long story short, after my studies, I spent 21 years teaching secondary school biology in Cyprus, taking on the charge of the school photography club and on-occasion helping a friend who needed someone to shoot video at weddings.
Life has many twists and turns and so it happened that I met my second wife who is a French teacher of English during a European Union project that our two schools were collaborating in. After a 6 year long-distance relationship we decided that someone should move and that was to be me (don’t ask ‘why?’). In preparation for the move I went back to school to do a BA in Photography at a College affiliated to the University of Bristol. I thoroughly enjoyed my return to formal education, this time being more sensible and studious than in my youth. I had endless reserves of energy probably because of the excitement of the new direction and being able to formalise and extend upon pre-exiting knowledge. I had great lecturers with whom I forged a different relationship than my fellow students… people who taught me the technical aspects of digital photography, or how to set-up a studio photoshoot but also how to see differently or how to setup a photography business.
September 2017 was the ‘new beginning’ in France. It was not an easy one given that my knowledge of the language at the time was very limited. In one of your recent podcasts you mentioned that you could see yourself moving to a new location to ‘set-up-shop’ with your networking being essential for the success of your venture. Well, for me it was a tad more difficult but, not being a quitter, I gradually started to build-up a portfolio and a client base. About a year and a half later, I was offered a full-time industrial job in nanotechnology by someone for whom I had done my first professional industrial photoshoot here in France. It came just in time and before the lockdown so that we haven’t really suffered financially because of the coronavirus… not yet at least.
My photography business is still there, but now I am being a little more selective in the jobs I choose to do. I don’t have the pressing need to take on those poorly-paying uberEATS jobs for example. I, like so many of your guests, for better or for worse, have not used Instagram and Facebook to promote my professional work, something which may eventually prove to be to the detriment of “the business”. I post the odd photo now and then on my personal facebook page and I might link it to the ekPHOTO one but I don’t spend countless hours chasing the ‘Likes’ and/or the subscribers. If it wasn’t for the ‘real’ job I guess I would be forced to take social media more seriously but I am, for the moment, resisting. I did try to improve my LinkedIn presence however, after listening to a podcast on which Jeff Brown The Photographer’s Mentor, exalted the advantages of that platform but I am far off from the 4-posts-per-week he suggests in order to ‘play the algorithm game’.
Moving to a new house next to the vineyards in a few months and influenced, in part, by your podcasts on film photography I have already started looking for a used medium format camera to start a longer term photographic project on viticulture that I have had in the back of my mind for some time now. One thing I wanted to ask, if you think it is relevant and you could fit it into your podcast programming, is about editorial photography. How does one combine images with the written word and who do you approach once an article has been created. How is this contact made?
On a more personal note… After listening to Amelia Troubridge on how she started photography following her father’s death or Tim Johnston on the power of photography to heal, I became aware of how both of these examples touched a particular chord with me. It was in 2014 after my father suffered a debilitating stroke to the part of the brain which, among other things, controls subconscious, autonomic activities like breathing, swallowing, sleeping etc. I spent the totality of my teacher’s summer holidays, sitting by his bed watching him moving his hands or contorting his face as he drifted in and out of delirium. At one point it dawned on me that when he was pulling at the length of tube that carried the oxygen to his nose, he was in fact ‘fishing’ off the side of our boat back in Greece like we had done so many times together during my youth. I picked up my camera and started to photograph and it was such an immensely cathartic and healing process that I treasure to this day. Six years later, my father is still alive albeit in a vegetative state and hence the reason I have not made these images public.
Two more things before I let you go…
The first is a name-dropping. If you feel at one point that you want to venture away from the Anglo-American guests on the show may I propose Petros Nikolaides (https://www.petrosnikolaides.com/) a very talented and passionate landscape photographer out of Cyprus and Bernard Russo (https://www.bernard-russo-portfolio.com/) a well-travelled French street photographer with a very rich portfolio of images. Both are fluent in English by the way.
The other thing is about your request for hacks. Maybe it has already been covered by someone else but my hack of choice is that of numbering my batteries. Whether they are for my Nikon or my drone I have them numbered on the bottom with a pink fluoro permanent marker. This ensures that I rotate them and thus extend their life. For example when I open the bottom of my Nikon to remove the spent battery, the number ‘5’ on the bottom tells me I have to grab number ‘1’ out of my bag… after that it’s number ‘2’ and so on. For double AA’s that I use in my speedlights, I mark them in groups of four. Four with a red marker, four with a black one, four with a blue one and so on. This way they always get used and recharged in fixed rotated groups.
Well that’s it for this long-winded story. Keep up the good work with your inspiring podcasts and all the best to you and your family during these trying times.
(Neale James: It’s always a privilege to read thoughts and memoirs of such a personal nature Elias and I sincerely thank you for your time in sharing this. I’m moved to read of your father of course, parents being such a strong part of the narrative I attach to my photographic thoughts in this podcast from time to time. Thank you.)
