BIOGRAPHY
Anthony Amos, a Sydney-based abstract photographer who has spent much of his career in New York city, marked his transformation from a successful editorial photographer of portraits, interiors and still life to an artist constructing hand-made images from large-format film with his first solo show, Redemption, at the Erickson-Davis Gallery in the USA in 2004. “Until a few years ago, I always looked at my photographs as pages,” Amos says. “I suddenly felt the overwhelming need to move beyond the figure and express something that would be hung up. It came about from a frustration at the temporary nature of everything I produced for work. I wanted to make something closer to music that you could meditate on.”
“Redemption” also accurately describes the process with which the artist works – collecting detritus from nature, the street, the trash can and “redeeming” these objects – the skeleton of a car buried in a forest, a coffee stain on a paper towel, a roll of discarded bubble wrap – by reconstructing them in another form, using reversed negatives, curious juxtapositions and total reconstructions of shape and meaning. “Film is usually looked at in photography as a finite sheet or strip,” Amos explains. “But a large amount of my work is built by hand from a number of pieces of complete or partial negatives and in some cases other material is added to that to make a master negative that I will print from.”
“I’m questioning what we actually see of things and what our perception of those things are,” he says. “Can I present something to you in such a way that that familiar object is no longer what you thought it was? Hence the reversal of things, the pulling in and out of things, the inversion, the reconstruction, the juxtaposition. Everything I use is under my nose – I’m not dragging things from far-flung places to show you, I’m trying to take what’s right underneath my feet and give it a different appraisal. It’s the belief that everything around us, animate and inanimate, has some kind of form or spirit beyond what we register at a glance.”
Amos says he always was a “seagull.” Born in 1962 in a beach side suburb of Melbourne, Australia, as a child he would comb the foreshore for bottles and bottle caps to redeem – that word again – at the local kiosk for sweets. “I would see things in the tide lines and imagine where those things came from, somewhere infinitely more exciting than where I was.”
He says he grew up feeling an outsider. “My father was the son of a Baptist missionary in China and his first language was Mandarin. My mother raised me on stories of life in the endless expanse of the Mallee. I would disappear for hours on end in the bush, like an aboriginal on walkabout. It was never lonely. I made huts, lit fires, even accidentally burnt the bush down!”
His first photographs were taken at age 18, of train tracks, sand dunes, jetties falling into the sand. “It was all rhythms and patterns, things running off into infinity beyond the immediate frame – not far from where I am now.” In his early twenties he taught himself how to make clothes, later working for Australian couturier Robert Burton as a cutter. He now says constructing clothes was rather like what he does with constructing negatives in his work.
All the while, he was teaching himself photography. His first professional job was a travel story on Europe. “I shot the Pitti Palace in Florence and accidentally ruined the film by opening the camera back. That was the first and last time I did that!”
At 23, he moved to Manhattan with his wife, Lee Tulloch, an Australian author. Almost immediately given an introduction to Richard Davis beginning a most complete mentorship , 25 year conversation , ongoing abuse of the products of Polaroid Corporation and avoiding the attention of the association.He began to take portraits for an Australian magazine. Soon after commenced work as photographic assistant to leading fashion and portrait photographers such as Bruce Weber and David Seidner. He began to take portraits of his own. “In New York, people are so accessible. My first portrait was of Phillip Glass, who spent two hours explaining to me the American social system. I remember Quentin Crisp, who didn’t see the reason for having more than one room, and William Burroughs, who is one of the most inspirational people I met, having been a non-productive junkie until the age of 38. Patricia Highsmith I remember as crusty and suspicious. I imagined a life as being in a room with people who were always going to be that interesting.”
In 1989, with a baby in tow, the couple returned to Australia. Amos set up a studio in Melbourne and spent the next three years taking editorial portraits and collaborating with the Artistic Director of the Melbourne International Festival, Academy Award-winning designer John Truscott. He developed an interest in people in their interiors when he photographed artist Jenny Watson at home. “The natural progression of a portrait is to show how someone actually lives. That became a way for me to shoot interiors that was not about architecture and design.”
In 1993, the family moved to Paris. “It was about tossing myself in the deep end, foolishly or not. I suppose that came out of an arrogance of going to New York at such an early age, surviving, doing well. Then coming back to Melbourne and being on top of the game after three years, at the age of 30. I wanted a challenge, the excitement of not knowing what work I was going to be doing six months from now. As an Australian it was an absolute shock. The French have an ability to produce and finish things to perfection. I learnt to beat it with a stick until it’s done, to finish and not settle for near enough.”
In 1995, the walkabout took the family back to New York. Amos began working for US-based magazines including Martha Stewart Living. “I needed to refine my idea of process and the people at Martha really taught me to slow down, take time, do it perfectly. This was possible because the material was often still.” In 1998, he began working on his first series of abstract photographic constructions, which he calls screens. “The first screen I made started with a negative created by applying the skeletal remains of a magnolia leaf in various stages of decomposition to a piece of translucent plastic. The leaves were built up to create an image of a human figure in an incomplete form. The screen was then taken to my studio where it was hung and photographed with a large format camera to provide me with a work negative to print from.”
The results were exciting. “Dull, discarded things like this without much colour when reversed to a negative form would become completely luminous and have a stellar effect to them. The driving force being some kind of redemption for these discarded waste products and to create a value of vision which would never have been assigned to these objects in their natural state.”
On 9/11, the Amos family were evacuated from their Tribeca loft and decided to move to Sydney. “It was about silence and removing noise,” he says. “There’s too much exterior stimulus in New York – all those sound bites that hit you all the time. Those things fire you up but at the same time are very distracting. It was time to step away and have an appraisal. To be by the sea and to be clearer.”
“When I first left Australia I felt it necessary to be completely removed from my birthplace and family history to have the freedom to attempt certain subject matter. I needed to be stateless. Back in Australia now, I still feel like I’m an outsider. But I went far enough and did it long enough that I now feel at ease with that wherever I am.”
His recent Sydney work reflects a life lived by the sea. “I’m trying to work more purely from nature. But I’m not out of the gutter yet!”
In April 2008 Amos held a highly successful exhibition, Native, at Depot II Gallery, in Danks Street Waterloo. His next exhibition Impermanence, will feature more of the unexpected and unorthodox use of the photographic medium.