Funny Business

During the late 1970s and 1980s I produced a large body of work for record companies and music promoters but most especially for John Pinder’s game- changing comic venue The Last Laugh. Pinder was a genius.. Way ahead of his time.

The photos included band shots of Nick Cave and The Boys Next Door, one of Australia’s most influential groups. I knew then Nick Cave would be a star. But several of his bandmates have not survived him. The photos were exhibited at Robert Imhoff’s Lighthouse Gallery in Prahran in 1984.They are now in the Performing Arts Museum at the Arts Centre, Melbourne, the largest specialist performing arts collection in Australia.

The first record cover photo session of The Boys Next Door. Nick Cave is third from left. On his left is Roland Howard, Mick Harvey to his right.

Ricard Boulez was both a performer and sometime waiter

The waiters at bThe Last Laugh were half then fun!

Mick Conway from captain Matchbox

Tracy Harvey from the Whittle Family

Pete Farndon – who founded the Pretenders with Chrissie Hynde.

Pete was a great mate. I miss him.

November 7, 2013

Indian Aussies

The Indian Aussies photographic project commissioned by The Australian Foreign Affairs Department has just been re-printed following almost two years on constant exhibiting across major Indian cities. Indian Aussies was commissioned in 2010 following the success of the All of Us exhibition to India in 2009. The result: 85 photographs of Indians living in Australia to demonstrate the contribution that Australia’s Indians migrants had made to the country.

A tour of India began in New Delhi featuring 2metre tall exhibition prints in December 2010, continuing through 2011 and into 2012. It is now continuing following a reprint to replace damaged prints.

The project was shot on a Nikon D3x to produce the portraits with a big enough file size for the large scale reproductions. The results proved to be even better than the previous exhibition shot with transparency film using a medium format Hasselblad! A great result for digital technology.

As well as the touring exhibition the portraits were displayed in a website designed and built by us for the Victorian and Australian governments. The site also also featured video interviews- produced by us- with a number of the Indian Aussies. We also produced an Indian Aussies blog which carried the photos to accompany the exhibitions.

At top, Joginder Singh at the Woolgoolga Sikh temple, northern NSW.

NOTE: Indian Aussies is now touring southern Indian cities and its been on show somewhere in India for the past 18 months.

November 7, 2013

Is It Art?

Inside Art, the arts television program launched on Channel 31 in mid 2012 and is now being screened in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide as well as Melbourne. The show sees Michel Lawrence move from stills photography to TV presenter. The new program presents art from the artists’ perspective. Inside Art has proved a strong performer on C31 with steadliy increasing viewer numbers and the blog, www.insideart.tv also seeing solid growth each week.

The program consists of three main segments, Artists-In-Residence where artists talk about their work in their studios, Making Art which shows art being produced ‘en plein air’ and even in bronze foundries and Private View which features gallerists, auctioneers and administrators discussing the latest issues in the arts.

The program is now screening as segments on the Big Screen at Melbourne’s FedSq and in Sydney at Westfield’s Chatswood Shopping Centre.

InsideArt is now also an educational program with 8 completed DVDs targetting secondary and tertiary art students. The video is now also available as direct downloads and soon will also be available with the SeeCue technology which allows instant searching by text in video.

Visit the website: http://www.insideart.tv/

November 7, 2013

Framed/Part#2

With the development of InsideArt.tv, a new series of portraits of painters was begun. This time the portraits were much closer-in to accompany artisles about the artists for the blog, for the website and for any publicity purposes around the show.

But just as the book Framed was conceived to put faces to names , so the new series of portraits has been designed to put more new faces to new names in Australian art.

It has seen the development of a whole new project and an online gallery, called appropriately enough, Inside Art which appears in the InsideArt.tv website: http://www.insideart.tv/photo-gallery/

November 7, 2013

All of Us

Michel Lawrence’s ‘All of Us’ project began as a statement about racism and an attempt to demonstrate what multiculturalism really meant to Australians.

Beginning with a large scale exhibition installed on the exterior walls of the CrossBar building in Melbourne’s Federation Square, All of Us had many iterations including a tour of India for the Foreign Affairs Department. The exhibition was launched by the Victorian Premier Mr John Brumby, for Australia Day 2008. The subsequent exhibitions were launched in India by Premier Brumby and Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith.

The photographs first appeared in All of Us, a website used to promote the project and were then used in a huge array of materials from the 240 page All of Us book published by Scribe Books to magazines and newspapers around the country, to TV commercials and the Victorian Government’s Multicultural policy book- for which it also borrowed the title All of Us. The photographs also formed the basis of a large website we designed and built for the Victorian Multicultural Commission.

The Fed Square Installation of All of Us.

View the 7.30 Report on All of Us:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r04aneo7y7o

November 7, 2013

Lavender Bay revisited

Brett Whiteley’s iconic Sydney Harbour paintings are among three chosen by Wendy Whiteley to feature in a release of new fine art reproductions on The Stock Rooms website. The new site, which launched on December 3, features artworks from leading Australian artists, photographers and sculptors.

Michel Lawrence photographed Wendy Whiteley in her Lavender Bay home where the originals were painted 40 years ago. The portrait features on both The Stock Rooms website and the Stock Rooms blog as well.

The house maintains the views of Lavender Bay although the giant Moreton Bay Fig which was below the balcony line when Brett painted there has now grown significantly to obscure the views a tad!

We asked Wendy why she chose the Lavender Bay paintings:

“People like them! They’re beautifully done reproductions.”

You can also see the portrait of Wendy as well as the video interview with Wendy on The Stock Rooms website.