Hugh Stewart’s family portrait studio is the ultimate Christmas gift
He’s shot the world’s biggest stars, and now you (and your family) can sit for one of Australia’s most lauded photographers this festive season.
It’s been three years and 300,000 frames since one of Australia’s most celebrated portrait photographers set up his own “high street” family portraiture studio. “My whole idea was that I wanted a studio that felt more democratic,” explains Hugh Stewart, who has otherwise spent his career shooting celebrities, politicians and tastemakers. “I work in a certain area, and I’ve worked for a lot of magazines, but it can be a little elitist. There are a lot of agendas at play – about who you end up photographing and even what they look like in the photographs.
“I love this idea of a little high street studio,” he says of his Woollahra space. “I’ve found it enormously rewarding, but also addictive.”
And so have Sydneysiders, who revisit Stewart to mark milestones as well as day-to-day life. “This tradition of a high street family portrait studio has just disappeared in the past 30 years,” he says. “I wanted to bring that back.”
The steady flow of sitting subjects has also given Stewart the confidence to take his studio on the road to Northern NSW with a pop-up inside artist Caitlin Reilly’s Station Street Co-op in Bangalow. A Melbourne proposition is also on the cards.
“Part of it was motivated by the fact that I think the existing arena for this is naff and fraught with opportunists who are really more interested in upselling prints and frames,” he adds. “Often the photographer whose name is over the door isn’t the one who takes the pictures.”
This portrait work has become a thriving additional business model for Stewart, alongside the traditional editorial and commercial work he has built his name on. “In an uncertain world in terms of image-making, and now more than ever around AI, my collateral was that I’d been semi-successful and I’d photographed a lot of recognisable people,” he says, downplaying the boldfaced names he has captured, among them Nicole Kidman, Paul Newman, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford, Catherine Deneuve, Clint Eastwood, the Duchess of Devonshire and a good handful of Australian prime ministers.
He’s also been a regular collaborator of director Baz Luhrmann, shooting stills on the film sets of Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge and Elvis.
Stewart’s rich portraiture has been exhibited at London’s National Portrait Gallery as well as in Canberra. However, his path to such sittings began in the fashion pages of British and Australian Vogue. “Like everyone else, I started out thinking it would be great to be a fashion photographer,” he reflects. “And then I realised that in order to be a really, really well-respected fashion photographer, you need to really understand the fashion world and kind of live and breathe it. And I was never that interested in that. I segued off into doing portraits, interior photography and people in their environments.
“My whole thing’s quite traditional in a way. With lighting, I’m emulating window light, which is the oldest form of flattering light. I use artificial light, but that’s what I’m able to do because I’ve had decades of experience making pictures like that.”
He credits his studio’s popularity to this lighting as well as a relaxed environment – no doubt a consequence of his easygoing and curious nature.
“I ask you to come in, you sit at a table. The table provides some sort of safety barrier between the camera and the person in a way that has them feel less intimidated,” he explains.
“I also love the idea that most conversations are had opposite somebody at a table. It’s a very familiar place to be open to other people in. I’m not asking them to walk down the end of a dark corridor and be in the middle of a 15,000 square foot photography space that feels intimidating.” His Sydney location at the back of a shop is probably smaller than the average double bedroom in Woollahra.
Stewart schedules days for individual portraits, as well as couples and extended families, that are listed on his website and social media. “The family portrait days, where I’ll probably do 20 in a day, they’re more fun,” he says. “You’re engaging with three, four, five people at a time, so it’s not quite as one-on-one. Those days go very smoothly and I don’t leave at the end of the day feeling exhausted.”
Individual portraits, he’s learned, take more out of him. “I’ve had people come in who are confronted by their life being over quickly. People with terminal illnesses. People bring parents in who might be going into palliative care. I’ve had people on chemo coming in who are very uncertain of their future. There are others who have anxiety or panic attacks around being photographed and I don’t think that being here really exacerbates that.”
He’s also not too bothered about the imagery’s end use, be it framed above the fireplace or used as a corporate bio pic. “I make no distinction about where they can use the picture,” he says, “so I’m not saying, ‘If you decide you want to put it on your book cover you need to come back and I’m going to tell you it’ll cost you $10,000’.”
To make a success of his high street studio model, Stewart says he realised he needed a tight and accessible proposition.
“When I was trying to figure out how I was going to make it work, I was a bit like, ‘Do I charge $3000 or $100?’ And if I charge $3000, I’m going to get some Bellevue Hill family once a month, and they’re going to probably hate the pictures, and they’re going to be like, ‘Why is it on the dark background?’ It’s just going to be fraught with potential issues. Where I arrived at was, ‘Okay, I’m going to do them in increments of 30 minutes and make them $250’, which is not nothing but it’s not an insurmountable amount of money for most people.”
Subjects receive every unfiltered shot captured: “I can’t charge $250 and then spend another hour editing everybody’s pictures,” says Stewart, adding that he shoots an average of 250 frames per sitting.
“People just instinctively get what I’m trying to do; it’s beautiful. I say, ‘Don’t go and get your hair and make-up done, just grab a couple of shirts and come down. Just be a picture of who you are in that moment the picture’s taken.’ I think it’s really important. I love the kids crying and the bloody dogs in the picture and the chaos of a moment in a family’s life. I think that’s far more valuable than heading down to Camp Cove under instructions to wear white linen.”
The whole exercise has become something of a psychological study for the photographer. “I’ve never been so excited about something,” he says, “because I’ve discovered a lot about myself in the process of doing this. It’s a very collaborative thing, and quite cathartic. I end up having the most brilliant, often quite personal, conversations with people and I feel we make the picture together.
“I was carrying on to someone recently about how I should have a degree in psychology just by proxy – I almost feel I’m owed one – and they were like, ‘No, Hugh, you’re just like a hairdresser’.
“Often with photography, people feel they need to reveal something of themselves at the time the picture’s been taken because then when they look back at that picture, which does become a marker in time, they go, ‘Yeah, that was when I broke up with my husband and decided I was gay’.
“I’m not passing judgment, I’m open to everybody coming,” he adds, noting that for many of his subjects their portrait is more than a mantelpiece memento.
“I enjoy the experience of making it more than the connection to the end result,” he says. “I will probably focus my attention on the end result further down the line if I do an exhibition or [some pictures] became a book. But I think for the person, I give them the picture and then that picture becomes more valuable over time.”
This story appears in the December issue of WISH Magazine, out now.
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