Tacon Portraits

- Hello everyone, and welcome to another virtual program with the National Portrait Gallery. It's so lovely to see you all coming in through the Zoom room and on Facebook Live today. Thanks so much for joining us. Even though it looks like it's nighttime in the background, of course, you're all used to the smoke and mirrors that we do with the National Portrait Gallery now, no, I am sitting in front of a green screen, but we are working across time zones today. And our special guest Dave Tacon will be joining us shortly from Shanghai. So before we get underway, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands in which I'm broadcasting to you from today, the Ngambri and Ngunnawal peoples. And I'd like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging. I'd like to extend that same respect to any of the indigenous people joining us today and also to any of the traditional custodians of the lands on which you're coming to us from today. So we do like our programmes to be interactive here at the Portrait Gallery. So if you have any questions throughout the programme, please pop them into the chat function on Zoom, which should be along the bottom part of your device, or throw them into the Facebook comments. And we have Hector, Robert, and Matt working busily behind the scenes to take any of your questions, comments, and please do let us know where you're joining us from. I hope that there are some people coming to us from China. That would be nice, but I also see some familiar faces here today as well. And welcome to all of you regulars who are supporting our programmes both through lockdown and now that we're starting to emerge back into real life. But without further ado, I'd to introduce Penny Grist, our curator, who is gonna be in conversation with our special guest, Dave. Over to you, Penny and Dave.

- Thank you so much Gill. This is very exciting to have another one of our international connections and a great pleasure for me to revisit some of the portraits in the collection, as well as to hear from Dave about his journey with photography, but mostly his time in Shanghai and his recent work as well. So it's gonna be a packed 45 minutes. So I think we'll dive straight into it. And it's my pleasure to introduce Dave Tacon who's been a friend of the Portrait Gallery for many, many, many years. And I'd love to start off by asking you, Dave, just where did your love of photography begin and how did your career get going?

- Um, well, I did an exchange through the University of Melbourne to Berlin in, I think, 1998, '99. And it was a great city to photograph, I studied photography with a point and shoot camera. And I guess friends were encouraging me, it was quite a while before digital. I mean I assisted some people. I mean, I did some assisting in Hong Kong before I sort of landed back in Melbourne with a thud. And I was assisting a guy called David Simmons, who was, I think, the president of the Australian Commission on Media Photographies at one point, which doesn't exist anymore. I think he's on the board of the Australian Institute of Professional Photographers now. He does architecture and industrial photography mostly. And I assisted on this thing that they did, which they brought together three great photographers. I think it was Brian Monroe, Sam Haskins, and Gary Heery to present their work to other professional photographers and, you know, do a slideshow and a talk. And especially Gary Heery's work just really blew me away and his stories, and I thought, yeah, I've gotta do this, and actually gave Gary a lift to the airport. It was about a three hour drive. So that was yeah, fantastic for someone who just wants to pick someone's brain and sort of work out how it all works. I think assisting photographers is also a really useful thing, especially dealing with clients and especially probably one of the most important things I learned about commercial shoots is when things go wrong to make it look you've come to a, I've had a flash of inspiration, and you've come to a creative decision, that isn't really working for me. And it's , you know, the stuff isn't hard to do, this is, you know, a creative solution, this is how we're gonna do it. And, you know, in reality just, you know, a light broke or something.

- And so since then, where has your work been appearing in your career? Where do you, what sort of work do you do? What sort of jobs have you had?

- I mean, it's a wide variety of stuff. I mean, I used to write as well as shoot stories. I was kind of, I was spending a bit of my time, as a freelance foreign correspondence writing for different magazines and newspapers. And it was also, that was a way to get my photography published. Don't do it so much anymore. I mean, who have I worked for, like who have I worked for recently?

- Yeah.

- I mean, I've been shooting for US Vogue, Shanghai fashion week for the last three seasons, which is interesting. I mean, the work I like to do is sort of photo journalism, and I've been able to work for magazines Stern, the German news pictorial, they're great to work for. And I should have some assignments coming up for a Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, which is also good to work for. And I work for all these, mostly the Australian ones. I used to do an assignments for the Australian Overview and the Australian Financial Review and Good Weekend, but not much of that going on these days.

- So we've got 18 portraits by you in the collection, which is really exciting and we're not gonna go through all 18 now, but I've selected some of my favourites. And it's always, I always, as a curator, enjoy the privilege of having a captive artist to tell us some backstories of some of the portraits in the collection. So we're gonna enjoy Dave just taking us through a few of these shoots. And it's funny, it's probably, I find this really fascinating because you have such a, they're so pared back in a way there's, you know, there's a real immediacy and honesty to these shots. And so it's even sort of more fascinating to hear your experience of capturing them. So we might start with Toni Maticevski, the fashion designer.

- Right, well, I didn't have very much time with Toni. I mean I've had a chat with him to interview him for a story I was doing on Australian fashion designers, showing it at New York fashion week. That was the West Weekend, which is a newspaper in west, Australian magazine doesn't exist anymore. like a lot of magazines I used to work for in Australia, but anyways, he was really exhausted. He'd been up all night. He did all the sewing himself, which is, a lot of designers don't know how to use a sewing machine or whatever, but he's certainly an exception there. And yeah, it was just really, really quick. I mean, this, I mean, we were just talking a couple of minutes, really.

- Oh wow.

- I used the lights, just in the backstage area and, you know, I mean, this is kind of how I do all my portraits in a way. I mean, for something like that, I mean, I didn't really have any preconceived ideas because, you know, I mean, I knew I was gonna be backstage, I suppose I was just looking to shoot it in a way that didn't really look backstage or had a hint of that. And it was uncluttered. So yeah, there was just this backdrop, which sort of really suits his style of clothes. Anyway, but I mean it's his backstage area, so, I mean, I guess he would have had some say in that anyway. And it's just catching these lights sort of shining through this backdrop.

- Oh, that's brilliant.

- Yeah, there was also some other ones sitting on some steps, but that was the best. My cat has just come to say hi, here he is.

- [Penny] Aw, kiss your cat.

- Wanna have a look? He's an enormous, enormous ginger cat. Dumb head, very vain, doesn't really being picked up but he loves to be to be groomed, his favourite, favourite thing is to be brushed by Gogloo.

- And we experience the international working from home and experience having our pets drop in. So let's move on to Pat McGorry. So, youth mental health expert, psychiatrist, psychologist, Australian of the year in 2010, how did you come to photograph him?

- I've photographed him a couple of times, but this time it was sort of to do with the University of Melbourne I used to do a bit of work for. He was quite friendly with the editor of Union News, which is a publication, I don't think they have it anymore, but I used to do study shoots every week or every couple of weeks. And they're usually just really quick portraits that just turn up and we'd wander around and sort of, you know, see what's available in terms of natural light and just, yeah, I mean, it's still the way I tend to shoot portraits. So wherever we met him, there was this inkwell, and it really went with his eyes, and his choice of wardrobe, blue, probably should have cleaned up that colour a bit, but, you know, I guess that's how he was. So yeah, nice guy, a very nice guy.

- Yeah, that's the thing, isn't it, because you, in both of these stories, that sense of immediacy is real and it really translates into how you react to the portrait. Is this a similar story, David Williamson?

- Yeah, I had quite a few commissions, I think 10 or 11 that I went and did for the National Portrait Gallery in '12? Maybe, yeah, well, I guess that was in the summer just before I left for Shanghai. So we had a good old chat. I mean, I sort of grew up with the work of David Williamson. My mother was an English teacher. So, you know, we had copies of his screenplays and plays lying around. I got him to sign I think "Brilliant Lies", unfortunately couldn't find the copy of "Sanctuary" we used to have, it was falling apart, but yeah, one thing that I can remember is that he's just about the tallest guy. Well, definitely the tallest playwright that I've ever photographed. I mean, I'm pretty tall anyway, I'm 6"2, but I'm just staring up at him. I mean I stood on a chair to get a sort of eye contact kind of portrait with him. So yeah, this is his newest apartment, which overlooks the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And yeah, I mean, there were quite a few, I think there was also a portrait of his desk and you can kind of see, his sort of physical presence when he's in this room where he writes, but they didn't use that one. One thing, when they had him take a walk in the park and they're just, you know, nattering away about all kinds of things. Yeah, I mean if you think literally, actually he's the Rockman who they sort of conspired to knock out, that big guy, that's your cameo indubitably.

- That's right. Say, Paralympian Michael Milton?

- Yeah, so that was in Melbourne and yeah, again, we made him just, you know, have a chat and I mean, I arranged to meet him sort of late in the afternoon, or this was sort of early in the shoot to spend a few hours and see how the natural light was developing and then just see what would sort of present itself. So, I mean, these shoots, they're kind of an improvisation in a way. So we ended up here and I mean, I didn't really sort of think that oh, this was a metaphor for anything, but I guess if you wanna read into it, then yeah.

- Yeah, you could, I suppose, I hadn't thought about that either, but yeah, I am always transfixed by the lot, the lot and the trees, they're beautiful. It's really interesting hearing you talk through this serendipitous creation of the backgrounds in these works. How about-?

- So yeah, J M Coetzee. Yeah, so we were also gonna see Raymond Gaita and I photographed Raymond Gaita before J M Coetzee. I think he knows J M Coetzee pretty well. When I mentioned who I was going to be photographing next he said, ah, a man of few words, and he wasn't kidding. I mean, I've really found it difficult to actually engage with him unfortunately. I mean, I'd say something and he'd either say nothing, just look at me or will just say a few words. And that was kind of it. And I really kind of regret not being able to sort of build a rapport. It's kind of what I try to do. But yeah, I mean, I remember seeing a front page story in the international New York Times because he mentioned this, when he was a teenager, he was a really keen photographer. So all these black and white photographs from his youth were on display because he donated his entire archive to somewhere in South Africa. Yeah, that was really interesting, but I didn't really manage to learn more about that while I met him, which was in Adelaide, and this would have been the first or second photo that I took after I'd entered his home. I think I'd had a quick chat and asked if I could quick photograph where he writes. And he said, no, I'm not allowed to enter that room. And yeah, I sort of describe this photo, well, he was sort of thinking about something. I'm not sure, yeah, he seems to be deep in thought. And I was asking him about, I mean I remember almost everything he said, because there weren't many things that he did say, but I asked him if he was a morning writer or if he wrote at night, and he said, I wake up in the morning and my mind is clear.

- Wow.

- And I guess those were all the words he needed to express his morning writing regime.

- That would be a lovely quote to accompany the portrait. You could.

- Yes, it would be. So, yeah. I mean, we took more pictures. I mean, there were also other portraits that I thought, you know, were nice, but this might've been the first shot I took the whole day. But yeah, I think that ended up running in Norway in some publications, he's actually, he is not often photographed, but he was very enthusiastic, when we were communicating via email about the offer to be photographed for the National Portrait Gallery, he thought it was, you know, a great honour, I suppose he was interested in the process and how the photographer was gonna go about it.

- Hm, and you mentioned Raymond Gaita, here he is.

- Yeah, so he's not a man of few words. We also got along really well. And this is around the area where he grew up. So this landscape's the setting for his memoir "Romulus, My Father", which had made into a film with Eric Bana and Franka Potente. And yeah, this is actually the next morning, because I mean, ideally the more time you can spend with the subject the better, and this was actually, I mean, the previous afternoon and evening we'd hung out sitting on the porch on these wrought iron chairs that his father had made. His dad was an iron monger and yeah, I mean, it was also 2012, so I would have been preparing to move to Shanghai. So I guess we were talking about China and I mean, he was talking about it in reference to academia, and he's not much of a cook, but he's able to cook spaghetti and his wife had who wasn't over had made a polonaise. So we had that dinner, I mean, had a couple of beers, drank a couple of glasses of wine. And then yeah, in the morning at first light got up and had a walk around the property, and that's when I, when I shot this one. The light was great, and yeah, it was a good experience. Hopefully, maybe the next time I'm in the neighbourhood, I'll yeah, get in touch and drop by again. But yeah, he was happy with how the pictures turned out too.

- It's lovely hearing you talk about hanging out with these sort of leading lights of the Australian creatives' enterprise. It's fantastic. And so I think we've got one before finishing up our little tour of the collection. Michelle Garnaut, is this one post your move to Shanghai? Is this one after you've moved?

- Oh yeah, this was 2015. So actually, this was one of the shots from, I was asked to shoot it for Boss Magazine, which is an AFR magazine. And so often when you're commissioned to do sort of editorial shoots, you can't pick the time. This is when she's available for the interview, because of course she's very busy and this was a time before they would have opened for lunch. So it was really bright. It was totally not the right time of day to photograph her. So I had her out on the, yeah, it was really clear day, too. I had her out on the terrace of her restaurant, M on the Bund, she'd be squinting, the light would be overhead and it would cast shadows. So I just had her just inside the shade so the sunlight was sort of blasting off the concrete of the terrace. And just as a hint of the city, you can see over in the top right-hand corner, there's the Shanghai TV tower, The Pearl Tower, and sort of looking into her restaurant, and also her pose. And she seems like a fairly formidable woman, she looks like a boss and she's great, but I mean, her contribution to the cultural life of Shanghai is fantastic. She established a literary festival and yeah, she's a legendary figure in the expatriate community in Shanghai. Yeah, so I mean, she's been here for a really long time. I mean, I've also interviewed her. I mean, I think I've photographed her three times and we had a chat about what drew her to Shanghai. And I mean, she said it was like a city set in aspic back when she went. I mean, it was nothing like now. I mean, I think the Bund hadn't been developed, I mean, all these buildings were empty. The Bund's the historic waterfront. All the skyscrapers hadn't yet popped up across the river in Pudong and everything was just like, yeah, it's like the city hadn't changed in 50 years, in Hong Kong, where she'd been living, where they'd just bulldozed everything and built new lands. So she was kind of, yeah, just drawn to this place. I saw her the other night, I saw her last week actually, had a good chat, I mean, she was really chuffed my portrait was picked up by the gallery here and her mother was able to go around and see her hanging on the wall and yeah.

- I've never thought of that, is our portraits of expatriates, their parents coming to say them in the gallery.

- Right, because she probably rarely gets back to Australia.

- Really does. So that's a good introduction to why did you decide to move to Shanghai in 2012?

- I worked there in 2010. I came back again in 2011 and yeah, just sort of felt the centre of the world really. I mean, the first time I'd been to New York, about 10 years before that, had this just incredible energy. And I felt that in Shanghai, I mean, Shanghai was much more rough around the edges. In 2010, they were just sort of gearing up for the expo. I met a lot of people who sort of had been, yeah, doing really well probably, but I think I was thinking, well, apart from their own skills, just by virtue of being in Shanghai just seemed like, you know, if you wanted to take the next step in, it seemed like the, yeah, the place to go. I mean, I went to work for a larger calibre of publications and do more photography, sort of break out, break a little bit from all the writing that I was doing and just focus more on photography. And now I'm doing video as well and not writing so much.

- So that's really, really fascinating. And so we're gonna now take a turn into some of your Shanghai work. So we're gonna look at a few images that have recently been included in a show at the Australian Consul General's office, is that-?

- Yeah, that's the event that I saw Michelle at last week. So this was at the beginning of when I hadn't, well, I mean, I've been commissioned by the German magazine GEO to do a story, actually, two stories for a travel issue on Shanghai. And one was on Shanghai's night life, which is something I'd already been photographing. It was actually, the photo editor was an Australian. And I think they'd just been searching for images and found them in the archive at Polaris, the agency that represents me. So I was meeting this Chinese German journalist who I was working with on this story, Xifan Yang, at M1NT, which was another Australian connection, the owner or founder of that was a guy called Alistair Paton who was a pretty colourful character. He was kind of run out of town. I mean I heard, you know, all these rumours, that he'd been detained, he was in jail. And then he was out of the country, and then, you know, he said, that he basically was forced to sell the nightclub, but it was a very exclusive kind of place. And they claimed that in the previous year, they'd sold board Dom Perignon than any club anywhere in the world, whether that's true or not I don't know. But anyway, I mean the champagne is also a table service. So it's yeah, ostentatious, conspicuous consumption. You see who's got tables and then those are the people with money, and anyone who has to go to the bar is, you know, a bit of a pleb, if you can get in the door in the first place, but M1NT's closed since then. But anyway, I'd just come from a shoot from Women's Wear Daily. I think I'd been shooting backstage. It's some lingerie label or something, there'd been a party and I had a couple glasses of champagne and just wandering over to M1NT to meet this journalist and talk about the story. And I stepped into the elevator, and then this is basically right in front of me. And I just happened to have a camera around my neck that has a wide angle lens, a 20 millimetre. And it was actually really bright from these lights on these dancers. So I just remember frantically changing my settings so I didn't overexpose the shot. And yeah, I think that was the first one, I think I took two on the way up to the 23rd floor or whatever it was in the building. And then, yeah, I sat down for a chat. It was one of the best shots I took in the series, which I kept on developing, and it ended up being shown a couple of times in Australia at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale and last year at Head On, it was actually an outdoor exhibition at Bondi Beach, of all places, a different kind of decadence.

- Let's keep moving through. By stark contrast, what's the story with this one?

- So this is the biggest linen manufacturer in the world. Yeah, strangely I ended up directing a corporate video for this company and I mounted the cameras, it was a DSLR camera on this crane. I guess you couldn't really do this shot with a drone, but it was just such an amazing shot from that perspective, because you don't see it from the ground, and I had a remote trigger for this Nikon D 800 camera. So while we were rolling and just getting the shot and I was doing it on a screen. I thought I have to get some stills of this. So actually, it's this sort of wide aspect ratio because that's how the video came out on that camera. But yeah, I just saw the shot and just, yeah. And then that was the end of that video we were doing. And we had to start rolling again. Yeah, I mean, you know, they run 24 hours a day in three shifts every day of the year, eight hour shifts.

- Wow. It's interesting that opportunistic moment of the straight photographer, you're alert to that all the time through your, you know, whatever shoot you're on, and this is one of your street photography works, isn't it?

- Yeah, so that's just, it was a nice, cold winter's day. And I just went out to shoot. I'd been looking at the work actually of Alex Webb is one of my favourite photographers. And one thing that he does is he has a lot of, his photos are really dense. They have so many layers and he really sort of fills the frame with the 35 millimetre lens that he uses. So I got a couple of nice shots that afternoon, but this is kind of light, I mean, he just kept on going back and forth. I think I even shot one with my iPhone that was quite nice, but yeah, so they've just knocked down all of these historic Shikumen sort of lane courthouses, courtyard homes, and in putting these new sort of luxury ones. I'd also photographed the area, the people who were sort of holding out in one bowl of money for the places that they were living. And then they're kind of slums of Shanghai, not much maintenance had been done to these homes, which were where wealthy people would have lived, you know, a lot of many families crammed into one sort of mansion basically. So I was familiar with the area. It was interesting to see that develop, yeah.

- Can I just jump in for a second, Penny, sorry. We've just, we had a question a while back and I thought it was a good interjection at this point, because you just mentioned an influence on your work, Dave, but Neil, one of our regulars was interested in finding out which creatives you would say have inspired your photography?

- You know, funny when I was starting out, I really liked the, I mean the film and also the photography work of Wim Wenders. I did my thesis on him at university, and I even did a internship at his company in Berlin, but he does sort of empty streetscapes mostly. But I don't do that, but I suppose also the work that he did with Robbie Muller, just these sort of, the rigorous sort of composition and light, the use of light also, I mean, in colour as well as black and white was just really, really great. I mean, cinema studies was something that really opened my eyes to composition and light really. I mean, I think before I got into photographers like Alex Webb, I was interested in Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman's DoP, later people like Christopher Doyle, he did a lot Wong Kar-wai's early stuff, Kelly De Palma. Yeah. So yeah, it was later that it was photographers that I was influenced by.

- That's a great question, Gill. And Neil, thank you, and very good time to bring that up because we're gonna move on to the next, let's have a little, tell us about this particular one day.

- So this is in Heilongjiang, a place called Jixi, it's where a lot of the world's carbon comes from, so this is a warehouse for sorting the carbon, like graphite dust. So yeah, when you see these guys outdoors in the sunshine, I mean, they're basically head to toe silver. So I mean, carbon is what you need for batteries, and the Macbook Pro that I'm using here would have a piece of carbon about the size of a slice of toast, but then the batteries that you need to power electric vehicles are much bigger and there's artificial carbon in Apple products, 'cause it's much cleaner, but this was an assignment for Wirtschaftswoche, a German publication, that they did this story internationally, , for your car. And it also included the mining of rare earths in Africa. And yeah, so we basically just walked into this place and it was incredibly dark and I happened to have a face mask just in my camera bag. It was a hot day in the summer and that white t-shirt never recovered, but yeah, just spent a couple of minutes in there and it was a really powerful, sort of hellish looking image.

- It's interesting, just getting this insight into both sort of daily life and partying in Shanghai, as well as, you know, the heavy industrial side of Chinese production.

- Yeah, actually at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale my work was sort of presented, or we did a conversation with this guy who was, he used to work on oil rigs also I think up in Heilongjiang. And so he had all these sort of photos of workers sort of in the ice, and it was all this, these really gritty sort of, you know, hard life of these workers. And we sort of showed side by side with my pictures of the, you know, the decadent party life in Shanghai. But his feelings about that was just, you know, that these people are enjoying success and he thought it was, yeah, he didn't see any, he didn't have any objections to those images, all the fun that the people were having.

- How about this one, it's another slice of life.

- Yeah, so that's about two blocks from where I live. So this is, just all of sudden all of these new sort of surveillance cameras popped up in my neighbourhood and in the former French concession. I mean, I think I passed through about 12 just to go down my lane that's similar to this one. So, although, I mean, we've being surveilled by corporations all the time. I mean, if you're online, if you use Instagram, Instagram is basically creating a psychological profile, just like Facebook is just, you know, mining your emotions to sell to more corporations to sell you stuff. But still, I mean, facial recognition technology and having you're face scanned is something I feel kind of, I can't really get used to it, but anyway, so this is a change I've seen in Shanghai. And I wanted to see if I could capture an image just to add it to my catalogue of Shanghai photos. So I went up one sunny day and I was shooting film, actually, this was shot on slide film, and I thought this would be a good sort of staging place as opposed to the photo, but it's not staged, this guy just happened to walk between the cameras. I think I did two such photos and this one worked better and just, you know, this is how I'm gonna frame it. And then I'll see who turns up and I'll just set my settings so the figure is blurred between these stationary objects in the background. So that's how that picture came about.

- It's an image that could be, you know, relevant really, a lot of places in the world now, too.

- Yeah, especially China now though because I mean, they've got the majority of the world's surveillance cameras, and apparently this research group said that by the end of this year, they'll have more than a billion cameras.

- And this is another beautiful image that you've noticed just as you're wandering around the city.

- Yeah, this is another winter's day, I went out. I think this was 2014 or something. Yeah, so they're just these maids at this, I think it was a high end residential development, and they're all just, yeah, cleaning the concrete. So I guess the play of colours was something that attracted me to the picture. I took a few nice ones. I like this better than a vertical shot, which is going to be in a book on Shanghai, on modern Shanghai, which is actually launched tomorrow. Yeah I mean, I don't really sort of, a friend who was getting into photography was telling me about composing with triangles and I think early, when I started photography, someone told me about the rule of thirds and I didn't know what she was talking about, but I can see that if I break this down, that this is all sort of, you know, the rule of thirds and triangles, even, there's three triangles in the shot at least.

- [Penny] Got there by pure instinct.

- Yes, I don't think about, you know, that kind of thing. I mean, if you've seen a lot of, you know, good movies, compositional ideas or what's aesthetically appealing just kind of becomes sort of ingrained, I guess.

- Yeah, and people bring their own metaphors, and I think actually this one is quite a good one for that. This sort of window that you're all giving us actually into your time in Shanghai, but this was with a different camera, wasn't it?

- Yeah, this was the Hasselblad XPan panoramic camera. So I was trying to find the Yangtze river, which was for this series I've been doing on China's longest river. I was in Chongqing, which is this booming mountain city on the Yangtze and also Jingzhou where these two rivers converge. I mean, I think, well, including the rural population there's about 35 million people in this sort of city municipality. So yeah, anyway, these guys were laying plumbing and this is an awning of a construction site. So it just came across as, oh, wow, this is a great shot. But the workers noticed me and thought oh, what was this foreigner doing this with a camera and just don't see many of them around here or whatever, and I just had to wait until they got back to work, and then I took this shot. And then when one of them walked through the door, I took another shot, but this one's better. So yeah, this has been published quite a bit, and won the EPSON International Pano Award's prize for the best film capture, because it's shot on film. Hey, it looks great, and as a large print, actually, that was in the exhibition last week.

- Now we've got about five minutes left and we've got a bit of a treat for everyone to finish off with. So you've been shooting Shanghai fashion week, haven't you Dave, tell us about that.

- Yeah, for about 10 years. When I came to Shanghai, the first publication I worked for was Women's Wear Daily. I'm still shooting for them now. And over the last three seasons, I've started shooting for US Vogue. So I go out and shoot what people are wearing. The WWD also sometimes shoot general coverage of shows, I might have to shoot runway and shoot all the looks of its new collection, and also do a day of this, but this was eight days straight, mostly for Vogue, I mean, I also was shooting for a market research company, which was interested in jewellery. So I was doing jewellery details as well. So I was pretty busy. And these were in Xinxi, yeah. So I shoot outside the shows. I mean, it's sort of, that's actually just on my street and these, yeah, I just saw them walking down the street and I thought, oh, so I positioned myself to capture them crossing the street. And then I asked the girl on the lift if I could take her portrait. But in Vogue they tend to want people moving and they like colour, but head-to-toe black might run down there but they wanna avoid that.

- There are a few more from fashion week. So there's actually-

- Apparently she used to tie up girls to the Japanese photographer, Araki, apparently, that's one you see here, she's Australian, Chinese, Japanese, yeah, Leah.

- So there are over 200 of these on the Vogue website. And I think Matt's gonna share a link for everyone because this is only a little taste of the amazing, if you're into fashion, the amazing fashion that Dave got to shoot eight days straight at Shanghai fashion week. And there's just one last series we wanted to share, isn't there, that you have included at the Shanghai Photo Fair.

- Yeah, so there's an exhibition on, well, I'm not in Shanghai, sort of a bit of a spin-off with this book that's being launched. Liu Heung Shing is a famous Chinese photographer. He was used to be with AP. It was posted all over the world, photographs full of the Soviet Union, Tiananmen Square, Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan, a lot of wars, also sort of entertainment. You'll see his byline appear in newspapers still quite regularly. I mean like a file photo of Prince in concert, or there was the sort of Australia celebrating their World Cup win I think back in the nineties. Yeah, but anyway, he put this thing together and he wanted to show this sort of element of modern Shanghai, because they didn't really have these pictures of the whole sort of selfie thing in the archive. So this is how I ended up doing it after first going out and doing it sort of reportage style because you could go to certain streets and you know, everyone's got a phone and guys are taking photos of their girlfriends and girls are hanging out and just sort of sharing the camera around and posing in front of various sort of, you know, photo spots. But that wasn't really quite what he wanted. So he said, can you shoot it a bit more like you do for Vogue. So I thought I'd seek out people who are, yeah, mainly sort of almost professional selfie takers, some of these are of influencers and fashion bloggers. So, yeah. And the idea of I thought that I might be able to get their selfies and sort of somehow use them together, but that didn't really gel as an idea. This is a Daisy Dai, a fashion blogger from Hong Kong and she's a former contestant in Miss Hong Kong. The next one is Zoe, she's a model. She did a lot of shows this fashion week. I actually met her at four a.m. with her ex-boyfriend drinking in front of the, I guess, a convenience store. And I took a photo with this point and shoot camera and sent it to them and they really, really, liked it. I actually posted it on my Instagram. So I've photographed her a couple of times since then. And I thought, she's very photogenic, so I thought she'd be good to include in this.

- Yeah, it's a really great series. They're really evocative portraits of that particular lifestyle that all of those people are living in. Yeah, I was really captivated by them when you shared them with us. So we've only got a minute or so remaining, but I have to finish off Dave by asking you what's next, what's your next project, what's your next shoot?

- Yeah, might be going to Shaanxi province for something. It's an environmental story. I mean, that's just, I have to see if that'll be confirmed. I mean, this paper, I think Greta Thunberg is going to be the guest editor of some issues. She's been pushing them to put more environmental stories up there. So I did one which was page one of tree planting in Guangzhou and the reforestation of this area, I mean, in terms of producing carbon, had even surprised scientists as being really effective. So the opportunity to travel to all these different corners of China for work is something I love about being here. So hopefully that'll happen. Otherwise I'm shooting a sort of jazz Christmas party at this outrageous hotel. I'm sort of producing that shoot, and I think my wife is gonna be the lead photographer on that. And I'll be doing the video and even editing the video 'cause the budget's a bit low, and I'll have to do it myself.

- Oh, well, that's a great answer to end. Thank you so much, Dave, that's been just a brilliant journey for all of us and a great insight into your work and your life as a photographer living in Shanghai. So I think Gill, I'm handing back to you. Thanks so much.

- Thank you all for having me.

- Thanks so much, Penny and Dave, that was really such a fascinating variety of work that you do. I mean, you know, environmental shoots to jazz parties, you know, Christmas parties, it's just such a broad range of things. I can see why you think that Shanghai is the centre of the world. Just sounds an incredible melting pot of people and places and photographic subjects. So thank you so much for giving up so much time to talk to us about that today. Photography is the theme of the month, this month for the Portrait Gallery, because we've reopened now after lockdown. Our Living Memory: National Photographic Portrait Prize has been extended until the 16th of January. So I hope that some of you in Australia may be able to make it here to Canberra to see that exhibition before it finishes, if not jump on our website, portrait.gov.au, and check out all of the finalists and vote for your favourite in this year's exhibition. Also the call for entries for next year's National Photographic Portrait Prize has opened. So photographers out there, get your cameras snapping and get your entries in for that. And hopefully we'll see some of your works on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery in 2022. Jump on our website also if you'd like to find out what programmes are coming up. Next week in the photography themed Thursday lunchtime sessions, we will be talking to Scottish, Australian, and now Parisian based artist, photographer, Nikki Toole. So please don't miss that one. It'll be a fantastic conversation with her next week. Until next time, stay safe. And thank you so much for joining us today. Take care, bye bye.