Photographing the arts: Different Spaces—wide angles for close quarters

In a previous essay I was talking about the difficulty of going into unfamiliar venues, and working out how to know what lenses might be needed to reach a performer on stage over a great distance. This time, I wanted to look at the opposite issue—how to work with a large production, in a small space.

When there isn’t going to be room to back up very far—if the seating in the venue is right at the front edge of the stage, for example—an ultra-wide angle lens is what’s going to be needed to get the full scale of a very wide or tall set, which can be useful for both publicity/marketing of the production (especially if it’s a particularly ambitious show in terms of scale), and later on for designers’ portfolios as well.

But that can create other issues, even as it’s solving one problem…

Photographing the arts: invisibility by design

There’s an inherent irony to photographing performance, I think - and, at times, to designing for the stage, especially for drama.

The ideal is, sometimes, not to be noticed; for your work, however complex or difficult it may have been to complete, to just be accepted as part of the production; not showy, or calling attention to itself, and jolting the audience out of the experience. If someone thinks ‘wow, what a great lighting cue that was!’ then it possibly wasn’t, because they noticed it. A truly great cue would be subtle, almost subliminal; and it would have the emotional impact that moment required, without necessarily being detected by the audience.

And so it is with photography - the ideal is for the camera, and the photographer, to be completely invisible - both to the performers on stage, and equally to the person viewing the photos later - and for the images to be a clear portal into the production, in a sense.

So, ironically, the better I am at not being noticed in the construction or design elements of an image, the more successful that image usually is…

The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice, at Darlinghurst Theatre Company

I’m really pleased to be spending time with Darlinghurst Theatre Company this year - their whole mainstage season, in fact - not only because they do good work, but they’re also really lovely to work with. So it’s great to be ducking over to the Eternity Playhouse on a regular basis, all through 2019!

Our first production in this collaboration, which is on through 24 February at the Eternity Playhouse, is The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice - starring the amazing Caroline O’Connor as Mari, and the wonderful Geraldine Hakewill as her daughter “LV”.

Directed by Shaun Rennie - who I also worked with on Only Heaven Knows at the Hayes - it’s a dark comedy about finding your voice, breaking out of old relationship traps, and being true to yourself…

I Love You Now at Darlinghurst Theatre Company, Sydney

Last time I was over at Darlinghurst Theatre Company, it was for a surrealist door-slamming farce; this time, it was a bit less farcical - but doors were slammed nonetheless...

Jeanette Cronin (who I photographed last year in The Shadow Box at the Old Fitz, also directed by Kim Hardwick) is this time both writer and co-star in I Love You Now - not so much a farce as a series of overlapping stories about modern love, lust, relationships and death, all played out in a single hotel room. Punctuated with live music, and tango...!

Photographing the arts: turning a 3D stage into a 2D image

I was back at Darlinghurst Theatre Company recently for their production of Hysteria, by English playwright Terry Johnson. It's a tough one to sum up quickly, but let's just call it a door-slamming French farce starring Freud & Dali, and leave it at that for the moment!

After my last entry into the Photographing The Arts series of essays, about how to create depth in a production image on stage, I was watching myself work and once again analysing the decisions I make on the fly - how I choose my point of view, both in terms of camera position and lens choice; and it reminded me of something I learned early on as a photographer, from a workshop by Freeman Patterson.

The trick to photography is to translate a three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional page, on the fly. And make it compelling...