Mitchell Burns is the ‘younger and hunkier David Attenborough’ with wildly ambitious plans
Two years ago he was working as a FIFO coal miner. Now Mitchell Burns has turned his passion for the great outdoors into a photographic career and he’s taking risks to create serious online buzz.
Mitchell Burns will do just about anything to get the shot. Charter a helicopter over a reef, drive through a blizzard, camp out for days, spoon cold baked beans from the can, sleep jammed against the back of a hire car, wake before dawn, sit still as a whisper through rain, hail and shine while waiting for that one moment when the landscape lets you in. Burns lives for these moments. They are rare and the reason he left a career in mining two years ago to pursue his dream of becoming a photographer.
A few times he’s been lucky enough — in truth though, he was patient enough, determined enough — to be crouched over his camera in the right place at the right time. Like recently, when he slept through a Tasmanian snowstorm for two nights until the sun rose over Cradle Mountain, perfect as a poem. You can see glimpses of his dedication on Instagram, where Burns charts his al fresco life to half a million followers resembling, as one article put it, “a younger and hunkier David Attenborough”. “I’ve always had this saying—‘Capturing nature’s most intimate moments’ — because that’s what it feels like,” he says. “Everything’s going off around me, and I seem to be the only one there. That’s what I love. And then showing people, ‘This is what you missed out on’.”
Turns out, Burns is just as focused in front of the camera. On a crisp morning at Symbio Wildlife Park just south of Sydney, Burns is deeply committed to getting the shot, including getting swarmed by meerkats who leave him with two tiny scratches on one of his smooth, chiselled cheeks (apologies to his publicist!). All day, he jokes that he is channelling his inner Blue Steel, in homage to Derek Zoolander. “’Cos he was a coal miner, too,” he explains.
For one shot, GQ’s stylist Isabella positions Burns against a canopy of leaves. Zookeeper Jules, who has an appealingly no-nonsense air, is dispatched to fetch a snake. “I’m thinking if we wrap the snake around your arm and then you …” Isabella begins, tentatively. Burns’s arms, clad in a sleeveless Dior shirt, are like two gleaming pistons. “Flex?” he says, finishing her thought, his biceps rising pneumatically, as if on cue.
The afternoon before, Burns slouches comfortably in the foyer of his hotel, wearing a shirt unbuttoned almost to his navel, revealing an entire pec. This is a standard look for him, it turns out. “It’s the tropical boy in me,” he grins. “You gotta let the breeze in.”
Don’t miss your copy of the glossy style issue of GQ Australia in The Australian, available on Friday September 13
He’s with Jessie, his girlfriend of two years. They are a picture-perfect couple, which makes sense, because they met on Instagram. Burns first saw Jessie on his Explore page — would that your algorithm could ever be so lucky! — and after psyching himself up for a couple of days, he slid into her DMs with the message, “You can’t come into my life looking that good with no warning”.
Burns writes about their meeting in detail in his new memoir, Life, Camera, Action, including this opening line. Hearing his words again, he beams with pride, like a child who faked a temperature to bunk off school and ended up with a sick note for the whole week (if the child also looked like a young Hugh Jackman). “I probably thought I was pretty cool writing that,” he recalls. He looks at Jessie for a long moment. “Well, it worked.”
Life, Camera, Action is the story of Burns’s life. He grew up in the town of Bluff in central Queensland, a “tiny little dust hole” with a pub, a general store and a train station. The soundtrack of his childhood was the shuddering of coal trains as they rattled by. At his high school, there were classes in metalwork and boilermaking and the only recruiters on career days were from mining companies. What there wasn’t were art classes. “Everything was driven to mining,” Burns says.
His dad is a miner, his mum is a miner, his brother is a miner. Burns was already interested in photography as a teenager, trading a dirt bike for his first Nikon DSLR and winning a competition with a zoomed-in photo of the grooves on a rusted barbed-wire fence. Nevertheless, it was expected that he, too, would work in the mines, so for almost a decade he drove a truck on gruelling FIFO shifts.
Why did Mitchell Burns leave behind his career in coal mining?
The money was good and the on/off roster afforded him the opportunity to travel the country, honing his photography skills. But during this time Burns experienced depressive episodes that saw him crying on the bus in the morning and feeling like “a phone battery on one per cent”, as he writes in the book. With hindsight, Burns believes his depression sprang from “the feeling of knowing I was meant for more, and not having that feeling be fulfilled”. It was mundane, lonely, water-treading work, with no way to feed his artistic passions.
“I struggled through my mining career to get anywhere in my life, it always felt like I was going against the grain,” he reflects. “Constantly thinking about that just gets to ya. It got to me.”
So in 2022 he quit to pursue photography in earnest. After six months he shared a video on Instagram about his journey. It was part proof of concept and part promise; by posting the video, Burns was not only backing himself but doubling down. He pressed publish right before driving from Torquay in Victoria, where Jessie is from, to Queensland. By the time he crossed the border, his follower count had crested 80,000. “Random,” is how he sums it up, now. “I didn’t know how far it would go … and we just rode that wave.”
What is his social media presence like?
Today he has built an Instagram following of half a million on the scaffolding of raw Australiana: Burns running around the bush taking photographs in shorts with a perilously small inseam. Many of his most popular videos feature animals, the fluffier and the cuddlier the better, like one with an abandoned joey snuggled inside his shirt. (“I am also abandoned sir,” reads one of its 5951 comments.)
Jessie is his secret weapon. Like a director coaxing a performance out of a reticent actor, his best posts are by her hands. He couldn’t ham up to a camera on a tripod, he admits. “I don’t think I’d be here without her. For Jessie to bring that side out of me, that was a missing element.” By which he means: Jessie has a female gaze.
“I keep all the smiles in,” Jessie interjects. “It’s what I love.”
“I hate it,” he admits. “Because sometimes I want to look hard and masculine.” (If it was up to Burns, Jessie adds, every image on his account would be a Blue Steel “where a vein is popping”.)
When it comes to the reality of social media, Burns can be refreshingly artless; he recounts the time he shared a brace of new landscape photographs, only to receive the dispiriting response “Send feet pics”.
“They make innuendos out of everything,” Burns concludes. “I think that’s just the internet, though.” But sometimes it’s not just the internet. On Christmas Day 2022, Burns and Jessie walked past a plant in the Cairns Botanic Gardens whose conical ridges secrete a “natural shampoo”. Burns decided to demonstrate how to extract the substance. “It was just very phallic,” he says with an admirably straight face. The video received almost 70,000 likes and countless riled-up comments, largely unprintable. (The official Grindr account displayed uncharacteristic restraint by posting a single fire emoji.)
“That has haunted me ever since,” he sighs with resignation. Burns protests that this video had “innocence behind it”, but he does have a shrewd understanding of how to serve his audience. “Not everyone loves my photography,” he says. “A lot of people just follow me to look at me. So some posts are thirsty, some posts are funny, some posts are photography.” The thirstiness doesn’t bother him. “I’ve had a lot of objectification my whole life, to be honest,” he says. He smiles a sparkling, symmetrical smile. “I don’t know. I’ve just got the face for it, I guess.”
I struggled through my mining career to get anywhere in my life, it always felt like I was going against the grain
If he’s playing the hand he’s been dealt, can you blame him? Burns has grand ambitions: own his own gallery, host a television show, become a household name, and is using his following as fuel. He does not believe that this takes credibility away from his work as a photographer. As he puts it: “Social media is just there for attention”. And Burns is upfront about the fact that social media has formed the backbone of his income since going freelance, and is an unpredictable backbone at that. The rare “dark times” that he has experienced since quitting mining have been because of financial stress.
“Honestly, sometimes it’s embarrassing,” he admits. “You go out for dinner and you can’t pay for dinner. That’s the hard times, when you’re missing out on the fun stuff.” But for Burns, any hardship is worth it. “I think the sacrifice is going to pay off,” he says. “I know it is.” Take the book, for example, which he hopes will show people “I’m not just some guy who’s gone viral on social media. There’s so much more to my story”. When times are tough, and they have been, Burns reminds himself that “this has always been the right decision”. That he’s the kind of person who will do anything to get the shot.
Life, Camera, Action by Mitchell Burns (Simon & Schuster Australia, $34.99) is available in bookstores and online retailers now.
GQ Australia’s style issue will be on sale on Friday September 13, exclusively in The Australian.
More Coverage
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout