How I Came To Call Myself a Portrait Photographer (With Confidence)
Hello and welcome to my new blog!
I’m Matthew, a portrait photographer based in Brisbane, Australia. I specialise in creative portraits that transport you to another world or realm through visual storytelling, as well magazine style legacy portraits for the everyday person to feel like a movie star for a day and come away with a collection of prints that will live well beyond their or my lifetime.
Some of you have been following my journey to this point and seen me grow into the professional that I am today, others may be just joining. Either way, allow me to properly (re)introduce myself and tell you a little bit about how I came to be a portrait photographer.
My Mother’s Legacy Portrait
Before my mum had met my dad, before she was a mother, before she was an aunty, she was a single, independent woman living her best life in Sydney. She captured this time in her life with a portrait session at a studio on Pitt Street in the early 1960s when she was around 21 years old and her framed print lived on the wall of our living room ever since. I grew up admiring this image and admiring my mother. As a huge movie buff, I always thought of this portrait to be that of a movie star goddess like Elizabeth Taylor.
Hi mum! Love You X
1990s Inspo
Throughout the 1990s (my teenage years), my love for a wide range of music styles really expanded. On one hand I was full alternative/grunge and living for Pearl Jam, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Silverchair and Regurgitator, but on the other hand, I was a closested baby Stan of Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson and soon I would find my way to my haven of alternative women such as Tori Amos, Bjork, Veruca Salt and The Cranberries.
Luckily all of these artists collided and lived together in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine, which I religiously collected and tore apart to make wall posters or scrapbooks of stories and pictures.
I started to make walls in my bedroom dedicated to their images taken from the pages of Rolling Stone magazine (now the collector in me wishes I kept them in immaculate condition but hey… #choices). On one wall I had a gorgeous spread of black and white, statuesque portraits of Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Janet Jackson and Cher.
Another wall was filled with bright, outrageously colourful portraits of Tori Amos, Uma Thurman, a different side of Madonna as well as evocative images of Tupac and Eminem that did nothing to help my sexual confusion at the time. Looking back there should have been no confusion considering I had posters of Cher on my wall.
I didn’t realise at first, but I had curated collections from two prominent photographers - Herb Ritts and David LaChapelle - and to this day they are still my biggest inspirations.
At the same time, I was hating life at school, except for art class where I was learning photography. Instead of playing footy with the other guys at lunch, I would be in the darkroom developing portraits of my friends or abstract architectural images from around my school.
Unfortunately, my main art teacher was not a fan of mine and would bully me, making me believe I would never amount to anything. Before I knew it, I graduated from high school and instead of going on to follow my dreams, I bounced from job to job before becoming a flight attendant in 2003 which would keep me occupied for nearly two decades.
Travel and Lifestyle Blogging
In 1999, I took off to spend 3 months backpacking South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe. I had my first automated film camera and came back with around 40 rolls of film - 1440+ pictures! I would say I have around 20 shots that are pretty decent and around 1220 that are useless. To be fair there was zero zoom on that nifty little camera and except for the pride of 13 lions that blocked our road in Kruger National Park, most of the incredible creatures I witnessed were at a safe distance.
When I left for Dubai in 2003, I bought my first digital camera and filled up a few hard drives of travel snaps. Around 2010 I bought my first DSLR, a Nikon D7500 with a kit lens which was definitely a step up from the digital pocket camera and was good enough for the travel snaps. However, I had no idea what I was doing and often got the shits with this big clunky camera and would leave it at home more often than not.
And then in 2012, just before I returned home to Brisbane, I was introduced to Instagram and also started my own travel blog. By now I was starting to wrap my head around the manual functions of the camera and could apply that together with my eye for composition and I was producing some engaging images of my travels that I was happy with.
I started to share a few pictures, tagging tourism boards with my travel and wildlife pics and it wasn’t long before @Queensland reposted one of my whale watching images.
This is when I started to build a relationship with my now dear friends at Tourism and Events Queensland and even started to work with them to produce new content from different regions. I was sent to The Whitsundays, to the Fraser Coast region and deep into Outback Queensland. This was a dream to be a working travel photographer, but I felt that as I was self taught and had no peer review or critiques, I was just another amateur at this stage and still had that belief that I’d never amount to anything, so I was not actually ready to call myself a photographer yet.
I reflected on my initial love for photography and the posters on my bedroom wall and decided I wanted to be a professional. So I started to figure out where and how I could study.
Design College Australia
In 2016, with the help of two women I love and respect so much, I was granted a career break from my job as a flight attendant so that I could go and study photography professionally at Design College Australia.
At the same time, I approached my friends at Tourism and Events Queensland about further work with them and it just so happened they had a role opening in their social media team with another two women that I love and respect so much! And it was so amazing. I had the best time learning the ways of digital marketing while also getting the opportunity to go out and take photos of Queensland destinations and events, including a highlight of my life where I was able to try my hand at concert photography for the Maroochy Music and Visual Arts Festival which included acts like my local goddess, George Maple.
So I had the most hectic year of my life, working and studying full time, but I could not have been happier. I was working with an incredible bunch of humans at TEQ and also developing the skills to become a professional image maker. I started using my assignments and free time to create some portraits, realising this was where my passion for portraiture came alive.
While studying Visual Communications, majoring in photography, my first studio assignment was a Harajuku styled fashion shoot and I will never forget that feeling of getting that first shot pop up on the tethered laptop and seeing what I had created after weeks of research, planning and designing with stylists and makeup artists.
Creative Portrait Series
I now had the skills to create the imagery that had been living in my imagination for the last 20 years. So I got straight to work on my first artistic collection which was titled ‘Robbing The Muse” and was a visual translation of the 2014 record ‘Unrepentant Geraldines’ by Tori Amos.
Twelve pieces that each had an individual story and design, all brought to life with the help of SPFX hair, makeup and costume designers Shylie Parsons and Li-Sa Choi as well as a wonderful bunch of humans who donated their time to model for me. Shot over a period of 6 months, ending up as an exhibition at the Brisbane Powerhouse during MELT: Festival of Queer Arts and Culture, 2018.
The series was so well received and I felt so much love and joy and success. But when the 2 metre high prints came down from the walls of the Brisbane Powerhouse, I had an emotional crash. This coincided with a really ugly time in Australian media where the rights of LGBTQIA+ people were being questioned in a nasty debate about marriage equality and the plebiscite.
From here, my next collection was inspired. ‘Stygian Stones’ was a visual journey through feelings of depression, despair, hopelessness and surviving in the toxicity of this masculine society.
For this series, I again had the help of SPFX hair, makeup and styling artists such as Madison Visser as well as Husk And Vine, but I also asked local legend Glen David Wilson to help me create a short story in film form to accompany the collection.
The collection also featured at the Brisbane Powerhouse during MELT: Festival of Queer Arts and Culture 2019, including the short film being projected across a 6 metre wall. See the full blog here.
Legacy Portraits
My good friend Christie, like many others, had been through a very difficult year in 2020 and was feeling a little lost and not where she thought she would be in life as she approached 40. I decided she needed to capture this time in her life with a legacy photoshoot for her birthday. My goal was to make an iconic portrait of her that she would have framed and could look at every day and appreciate her own beauty.
We spent an afternoon drinking rosé and going through her wardrobe for fabulous frocks to photograph. Then I hired a professional hair and makeup artist and we gave her a glam makeover where she felt pampered like a model. We then spent an hour or two photographing her in style that would be suited to the cover of a fashion magazine.
Before even seeing any of the images, she told me how she felt reinvigorated and confident after the photoshoot. When she did see the images she was overwhelmed with how gorgeous she looked. I then took one of my favourite portraits of Christie and created a custom made water colour version, had it printed on fine art paper and framed for her birthday.
It was an absolute thrill and honour to have given her this gift and seeing her go through the transformational experience throughout this portrait session experience and I wanted to do it for others too!
Business Education
I had the skills and the idea, but not a head for business. So the timing aligned and after a year or two of procrastinating, I joined Sue Bryce Education and have been studying and training and developing my business skills to become a full time professional photographer.
So here we are, at the start of 2021 and my small business is open with my boutique studio up and running! I finally have the feeling that I have arrived as a portrait photographer. I still have a long way to go and will always be learning, but I now value myself and my skills and I get so excited to share it with others.
I have some exciting things planned for this year - on the blog and in the studio - so I invite you to follow along by subscribing below.
Thanks for joining! Wishing success for us all in this new year.
MTT XO
