A NEW exhibition in Mosman Park features the stunning rock photography of North Fremantle’s Tony Blackwell, who captured performances by some of the biggest names in the music business including David Bowie, Lou Reed, Bob Marley and Tom Petty.
Blackwell started out playing drums in a rock ’n’ roll band at school in the 1970s, performing gigs at venues across Perth including the Raffles Hotel, but then he went to university in Canberra and was a poor student with no car, so his drumming career swiftly ended.
“It was around then that I bought my first camera and was quite enthralled with this novel idea of creating an image of something in only a matter of a few days after an event had occurred,” he says.
“I still retained a very strong interest in music and we used to go and see pretty much every band that came to town whether it was at the Canberra Theatre or The Australian National University or the CCAE refractory and that’s when I started experimenting with pushing limits of film under these rather challenging conditions.”
Blackwell had been bitten by the photography bug and went on to snap virtually all the big acts playing in Australia during the late 1970s and 80s including Elvis Costello, Roxy Music, Midnight Oil, The Police and INXS.
A designer by trade, at night he would moonlight as a rock photographer, with his work regularly published in Rock Australia Magazine.
“Some shoots I remember because it all came together really easily, like the lighting was consistent and the musician’s charisma really shone, like Tom Petty or Bob Geldof from The Boomtown Rats, or Carlos Santana mainly because of his sheer virtuosity. The other performances were akin to a religious experience like Bob Marley,” Blackwell says.
“Some bands like Midnight Oil and Matt Finish we used to see regularly and mainly just go there to dance and have a good time and occasionally I’d take my camera and snap a few shots simply because I liked them. These were in intimate environments, as was the one time I saw The Cure in the Manly Vale Hotel with an audience of probably less than 100 people.”
For his new photographic exhibition Echoes Beyond the Night, Blackwell has assembled a collection of moody black-and-white photos he took of bands performing in Sydney in the late 70s and early 80s.
Blackwell said he wanted a certain black-and white aesthetic for the exhibition, but back in the 70s it was borne out of necessity.
“I shot black-and-white film primarily because it was cheap, and easy to develop in our home-made dark rooms, of which I built several over a span of a couple of decades,” he says.
“But it’s also worth recalling that we didn’t buy our first colour television until 1982 which was at the end of the period covered in both the book and the exhibition.”
Blackwell says rock ’n’ roll photography was challenging in the late 1970s, and often the lighting was so bad that photos from whole concerts, including The Stranglers, were unusable.
“These were the days of manual exposure and focusing, so a lot of it had to do with anticipation and luck,” he says. “My measure back then was if I got one good shot out of a roll of 36 negatives then that was a good result.”
As Blackwell got older he moved from mosh pits and head banging to setbacks and fire pits, carving out a successful career as a landscape artist in Perth (his company Blackwell & Associates designed the landscape for the Leighton foreshore).
Now semi-retired, the Chook asked if he hung out with any of the famous rockers he photographed back in the day?
“Personally, I don’t like bragging about such things,” Blackwell replied.
“…Mostly, those I’ve spent time with are pretty cool, but otherwise much like other ‘ordinary people’. Admittedly, some of them are extraordinary and it is particularly gratifying when you find that, when it comes without pretence.”
Echoes Beyond the Night is at Gallows Gallery, 53 Glyde St, Mosman Park until December 20.
A book featuring the photos is being published with Blackwell doing a book signing and talk tomorrow (Sunday December 15) at the Gallery at 3pm.
by STEPHEN POLLOCK