Atkins Labcast
Hosted by Kate and Paul Atkins, the third generation owners of the oldest photo lab in Australia. A podcast about living with and loving photography. From philosophy to technicalities, for amateurs, artists and professionals, we talk about it all.
Atkins Labcast
Atkins Labcast Episode 45 - Mark Kimber interview
In episode 45, Paul interviews Mark Kimber, an Australian based photographic artist.
Mark has been exhibiting his photographic art for over 40 years and is internationally collected.
Mark has also been head of photography at the University of SA, and a teacher there for most of his working life.
He is uniquely positioned to reflect on creativity and art as Mark lives a life driven by making work. His latest series was made using AI, he previous using Wet Plate Collodion, quite the contrast of medium.
https://www.markkimber.net/
https://www.instagram.com/mark.kimber
Show notes:
Birth of surrealism
The first photographer: Nicéphore Niépce
Eadweard Muybridge
Ed Douglas
Peter Fisher
Blow Up the movie
Saudade, Mark's recent Tin Type exhibition
James Tylor
Craig Tuffin's Daguerrotype series
The Little Machine Gallery
Mornington Penninsular Gallery
Albrecht Dürer
G'day listeners, welcome to episode 45 of the Atkins Labcast. This episode I interview Mark Kimber. I've known Mark for many years. Mark has been the head of photography at University of South Australia and he's been teaching there for decades. Mark's work is collected worldwide. He's one of those people who just lives for creativity. So sit back and enjoy this great episode.
UNKNOWN:Music
SPEAKER_01:Mark is one of the people that I would go to when it comes to understanding the world of art and where photography fits into it, and you would be probably one of the most logical guests for this little device.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's a very kind thing for you to say, Paul, and I really appreciate your interest, and I'm thrilled to be here. Thrilled?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely thrilled. I'll take that. Thank you very much, Mark. Thank you. So, Mark, are people who listen to the podcast... One of the things I'd like to know is why is Mark Kimber, why is my guest interested in photography? This is a photography-focused podcast. You're a contemporary photographic artist, right?
SPEAKER_00:Well, yes, I certainly try. I think my interest stems from a year 10 trip to Western Australia with my high school in which the science– teacher had one of those big old, I think they were Nicomats, I'm not sure. And I thought, that's a fantastic looking piece of machinery. And when we got to Perth, I used all my spending money to buy a box brownie. Oh, wow. And then photographed the trip from then on. And so that's what, that's probably what, 13, 14. And from then on, It's all I really wanted to do.
SPEAKER_01:When you purchased the Box Brownie, that would have been an old camera. And we're not talking, you're not in the 1930s here.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it wasn't like the original Box Brownie. It's probably, it was a Bakelite actually. Right. And one of those curved body Bakelites. Oh, beautiful. And it was, it took 120, I think. Yeah. Probably 127, not sure. And it's... It was just a delight to work with something that captured what was going on around me. And I found that incredibly enchanting. And it just grew and grew in me and didn't
SPEAKER_01:go away. The Box Brownie is a great little tool because it's just about an aperture. There's, I think, like two shutter speeds. Isn't that right? Yeah, there was B and click, and that was it. And there's no focus. No focus. So it was the sort of… The very essence, it's like having a piece of charcoal in your hand, really. Oh,
SPEAKER_00:it really is. I mean, you're back to what some cameras do for you, and that's that it's what you point it at that matters most. There's a tendency to use old cameras sometimes for the look, but the look isn't quite enough. You need to actually point it at something interesting as well. And that took me a while to work that out. Right.
SPEAKER_01:And so when did the, for just using a camera, because you can go down a path of being a professional photographer and take on things like weddings and sports or landscape, and then you can, or you can go, okay, this is a tool to create something more. When did that path, that intersection happen for you? Because I know you ended up on the art path. Right. And so when did that happen?
SPEAKER_00:Well, my interest was mainly, I would suppose, in portraiture. And I did weddings in those days and things like that. And then I met another Adelaide photographer, great photographer, Peter Fisher. And he was looking for something to do. And I suggested, why don't we try photography? And he hadn't done anything before. And I said, look, this is a very good therapy for us. So we set up a darkroom in his mother's laundry. And we started with, we each bought a Roliflex. At one stage, I had a standard, a wide angle and a telephoto Roliflex. And I managed to sell every one of them when I got to art school for the money. Ridiculously. In Japan recently, I saw the telephoto one going for something like$10,000. Blimey. Which sort of exceeds the$200 I got for it. But anyway.
SPEAKER_01:You've never been
SPEAKER_00:someone about what the
SPEAKER_01:tool is,
SPEAKER_00:though. No. I actually use all sorts of cameras and all sorts of methods to do what I want. I'm not bound to... particular sort of machinery in in some ways is although strangely to put it into context i am because i'm looking for a particular vision a particular look that you only get with certain cameras under certain situations but the thing is though is that i tend to move around a bit once i've done something with a particular camera for a particular idea, I sit back and I think, oh, I'll never have another idea again. It's all over. It's finished. And then two days later, there's something else I want to work on. But it requires a different piece of equipment and a different way
SPEAKER_01:of looking
SPEAKER_00:at
SPEAKER_01:it. So that two days is a pretty quick turnaround from it's all over, no good, and to, oh, my God, I'm off on this. Where does that– gap get filled what what what rushes back in once you've drained the idea out of you well i always
SPEAKER_00:feel very very drained uh after an exhibition like i put everything into it and uh i used to play in a band a lot and um and i always remember the day after performance feeling sort of washed out but it tends to sort of drain out of your body and inflows this compulsion that I have that I have always had and continues now to be creative. I think being creative is the only response to life. And sometimes that's very personal. Sometimes that includes work. Other people, sometimes it doesn't. And it's the only way I can see myself reacting to the world around me is to try and get a little bit of something of me out there. I make all my photographs for me with my idea, not with an audience in mind. And I do the best I can to... encompass that idea and then I hope that there will be an audience for outside. I think that's all you can ever do. I don't think you can actually make work in an artistic realm for a particular audience. You have to sort of believe in what you're doing for yourself and the process of that You may just latch on to something that other people will also find interesting. And that's what I hope
SPEAKER_01:for. So the exhibition in some ways becomes the performance of what you've been putting together, just looking at the band analogy. And the post-show, of course, is the exhaustion and come down. It's not a– you don't find yourself sliding into like a depression after that. It's actually like a relief and a– Like, I've done that, I've
SPEAKER_00:got that? Yes, it's a strange feeling. And exhibitions do tend to, from my point of view, rule a line underneath what it is that I'm interested in. And by that I don't mean, well, I've said that so eloquently that I never need to say it again. I don't mean that. I mean it's the end of a particular way of approaching it and the beginning of perhaps another way of approaching the same thing. And that same thing is an interior enchantment I have with the visual world, that I think there is more out there than what we see. I've always thought the artwork that I tried to make was a bridge between what what's inside me and what is out there in the outside world. And bringing them together in some sort of alchemist type way might just create something interesting enough
SPEAKER_01:to interest others. Wow. Okay. So I'm not going to, we'll unpack this sort of idea, but these thoughts formed and you're kind of clearer than anyone I've ever spoken to about, this part of the process. You moved to– we were loosely following your career. You moved to teaching. You made a decision to go to art school, you said. Well, I didn't know. You just found yourself there, or your father told you you had to do something with your life?
SPEAKER_00:No. Peter Fisher and I really enjoyed our photographic outings, and one day he came to me and said, there's a course on– Fine Art Photography at the University of South Australia, although then it was called SACAE then. And it's two nights a week for four years. And I thought, what do I want to do that for? I mean, I'm not really interested in that so much. It's not a world I knew anything about. He said, oh, look, it'll be fun. So he enrolled me without asking me. What a friend. Yep. And we both rolled up and it was that sort of revelation on the road to Damascus sort of situation where I finally found out how little I know and how much there was to know about photography. And I had a great lecturer called Ed Douglas. He's still with us. He's still with us doing lots of photography. And it introduced me to this vast, enormous, totally enchanting world of art and photography that I'm still trying to get my head around and still trying to figure out. And I just thought it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me, apart from the surfing. That was my other great sort of pastime. After I'd done one year of this evening course at art school, thanks to Peter, I quit my job. I was working at the advertisers then. So you were a photographer at the advertisers? No, I was working as an administrative assistant, I suppose would be a nice way of putting it. And though I had worked prior to that as a darkroom assistant at Messenger newspapers at Port Adelaide, and doing photography with them. But I gave that up to go around the world and go surfing.
SPEAKER_01:These are all really good choices, by the way.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, the only trouble is that when you're the photographer on a surf trip, when you come back, it doesn't look like you've been there at all because there's no photographs of me anywhere. It's me photographing the other guys surfing or the other places we've been to. And I'm on the other side of the camera. So I haven't been to any of those places photographically. Right, right. So I quit my full-time job and I took on a degree in visual art, photography major at the South Australian School of Art. And I enjoyed that immensely. It opened vast vistas of interest and excitement for me. And that thrill of photography, I might point out that that thrill is in the taking, the making, less so than it is in the exhibiting of it. The exhibiting of it I've always found somewhat frightening.
SPEAKER_01:Is that because it's people? Reflecting on your, you're getting marked.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you are, truly. You're saying, well, this is me. This is how I see the world. What do you think? And if you're doing anything worthwhile, people are going to love it and some people are going to hate it. I remember an interview once with an ex-McDonald's associate professor And the interviewer said to him, McDonald's hamburgers are very bland. And the executive was saying, exactly, that's the right thing. We have to take all the edges off of anything so that it fits the taste of as many people as possible. And the trouble is that when you're working with photography and the fine art process, It has to have those sharp ends of your own personal philosophy. Some people are going to really like that and some people aren't. If everyone likes it, then maybe you're not doing the right thing. I think you've got to be pushing those barriers a bit to the point where it delights as well as perhaps pushes away others. I'm not sure how to... quite how to articulate that but it's really a matter of doing what feels what I'd be happy to look at just sitting in a chair at night one of my favourite experiences though it doesn't happen much now is I would go out shooting at night on colour and then I would come to Atkins and drop off the roll of film and I'd wait a couple of days and I'd pick it up and with proofs and such, and I wouldn't look at them at first. I'd go home, wait till the evening, put on some nice music, sit down in a nice comfy chair, and then start going through the images. It was like a ritual.
SPEAKER_01:Were you worried about what might be there, or were you just like a box of chocolates that you were about to open and excited? Looking for surprises.
SPEAKER_00:Looking for the unknown, perhaps. Because I was doing night photography, I was doing long exposures. And because of reciprocity failure and color changes, I was never, this is pre-digital, this was a film, I was never sure what I was getting. It wasn't revealed to me until I had that film developed. And then I could see what it is that the camera saw in its following of my directions. And sometimes that was fantastic and sometimes that was really boring. But that's how it goes. But
SPEAKER_01:the, like that, I mean, I think that's followed through our conversation at an exhibition event. artist talk or almost it was a finissage of the show a week or so ago that I was at that I heard you speaking about you know you enjoy not knowing what's going to happen as part of the process which is you know it's sort of working without a net in some ways you don't know what's You don't know what your work's going to make. And if you knew exactly what it's going to make, it's not going to interest you anymore. You were talking about that. Is this the beginnings of that idea in your work? Or is that more of a surfing thing where you just wanted to go out and see whether you got knocked off this year?
SPEAKER_00:Well, certainly with the stuff that I started doing first at art school, which was nighttime photography, I was looking for something that I didn't know was there, that I couldn't see, but the camera could see.
SPEAKER_01:Is
SPEAKER_00:that because
SPEAKER_01:it's a long… I mean, you can see your eyes are better than film.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, except that the long exposure changes the colour gamut of the image and some things come forward, some things go back. And on some of them I was working with using fill-in flash as well. So I wasn't sure what I was getting. But the idea of… which is something we'll get into later on with AI, is the idea of happenstance. It's if you put yourself in a situation where you have the control over a reasonable amount of the variables, one then hopes that something special happens. Don't know what it is. Don't know if it's necessarily going to work or not. But it's that that's thrilling about it. Not knowing exactly what it's going to be and stumbling onto directions. All the advances, in inverted commas, that I've made in my photography have come out of mistakes or not completely understanding what I was doing. And I add... two and two together and I get seven or 13 or 42. And I think, wow, that happened. I hadn't thought of that before. And I start pushing my work in that direction. And so it's in a way flying blind with photography is one of the exciting things about it. Being able to, I suppose, access maybe part of the subconscious, I think... Automatic writing. Yeah, surrealists have always interested me, and it's interesting enough this year, it's the 100th anniversary of the birth of surrealism. Wow. And I'm trying to look for things that are there that we don't necessarily see, but they're still there because the camera has a way of... of doing that. So it's another
SPEAKER_01:sense you're chasing, like sight, sound. You're looking for other sense of, and is it related to time? Yes. It's a
SPEAKER_00:compression of time. We look at most shots, you know, 60th of a second, 125th of a second. But when you're doing five minutes, 10 minutes, an hour, that's time compressed into one image. And that's quite an amazing thing. It really is. When you think of one of the first photographs ever taken by a Frenchman called Niepce of a courtyard. Thank you for pronouncing that, by the way. Yes. I think that's how you say it now. All the French people out there will get me wrong. And there's debate whether it's a 24-hour exposure or or a 12-hour exposure because there's light on both sides of this courtyard that he's facing. But the camera, inverted commas, he was using, saw something that he could not see himself. And that was one of the relatively amazing things about this idea. Although it goes back, the head of Wedgwood, Mr. Wedgwood, was experimenting in the early 1800s with photography, except he couldn't figure out how to fix them. It wasn't until later that they actually stumbled on sodium thiosulfate, I think. Yeah, the fixing agent. The fixing agent. And Herschel, who was an astronomer, was one of the people that was responsible for figuring out how to fix images. I don't know how I
SPEAKER_01:got to that tangent, but... Well, we were talking about the sense of time within an image.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and the early photographs, the very early daguerreotypes, which I collect, you know, started off at a two-minute exposure and then a minute and then they finally got it down to like, you know, a couple of seconds as it got faster and faster. And then we get into people like Edward Muybridge who did– He was an American photographer that was famous for shooting his wife's lover, but he got off of that somehow. And some big deal money guy came to him and said that he had a bet on with someone else.
SPEAKER_01:Not photographing her, actually killing her. Sorry.
SPEAKER_00:I didn't realise I laughed at the message. I mean, bang, gun. Sorry. Bang, shot. That wasn't good. No, no. Okay. Anyway, this baron of industry was sure that all the feet of a horse, all the hooves of a horse, were off the ground at one time. And another friend said, no, there's always one, all the back ones, all the front ones. Yes. And my bridge, by then, was able to use cameras that were taken at... five hundredths of a second, really fast exposures, and proved that there is a spot every few steps where all of the horse's hooves are off the ground and it's actually flying along. And then that's when time changed and people sort of weren't quite so interested in long-term photography. Well, one of the things that I taught at art school for many years was working with a pinhole camera. And with a pinhole camera, you put a bit of photographic paper inside it and the exposures are 1, 2, 3, 10, 15 minutes, depending on the day. And that's another example of it revealing something to you that the eyes don't see. There's something... I am somewhat obsessed with process in a way. I know friends of mine that are very keen street photographers that will walk out looking for certain instances to happen in the streets and photograph it, the chance coming together of two or three elements. And I've done that and I like it, but I tend to like the situation where I can bring about something that comes because of the camera, the film, the set, the process is a way of getting my idea across. And my idea is, I don't know, it's interesting. Someone said the other day to me that they were looking at a range of my works and they said that they always looked like I took them. And sometimes I feel I'm a little bit...
SPEAKER_01:Is that a good thing?
SPEAKER_00:Well, when you think about any composer worth their salt, all their music sounds like they wrote it. Every Beatles song sounds like the Beatles wrote it. I think if you...
SPEAKER_02:I think
SPEAKER_00:with most people, and there may well be exceptions, there are... instances where there is a congruity about how you look at the world. And to me, it seems natural. To others, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But this person said that they always seemed very Kimber-esque. and that's really interesting i took that as a compliment
SPEAKER_01:actually i think i would um i think i would although you did say earlier that you know the analogy of mcdonald's taking the corners off of things so i think there is a thing about if you want to be if you want a job in photography and to get good reliable money people to back you and pay you you they have to know that when they engage you for whatever it might be piece of art or whatever, that it's going to match and meet the Kimber standard or whatever their standard is. And so in a, and this is not you, of course, in a working commercial photographer's role, that's critical that Peter Fisher is a great example. You can see, you can recognise Peter's work. Definitely. And I think that makes for a great photographer because whatever he turns himself to, it's a really good result. You know, it's excellent work, but you can feel the threat of Peter. And I think there's a role for that kind of photographer. But there's also a role for the kind of photographer who's breaking ground, who you might not recognise their work particularly, who's out there. But what that means is that photographer doing that work can't really get a job as a photographer. No. Maybe they find themselves teaching. And this is where I wanted to ask you. You found yourself, you know, you got so much out of art school and majoring in photography that you clearly develop the ideas of what it was to be like an artist at heart. It's not like you sort of worked out what it took to be an artist and went and did it. You were naturally an artist. And so I think from an outsider, your role as a teacher of visual arts was so valuable because the thoughts that we've been listening to as me as a listener, and asking you these questions and people who'd be listening to this, you'd be filling a lot of gaps in where people felt like, oh, I kind of felt that that was the answer. That's what was happening here. And you've been able to eloquently put it together. Did that natural move into teaching, did that make sense to you? Oh, it did.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I remember clearly the day I graduated of being extremely depressed because it meant I had to leave art school. And I didn't really want to go. I wanted– there wasn't a further path then as there is now. But I love to experiment. That's why I tend to– well, let's put it this way. I tend to not be the world's greatest commercial photographer simply because– I try to get things the way I see them. And what a client wants is the way they see it. And they are depending on you to have the skills and the ability and the experience to be able to create the sort of image they're looking for. They don't want it turning into some surreal masterpiece or something. They want it to do very specific things. very objective things, whereas I have a rather subjective way of looking at photography. I remember doing weddings and having to adhere to a very particular format, and in that way feeling somewhat stifled. I had one of the first weddings I ever did. was shooting with 120 colour film and I had an RB67. The biggest camera you could imagine carrying. It's horrible. Huge thing. Great for on tripod for a wedding. Anyway, the later versions cocked the shutter when you wound the film on. The earlier ones, you had to wind the film on and cock the shutter. So, I'm shooting this wedding. After I'd done about 18 shots, I thought, I'm not really supposed to be getting this many shots out of it. I figured out what I was doing was just cocking the shutter and taking another shot. Yeah, yeah. And taking another shot. Double exposure, triple exposure. And quadruply exposing it. And actually it came out as a really unusual, strange negative. And I tried to sort of explain to the people that what I'd done was compress the joy and the thrill of the moment into one image. They didn't go for it at all. They hated it. So I thought there were some great possibilities in that negative, but they didn't see the point. So that's a difficult thing for me. in being a commercial photographer is that you do have to please a client. And all I'm, to be quite honest with you, all I'm really interested in is pleasing me and then hopefully others may see something in that. And some people do and some people don't. But that's the way it goes. I think it's important to be... true to the way in which you see the world and try and, as I said, construct this bridge between my inner world and the outer world and using photography to pull those two things together. The interesting thing was once I was engaged by the National Portrait Gallery of Australia south of Australia, in Canberra, to do a portrait of a particular scientist who lived here in Adelaide at the time. And I remember ringing them up and saying, what are you looking for? And they said, well, that's your job. I said...
SPEAKER_01:That's a National Portrait Gallery. That's a different kind of– I think they're not saying make us happy. They're saying make Mark Kimber happy.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, he said, I remember him very clearly saying, we want you to do the sort of photography you do, whatever that is. We don't care as long as that person's in it and it's something that you do. And that was very, very liberating, which meant I could do– whatever I wanted to do, and it was going to be fine. I knew enough about what I was doing to know that doing a long exposure with some flash at a particular spot with some background lighting at the right time would give me an interesting image. And it did, and it worked out just fine. But that's rare. I mean... There are a number of photographers that, of course, in the commercial and advertising world, that if you go back to people like Irving Penn and Richard Averton that have a style that's so established, they were just asked to do whatever it is they do. But for most photographers, they're having to please a client, and the clients often have very different ideas about what they want to do. It's a rare client that would just say– Yeah, do whatever you want. Yeah. Just go for it. And I think that's one of the reasons why I would make a really crummy commercial photographer because I'd want to do it in a particular way that most probably the client didn't want. Yeah. So I tend to do things that every now and then, and sometimes it's by chance... I touch on something that seemed to resonate inside me. There was this, the Romans had this idea of genius. Now, let me qualify that. I'm not saying I'm a genius. But they had this idea that genius existed outside of our material world. and that the gods would choose individuals every now and then, that they would allow that genius to flow through, and you could create a marvelous statue or building or something. But it was really coming from somewhere else, but it would only come when the gods allowed it to. So you were never allowed to take credit for anything wonderful you did. because it was the gods allowing that genius to flow through you. But you were never criticised for doing anything bad because the gods just hadn't decided to give it to you that day. Great way to live. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the commercial world was like that? Sorry, the gods have deserted me today. It didn't work out. I'll give you a call in a month or so.
SPEAKER_01:Be very good for your mental health, not worrying about, you know, blaming an entity like that. That's
SPEAKER_00:great. Well, I do find, though, very– there's nothing quite like the thrill of getting something you didn't quite expect. Especially when it's really good. Yeah, when it's really good. That's like everything comes together. And it's just this convergence of light and time and space where it just happens and it works. Conversely, there are periods where the muse, as it were, deserts you and it doesn't matter what you do, it turns out really boring. But I've always believed that progress comes through I think it's absolutely vital that while I will sit around and think about an idea, especially late at night, it's the trying to do it that will bring about the idea, the process of movement. And in that movement, you might prove, inverted commas, that idea, or you might disprove it, or you might disprove it in a really creative way. And that's what's exciting. It's the possibilities. Recently, I had the wonderful experience of working with Paul Atkins and with Sam Oster on tin types. And that was an incredibly exhilarating experience for me. because I got to see something that I had never seen before. I had seen chin types, but not ones that I had set up and planned. And I found the process just so enchantingly beautiful. And there would be errors and faults, but I liked that. An American photographer called Gary Winogrand once said that He photographs things to see what they look like photographed.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Because a photograph is a lie. It's an absolute lie. The old line that photographs don't lie is a lie. It's a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional world. And it's on a piece of paper or it's on a screen. But it's not real life. It's a transformation of it. and it's passed through a medium that collects light and then does something with it. So I'm not looking for absolute truth or anything like that. In fact, I'm looking for perhaps the unknown, to unveil something that's there that we don't notice. One of my early favourite films was... a film called Blow Up. Oh, yeah. Which was about a fashion photographer. I
SPEAKER_01:can't remember. I think it was meant to be– Fred Astaire played him in another film. Yeah. I can't think of who it was, but anyway. None of us can. We'll put it in the show
SPEAKER_00:notes. We'll come back for that. But
SPEAKER_01:what happened? Set in the 60s in London.
SPEAKER_00:Set in the 60s. Swinging 60s. Swinging 60s. So much so that looking at it now, it's a real cliche, but it's sort of probably what it was like. Problematic. For David Bailey. Anyway, he takes a photograph in a park and then later on he blows the image up and he sees something and he blows it up more and he blows it up more and finally there is this body lying in the shrubbery that he didn't even see when he was there. And it's this discovery of this body that leads the narrative from then on in the film. So I think when you discover things, like when I was working with you, Paul, on tintypes, the way things looked, they didn't look like what I was looking at. There was my vision, like opening my eyes and looking at it, seeing it one way, and then there was the way that the chin type saw it. And that was a completely different way of picturing the world and something I found incredibly exciting for that because I suppose often I'm looking for that intervention of photography into daily life to see what it can distill from daily life what's what what's left over um sort of the um the remnants of of what perhaps goes unseen
SPEAKER_01:so with the with the 10 types that that series that you did and sam and i were involved with um You shot objects. You chose to shoot everyday objects, plastics that you had then adorned with great art, you know, Turner pieces and that kind of stuff, and then used a tintype process to render them, and they were pretty little things. I know it was an eye-opening process for me, and I know Sam really enjoyed the results because both of us are noodling away with what we're doing, trying to get just get a nice looking plate. And then someone like yourself steps in with these ideas that we hadn't ourselves had. But when you think about what you've done, it made great sense. And the end story was fabulous. We had all sorts of problems we had to overcome. Both of us are used to dealing in a commercial way with commercial clients. And here we had a client that was excited for randomness, which really, for me, I was totally confused, but loved it. I've had this experience once before in my commercial print life, was again working for an artist where he said, oh, whatever happens, happens. I was like, this is wonderful. I don't know how we live in this world. So that was the show that I was involved with the last year. And with a promise of what we said to listeners back a little earlier, that we would talk about AI, artificial intelligence. The next show Mark Kimber steps into, you go from an 1860s process to generating art with artificial intelligence. Did you stop, did you drain yourself of the tintype idea late last year and inflowed the idea of artificial intelligence? Where did that begin and how did you start working with that? Well, it's
SPEAKER_00:probably more pro... pragmatic than that in that um i did have in my garage up until about four years ago a studio where i could set things up we talked about you losing that to a teenager and i gave it to my son to be a sort of you know boy's den where he could hang out with his friends and play video games which means i had no studio anywhere yeah um And so I had to rely on the goodwill of people like Paul and Sam to do these things. Once I had done this experiment with tintype, I'm not suggesting that, well, I've done tintype, that couldn't be done any better than that. It was the fact that I had to rely on the goodwill on the goodwill of others to make it happen. And it's not something that I'm used to doing because you're asking a lot of other people to drop what they're doing so that they help you make something. I like to be somewhat in control of my uncontrollability. So I would still like to work with GenType. Tragically, one of my ex-students who now is a very famous artist called James Tyler is moving to
SPEAKER_02:Canberra. And he
SPEAKER_00:offered me his entire daguerreotype setup process. Wow. For a couple of hundred dollars. Wow. I had nowhere to put it. Wow. I would have dearly loved to be able to set that up somewhere and work with that, but I don't have anywhere. So someone else has got it. Because it's interesting, two points there. One, there is, for me, no one particular way of photographing or photographic process that is the best. It doesn't matter whether it's film or digital or black and white or tintype or calotype or daguerreotype. It's all photography. There's no one right photography and everything else is sort of secondary. Although, I must admit, I do have a real passion for the daguerreotype. There's a brilliant clarity about it and the fact that i'm looking into the eyes of someone that lived 160 years ago and in some instances looking into the eyes of someone that fought in the american war against the british it is the ultimate in time travel
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:That sort of photography.
SPEAKER_01:And in some ways with daguerreotypes, you're actually looking at yourself as well.
SPEAKER_00:Well, you are. Because they're mirrors. Because they're little mirrors, yeah. And you get in the wrong spot and you are looking at yourself. In fact, you have to find the right spot to look at it.
SPEAKER_01:And then it reveals itself like
SPEAKER_00:a magic. And then it just goes, oh, and it just goes, boom. And it's utterly fantastic. And it's a wonderful medium to work with. And I remember Paul describing some daguerreotypes he'd seen on a recent trip to Victoria. Craig Tuffin's work. Craig Tuffin's work. And they're astonishingly beautiful. I mean, they're just remarkably beautiful. And they take advantage of the mistakes, inverted commas, that happens in photography. There is, when you have white areas with daguerreotype, sometimes if you overexpose it, you get what's called daguerreian frost. It goes blue. And he had some images of some landscapes where the sky had gone blue in places because of overexposure. And it just made the most wonderful, wonderful images. But even though I might work with a plastic camera with chin types, with digital, with 35mm or 120mm, What I'm trying to do is find the best medium to capture the idea that I'm interested in. And it's always a matter of adapting my ideas to what is possible to achieve. And so I jump around. Some people may have a Leica for their whole career and they do everything on that, and that's fine. Except that I find it... too limiting i'm always looking for and again it gets back to what you said that area of happenstance that if if you work with something where you're not completely in control there is this chance that you'll make mistakes certainly but you also might make discoveries as well and that's what makes it exciting for me of seeing uh Something happened when I was working with you, Paul, and a couple of the tintypes came out blue, which I had never seen before, and I don't think
SPEAKER_01:Paul had ever seen them before. And no one that I know, Craig Tuffin had never seen before. Yeah. No one could work out. And look, I've stopped short of going overseas asking all sorts of people how we did it, but... The funny thing was the thing in front of the camera that went blue was a Listerine bottle, a greeny blue. And we all wanted it. Everyone we showed these rejects to were like, no, can you do more of those? And I was like, well, I don't know how.
SPEAKER_00:No, there's a story that a guy called Levi back in the 1860s in the US made a colour daguerreotype by accident. and then spent the rest of his life going insane trying to replicate it. Now, whether that's true or not, I don't know. Maybe it was the mercury. Yeah, something. Or he was nuts and it wasn't. There is talk of it actually existing, being held in the Smithsonian Institute collection, but I haven't been able to find it. Okay. But… These marvellous things happen.
SPEAKER_01:The theory is right. You know, like this does happen.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And that happened first in art school, in my final year in art school. The lecturer said to me, said to the class, I want you to go back and photograph where you came from. I want to see the origins of your photographic sort of belief, as it were. So do that. So I said, okay. And I went back to the area where I grew up, where my grandparents grew up, which was Port Adelaide. And during the day, it felt like now. The past wasn't there. So one day I decided I'll go back at night and I'll photograph the same places at night. And there's something about night that... transposes the sort of imagery that I'm looking at into being timeless. It could be that night. It could be a night 20 years ago. It could be a night 100 years ago. There was something about photographing things with long exposure at night that got closer to that idea I had of revealing something unknown. So I started doing long exposures with colour to do that. And that sent me off on a career path that went for many years with long exposures. And I've also worked with little sets that I've made. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:beautiful miniatures, like exquisite little, the cloud chamber.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. Which was done with a pinhole camera. Right. Was that a pinhole on a Hasselblad body? No, it was a Holger. pinhole camera a plastic lens pinhole camera and that saw things that I couldn't see and it saw and I always liked that idea of something in it that's going to chip it a certain way and some days you eat the bear and some days the bear eats you and that is the whole rub with creativity sometimes No problem at all. Sometimes you really struggle, but you have to keep trying, and it's through movement that you finally do achieve something.
SPEAKER_01:So artificial intelligence, the process there, the work we've seen that have come out of you is, for me, it's a very revolutionary mark, Kimber. I've not had this feeling before, whilst looking at the work. And I don't know whether it's a combination of the elements or whatever, but I know you've used photographs that you've taken in combination with prompts that you've worked very tirelessly on trying to generate a result of feeling. And the work that showed up at the little machine that we just talked about, can you talk about how you made it and what was the process and what was your thinking behind it? One day,
SPEAKER_00:Peter Fisher said to me... Is he your muse? He's one of my muses. I show things to the first, because our photography goes back to the very beginning together. And he said, oh, there's a new computer program where you can tell a... They've told the computer to make a picture of an angel walking down Fifth Avenue. And I thought, oh, that sounds... ridiculously amazing. But then I saw it and I said, that's unbelievable. And I mean that in many ways of unbelievable. That's just incredible. And so I thought, well, I'll give it a try. What I was interested in was the fact that it could achieve wonderful things, but it is very quixotic. It has a life... of its own. Now, for people out there that perhaps haven't had much exposure, forgive the pun, to digital, to AI work, it doesn't steal someone else's imagery. If you say, I want a picture of a giraffe, It goes out or has already gone out and looked at thousands of pictures of giraffes on the net and then it redraws a giraffe for you. So it doesn't take, you know, Jane Merkel's photograph of a giraffe in a zoo in Germany and give it to you and say, there you go. It actually creates it in the same way if I asked you, Paul, to draw a picture of a tree, you could. You would do that. And that's your memory and your idea and your understanding of a tree. Well, that's what it's like with AI. But it's often you forget to set the right parameters. It's a long process. Through a series of prompts, you tell it what you want, but you don't always get what you want. And I remember there being this marvellous film from the 1960s with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in it where one was the devil and one was the guy that wanted the devil to do things for him. And the devil said, yeah, yeah. Peter Cook was the devil. Yeah, Peter Cook was the devil. And he'd say, yeah, I'll do that for you. I can do that, yeah. But he'd always find... a loophole that the other person forgot to say, oh, you didn't want that. You've got to be very specific. Every little point, you know, or else it will go off into another tangent. But that's what I really like. I particularly love the idea that happenstance comes into it. It's not undirected. It's not like, I think people think you sit down and type in, Nice country scene. It'll give you that, but it'll be pretty boring. What's exciting is that when it gives you something that you hadn't even thought of, something that you may have left out, the way it's interpreted, a prompt, and the strange thing,
SPEAKER_02:excuse me while I take a sip of water, is that You can learn
SPEAKER_00:what prompts to put in. You put the same prompts in twice, you get two different photographs.
SPEAKER_01:Really? It doesn't. But it knows that you've repeated that prompt, so it would be saying you weren't happy with what I gave you
SPEAKER_00:last time. Yeah, and something else happens. It's not so formulaic that you can just type in something It's concrete, and it'll just give you that exactly. And the next time you put the same prompt in, it'll give you the same thing. It'll give you something similar but different each time. And that's what's really exciting about it. Trying to juggle the balance between what you want, what you know, and what the machine knows and wants. And that brings about that word again, it comes back, happenstance. That brings about things that happen that happen not, sometimes not because of what you've said, but in spite of what you've said, something has happened.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The other strange thing I've noticed, and my friend Peter Fisher again, and I both work with AI, is that after a while, it starts to learn the way you look at the world. And a lot of my AI stuff looks like my AI stuff. It's begun to interpret my vision because of the ones I've selected. And accepted. And accepted and taken. And it said, oh, I think I know who you are. Who knows? Maybe it delves off into the net and finds you. images by me and learns my style, maybe it has no idea who I am. I don't know. But after a while, I find that it does begin to learn my way of seeing things, but not completely. It'll always throw in errors. So far. Yeah, yeah. So far, so far. I don't know if I could ever get to the point where And I don't want to get to the point where it's got everything I want. I was doing some portraits the other night, like people that don't exist, and the stuff it was throwing up was really quite– throwing up is probably not the best phrase to use for it. The stuff that it was giving me, although some may say it is a good idea, the stuff it was giving to me was– Beyond anything that I had thought about, it was what I wanted, but it was a whole lot more as well. And it was an amazing experience. But the thing is that there is a lot of pushback in the photography world and in the world in general with AI, especially because you can't copyright an AI image. I mean, I use a combination of my imagery and AI. Whether that will be or can be termed as copyrightable is not known yet.
SPEAKER_01:Well, obviously, if it's an output of the software you're using, probably the general rules would be, well, it's not copyrightable.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. In Europe, it's not. It just passed a law that it wasn't. I'm not completely concerned about that at all. I'm not necessarily trying to sort of– I'm playing with it. I just love the idea of removing some barriers. You know, it's like when you're doing a scene. Say we were doing a chin type and it goes blue and you think, oh, God, I'd really like to do one where the background was blue but the front wasn't. But you couldn't do it. This gives a look of that, even though it's not a chin time. Um, you can do things that, well, when Photoshop first came out, uh, a lot of, um, older photographers thought, well, this is the end of photography because you can just make all sorts of mistakes and fix them in Photoshop. But now it's just, you know, everyone uses it. Um, and AI is, is, is in Photoshop now. AI is in phones now. So it eventually becomes a consumer product. The only thing you can guarantee is change. Apart from that, I have no idea where it's going to.
SPEAKER_01:Does it bother you? There's a lot of people, there's a lot of fear, and I don't feel that coming from you. I don't feel that you're someone who lives... in that world where you just say, oh, well, this is clearly going to swallow me up in one way or another?
SPEAKER_00:No,
SPEAKER_01:I
SPEAKER_00:don't. That's only because I suppose I have very particular ideas about what I'd like to do, and AI removes a lot of those barriers. There's a great science fiction film from the 1960s called Forbidden Planet. It was the first introduction of Robbie the Robot. Yep. And they land on this planet where the people that used to live there called the Krell had developed machinery, a computer in a sense, that operated on thought and And there's a line in a Leonard Cohen song that says, making objects out of thought.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And that's always really appealed to me. Anyway, on this planet, they'd created this thing so the people only had to think of what they wanted and it would happen. But unfortunately, what it did was it crossed over into the dark side of people's mind and would go out killing people as well. And in the end... Totally brutalised everyone. Yeah. There's this great Stephen Hawking's joke where Stephen Hawking's just talking to some reporters and Stephen Hawking says, you want to hear a joke? And they said, oh, yeah, okay, what is it? And he says, well, a whole bunch of Harvard scientists get together and they create the ultimate joke quantum computer, I mean, it's already been one built, actually, that can do things the best computers we've got in the normal range could not possibly do. It's just amazing, this computer. And they say to each other, look, now I've got this thing, what shall we ask it? So one of the scientists says, I know what, and goes up to the machine and types in, is there a God? And the computer says, there is now. And we're back into Terminator territory. Do you
SPEAKER_01:feel that really, though?
SPEAKER_00:Whether that happens, I don't know. It gets to the point of, will AI ever become self-aware? The weird thing, as I suggested, is that with me, it's... It's begun to sense me and mimic me in what it gives to me. So it's learnt that. It's like I ask you to draw a tree and you drew three trees and I picked one of them. I said, this is the tree I want. And then I came back another day later and said, I want a tree, but I want it like that third one you did. And after a while, you would get to know that I want pictures of trees done the way…
SPEAKER_01:Well, I could do a tintype for you now.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I know what you're looking for that theory. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:you could. You could do that very easily. A good metaphor.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And it would
SPEAKER_00:look
SPEAKER_01:like what I'm looking for. No doubt about that. So you're saying this is the self-awareness of artificial intelligence and image generation that is… What's happening next? Well, it depends what happens.
SPEAKER_00:I think within photography, gosh, it's difficult to know. I mean, the first digital camera, I remember seeing a picture of it. They used a cassette on the side to record it, and it was something like, you know, 0.001 kilobytes or something, and it, you know– It took 30 seconds to take it. It was like the beginning of photography. Yeah. So if in 1838 and you were a cultivated, sophisticated man about talent like you are, and I said to you, oh, we're going to invent this thing called photography, first of all, you wouldn't know what I was talking about. Yeah. And secondly, what I would describe to you as being– what Oliver Wendell Holmes called a mirror with a memory, you would think I was a bit strange, but at the very least, you wouldn't understand what it is that was coming. And I don't think Daguerre had any idea when he and Niepce developed the daguerreotype that what photography would do. And photography has transformed the world. It is incredible. everywhere it's the one pervasive sort of thing that that fills the world and for a while even though it really didn't it fulfilled people's idea of truth but it never was it was a lie then now you cannot believe it the old saying that don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see. You have to say nowadays that don't believe anything you hear and don't believe anything you see because there is a possibility that it's not real. Yeah, yeah. And recently some of Trump's team produced a series of photographs of Trump with a whole bunch of black African-Americans, of him hanging out with them and having a good time and having pizza and whatever. But they were total fabrication. Yeah. So if anything's presented to you that that's at all contentious, there is a distinct possibility that you're being lied to.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I think I'd like to think of it like if we were– in the 1860s and we were reading the London Times and we'd seen some pictures taken from the Crimean War, you might– and the average person might look at those pictures and say, oh, my God, what a hellscape. Of course it was war. We don't argue whether it was a hellscape or not, but we know for a fact that Roger Fenton misused and created images– not in, well, they were in front of the camera. He assembled cannonballs on the road to make a scene look more dramatic than it was. So we were being manipulated as two fine gentlemen in the 1860s by photography. Before that, a sketch artist was manipulating us. Yes, absolutely. And since then, darkroom technicians, photographers, choice of lenses, it's always been the case. Perhaps now... we're being better educated in questioning what we're seeing, more so than it's worse than it's ever been. I mean, it was better done and perhaps a little less of it before, but now we're more aware and perhaps I'd like to think we're not more cynical because I don't think cynicism is the answer, but, you know, careful before you jump to conclusions and make judgments. Would that be fair? I
SPEAKER_00:think that's fair to say that. I think... It depends. If someone's telling you a truth, in inverted commas, that you want to be true, then you believe in it because it's confirmation. If it's telling you something you don't want to believe, you might question it a bit more. But art has this ability to influence people. By that, art, I term photography and all sorts, has the ability to influence people. the way people see things. If you go back to the days of Albech Dürer, Dürer did this very famous etching of a rhinoceros. Now, one hadn't been seen earlier in Europe, but someone who'd seen one in Africa had come back and said– Well, there's two horns on a rhinoceros. Endura did this picture of the rhinoceros with one horn on its nose and the other horn on its back. And it became standard. That's what it looked like. And even after someone had actually brought a real rhinoceros back and put it on display, people were still drawing it with a... a horn on its back because the art had told them that's what it looked like. And as sophisticated as we think we are, we are as sophisticated as the people were in 1860 about the future of photography. They had no idea. I don't think any of us have, I know none of us have any idea of where it can go. That is just something that's getting pushed day by day by day. You know, with chat, GDP is advancing at an exponential rate that is very difficult to understand. But I don't think, like the painters of the 1840s that said, now that photography's here, painting is dead. No. Painting hasn't died. It just freed up painters from the task of representing reality into representing the subconscious. This will change photography. There's no doubt about it. The way in which it will do it, when you consider that you have some mobile phones where you can take two or three pictures of a group and then on the phone take the face of one person and put it on the face of that same person that looks better in that image than it did in the other image and create this fiction. That's not what happened. In that picture that was actually taken, that person wasn't even smiling, but now they are. It's a lie. And again, we get back to photography being a lie. I don't think any of us can... accurately say I saw an interview with David Bowie recently and this was just when the internet was invented
SPEAKER_02:and he said he said
SPEAKER_00:you may think that all it can do is calculate the household spending budget and work out you know what the electricity bill is and make a shopping list. He said, we have no idea what it's going to do. It's going to change the world in ways that no one knows about at the moment. And that's what AI will do. And I'm not saying it's going to replace photography, but it's going to have a part to play in photography as AI... starts to have a bigger role in what people see as cumbersome tasks. I will let the computer work that out. And sometimes that works very badly and sometimes it doesn't. But what I love about it is this idea of creating with AI photography is going back to the Leonard Cohen quote, making objects out of thought. I love being able to think of, oh, I'd like this with that with this, but I want this happening and that happening. Just think of it. And then type in a series of prompts. You get something like it. So then there is another button that says change or minor change or major change. And you do that and you change it. And it keeps on going. morphing into different versions of itself. And finally, after about 20 of those processes, you get an image that's close to what you want. And sometimes that exceeds what you're looking for. It's marvellous. If something happens, you think, wow, that's incredible. I had thought something similar to that, but it didn't really... occurred to me that that would be possible. And because you can actually type in photorealistic, photorealism, it gives you completely photographic-like images that look absolutely
SPEAKER_01:real. Certainly that work at Little Machine of yours, I'm becoming quite literate in recognising artificial intelligence. So I could see it there. But I would suggest that a lot of the population would look at it and just saw that you had staged this scene. It was a wonderful composition of elements that sort of fitted together, but also were a little jarring. But I don't think it looked completely artificial. And I think that was the exciting thing about it for me. I felt connected to it. And for me, I'm always quite behind things, but I'm always layering against what you might find in front of your camera and whether you could do that. And so that was the exciting part about seeing what you're doing. And also the artists that you were with, there's such an age range and experience range amongst them. And there were people dabbling with lumen prints and there's camera-less photography. There was slit photography, you know, real compression of time type of stuff. And there was Mark who's been having a long career in making photography and teaching photography, teaching contemporary art. And there you are striding out in front of everybody making brand new work. It was very, very cool. And that's why I wanted to talk to you about this. So look, we're at the close of our time, but I will say you've recently retired as senior or head of photography at University of South Australia, where every year a cohort of people got an opportunity to hear these thoughts. And I mean, they obviously didn't hear about artificial intelligence. It was... That's more recent than– but I really feel for the students that are going through now that are missing your take on this because it is so fresh and accepting and open-minded. I think the world could do with that attitude. And I hope you can find vehicles to be in contact with people and be adding to what we see and our understanding of this because, you know, the fear with AI is palpable. And, you know, there's people jumping at shadows about it. And I think the media likes that. I think people controlling the message like the fact we feel destabilized and there's a sense of chaos out there. And then there's people like yourself who seem to just ride the chaos and sort of calm us all down by looking at an objective and applying history to the situation and going, hang on, this is just a new tool. I don't think you believe it's going to ruin the world. No,
SPEAKER_00:I don't think so. There's a quote that says that chaos is order as yet undescribed, that there is an order amongst the chaos. We just haven't seen it yet. Yes. The other thing, too, is that what a lot of people don't understand about AI is that it absolutely depends on human... intervention. You have to learn to write and describe your photograph before you take it. It's like going off on a job to do a portrait of someone and having to describe every element in the photograph before you do it to get it to work. So it does take skill and it does take time to get it to do what you want it to. And it's not just making an image at a pressing of a button. It's actually a lot more involved than that. There's a lot to learn in relation to how you program a computer because that's basically what you're doing. And I can only see it expanding the possibilities of photography. Yeah. You can't stand on barricades waving a flag saying, no, you know, we're Luddites and we want no further expanse because it's going to take away our whatever. I often wonder what happened to all the sail makers in the late 19th century that lost their jobs because ships went over to steam. Yeah, yeah. Change is inevitable. That's right. If you can work out what the change is, you could become very rich. Yeah. But I'm not proposing for a moment that I am. All I'm doing at the moment is having a wonderful time playing with possibilities.
SPEAKER_01:So my last question to you, what's your next show? I've heard that there's something in Victoria happening, an exhibition.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, there's an exhibition coming up at the Mornington Potential Gallery. of Turner William Turner William Turner W.M. Turner and the curator is also putting in imagery by other Australian artists that work with that same sort of sense of the sublime perhaps so there'll be a mixture of that so I'm working the images that I made for the show that's just been in this gallery called The Little Machine, which is in Regent Arcade, which you must check out because it's a great– it's at the vanguard. It's sort of at the pointy end of art. It's worth checking it out. The images I made for that were made with this Turner exhibition in mind. So by the time I get to Turner, which will be later this year, I might be a little closer to getting
SPEAKER_01:exactly what I want. How exciting. Well, thank you so much for your time, Mark. I'm incredibly grateful for it. And, again, I feel excited to go forward with photography and to talk to people about what's happening. And I'm so glad that you're here on our court, able to, you know, bring the thoughts, wrap them into an understandable narrative you know, package that we can, you know, digest. Because not everyone can think as broadly and as freely as you can about that. And you're a great asset to us.
SPEAKER_00:Well, there's an even bigger asset in this town, and his name is Paul Atkins. Certainly I am very grateful for the assistance you've given both me and my fellow artists and commercial photographers, et cetera. Because you're always pushing what you do. You've never actually stood still and just done the same thing over and over again. You've always been trying to find new ways. I mean, the Atkins that exist now is nothing like the Atkins that existed 10 years ago. And it keeps changing. And that's because of you and your staff seeing what can we do with this process? How can we make it more enchanting? How can we make it more desirable, more beautiful, more powerful? And without you, we would be in a very bad state. So I'm very grateful that you exist.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. Thank you, Mark. That was lovely.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you.
UNKNOWN:Thank you.