DOWN TO A FINE ART
Photographers working in the art world face as shifting a territory as those in photojournalism or commercial work. Here are three young artists navigating those shifts, chasing opportunities across the world, evolving their voices and their style, and, most of all, supporting themselves to share their ideas with the world through photography.
ORDERLY LINES
Leaving home to chase her dreams in New York is a story as old as the city itself. For Zoe Wetherall, it offered opportunities to expand her fine-art photography career that would never come her way at home in Melbourne.
WRITTEN BY NAOMI ARNOLD
IT'S GETTING COLD in New York. By late October it's already 'Melbourne winter', says Zoe Wetherall. Still, the monochrome, but-toned-up city will look starkly beautiful in Wetherall's signature aerial shots. The 32-year-old moved to New York at the start of 2016, fulfilling a dream that she's been laying in the groundwork for over the past decade.
Wetherall graduated from Photography Studies College in Melbourne in 2006, and after assisting in Melbourne for a couple of years, made her first visit to New York to work with commercial photographers there. After another stint assisting in Sydney, she returned to Melbourne, where she built up her own commercial client base, and began to refine her personal portfolio.
The United States was the natural place to develop her career further. She has a professional interest in the immense, diverse landscapes of America, compared to her sunbaked homeland: "It's unlike anything that exists in Australia."
But moving to New York proved to be a massive undertaking, a tyranny of to-do lists. Her three-year artist's visa is for those who are classed as 'outstanding in the field', and getting it required collecting 12 letters of referral and hiring an immigration lawyer. The process took seven months - and that was on top of years of work to establish herself as an artist, including a shelf full of local and international awards.
"To get the visa you have to be able to prove a certain amount of achievement: the older you are the easier, because you've done more," she says. "I started entering competitions because if you win awards that helps. Over the past 10 years I've done things that I knew would help if I ever wanted to apply."
It paid off, though; now she's living in Brooklyn's eclectic, colourful Bushwick, in an apartment with two roommates and a sparkling rooftop view of Manhattan.
To pay the rent, Wetherall is shooting commercial work - real estate, construction, and architecture - while also working on her personal projects. Her obsession is creating bright, clean, graphic shots of the world, from unexpected viewpoints. One series, Order, is focused on the beauty found in abstract tessellations of architecture; in this, she likes to sort the clutter, stripping away the original meaning of a structure and giving it new life as a collection of colours and shapes. Another series, Crowded, comprises aerial shots of close-packed city buildings.
Building a career as a fine-art photographer in New York is about burning the shoe leather: making contacts, sharing work, talking, meeting, talking, following up. As well as the sheer stimulation of the environment, for a photographer the city offers more volume than anywhere else: more galleries, more publishers, more experts, more people who appreciate fine art, and more buyers. After a few months of settling in, Wetherall is beginning to focus on self-promotion. "Establishing yourself is always a work in progress." she says.
She recently attended two portfolio review fairs, blitzing through 22 meetings in four days with ad agency and magazine creatives, agents, blogs, and art gallery reps.
"Overall, I had a really good response, which is great," she says. "I got lots of advice; it was definitely worth doing. And I had a lot of people say they hadn't seen work like mine before. Everyone said that if I have an exhibition, they want an invite."
She recently launched a blog on her website, and is looking for gallery representation; her first goal is to take part in a group exhibition. She's held more than a dozen shows in Australia, and knows that that kind of exposure will help to push her work further.
"Having an exhibition in a well-known gallery definitely helps," she says. "Most of the prints I've sold in the past have been through a gallery."
Wetherall has sold many pieces to companies who hang her large prints on the walls of lobbies and offices. Ordered, intricate and soothing, they're pieces of abstract art made from the natural world.
"The corporate world is a place that I would target in the future; unlike individual art collectors they generally buy more than one print, and they have lots of space on their walls. They also generally have more money than individuals, in terms of buying eight or nine prints at once."
"There are all kinds of possibilities with places you can sell your work - people have suggested computer desktop art and as prints for fashion design."
"The corporate world is a place that I would target in the future; unlike individual art collectors they generally buy more than one print, and they have lots of space on their walls. They also generally have more money than individuals, in terms of buying eight or nine prints at once."
Man-made forms come to the foreground in Zoe Wetherall's work, which are the photographic equivalents of colour-field paintings. Above, the facade of a JW Marriott hotel: below, a field of crops. Below that, Wetherall finds that cropping out the sky and horizon makes the textures of the land more prominent: in this case, Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah.
Though Wetherall has produced plenty of other work, such as a starkly beautiful carpark series that turn the mundane into unexpected sculpture, aerial photography is her oeuvre. Drones might be a new obsession, but she has been invested in aerial photography for most of her career.
Wetherall likes how the confusion and noise of the world disappears the higher you rise, becoming neatly encapsulated in simple forms. She likes to see how humans have made their mark on the world; sometimes by dramatically razing and changing it with buildings and swooped looped highways; sometimes with the ordered lines of crops; sometimes making a mark so small it highlights our essential impermanence.
Removing ordinary points of reference, such as the sky and horizon, is Wetherall's signature. "It helps me focus on the earth's colours and textures, and turns the landscape into an abstract work of art," she says.
She first realised aerial photography was going to be her things when she was holidaying in the United States, visited Albuquerque, and flew above the city in a hot air balloon. Looking down, seeing forms pop out and man-made structures resolve into patterns, the hot-air balloon immediately became her vehicle of choice. She likes to shoot from them because they move slowly across the ground, giving her the time and space to gaze straight down, studying the landscape to spot unexpected shapes, textures and colours.
Unlike a helicopter, a hot-air balloon has no doors or windows to get around, and no awkward manoeuvres to execute. It's peaceful, almost meditative. Each ride lasts for about an hour, and depending on the wind, Wetherall can cover a lot of ground, finding dozens of difference shots.
"The fact that a lot of my aerial work is shot from hot-air balloons sets me apart from other aerial photographers; most use helicopters or drones," she says. "It's a definite point of interest in my work. With a drone, it is taking the photo: you're not. They're great for going places you couldn't go in an aircraft, but they way I shoot, I prefer to be up there to see the patterns."
Although more people are taking aerial shots these days, Wetherall feels that view from above still offers a fresh perspective: "Bird's-eye is still an unusual and intriguing way to see the landscape, for us."
As well as Albuquerque, she's flown above Hawaii, Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, Melbourne and the Yarra Valley, New York City and Phoenix, sometimes from hot-air balloons, sometimes from helicopters. Where's next?
"Everywhere," she says with a sigh. "I would love to do a hot air balloon tour of the world and go in every one that exists. You can do them in the outback of Australia at Alice Springs. Africa would be amazing. And though there are no hot-air balloons in Antarctica I would love to go there and do aerial shots. It's never-ending. One day, hopefully, I'll get to do that."
While the career she's chosen hasn't been an easy road, she's still glad to be on it. "if you love what you're doing, it's worth it in the end. Don't listen to the people who tell you not to do something, or that you can't do it. In this industry everyone feels like that at some point, but just keep going.
"Holding your first solo exhibition and seeing the prints on the wall, with everyone looking at them, makes it worth it."
The facade of Melbourne shopping mall Eastland offers slices of geometrically interesting shapes to Wetherall's lens. Her talent for 'detangling' the urban environment - singling out repeating patterns, long lines, bright colours and banks of windows with occasional reflections. "Cities are complicated and messy." she writes, "and with all their layering and confusion, they can be visually exhausting too. But I believe that mash-up of buildings hides views of peace. My work is to find them."
Find the original article here:
https://zoewetherall.com/Pro-Photographer-Magazine