Snapshot of life behind the lens

PORTRAYING the true essence of life is at the heart of an awarding winning Kallista photographer’s work.
Andrew Chapman has been in the business of taking photographs for more than 35 years but he said his real passion was to be able to capture the truth behind the person.
Andrew first picked up a camera as a 16yearold schoolboy when a friend brought one into class and passed it around.
He soon discovered he had a knack for taking pictures.
“I finally found something that I was good at doing.
“I was never very good at school or at sports but taking photographs seemed to be for me,” he said.
After finishing high school, Andrew went on to study photography at Prahran in the 1970s.
As a young photographer, Andrew said he started out with an objective to find the ‘truth’ in his pictures.
After completing his studies, Andrew started out as a newspaper photographer where he worked for a number of publications across Victoria.
Andrew said working as a newspaper photographer he soon had his naive idealism of finding the truth behind the subject he was photographing knocked out of him.
“As a newspaper photographer you don’t have time to wait around for that perfect moment to materialise, it is all about getting things done quickly and within a certain time frame.
“Basically, you have to get to a job, set it up and get back to the office to process the photographs,” he said.
Andrew said in the cutthroat world of photography he soon learnt that you are only as good as your last job.
However, he said that the time constraints of press photography meant he did not find it as fulfilling as he had hoped.
Andrew continued to grow as a worldclass photographer working freelance in 1985 for Time Magazine and Business Review Weekly.
Andrew was one of the founding photographers to work on Who Weekly, but he said this was before it became the celebrity driven publication it is today.
Andrew has also worked as a corporate photographer on many occasions for the City of Melbourne.
In his spare time, Andrew spends many hours working on his own personal projects experimenting with the use of black and white photography.
Andrew has developed a passion for documentary photography and has undertaken several large projects over the past eight years.
Between 1976 and 2000, Andrew has photographed rural life from around Victoria culminated into the exhibition Click: Rural Photography which was acquired by the State Library of Victoria.
Following the success of his rural exhibition, Andrew was approached by the Shear Outback, the Shearers Hall of Fame at Hay in New South Wales and asked to photograph shearing in the remote parts of western NSW.
Although he initially started photographing around the bay locks of Hay, Andrew travelled as far as Longreach in Queensland and Carrieton in the lower Flinders Ranges for the project which took just over four years.
After finishing the project for Shear Outback, Andrew decided to hold an exhibition on shearing titled The Shearers which is now on display at the State Library of NSW.
In late 1997, Andrew organised a large group of photographers to go to Ararat for a photographic shoot of the town. Andrew said he told the photographers to take pictures of whatever they wanted, without pressure or expectation.
“For many of us it was a turning point bringing us back to why we got involved in photography in the first place,” he said.
Andrew has continued to work on documentary photography projects including one in St Arnaud in northern Victoria.
His photographic exhibition for the City of Knox of 32 sporting heroes, which he completed in just six weeks, has just finished.
Andrew said although documentary photograph was not an easy way to make a living it was more satisfying than working in the newspapers and magazines
He still does the occasional magazine and newspaper photograph, but is mainly concentrating on documentary exhibitions.
Andrew is now working on putting together a photographic exhibition of Australian politics that will be opened in 2007.