Spotlight Australia: Claire Martin, Nimbin

A curatorial focus on Australian photo essays that have received little or no attention outside of Australia by Tamara Voninski.

Claire Martin, Nimbin

The Hamlets of Australia’s Rainbow Region hold the dream -­‐ the promise of a better life, or indeed a better world. Drawn to these fecund misty valleys are dreamers, idealists and escapists in search of something more – their desire to craft a new existence born through their experience of a less than perfect one.

It was during the awakening – the Age of Aquarius – the land called to these people, whispering ancient wisdoms through the gums and ferns, of destruction and creation. Once a powerful volcano repressed by the boundaries placed around it, it fearlessly shattered them, the walls falling away to create a vast caldera -­‐ and an expansive, new view of the world around it.

With great faith, the people heeded the lands call for revolution, tearing down the boundaries of body and mind and the limitations of society and culture -­‐ eradicating a familiar world that kept them bound and repressed. What grew in its place was the beautiful dysfunctional utopia that exists today. A community that embraces and accepts those who feel smothered and rejected by arbitrary definitions of normal. 

The Hamlets of Australia’s Rainbow Region hold the dream -­‐ the promise of a better life, or indeed a better world. Drawn to these fecund misty valleys are dreamers, idealists and escapists in search of something more – their desire to craft a new existence born through their experience of a less than perfect one.

It was during the awakening – the Age of Aquarius – the land called to these people, whispering ancient wisdoms through the gums and ferns, of destruction and creation. Once a powerful volcano repressed by the boundaries placed around it, it fearlessly shattered them, the walls falling away to create a vast caldera -­‐ and an expansive, new view of the world around it.

With great faith, the people heeded the lands call for revolution, tearing down the boundaries of body and mind and the limitations of society and culture -­‐ eradicating a familiar world that kept them bound and repressed. What grew in its place was the beautiful dysfunctional utopia that exists today. A community that embraces and accepts those who feel smothered and rejected by arbitrary definitions of normal. 

Nimbin is part of three bodies of work from around the world. Describe your triptych of stories and how the overall body of work evolved to include this series?

This triptych of work explores what it means to be marginalized in developed countries by focusing on fringe communities in Canada, the USA and Australia. More specifically the project looks at how the culture of a community can affect the relationship between stigma, disadvantage and quality of life. The work is a creative bridge between my studies in social sciences and a personal response to the experience of stigma in my own life surrounding a loved ones addiction.

The first series in the triptych was photographed in Vancouver’s Down Town East Side. The ten-­‐ block slum is home to a host of social problems including extreme poverty, homelessness, an AIDS rate estimated at over 30%, and the leading cause of death is overdose. The direct proximity to Vancouver’s affluent retail and business district is a constant reminder of the gap between the have’s and the have not’s, creating a culture that is heavily entrenched in the negative stigma, fear and misunderstanding of the average Vancouver citizen.

I was drawn to photograph this community as a gut response to my own experience of living with and loving an addict. I watched someone I loved and respected turn into a self destructive, dysfunctional, sometimes cruel mess. I judged her actions, I thought she was deliberately hurting me; I believed her problem was a matter of choice. Photographing in the Downtown East Side became a catharsis, where I could attempt to understand the problem without the exhaustion of personal attachment. It was also a form of deviant communication about an inner world of pain I was too ashamed to speak about.

My continued obsession for understanding this problem led me to Slab City, a remote squatters community located in the Colorado Desert in California. The same socio economic problems are equally as chronic in this community and are in many ways exacerbated by the remoteness, with poverty stricken, drug addicted or mentally ill residents living with no access to electricity, sewage, water or waste disposal. However, the culture of the community is such that while the residents recognize their disadvantage, they do not feel defined by it. Their remote location means that external stigma associated with their problems doesn’t exist, and the culture within the community is one of tolerance and acceptance.

I connected with this community as it offered me an alternative to the depressing picture of addiction. The addicts at Slab City were people too, living in a vibrant community of other misfits, some of whom were not addicts, but outsiders nonetheless. This community showed me a way to try and relate to this person in my own life as an addict and a human, rather than just mourning the loss of the person I once knew. It also exposed to me the destructive nature of the latent judgment and stigma that I had been internally harbouring.

Nimbin, the final series in the triptych, houses an eclectic community of communes created during the 70’s drug fuelled social experimentations of Australia’s hippy movement. Many of the people drawn to these communes were escaping marginalization and stigma in the broader community, embracing the anything goes counter culture movement. While Nimbin is renowned in the broader Australian psyche for it’s street drug culture and feral residents, the nature of the community is such that the poor are supported by the rejection of a monetary economy, the Queer community are embraced rather than condemned and drugs are considered mind expanding, not life destroying. Here, people relegated to the margins of society can find a home that not only lacks stigma, but embraces and encourages the core ideologies of their lifestyle.

By the time I started photographing in Nimbin, I was ready to move on, and leave the pain behind. I realized I had no control over the problem of addiction, only control over how I responded to it.  What I found instead was a community of people who also were looking to move past a life of pain, inflicted largely by a society that judged them. I found so many others who had suffered trauma, in their lives for various reasons who like me, were using bizarre forms of creative self expression to work through the silence that stigma blankets you in, and to ultimately move on.

Nimbin and surrounding communes have been known as Australia’s hippie, a counter-culture rainbow community since the 1970’s. Describe what it is like today and why you were drawn to photograph there?

When I was about 15, and I was a juvenile hippy stoner… I watched a documentary on Nimbin and the Aquarius festival and the counter culture revolution freak show that was going on there. Naked hippies taking acid and swimming under waterfalls and talking about existential theory and peace and love, and I felt a desperate urge to go there. It also happened to be the 90’s, and Nimbin was now identified as a heroin hot spot, full of drug pushers and junkies. As an impressionable teenager watching The Basket Ball Diaries, Trainspotting, and advertising campaigns with Kate Moss doing Heroin Chic, I had a terrible romantic notion about all this. 15 years latter when I was 30 I received a grant that very loosely proposed to look at marginalized communities in developed nations and decided to fulfill this juvenile dream of living in Nimbin by using the grant to focus on this area.

Nimbin is not how it once was, the drugs have changed, acid became heroin became crack became meth, but it has also cleaned up a lot. Many of the original communes still exist today, but they call them “multiple occupancy communities” Much of the real community living is gone and they operate more as a way to buy cheap land. The Aquarius spirit is still very evident though and overall it is a very alternative and open-minded area. Many of the hippies that moved out there in the 70’s are still living their dream, but the next generation seems a little less idealistic.

What was your original idea for the story?  Did the narrative change over the months you spent in Nimbin? What was the turning point?

My original idea was to look at the drug culture, as my other series of work have focused on this theme but as I said it has cleaned up a lot. There is still a strong street drug scene with gangs of young boys (called the lane way boys) dealing, you get offered pot or anything else you may want on every corner etc., but it just didn’t seem to be the true identity of the community. A story about Nimbin needed to be richer than just this. I was also looking for that commune utopia story. First I looked for people I could connect with to find an “in” to a more human story. It took a long time, as the communities or communes are private property, so I couldn’t just turn up unannounced. I needed to be invited in. Eventually I found two different stories that I pursued. With one community the story was strong, but I wasn’t making that real personal connection. The other, the one you see here, I found the people I connected with. People who embodied and lived a real rejection of the mainstream way of life. Creatives, dreamers, sensitive souls, freedom seekers, artists of life – all misfits, in one way or another. I realized my narrative was changing when I didn’t want to pursue the drug story anymore, I found people who sought and found a way to heal their wounds. Be it from drug addiction, or anything else. Nimbin is magical, the people I photographed all had trauma in their lives, but found a way to become whole through being complete weirdos in the bush – through being true to their creative selves.

How did you obtain access to the community? Did you live with your subjects?

I actually was living mostly with another community that I was hoping to create a story on, but the progress of getting intimate access with that community was laborious, so I would frequently visit this community and eventually I realized that this was where my story was. I kind of fought myself over it for a while, which was silly. Access is easy when you connect with people, and I had a strong and easy connection here.

You often portray people’s intimate lives. How do you obtain access into their lives to photograph them nude?

If someone doesn’t like being nude or isn’t into revealing themselves to relative strangers I will never be able to photograph them nude, no matter how hard I try. When they do it is as easy as photographing them with clothes on. Subject selection and connection is everything! (I say the word subject warily as I feel it’s a pretty horrible way to talk about the people I photograph, but I can’t think of a better word right now). Also I wouldn’t ask anyone to do anything I wouldn’t do. It becomes too voyeuristic that way.

You recently relocated from Perth, Western Australia to Los Angeles.  How has this impacted on your vision and photographic projects?

I shot a previous series in a community a few hours from LA (Slab City) and I intend to spend more time photographing there. Being in LA makes that easier. Also, the other community I was photographing while I was in Nimbin eventually came around to the idea of me photographing on a second visit to the area, and things finally clicked into place (sometimes it takes time to prove your intentions to people). This community is also international so I want to continue photographing while in the USA. This series isn’t finished yet though. I find in some aspects that it is easier to photograph in the USA as people here really embrace that idea of their 15 minutes of fame. Australian are much more private and modest and less willing to share their stories than Americans in my experience.

Everything in life leads us on a journey to this very moment. How did you discover your photographic voice and what inspires your projects?

I dabbled in a lot of different subjects in university- social work, anthropology, psychology, fine art, journalism, and photography. For some reason I thought that being a photographer meant doing fashion shoots or photographing babies Anne Geddies style so I didn’t really consider becoming a photographer until I was working as a cook in Vancouver and met a documentary photographer (Lung Liu) who opened my eyes to this way of photography and the industry that supported it. He encouraged me to pursue personal projects so I started photographing drug culture in my spare time in the Downtown East Side, very near to where I was living at the time. It was as if everything I had dabbled in in the past had a place in the one art form. It felt like everything clicked into place. I was obsessed from that point on.

This series has been shown at several photographic festivals around the world, but heavily censored. How was the series censored and what was your reaction?

The series was shown at the Reportage Festival in a number of different capacities. I was forewarned about censorship for the large public projections, so I accepted this. The problem was largely about nudity in the public realm which I understand and accept, although principally I disagree with. Many of my images that were not allowed, only alluded to nudity, and no “offensive” parts of the human body where shown which was very over the top, given on a daily basis we are subjected to highly sexualized advertising. I also personally think it’s a pretty sick society that disapproves of real nudes, but doesn’t question the wide spread body dysmorphic retouching of advertising images. Surely the latter is more psychologically damaging to the masses. I also had images in a group Oculi show. They were in a private building and there was a warning sign for nudity, yet the festival director was asked to “Tape over the offending parts” of my images. So all the genitalia was covered, without my permission, and also without any legal basis. There is no reason to censor a private show. People can choose whether or not they go and see it. Representation of the nude in art is as old as art itself. Some people argue a photo is different to a painting or a sculpture, I don’t really understand why. For me it is important to photograph things that are unnecessarily stigmatized to make them visible, give them a face or a voice and this includes nudity and sexuality. I understand it is a grey area, and different people will feel differently about this, but I feel compelled to make my case, and I do it with photography.

BIO:

CLAIRE MARTIN began her career by studying a degree in Social Work, however, she changed her focus to Photography when she realized that change can also be effected through this medium. Since beginning her career pursuing personal projects in 2007, she has focused her lens on marginalized communities within prosperous nations.

This work has been recognized with a Prix Pictet nomination (2012), a Lead Academy Award (2011), the Magnum and Inge Morath Foundation Inge Morath Award (2010), by Reportage by Getty Images and The Sony World Photography Awards (2009), and with an IPA nomination (2008). A limited edition Zine was created, and sold out in 2012 by Editions Bessard, and the complete triptych was exhibited at Image Singulieres in Sete, France in May 2013.

Claire divides her time between Perth Western Australia and Los Angeles, USA where she works as a freelance photographer and socially concerned documentary artist. She is a member of the Australian Documentary Photo Collective “Oculi” and her work is distributed through Agence VU in Europe and Redux in the USA. Website: www.clairemartinphotography.com

TAMARA VONINSKI recently bought an old caravan to travel and explore Australia following a redundancy from the media where she worked as a photographer for magazines and newspapers. She is a founding member of the Australian photo collective Oculi. Her photographic projects have received multiple international awards and residencies including: International Pictures of the Year Awards, AGNSW residency at Cite Internationale des Arts and Alexia Foundation Photography for World Peace grant. Follow Tamara’s journey around Australia via her blog www.gypsypoptop.com. Website: www.tamaravoninski.com.au