Andrew Quilty: 20 Year Issue

Interview by Sam Hetherington.

While we don’t pretend to take ourselves very seriously here at Monster Children, we are a magazine run by human beings who inevitably care about issues outside of the silly little worlds of skate, surf, music and art, particularly when it affects others and the planet.

Andrew Quilty cares too, as a war photographer based in Afghanistan, he has been bringing attention to a world that seems so far away from ours. Andrew captures the hopes and horrors of humankind and produces images you can’t look at without something shifting.

What were you doing in 2003?

2003, I was still kind of learning to surf, I didn’t start surfing until after I left high school, just before I was about to set off on a road trip with a couple of friends around Australia in 2001. It was actually on that trip which took 6 months, that I became obsessed with both surfing and photography. I’d been given a camera by an uncle of mine who was a photographer which I took along not really having any expectations of what I was gonna do with it, but I just enjoyed taking those pictures that we all take, and have always taken of friends and family on holidays. I knew I wanted to do something creative after school but the school I was at had a very much ‘get a degree, get a proper job working in an office’ vibe. So the years following that I put everything into photography, I started at TAFE in Ultimo in Sydney learning how to use the camera and how to use lights, all very technical stuff that didn’t really give me much to start off with in terms of going into the world with a camera, it was all very dark room and studio stuff, but it gave me a very good understanding of how light works.

So from surfing photography how did you get into covering Afghanistan? It seems like a pretty big jump.

Yeah, there are no waves in Afghanistan. So I suppose in the early two 2000s’ I was devoting equal attention to surfing and photography. I couldn’t really split them, but I realised surfing wasn’t going to be a career for me. I’m joking I was never under any illusions about that but I started to focus more of my attention towards photography, getting a bit more confident with it and how I could use it. By that stage, I had been published by a few reputable publications and was becoming a bit ambitious, and wanted to spread my wings. I worked from 2004 to 2009 with Fairfax, for a bunch of their newspapers and magazines. It was very dry, shooting CEOs and politicians but I was so stoked to earn a living from taking photos.But by the end of the 2000s’ I realised I could apply my passion for photography a bit more effectively. I left Fairfax and went traveling. In New York I had a few friends who’d been based there or working for publications that were there, one of whom is an Australian photographer a couple of years older than me who really blitzed a trail as a photojournalist. He sent me the contact details for the New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Times Magazine and News Week, so I rocked up to these meetings very ill-prepared with this really shitty portfolio on my little shitty laptop. I had photos to try and impress these people and I went for not the photos that were probably more indicative of my style, but photos that had subjects that I thought might impress them, because it’s like ‘Oh I got to photograph the Australian Prime Minister’ so that will impart some sort of status on me, and of course, picture editors in New York city probably wouldn’t have a clue what the Australian Prime Minister looks like so I’m sure they were underwhelmed by those, none the less something must have stuck with them because I started to get a bit of work from these publications when I came back to Australia. That then saw me get a little bit outside of Australia for work. I started a bit in the Pacific and gradually began to expand my horizon. I loved working for these publications because of the challenge and there’s a bit more passion. Then I thought if these are the publications I want to work for I should move to New York because that’s where they are. Of course, I quickly worked out that so are a million other photographers and I’m now at the bottom of the pile. But then a friend wrote to me and said have you got any friends working in Afghanistan because I want to go there and write a story for an Australian magazine and I need a photographer to work with. I was like, I’ll come. I had no intention of staying there, but yeah we went. We were planning to spend two weeks there, she was going to write a story about the Afghan cricket team. We ended up spending like three weeks, then a month, then we had to extend our visa for the maximum amount of time and by the end of the it, I was hooked on the place. I made some fast friends and it felt like a place where there weren’t many other photographers. The world had lost interest in Afghanistan by that point, but for me, it was all new and exciting and challenging and dangerous. I could have this life there were I can enjoy a lot of the benefits of living as a foreigner relatively well, I wasn’t working for anyone so I didn’t have the same kind of restrictions that the big organisations and media outlets had.At the same time I'd go out in the country and explore and see incredible things and potentially take really dramatic, hard-hitting, powerful, touching photos of it which I’d never really been in a place where I felt to that extent. I realised this is actually what the camera is for, whereas before I’d been happily making mundane scenes look beautiful through the light and composition, and now all of a sudden I could do that and beyond, there were so many stories to tell and they were so rich and filled with life and death and real struggle, photography all of a sudden became about more than just aesthetic considerations.

So do you see your work as helping others in a sense?

I always struggle with that, I think in the grand scheme of things potentially, this topic really confuses me because have I ever really made a difference to anyone through a photo? You know it’s pretty hard to answer, and I guess the reason I struggle with it is that I think on the off chance that a photo can benefit someone who is in the photograph or has some sort of relationship to whatever is depicted it can also have the opposite effect and a lot of my photographs from Afghanistan depict people amidst possibly the worst day of their life in incredibly vulnerable circumstances. I think those kinds of pictures are the ones that people outside of the immediate vicinity of the photograph can take something away from and gain some sort of understanding of the circumstances that they didn’t have before, or the horror of those circumstances or the struggle that the people in the photograph are going through, but on the other hand, how do you weigh that up against the needs of the person in the photograph.

How do you walk the line between violence and harmony when you take a photo?

I don’t know if you can in the one image, I think having said that I would prefer it to be judged on a body of work as a whole rather than one picture because you could pick one violent traumatic photo and say this is representative of all my work in Afghanistan, one it would be inaccurate and two you could say that’s just perpetuating the stereotype of Afghanistan as a violent lawless place.

Occasionally you might take a photograph that mixes the two, you might have a really horrific scene that somehow evokes these awkward uneasy feelings of beauty whether it’s in the composition or if you think of photographs of people wounded or dead being carried across a crowd of people trying to help or mourners in a christ-like pose or something. It can almost be the ultimate when you can find that line between horror and harmony in a single image where a viewer would have to question themselves as they see beauty in the image but it’s also depicting great horror.

What comes first for you, the story or the photograph?

I think that’s the thing I love about Afghanistan, there was nearly anywhere you could point a camera where there wasn’t a story that made it a photograph, and I never found that before.

Everywhere you went and everyone you met and photographed had incredible stories.

What has changed in your industry as a photographer and photojournalist in the last 20 years, aside from the war situation?

I learnt and shot on film for the first couple of years before I made this distinction between my paid work and personal work.Since then I haven't shot a single frame on film, actually part of the process of going through having spent the last six months going through about 350,000 photos that I took in Afghanistan, all of which are digital is putting them together for a book. Having spent so long looking at that work and kind of getting a really detailed overall picture of my style I see this kind of search for compositional perfection in it which really annoys me. I wish I could be much looser and freer. Coincidentally, talking about Steven Depont I was looking at a book he produced from Afghanistan a lot of which was shot on film and I saw this difference between his work and mine. You know we shot very similar subjects but his work seemed so much freer and more spontaneous and less ‘perfect.’ I mean that sounds like an insult but it’s really not, I feel really constrained by my search for compositional perfection in an image and Steve just had this real beautiful spontaneity. So ironically in the past couple of weeks, I’ve dusted off some of my old film cameras and I’m getting them serviced in an attempt to get them back in working order, partly to see if I can change my style a bit and get excited about photography feeling fresh and new and valuable. That’s another thing about digital, photos seem a lot less valued because they are infinite and they're disposable, whereas if you have a photo of your parents or grandparents that is on film you treasure those, or even if they are in print, regardless of how damaged or imperfect or out of focus or poorly lit there are you really treasure them.

No, I feel like it has, I can semi-relate to that on a non-professional scale, in the sense that I just got so many rolls of film developed from a trip to Europe last year and so many of them just didn’t work because I had a really shitty, faulty point and shoot and so the ones that I did get back they're just so precious. I've got a million photos on my phone but it’s the developed film I look back over.

There’s something about scarcity that evokes value.

Yeah for sure. Would you see yourself going back to Afghanistan hypothetically and doing a trip with maybe just film?

Potentially yeah, I mean don’t get me wrong digital is incredible, I was very conscious in the time that I was in Afghanistan that I wanted to shoot everything in the same format because I thought that one day after I had left there I would make a book out of it and I wanted it to be consistent.

If you could give your 2003 self some advice what would it be?

I suppose understanding that learning what you’re photographing is more impactful than learning how to photograph. I think if I really wanted to look long term back in 2003 without being much of a planner or knowing if I was still going to be doing this in twenty years' time I probably would have learnt a language rather than studying photography

Where would you like to see photography and photojournalism move to moving forward?

Well, the difficult thing about photojournalism these days is making a living out of it. There are very few people who can do just photojournalism and make a living out of it. It would be great if there was a flood of investment in publishing, advertisers disappeared off social media and went back to ideally print magazines like Monster Children, and all of a sudden magazines were flooded with money and budgets to send photographers overseas on assignments for months, but that’s not going to happen. In the face of AI and disinformation and whatnot, ideally I would hope that photojournalism is able to maintain its value and its power with the respect that it has a foundation in the twenty-first century with a lot of people, a lot of governments, nations, readers and viewers having world views more shaped by what they saw and read in the kinds of magazines that photojournalism was born out of and I can see that is becoming increasingly challenged with AI and with the ambiguity of cameras now.

It would be nice to have some budgets again. Are you planning on going back to Afghanistan or are you staying put in Australia for a while?

I haven’t tested whether I can get a visa yet for Afghanistan but assuming I can, yeah I’ll definitely go back there one day. It’s one of those places, like anywhere that you spend a quarter of your life, it gets under your skin. After ten years of living there, the Taliban took over and that changed the country overnight. It’s sad to have to leave under those circumstances so it’d be nice to go back and ideally see it under better circumstances which don’t exist there at the moment.

I would also like to understand how you separate yourself from the war zone areas and relax. Do you have any hobbies that let you escape from where you were?

Yeah, I tried for sure, surfing was one of them, every summer in the northern hemisphere I’d do a dedicated surf trip, whether it was to Europe or Indonesia. Having been back in Australia for eighteen months I’m only just realising how hard it was to detach, and I never really did. A part of me still craves the excitement and thrill. That life and death element that embuses photographs with meaning, value and weight in the same way as it imbued my own life and own experiences with meaning and fulfillment.

Finally, what is Monster Children to you?

Monster Children has always been a nice departure for me from the traditional surf mags. The way the photographs are used it feels as though they are given more respect and value, through the way it’s laid out and the paper stock. It’s always immersive to read through. More of a beautiful tangible product than a magazine. It’s a nice thing to have a stack, pick it up and immerse yourself in it. It’s a feeling. I never really worked out why my photos ended up in it because they are quite different to what is usually used, but then that’s what Monster Children has always done so well - blending worlds and bringing attention to an audience who usually wouldn’t see it or expect to see it.

Get your hands on issue #73, the 20 Year Anniversary Issue, here.