EDITORIAL

Australian Open 2021 for The New York Times

I am a Melburnian and a tennis fan. Despite month upon month of a hard lockdown last year to achieve our much-envied covid-free status, despite low-level ire at the preferential treatment sport gets here compared with things like the arts, I wanted the tournament to go ahead. I willed it to go ahead.

Binging on tennis was the way my family rounded out the summer school holidays and escaped unrelenting blistering mid-summer days of above 40C. At 11am curtains were drawn to block out the heat and minimise reflection on the television screen. The squeak of sneakers on the hardcourt and crack of the tennis ball became the ambient soundtrack of the house, accompanied by pedestal fans and air conditioning. Over the course of the tournament, an installation of tennis photography grew across my wardrobe door, each player carefully cut out from the newspaper and attached with lumps of bluetak. Anna Kournikova, Martina Hingis, Steffi Graff, Pat Rafter — tennis was at the heart of my first photography exhibitions.

I wanted the tournament to go ahead to achieve a true feeling of summer normalcy, to believe the year ahead would be different than the one before. I wanted a chance to photograph an event that marked the end of every summer I can remember. While the virus found ways to disrupt and public sentiment towards the event dipped and swayed, somehow the show did indeed go on.

Here are some of the features that ran on The New York Times with my pictures, written by Matthew Futterman:

Big thanks to Fujifilm Australia for loaning me an incredible kit for this assignment. I was able to get my hands on a GFX 100 and two X-T4 camera bodies plus a range of lenses to cover me courtside and beyond.

Porch Diaries published on The Washington Post: Perspective

What started as simple idea to record visitors on my iso-birthday has expanded to become an ongoing record of this global moment in history from a single perspective: my porch. I was thrilled to have the early stages of this series published on The Washington Post recently. Thank you to Olivier Laurent, photo editor there who loved the work and published it immediately, giving me such a boost and motivation to continue as long as we’re under social distancing restrictions.

See the feature here.

And see Porch Diaries unfold here.

Currently working on a few grant applications to get Porch Diaries turned into a book and exhibition, stay tuned!





New work published on The New York Times - In Australia, an Architect Designs for a Future of Fire

On a windy day in February, I visited the beautiful south eastern corner of Tasmania on assignment with The New York Times to photograph Apex Point House and Dr Ian Weir, the architect who designed it.

As the country rebuilds after its devastating wildfires, Ian Weir is leading the push for integrating houses with the land, rather than mass clearance of vegetation.

Along with a lovely read by journalist Casey Quackenbush, a small selection of the images were published online and in print on Monday 20 April, 2020.












New work published on Libération.fr - In Australia, with Victoria fire refugees

During Australia’s bushfire crisis, I spent a few days Wangaratta, north-eastern Victoria working on a story for French daily newspaper Libération. Along with journalist Valentine Sabouraud, we met with fire evacuees, volunteers and emergency services near the Ovens-Complex, in the state’s Alpine areas.

A selection of the images are featured below, you can see the photo essay online here.