Talking about big creative plans and making do with humbler realities.
Hana - a portrait of my sister, and my entry for the 2025 PCP Iris Award
The Perth Centre for Photography Iris Award was coming up for the year, and I was thinking about new pictures I could take to enter, or what I had in my recent archive that might be worthy options.
To be honest, in the last couple of years the majority of portraits I’ve taken have been very straightforward headshots to accompany news stories for my 9-5 job.
I’ve always been drawn to and inspired by documentary photography and photojournalism, street photography and environmental portraits too. My interest in these genres has combined with some laziness, resulting in my own personal photographic endeavours leaning into spontaneity and rawness, and away from technical expertise, planning and in-depth editing. I do admire more layered and conceptual portraits (like some of those by local artist Sherry Quiambao) when I see them, and I wanted to try and create some pictures for my Award entry with more intention and some room for interpretation…
My sister Hana is the second-oldest of five siblings in our family (after me). Now in our mid-late thirties we’re basically the same age, and while in recent-ish years our journeys have been very different, there’s also been been some synchronicity in fairly major and tumultuous life events, and we’re now spending more time together than we did for a long time. When I was thinking of subjects, these aspects of our relationship were underlying and mostly subconscious motivators in asking Hana, but the creative element hinged on some tattoos she’s got recently. These tattoos speak to challenges, development of character and identity, and the initial concept was basically to create a scene, or scenes, that recreated or referenced the artwork, without focussing on the actual tattoos on her body.
After talking with her about the concept, I’d decided I was going to create a suburban interpretation of one of the tattoos, complete with some small built props, and take photographs that would include fire and water in motion, and Hana as the subject in the middle of the frame. Another of the tattoos was going to be a minor feature in the background.
With the submission deadline approaching and both of our schedules kind of full, there was basically one day we were going to be able to shoot. The afternoon before and the morning of shooting, I’d gone to get some supplies I needed, but I hadn’t managed to map the whole shoot out in detail, or get beyond the very initial stages of building the small props I’d hoped for, with less than ideal materials. We were still going to be putting it all together and figuring it out when she arrived.
I’d spoken with her about what she might consider as wardrobe options, but also stressed that I wanted her to wear something that worked for her and her interpretation of the planned pictures. She brought some options, but for me what she was wearing when she arrived was perfect, at least to get started with some test shots, and that’s what ended up in the photo I submitted.
We took a single test shot, and I was really tempted to just call it a day - maybe I should have entered this pic, I still think it might have been the one with the most character, but it didn’t follow the creative concept.
The test shot that should have been my portrait award entry?
From here we decided to start with one of the early ideas, using the lemons that ended up in the final picture as the main feature of a photo, rather than a feature in the background. My son was with us and we were all having fun, and pretty quickly I decided to abandon any ideas of set building and prop construction. Maybe one day we’ll revisit, but for the time being, I’m content that we followed through with plans for a somewhat creative shoot, went with the flow to get a portrait I was personally happy with, and made and drank some fresh lemonade as family (I also ended up with a killer ceramic jug and cups set from Greece via Nedlands and Marketplace).