Photographer Gavin Libotte reveals a secret world by shooting Sydney from the ground
Armed with just a camera, flash and hot chips, a Sydney photographer has uncovered a magical perspective of beach life from ground zero.
It pays to look at the world a little differently sometimes. By simply changing your viewpoint, who knows what interesting things you might discover?
Take it from photographer Gavin Libotte, whose new series Wanderland is exhibiting on the promenade at Bondi Beach as part of Sydney’s Head On photo festival this month.
The series was born from an experiment in his street photography practice: what would happen, he wondered, if he positioned his camera right down on the ground, instead of at eye level, and used a handheld flash for a pop of daytime illumination?
The answer: a kind of cinematic magic.
“The first few times I tried it, I was really astonished at how the world looks from that perspective,” Libotte says. “I saw the world afresh, and I was hooked.”
The 56-year-old has always been creative. As a young man he did painting and sculpture at art school in Perth, then studied jazz at UWA’s Conservatorium of Music, all while taking commissions as a muralist.
These days he makes a living as a musician, playing gigs as a duo with his wife Niyati, and performing his own instrumental compositions; he also teaches guitar at schools on Sydney’s Upper North Shore.
Wanderland is all shot at beaches in Sydney. Not just for the sweet Aussie-summer vibe, but for the glorious blue-sky backdrop – or “negative space”, in Libotte’s art terminology – to frame the human and animal subjects as they “enter stage left or stage right”.
Using a wide-angle lens at ground level also allows him to play with scale, as things near the camera appear huge in the image – like the seagull-with-attitude that’s the hero of this shot.
Come to think of it, how did he get so close to it? Silly question, obviously.
“Someone nearby had a bag of hot chips,” he laughs.
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