"My work is little more than the visual diary of a very long walk"
- Andrew Stark.
Andrew Stark's photography is a constantly evolving mass. Spawned from the traditions of realist practice it is nurtured throughout by a deeply monochromatic hue of poetic vulnerability. Gentle innovation is apparent, not via extreme lurches of style but rather in the subtle maturing of a vision. A distinct move away from traditional documentary, to a more interpretative, intensly personal body of work has taken place in recent years.
Andrew Stark's photography remains unambiguously candid, never set up, and never staged. It embraces a stripping away of 'what's expected', a shunning of 'trick of the light' aesthetics, and current trends are ignored as he continues his two decade journey of the true outsider. His work presents as a diary of; place, time, mood, and one man's struggle for pure honesty.
An insatiable need to observe intertwines a maddening need to make sense of a world that continually swishes past in the never ending blur of human curiosity ...
"Stark is irresistibly drawn to capturing moments of tenderness, intimacy and surreal humour in public places."
- Robert McFarlane (Sydney Morning Herald - Sept 2006).
The street photographer lay flat on his back under Sydney's frenetic Cahill expressway when the thought first drifted casually into his overtaxed mind. It was a glorious Australian late winter's day and he'd spent the previous moments pondering just why it is that seagulls don't eat peanuts. Using his camera bag as a make shift pillow, the cars and trains rattled and swooshed up top, his thoughts shifting seamlessly to psychological make up, and the workings of the mind. Thoughts of street photography and why. Was there perhaps a direct relationship between personality and this strange visual style of hunting the everyday. His interest in this possible correlation centred around an instantaneous theory, a suspicion that as a street photographer he had had very little say in actually being on the streets. In effect, he hadn't found street photography, street photography had found him !
Toughts of determinism and free will fought their age old battle as the slightly disheveled, horizontal photographer tossed another peanut out towards the gulls.
"More concerned with people who inhabit this city than with it's structure, he is moved by the moment, drawn in by the emotions of his subjects - a fleeting look of vulnerability, a spontaneous burst of joy, or the blank stare of melancholy. Stark leads a fairly solitary existence and admits that his work is ever more autobiographical. 'Detachment' and the plight of the 'outsider' are recurring themes in his work."
- Inara Walden (Curator - Museum of Sydney - Insights Magazine 2006)
Andrew Stark has been wandering the streets of his native Sydney, capturing unfettered moments with a second hand SLR for over two decades.
Describing his journey as, "The visual diary of a very long walk". The photographer is moved by the mood of the moment, slices of poetic candor burnt into an accomodating emulsion of monochrome. An insatiable need to record the unsuspecting faces in the street ...
"My window-sill is level with the faces in the street -
drifting past, drifting past,
to the beat of weary feet."
- Henry Lawson.
Did he have any say in becoming a street photographer ? "It's a question I genuinely don't have an answer for. As the years roll by I'm more and more beleiving 'street photographer' is to many practitioners almost an inclusive personality type."
Street photography has a considerable range built into it's realist housing. A subtle calibration of difference when compared to the sweeping, open canvas art styles, it surely doesn't appeal to the 'fluff & grab' culture of bigger, brighter and louder sensibility. However to those with an interest in intuative actuality, street photography is a vibrant and poignant form of art.
"Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love. It is important to see what is invisible to others. Perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness. Also, it is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph."
- Robert Frank (1958).
When attempting to analyze street photography, I first wonder why an artist would pursue a creative outlet that has little hope of garnering the prize. If personality is not directly feeding these camera wielding voyeurs out onto the sidewalks, and if they truly want to be successful why not choose to exhibit a 50 foot high flashing controversy and proclaim it, 'a beaming metaphor for the modern age'. Why play bass when you could be hero worshipped as the lead guitarist ? Why not be the flamboyant Warhol, or the wrapped up Christie, or the shocking Emin ? It'd be so much easier to grab the world's attention, and let's face it that's what successful art has come to mean (and maybe always has meant). The winning formula demands, the Emperors new clothes syndrome; a sprinkling of outrage pushed very hard by crafty marketing. Realism and subtlety are never a hope of making the big splash. So it's fair to deduce that the practitioners of street photography have no intention of chasing headlines. They are clearly driven by a different beast. Each year, thousands of juiced up, wide eyed students hare from art colleges the world over, desperate to create, ambitious to succeed. Next to none become street photographers. No, street photographers emerge almost exclusively today from the suburbs. Like a small, mangy pack of bewildered lemmings they shuffle out onto the streets to chase the world, cruelly programmed by their own inner make up, driven in an unrelenting fashion toward a ghastly drop into the art void. They are collectors, hunter gatherers, almost kleptomaniacal in their systematic grabbing of what is not ever truly theirs.
"Stark's spontaneous, acquisitive eye finds quirky truths and glimpses of transcendental meaning in his subjects' simplest gestures, physical manner and orientation. Within the spaces bisected by street lamps, buildings, curbs and sidewalks, his subjects seem to punctuate an urban stage as symbollic, graphically abstract elements. By manipulating space and scale, Stark provides glimpses of the emotional distance that seperate people despite their collective physical proximity."
- B&W Magazine (USA) Dec 2003.
Before I progress further I really should define just exactly what a street photographer is ... we are people who wander about the thoroughfares of cities and towns, mostly taking photographs of everyday scenes, usually incorporating people going about their everyday business. Some of the better known practitioners of this art form included Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Helen Levit, amongst a cast of thousands spanning well over a century. As an art form it probably reached it's zenith in the 1950s and 60s, and as a wholly realist genre it is left to an eccentric group of artists to further it's ideals in this, the contemporary climate of 'shock & awe'.
"One suspects realism flourishes most when the outlook is one of carefully balanced scepticism and activism, in other words, when there's the ability to laugh at something and take it seriously at the same time, however sardonic that laughter."
- James Malpass (British art historian & critic).
It must begin with genetics: surely it has to be a predetermined disposition. This compulsion to observe, a thirst for kind of decoding the true essence of place. A journey of a thousand steps (per half hour): a trip to nowhere. Roll up roll up and watch the solitary man walk in circles. Just as the bower is programmed to seek out all blue: a chronic introvert with an inquisitive bent, is left by the big city, to wander, and to collate.
And so it is in Sydney, Australia. Either side of the fuss that was the millennium. A camera and a set of ears; watching, listening, procuring without knowledge. Spying on the mundane: the commuters travelogue. A habit whose worn groove has etched deeply to routine. Stolen pictures, eavesdropped conversations - unrelated directly, yet woven randomly into a pastiche of place.
"These images are refreshingly natural. They are about the subjects, and the considered and thoughtful vision of the photographer."
- Photofile Magazine (2003).
The geographical centre of Sydney is said to be just west of Granville, and the historical centre is surely The Rocks. Yet I've long held the view that the corner of Pitt n Park is the spiritual centre. The spot where the cities true essence is to be found: a concentrated, accurate sample of the whole.The four points of the Pitt n Park compass house; a multi national coffee palace, an old working class pub, a multi national fast food joint, and a discount store whose closing down sale, 'Hurry Hurry Last Days', has by my reckoning been running now for four and a half years.
If you sit and watch the passing stream of Sydney you'll see; all ages, all races, all religions, all socio-economic groupings, all hairstyles and all manner of behavior.
Mums and dads with litter in tow daytripping from the suburbs, contrast slick gay lads in chesty bond whites rolling down from Oxford Street via the park. The homeless hustling with their scrawled cardboard signs, or kicking back on a borrowed bunger. Seventy somethings, smartly dressed, queuing for a 'whippy cone' - what a treat. The hormone frenzy that is the nearby dance club, occasionally spitting it's sweaty nocturnals up into the mix. All the time the traffic rushes by and the monorail glides above.
Lying a block from the Town Hall and a block from Packers' ACP headquarters, Pitt n Park is a symbollic midpoint dividing the cities perceived and actual bases of power. You'll see the naavy waiting to cross, standing side by side with the nine hundred dollar suit, both screaming hysterically into overcooked mobiles. There'll be women so beautiful you grow weak at the knees, brushing past timeless, sad stories losing arms into deep rubbish bins. Good humoured cabbies park and grab a pit-stop of burgers to go
... whilst the 'sensational savings' just never seem to end.
- Andrew Stark.
"The strength of the collection lies in Stark's dry wit and his feel for Sydney's bustling humanity."
-ArtReview Magazine (2003).
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