In The Mix 18 seconds - Sean Davey

In: In The Mix by doclach 0 Comments Tue 17th Jan '12

Tags: Sean Davey , andy Morris , 18 seconds , Tasmanie , Bronte , surf photography

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SINGLE LENS REFLUX - SEAN DAVEY. 18seconds Magazine

Thanks to Andy Morris for sending this excerpt & gallery from 18seconds Magazine through. A great insight into Sean Davey and his work:

Interview Andy Morris

Not many people can lay claim to over 140 magazine covers in their careers. Sean Davey can and he's still counting. As a child, Sean fled his broken family to be with his mum in Sydney's eastern suburbs at Bronte Beach. It was there he discovered photography and experimenting with makeshift water housings engineered out of goon bags. Fast forward several years and his imagery is seen in publications such as Tracks, Australia's Surfing Life and Surfing World where he enjoys many years as one of the leading editorial photographers. In 1997 Sean moves to the North Shore of Hawaii where he continues at the top of his game. Around 2004, alarm bells start ringing, as the line between hobbyist and pro shooters is blurred, as the market is flooded with surf photographers. He also notices the magazine environment changing. The global financial crisis strikes. Eventually, reality sets in: the freelance market is squeezed, his daily crust begins shrinking, so he reinvents himself: supplying stock photography. First year, business booms. Then others follow suit and profitability drops out. He reinvents himself again: selling prints from his archive. In 2008 his business kicks into high gear. Freedom. Joy. He's never looked back.
Without further ado ladies and gents, Mr Sean Davey.

THE BEGINNING
I was a child in Tasmania through the ‘60s and moved to Sydney to live with my mum in 1970. We lived at Bronte Beach, one of Sydney's city beaches, although back then people used to look down on the place. It was working class in those days, but I loved it because I could be at the beach all the time.
My mates and I would surf all day long: like half a dozen surfs every day. I was a skinny runt with ribs hanging out. All that. It was a magical time in Bronte. My mum rented a flat on Pacific Street (behind the main drag) for the princely sum of $28 a week. I really developed a love for the sea at Bronte. You just couldn't keep me out of the surf. I can clearly remember seeing the, "photo nerds" going in and out of the darkrooms at Dover Heights High School back then. We used to bag on them, totally ignorant of the cooler than cool image making process going on in their darkroom.
Photography kind of found me actually. It was October 20, 1977 and I'd just come home from school and raced down the beach to go for a surf. Disappointingly, the surf was tiny. Even more torturous was the waves were perfect shape, but much too small to surf. That was when I sussed on to the crappy old plastic Kodak Instamatic camera sitting in the back of the wardrobe for the past four years. I ran up, grabbed it and headed back to the beach. I took my time, framed the scene, paying attention in particular to the composition and idea I needed to get really low to make the shot look correct. I squeezed off just one frame and when I got the picture back, my mates were asking why wasn't anyone out. The little light globe just clicked on there and then. From that point, I was hooked on photography.
I took it to the next level when I really wanted to get into the water. I was poor though and had no way of affording a fancy waterproof camera rig (not that they were easy to come by back then), so simply worked with what I had. My mum used to like a few glasses of wine after work, so I grabbed one of her (empty) wine casks and removed the plastic bladder bag. I then sealed my camera inside with some tape. Nothing too elaborate here, I can assure you. I took the tap off the bag and replaced it with a couple of camera filters, so I'd have something to point the lens through. It was a pretty poor job, but it worked for exactly one session. I took it out at Bondi and after about ten minutes there was so much moisture inside the bag, it'd filled up with a fog, which made shooting no longer possible. Of course the camera was trashed, but I was now a water photographer. I was stoked!
It well and truly sowed the bug within me... I took it to the next level by buying a cheap SLR (a Praktika L - bottom of the range Russian camera - truly a piece of crap which fell apart). Anyhow, I put the Praktika inside an Eva Marine bag, which worked for a little while till it also started taking on water and moisture. I didn't want to trash my SLR at that stage, so I stopped with the water shots until I could get hold of a Nikoness II some time down the road. They were pretty much the only option in those days because water housings were only custom made and there were no waterproof consumer cameras like these days.

THE DARK ROOM
Actually, I was a master of the darkroom. During my early years, I worked in quite a few professional labs where I learnt just about every single aspect of colour laboratory work there is. I learnt how to use colour enlargers in the darkroom, processing black and white and colour film, and printing them. I also know every aspect of professional copy work there is to know. I even used to process the slide films. All those years working in labs helped me to pick up all manner of influences and tricks. Like, Fuji film always processed better in Kodak chemistry just as Kodak film always looked better through the Fuji chemicals. Weird, hey?

INFLUENCES AND TRAINING
I had no formal training at all. I was truly inspired more than anything by pictures of waves. There was one guy from the US who was nailing them better than anyone at the time and that was Woody Woodworth. He single-handedly inspired me more than anyone. Every time I saw one of his pictures in the magazines, it was a perfect spinning barrel, usually quite glassy and always interesting light-play. He was the master of shooting waves. I hope to meet him one of these days. Another man who had a huge influence on me, although I wasn't really aware of it at the time, was Warren Bolster. He was always looking for ways to see things differently. That's something I've strived to do too. I love to come up with something completely different, even more so if it's a visual on a very well known subject or place.
Another major influence for me was Bruce Channon and Hugh McLeod when they ran and photographed Surfing World magazine. Those guys had the perfect formula right there. They would simply do surf trips and fill a mag with them. Sometimes, it might be two trips, maybe three. Sometimes, if they had a killer trip, it would be almost all from that trip. It was such a good publication. They were a great team. Bruce would seek out all the cool water angles and Hugh would concentrate on land angles, as well as sunsets, landscapes, native portraits, flora and fauna. These guys had such a good gig happening there. They showed surf travel photography way better than anyone has, even till today.
You would get such an immersive feel for a place when they went there. I based my approach to surf trip photography off these guys. Each trip, I would concentrate on trying to capture little visual glimpses into what a place is about. Get some moody portraits when the moments presented themselves. For me, shooting the surf is just part of doing a trip. There's so much more going into telling a story visually and I've always been first and foremost about doing just that.

Another major influence from the surfing world for me was Ted Grambeau. I could see that he had such a creative approach to what he does and a lot of that really rubbed off on me when I was sitting on the Australia's Surfing Life masthead with him. Ted is the man! He inspires me to do my best.

EDITOR/MAGAZINE WHO OFFERED BIG BREAK
Kirk Wilcox who at the time was editing Tracks gave me my first big break with another mag that he was editing, called "Surfing Snaps". It was filled with cool surf pictures that weren't finding a place in Tracks. Kirk used so many of my Tasmanian shots back then. I was stoked.

HOW DID SURF PHOTOGRAPHY TRANSFORM
It was kind of a perfect storm of sorts.
First you had the advent of digital, which just created an army of new SLR shooters.
Second. A lot of these new shooters bought a camera so they could shoot their kids surfing and being soccer parents, happily flowed the images to the companies for nothing, so their kid could get ahead. Now, although those images probably were not important to the companies, they saw the opportunity waiting to be exploited. Especially the publicly owned entities, which means they're always looking for ways to make money for their shareholders.
Third. Real estate prices were so high in the early ‘00s so a lot of peeps were suddenly thinking they were really rich and began quitting their jobs. A lot of those lived in California and instantly got into shooting surf photos.
Fourth. It was suddenly cool to be known as a surf photographer. I'm not sure how it came about, but suddenly we were seeing dudes on reality shows claiming to be surf photographers and shit. We didn't know any of them.
Meanwhile, mags were finally starting to come around to the digital deal because there's a lot of much money to be saved in film, processing and scanning. Downside for them is there are a million shooters out there now and they all want to get their stuff printed. Magazine photo editors were, and still are hating life. It's much harder to communicate with them as a result.

For the full interview including more photos visit
http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/0ebfcbe8#/0ebfcbe8/47

For a free magazine subscription visit www.18seconds.com.au

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