Not a good look

Art photographers are increasingly frustrated by a climate of regulation and suspicion

Photographer Ken Duncan at Whale Beach on Sydney's northern beaches. Picture: Chris Pavlich

Art photographers are increasingly frustrated by a climate of regulation and suspicion

THERE was a time Rex Dupain looked forward to his almost daily pilgrimages to Bondi Beach. The photographer spent nearly four years capturing the tribes and subcultures of Australia's most recognisable arc of sand and sea -- lovers and lifesavers, sunbathers and surfers, airborne skateboarders and preening muscle men -- for his 2007 Sydney exhibition, The Colour of Bondi. Hasselblad in hand, Dupain loved working on instinct, riding the current of a crowd, trying to spot something before it happened. As he succinctly puts it: "It's all about the moment."

In 2004, Dupain's unrehearsed beach photographs featured in Rex and Max Dupain's Sydney, at the Museum of Sydney. Rex Dupain is the son of celebrated 20th century photographer Max and this father-and-son exhibition attracted more than 27,000 visitors, making it one of the boutique museum's most successful shows.

Fast-forward to this year and Rex Dupain -- his long, lean frame levered into a squat swivel chair in his inner-Sydney studio -- is making a startling declaration. His voice subdued, he says his long flirtation with candid photography is all but over, that he has abandoned his attempts to create an authentic visual record of contemporary beach culture: the culture by which we like to define ourselves, the culture that produced perhaps Australia's best-known art photograph, Sunbaker, taken by his father in 1937.

"A lone man with a camera these days is not a good look," Dupain says, more in regret than anger.

In Australia, it is legal to photograph anyone on public land without permission, so long as the subject is not compromised (for example, getting undressed). This technique -- pursued for decades by masters of street photography including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Robert Capa -- was also Dupain's modus operandi. But Dupain says he encountered so much hostility from the public, lifesavers and the police, he quietly stopped taking unrehearsed photographs at Bondi months ago.

Despite his reputation as a renowned art photographer, Dupain has been reported to lifeguards or police four times while working at Bondi. His camera has been seized several times and on one occasion a police officer asked Dupain's subjects (two sleeping backpackers) if they'd like to have the photographer arrested. (The answer was no.) "I've been yelled at and harassed just for trying to create a record of the times we live in," says Dupain. "They make you feel like a predator."

Dupain believes the antagonism stems from public anxiety about "weirdos and pedophiles and people putting [inappropriate or private] images on the net". He adds: "It's just the bad apples in the barrel destroying it for the rest of us." But he also maintains public hostility to candid photography, a genre that produced many of the 20th century's most indelible images, "is just indicative of the time we live in. We are living in an age of censorship and suspicion."

Dupain is not alone in feeling that -- when mobile phones double as cameras and any uploaded image can be pinged across the globe in seconds -- photographers are being treated as if they are predators or criminals, the new pariahs of the arts.

In August, in an unprecedented display of their frustration, hundreds of photographers from across Australia attended a demonstration in Sydney organised by photographers lobby group Arts Freedom Australia to protest against what they see as a serious erosion of their rights.

Wearing T-shirts that said "I am a photographer, not a criminal" and holding signs that declared "Photographers not predators", these protesters clearly felt their freedom of expression was being hampered by exaggerated fears about child and online predators, and by creeping regulation of public space. In particular, the protesters argued their work was being stymied by onerous council and government regulation of landscape and street photography.

"Bureau-rats are killing us," says Ken Duncan, a leading landscape photographer and co-founder of AFA, tells Review. Many photographers, he says, strongly object to how national park and coastal authorities and municipal councils are increasingly imposing permits and fees on commercial -- and sometimes on amateur -- photography. For instance, Sydney's Waverley Council, which manages Bondi Beach, charges students and charities engaged in "low-impact", non-commercial photography an application fee of $150. Commercial photographers pay substantially more. (The council says these fees go towards upkeep of the beach.)

On its website, AFA claims Australian photographers "are forced to work under some of the most restrictive and draconian laws of any country in the world. Our national icons such as Uluru, the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge, our beaches such as Bondi and even events such as the Melbourne Cup are covered by laws that restrict artists and photographers painting or taking pictures." Duncan says: "People are trying to own copyright on national icons, but no one owns copyright on a natural resource."

It is ironic that photographers feel under siege when voyeurism has been turned into a national pastime. Witness the enduring popularity of reality television, the celebrities who tweet compulsively about the most mundane details of their lives and ordinary individuals who post dozens of photographs of themselves on Facebook. Our multimedia society is arguably the most narcissistic and (superficially) self-revealing in history.

Yet, paradoxically, the rise of online and mobile media has also bred mistrust of professional photography and has entrenched ideas about the need to control images -- and who makes money from them -- whether the subject be a private citizen or a well-known landmark.

Duncan and Dupain say they have been banned from taking photographs of their daughters at school sports and swimming carnivals. Certainly, while many parents are concerned about the sexualisation of children in popular culture and advertising, restrictions on photographing children in daily life have reached new extremes. Today in Australia, prominent eisteddfods for budding musicians and dancers ban photography, while at official surf lifesaving events only accredited photographers are allowed inside competition areas.

Surf Lifesaving Australia's policies make clear that these restrictions, which also apply to competitors' parents, are generated by fears of predators misusing photographs of children. Guidelines for photographing children issued by Western Australia's Department of Sport and Recreation provide a snapshot of the prevailing unease. These guidelines advise photographers to "avoid full face and body shots" at children's swimming, gymnastics and athletics events, and recommend that "poolside shots should be waist or shoulder up".

Dupain notes how Cartier-Bresson, a co-founder of the celebrated Magnum photographic agency, often used a hidden camera so he could take candid shots while moving through a crowd. "He was the velvet glove photographer, he was so fast you wouldn't see the camera, you wouldn't see him coming," Dupain says. "He wanted to record life without it being disturbed. You do that today and you'll end up behind bars."

Martyn Jolly, head of photography and media arts at the Australian National University, points out that candid photography produced many memorable images of early 20th-century street life and of historical turning points such as the end of World War II. "There is value in spontaneity and in just being there in the thick of reality as it unfolds. That is what photography is all about; that is why photographs from 100 years ago are now precious artefacts."

Here, one thinks of Alfred Eisenstaedt's V-J Day in Times Square (1945), in which an American sailor passionately kisses a startled nurse minutes after Japan's surrender is announced, or Capa's bleakly compelling shots of panic-stricken civilians fleeing air raids during the Spanish Civil War.

Jolly believes that in the 21st century, this once revered genre is under pressure. He argues the war between paparazzi and celebrities who want to control their images partly has turned public attitudes against street photography. Alluding to how actress Nicole Kidman successfully took court action against paparazzo Jamie Fawcett, he says: "The idea about the face and your image being your property is leaking across from celebrity culture to everyday culture . . . I think there has been a subtle yet seismic shift in the way we regard our own image."

Demands for privacy laws by the NSW Law Reform Commission and others, coupled with more public activity occurring on private property such as shopping centres -- many staffed with overbearing security guards -- also had a discouraging effect. "A lot of young photographers who have grown up in this culture think: 'I won't do it', and that is a major tragedy," Jolly says. "It's more and more common that students won't take photographs in public spaces; it's more and more common they will assume this is illegal even though it's not. I think there has been a major change. That is undeniable."

IN the 1980s, Duncan had a dream. "I wanted to do a [photographic] book on Australia . . . and I just went and did it." From ancient cave paintings in the Kimberley to South Australia's shipwreck-strewn coast, he photographed many of the nation's most spectacular sites with "total freedom". The resulting book, The Last Frontier: Australia Wide, was published in 1988. Today, Duncan employs 50 people in five galleries in Cairns, Melbourne and NSW that sell his brilliantly hued, panoramic landscapes. He says the freedom he enjoyed in the 80s has been replaced by a bewildering and often costly maze of regulations, permits and fees.

While some states have more liberal regimes than others, "it's so insidious, it's happening at three levels [of government]," he says. He recalls how, about 18 months ago, he was bailed up by a council official in Cairns for attempting to photograph the sunrise without a permit. The next day, he says, a tourist was reprimanded for taking photographs of his family at Cairns's swimming lagoon. "I couldn't believe it. I thought: 'Cairns, of all places. You've got to be kidding.' "

According to Duncan, there are so many environmental and cultural restrictions on photographing the Northern Territory's Uluru and Kakadu, photographers refer to these tourist drawcards as "Ulu-rules" and "Kaka-don't". He points out that in the past he and other prominent photographers helped secure World Heritage listings for sites such as Uluru and Tasmania's Franklin River by taking photographs that highlighted these places' unspoiled beauty. Yet he claims that today, because of bureaucratic overkill masquerading as environmental and cultural sensitivity, photographers are being "locked out" of the sites they helped promote.

The AFA does not oppose fees and permits for large, disruptive commercial projects: TV commercials, say, or film shoots. But it argues that the "one size fits all" model commonly imposed on lone photographers is grossly unfair.

Parks Australia, a division of the federal Environment Department, says that in managing parks such as Uluru-Kata Tjuta, it seeks to balance the interests of non-Aborigines with the protection of "local Aboriginal law and lifestyle and the integrity of the World Heritage natural and cultural values".

Tamara Winikoff, executive director of the National Association for the Visual Arts, confirms that her association is, like AFA, alarmed at restrictions on access. She says: "I think the fundamental issue is: who has the right to own the intellectual property rights to public space? All sorts of custodians and managers of public spaces are using this as an income mechanism and making it difficult for photographers."

She agrees Australia is "absolutely" witnessing an erosion of photographers' rights to freedom of expression. NAVA is particularly concerned about the Australia Council's protocols for artists working with children, initiated by the Rudd government following the 2008 Bill Henson affair. The high-profile art photographer caused uproar when he used images of a naked 12-year-old girl in a Sydney exhibition. Police shut down the exhibition and seized Henson's works, although the artist was never prosecuted. Then prime minister Kevin Rudd called Henson's photographs "absolutely revolting" amid a heated debate that pitted concerns about censorship against perceptions of child exploitation.

According to the Australia Council, the protocols, introduced last year, were "generally well received" and "provide a minimum, common national standard for artists and arts organisations whose artworks or projects involve children and who are seeking Australia Council funding". But some of the protocols, which seek to ensure that artists comply with child-protection laws, were found to be so restrictive they were revised in May.

"The Australia Council regulations go much further than existing laws. We feel that the existing laws are quite sufficient [to protect children]," says Winikoff. Yet state and territory governments, she says, are looking to the council's protocols as potential models when it comes to funding artists who work with minors. Winikoff has no doubt all this is having a chilling effect on artists. "There is no question of it," she says. Compared with 20 years ago, "you would now find a radical difference in the representation of children because of the public paranoia that has been developing over the past few years". She reveals NAVA is advising a painter who recently discovered a gallery wanted to retrospectively remove her work from an exhibition catalogue. The painting in question features an invented, "generic" child who is fully clothed.

Duncan, an avowed Christian, disapproves of the contentious 2008 Henson photographs but nevertheless believes local restrictions on photographing children are excessive. Not as excessive, perhaps, as in the US. There, mothers who have taken nude family snaps of their children have been denounced as child pornographers or charged with child abuse. Framing Innocence, a new book by Lynn Powell, tells the story of Cynthia Stewart, an Ohio school bus driver who, in 1999, was threatened with a 16-year jail sentence for taking photographs of her eight-year-old daughter, Nora, in the bath. Even after a court-appointed guardian for the child recommended the charges be dropped, they were aggressively pursued. She eventually avoided trial by agreeing to counselling and to having the nude photos of Nora destroyed.

In the early 1990s well-known American photographer Sally Mann released a book, Immediate Family, that featured brooding, black-and-white photographs of her three children playing and swimming in the nude. The Wall Street Journal heavily censored an image of Mann's four-year-old daughter while radical New York art magazine Artform refused to publish a nude picture of Mann's 10-year-old daughter swinging on a hook. Despite this, Time magazine went on to describe Mann as "America's best photographer" in 2001.

In a paper presented at the Head On photographic festival in Sydney last May, the University of Western Sydney's Jacqueline Millner argued that "the moral panic around child pornography shuts down images of children to their lowest common denominator, and this we need to passionately resist . . . it is vital to remember that the history of photography is full of images of children, naked and clothed, whose meaning is not reducible to the erotic or sexual, and even if sexual, most emphatically not restricted to being fodder for the pedophilic imagination."

Millner cited Nick Ut's Pulitzer prize-winning, anti-Vietnam war image in which a naked, burned and terrified Vietnamese girl is fleeing her village after a napalm attack. Here, "the naked child has been invoked in the name of political outrage", said Millner. This harrowing photograph, published across the world in 1972, galvanised public opposition to the war.

Put off by public suspicion of his candid beach photographs, Rex Dupain's work has undergone a paradigm shift. "I have been forced to change my style, but there is a silver lining," he says philosophically. Since giving up on Bondi, he has gone on an epic road trip to gather material for his forthcoming book, Australia: 150 Photographs.

In this book, to be released in December, Dupain captures a sweepingly eclectic gallery of Australian landscapes and characters, from a drag queen with a hot-pink dress and huge hands to a churchgoing Lebanese grandmother. (Many of the last candid beach shots he took are also included.)

These days, he asks for permission before shooting anyone and asks all his subjects -- including the homeless identical twins who appear in the book -- to sign release forms.

While this enforced shift has taken the photographer's work in unexpected, even exhilarating, directions, he still mourns the loss of his old way of operating. "There are a lot of taboos now," he says ruefully. "To photograph strangers [without their permission] is a taboo pastime now. We just don't do it."

Among his father's celebrated images were a deeply sensual, black and white portrait of a nude mother and child in the sand dunes at Sydney's Cronulla (1937) and a shot of a lithe young man snapped unawares as he climbs out of an ocean pool at Newport in northern Sydney (1952).

If the hostility and suspicion Rex Dupain has experienced had prevailed when his dad was working, would Max Dupain have taken such shots? "Not a hope," says the great photographer's son.