BY SAMUEL COTTELL
Jim Rolon has been a portrait photographer for more than 30 years. Originally from New York, his career has included photographing for multinational advertising agencies and graphic designers, books, CD covers, magazine editorials, and exhibitions. Outside Australia, his assignments have taken him to the United States, Vietnam, and the Middle East. His work has won many awards. The National Portrait Gallery of Australia has also acquired six of Jim’s images for their permanent collection. Jim has been in Australia for a number of years now and is currently undertaking a project in conjunction with the Australian Music Centre (who are celebrating their 40th birthday this year).
Jim is taking Polaroid photographs of Australian composers in both classical and jazz genres in an attempt to document them in a way that has not been done before. Jim is using his Polaroid cameras to capture the ‘real’ essence of the composers so that it can be recorded as part of Australian history.
It’s about history and capturing the moment,” Jim says of his work. “What I am concerned about is the photos existing in the first place. I think I have this attitude because this is about history, which is important – especially for such a young country like this.”
The project began after a conversation with Andrew Ford. Andrew suggested that Jim photograph composers as nobody was doing it.
“Since I know Andrew Ford well, I have photographed him many times, I asked him to sit for a portrait: ‘Hey lets try it and let’s see how it looks’. It looked great,” Jim says.
“Even though I was dedicated to photographing artists, Andy said to me in a half-amusing way: ‘You know, you should do a series of composers, nobody’s doing it’, and I knew that right off. He said: ‘If you do that, I can get them for you’. He knows everyone. I started doing it.”
“The Polaroid aspect is that question of doing something that is different yet unpredictable and creating a point of view, source, or file that you can’t create anywhere else, that somehow has a connection to the person you’re photographing,” he says.
“Digital photography is a post-produced art so it’s after the fact. You always have to ask yourself, ‘what’s real, what’s reality?’. I’m not looking for that in this project.”
For Jim, who refers to himself as more a ‘fringe’ photographer, the question of the Polaroid – when he began to think about the merging media world – was first questioned when he was undertaking a Masters of Design at UTS.
“I had been thinking, knowing that Polaroid film is disappearing, I have never put my signature on the process of taking a Polaroid and scanning it into a digital file. It has been done to death and many people have done it, but I haven’t done it. I wanted to do this,” he says.
“We all make sense of the world by constructing a sense of the world that appeals to us, and photography is a bit like that.”
The project will involve taking a series of Polaroid instant film photographs and then scanning on old computer scanners. Then the photos will be displayed on screens. Jim envisions that later on they could be displayed in a gallery. “Each image is interesting as itself, but as a series, what is most interesting is the grid, to see all of them, to have all of them together and that is a big aspect of the importance of this project.
The aim of the project is to capture the real face of the composers rather than the ‘idea’ of what a composer is. Jim is a photographer who likes flaws. “When I started this, I told the composers: ‘How many more pictures of a person like you sitting at a piano with a pen, looking off into the distance, dreaming or thinking, or looking dignified, do we need?’. There are millions of these and they are noise. I am trying not to do that. Beauty is boring, if there is nothing behind it,” Jim says.
Do the composers like the ‘flaws’ and the raw, and do they look at the Polaroids of themselves in these situations? “I am sure inside they are like, ‘whoah’. Composers, on the whole, don’t have kind of celebrity vanity; they don’t have this problem of having to market the way they look to get their next ‘role’ or their next gig.”
When Jim takes the composers portraits he talks to them about a number of different topics. “For instance, the last time I photographed Peter Sculthorpe, we talked about architecture. With Carl Vine, we pretty much talked about his beautiful apartment as well as the Polaroid process. Elena Kats-Chernin was sort of curious about me, and we talked about life and where she lives. Anne Boyd and I talked about health and running and a little bit about music -but not much. We also talked about her apartment. With Jenna Cave, we talked about watches. For most of them, it’s a diversion and you really want to make it fun for the 20 minutes it takes,” Jim says.
Through Creative Partnerships Australia’s MATCH program, every dollar given to this campaign will be matched dollar for dollar provided the campaign target with crowd funding is met. Jim is currently running a Pozible campaign to purchase the film, the cost of scanning and also to cover some travel costs that will crop up when he has to travel to composers in far away locations.
“The cost of prints is another thing, Jim says. “The most economical way to buy the Polaroid is from New York. The black and white Polaroid is no longer manufactured so I am just getting the last stocks of that and I have two Polaroid cameras.
“I thought I could raise this money, which I had never done before and then suddenly I’m on Facebook and I am trying to develop some sort of presence on social media. I’ve always had the approach that personal relationships are the way to go.
“So, here I am in the midst of a crowd funding campaign and I am hoping to source people who have an interest in fine photography and getting rare photography.”
I ask Jim where he would like to see these Polaroids in decades to come. “The whole fun of it is the capture,” he says. “I like it that they exist for other people to see years hence and after I am dead. Do I have this need to have my pictures everywhere? Not really, I think this cheapens it. I want them to be special.”
For more info or to participate in Jim Rolon’s campaign go to http://www.pozible.com/
Photos featured by Jim Rolon (N.B: The photos presented in this article aren’t the final product. Jim describes them as ‘prototypes’).
