Notes from the field: Regional trailblazing
The innovation coming out of regional Australia now is so exciting that we’re devoting a three-part series to the topic, beginning with On the snail trail.
To shoot the series we called on the talents of Western Australia-based photographer Duncan Wright, who’s great with both people and places.
“I love getting a call-up for an assignment that allows me to have a creative and flexible approach to image-making,” Duncan says. “This job was exactly that: travelling to three far-flung corners of Australia – Esperance in WA, Murrumbateman in regional NSW and the Torres Strait Islands – to meet inventors who’d come up with wild and wide-ranging ideas to solve their own unique issues. All three shoots were set in these vast landscapes. I wanted to show how hard regional innovators have to work simply because the next closest anything isn’t just around the corner, but around many.”
The first story in the series highlights the wonderful work of SnailCam in Esperance. “We shot in the baking midday sun on an incredible farming property,” Duncan says. “While everything around us was vast – the tractors, the landscape, the sky – I was there to photograph these tiny snails. My macro adapters weren’t picking them up, so I did an old trick and reversed my camera lens to get the shot, also revealing the minutiae of Rain Plaado’s hardworking hands.”
Not every shoot went as planned. “We had talent lined up for the Howdy app [see next issue] shoot in Murrumbateman who became unavailable at the very last minute,” Duncan says. “So we had to reconsider the brief. I began thinking of the ways regional people would have met and communicated in the past – hitchhiking, sitting in a pub, playing pool, by post – these were all scenes we shot on the fly to try and illustrate the story of a dating app for farmers. Fortunately, we got a call from a local who kindly let us shoot on their property with massive cows and a beautiful horse.”
Duncan’s shoot with Dennis Fay on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait [keep an eye out for this in issue 188] was another highlight. “After flying up from Canberra, we spent the afternoon shooting and exploring these immensely beautiful yet rubbish-strewn beaches by boat. We wrapped up once the sun had set on this tropical paradise. But instead of going to the pub for dinner, Dennis had been invited to a local teen’s 18th birthday party, where we caught up with some of his old friends and ate local foods for dinner.”
