Vision Australia supports people with vision loss, and the Vision Australia Radio Network operates ten community radio stations across Victoria, southern New South Wales, Adelaide and Perth with five digital radio services available in the three metropolitan areas as VAR, VA Radio and IRIS. They broadcast readings from newspapers, magazines and books, interviews and programs of general interest.

Screenwriter and playwright Chris Thompson for his ‘Behind the Scenes’ on Vision Australia Radio interviewed Paul Lambeth, one of the Prahran College Photography alumni:

Chris: Well, a month or so ago, at the Museum of Australian photography in Wheelers Hill, a new exhibition opened. It’s running to nearly the end of May. But in some ways it’s an old exhibition at the same time. It’s a harking back to Prahran Art College’s Photography course, running between 1968 and 1981.

The exhibition is called The Basement. One of the students from that time is also an exhibitor in this exhibition and a photographer, of course. Paul Lambeth welcome to the show.

Paul: Thanks Chris.

Chris: It was a pretty important course that course, wasn’t it?

Am I right in thinking it was the first photography course in the country to treat photography as a creative art form.

Paul: I think so. Although as a young teenager in that course I’m not sure I recognised it as special at the time. Certainly historically, that’s generally accepted. There’s a few points to make about that, I think. One was, none of the staff were educators in the traditional sense. They came from photographic practice, but they were all practicing artists in their own right. So I guess they weren’t modelling the school on anything else that existed. They just believed in what they were doing.

Chris: We’re talking old school photography. 35mm, I suppose, large format cameras, developing your own photos, I imagine.

Paul: Absolutely, all analogue, all old school stuff. Digital had not yet been conceived.

Chris: Was it on the horizon, were people kind of see it coming?

Paul: No, no. I can recall conversations in the dark room with student colleagues about wouldn’t it be great just to be able to have something really small and pull out of your pocket and blink and make a photograph?

Chris: Well, I suppose the closest was Polaroid?

Paul And even that was in its early stages and SX70 Polaroids came in around that time which we explored.

Chris: They were the ones that shot out the front of the camera and you didn’t need to peel the back of them. Which I remember in photography. One of the units I took was a photography unit. You could manipulate those polaroids by putting pressure on the surface of the photo, which would affect the emulsion before it had fixed. We had a great time, creating what we believed were artworks out of our Polaroids.

Paul: I guess photography hadn’t entered, in Australia at least, hadn’t entered the mainstream of the art world at that time. And everything was open for exploration. And this particular exhibition is a historical exhibition. It’s very much about the place, the people and images of the times. There’s certainly plenty of images on the walls created by students from that era. But there’s also a lot of images of us doing our student thing and what makes it interesting, I guess, is that it’s a slice of Melbourne from that period and a particularly interesting period in Australian history. If we think about Gough Whitlam and the Moratorium marches, a little earlier and into that era. If we think about uranium, the ban uranium marches. It was a very vital and explorative time.

Chris: 1981 almost takes you into the razor gang cuts to education, which I remember my university days.

Paul: I was in the middle of that that period, I went through Prahran in 1974, in my first year there doing Prelim, so 1974, 75, 76, and 77, so kind of in the middle of that that period 68 to 81.

Chris: So why? Why did Paul Lambeth decide: ‘I think I want to pursue photography rather than work at a bank.’

Paul: Well, we’re all products of our times and we’re products of our times and place. I went to a community school, which was Swinburne community school, the first publicly funded community school in Australia, modelled, I think, on Summerhill in Britain, but it was a very experimental school. I wasn’t doing too well in the mainstream system. In that school, I got to explore a lot, including photography and bumped into a trainee teacher that was a Prahran graduate. I put a folio together at the ripe old age of 16 and applied for Prahran. They mustn’t have checked the age on the form because I got in. I only applied at one place and I think retrospectively I can say that they were very optimistic times. It was pre-HECs or concerns about employment or the condition of the world particularly.

Chris: And if it was anything like my course, there was no cost to get your hands on rolls of film. There was no cost to developing, you know, those things were kinda there.

Paul: Yeah, not quite. There were no student fees as such. We paid a union fee, I recall, but we certainly spent all our part-time working money on film and paper. The course itself wasn’t an opulent course. There wasn’t a lot in materials. There was a lot in terms of characters and charisma. They were overflowing.

Chris: So tell me about the nature of the course. Did you go in with an idea about what sort of photographer you wanted to be or was it just photography in general and the course shaped what would become your photographic practice?

Paul: I think the course probably had some pride in the fact that it didn’t shape us. It was probably more a place for exploring what would be.
I think there was a great sense of trust and belief from the staff members in taking it whichever direction you want to go. On the other hand, it wasn’t big on delivering technical skill, particularly, and I think that, you know, for some people that wasn’t a good thing, but there was RMIT down the road that could do that very, very well. It was something totally different. It probably wasn’t for everyone. I think my background, you know, a hippie school, a community school probably was fairly easy to transition to an open-ended sort of art school. There were unit names and a timetable, but not overly meaningful in terms of which direction we would go or what our aspirations were.

Chris: I was going to ask you about the sort of photography that you were into, but you’ve just showed me an image. This is an image that you took while you were there?

Paul: I’ve just pulled that image out Chris, on my phone to show you. It was in my particular year, halfway through we became a little grumpy with the course, and there were quite a number of mature age students in the group. I was a youngie, but we held a, this will appeal to you, a theatrical revolution. We decided we were pushing back hard and we actually wrote a manifesto with a list of demands, all very studentish, but it had purpose. We had some sense that we didn’t know what we wanted. I certainly didn’t. But the theatrical component was fantastic

Chris: This image you’ve just shown me is of a young man. Oh, it’s you. I didn’t recognize you. It’s the curly black locks of hair. You’re in a sort of Che Guevara beret with dark glasses and a sort of military looking uniform holding a rifle with the Eureka flag hanging from the end of it. Against what I presume is a completely studio white background.

Paul: Yeah, that’s a fair description. It’s me at the ripe old age of 18, I think.

Chris: And did you take this, Is this a self-portrait?

Paul: It was a group exercise, not constructed from staff. We built this ourselves. We agreed on a form of street theatre I guess, but in the studio. We all went away and gathered what we could. I think I’ve got my grandfather’s old First World War rifle there. I’m not sure where that came from. But with the bolt removed, couldn’t be used. But I guess a sign of how different the times are, is I retrieved this rifle from a shed to participate in this mock revolution, wrapped a blanket around it and got on a tram. I’m not sure, I don’t think I’d get very far these days. And that was happening amongst a group of a dozen of us. One fellow, a colleague, went to a local army disposals place and borrowed machetes, no questions asked and put it in his car and drove it down. So we held this mock revolution. It was particularly our year level that did it, but it was just another exploration of something where we didn’t know what we were missing, but we felt it was something and we thought we’d push and to the staff’s credit they responded. Initially, I think, challenged by it, but they reacted very positively and one particular staff member actually participated in some of the protests.

Chris: Let’s talk a little bit about the staff because you’ve already said that they weren’t the traditional academic teaching background. I know one of your teachers was Paul Cox, who probably a lot of us think about as a filmmaker, but he was a very good photographer.

Paul: Absolutely. He came to Australia as a European trained photographer, very much in the European tradition, set up the Photographer’s Gallery in South Yarra, initially and started teaching at Prahran. I don’t know exactly what year he started, but he was in full flight, I think, during my years there and had a strong interest in film and ran the cinematography unit. Many students worked on his films, and we made our own films. So yeah, that was, you know, the early days of his career in film, but he’d had a long career prior to that as a photographer. The other staff, there were five that I can recall and a technician, but Athol Shmith, a very well-known Melbourne Collins Street photographer, he’d had a huge career. He was a photographer of celebrities. You know, he had photographed Vivien Leigh and Ava Gardner, there’s a beautiful book of portraits out there of Athol’s work so he was the senior fellow when I was there, Head of Department. John Cato, who would probably be described as photography royalty. In Melbourne, he’d been a business partner of Athols. Paul Cox, who we may know, yes, more from his films, but his photographs were also very, powerful, and a man with great charisma, I think, and influenced a lot of people. People would either warm to him or offended by him, one or the other it seems, or both sometimes in the same sense.

Bryan Gracey was there and a gentleman named Derrick Lee, but there was a kind of breadth of style that, no matter where you sat on the spectrum of aspiration, photographic aspiration, there would be someone that would get what you were doing or stimulate it in some way.

Chris: How important to you was that intersection between the kind of educational side, the I’m in a course and I come along and I’m learning some things. and the fact that then connected you to the professional industry, that you didn’t have to go out and seek the professional world that it was sort of coming into the classroom?

Paul: Look, I’ probably argue that it didn’t come into the classroom. The professional, if we’re talking about the commercial world, and we must remember that, you know, the photography department at the NGV, the National Gallery Victoria, arrived around that time. I don’t know the date exactly. So, you know, photography within the art world was a newish thing. And certainly private galleries, you know, larger cultural institutions hadn’t quite caught onto it yet. It was still emerging. On the commercial side of things, there was a few attempts at putting us out into the world. I recall an exercise where we were let loose at the Royal Melbourne Hospital with our cameras and there was some fantastic work done, by not by me, by some of my colleagues that were very suited to that work and some of them went on and had fantastic careers, many of them. Which is a point I’d like to make about that period in Prahran. If we looked across the photographic landscape of Australia, the number of photographers that came out of that decade or so is extraordinary across Australia. The contributions from photojournalism to fine art, a broad range, so many different directions that people went. Which to me is an accolade for what was happening there.

Chris: What direction did you take?

Paul: Multiple. I left there like most art students with no idea what that meant, you know, so I had this piece of paper that told me I could do something. I worked in a Cine film lab for long enough to save a small amount of money and bought a one way ticket to Greece and did the Europe thing, but mostly in Greece. I came back a year later and went down to the unemployment office and they got me a job two weeks later or less, working for a government department as a photographer.
I did architectural work. I was also a medical photographer at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital, and I was also at the Austin Hospital for a short while. So I did kind of 10 years of that, and then I went back to university and added a couple of things to my bit of paper, which enabled me to be less specialist and possibly earn a living.

Chris: Were we in the digital world by then?

Paul: No, no, we’re still at about 1985, 86 or 87. In 1987 I started teaching photography at a TAFE college in Ballarat, in the era when TAFE was funded very well and again pre student fees. Great job, great environment, great colleagues. Yeah, I felt very, very fortunate.

Chris: The revolutionary Paul Lambeth in that Photo, that’s in the exhibition?

Paul: It is, its in a glass case. At least it’s the photo in a glass case and not me. A joke made yesterday is we’ve made it to museum status. Yes, there is that and other images in the exhibition.

Chris: So what else did you contribute to this exhibition?

Paul: Many people submitted work. The curators particularly wanted—it’s a legacy process—they particularly wanted to see images from that period, not what I’ve done since. So I was working on images that were quite abstract in a sense. If there was a Prahran style, if there was, it may have been very strong in documentary street photography. There’s some fantastic practitioners in that genre that came out of Prahan. But that wasn’t me. I was taking photographs of creek beds and you know, hills and things. Quite organic, yeah, but also quite abstracted.

Chris: Well, we can see your work and the work of others at this exhibition, The Basement, photography from Prahran College 1968 to 1981. It’s at the Museum of Australian Photography in Wheelers Hill, running until the 25th of May and there’s a couple of events that people might want to come along to. Saturday 3rd May, teaching the history and theory of photography with Norbert Loefler, a lecture. A week later on the 10th, students of cinema with Adrian Danks, Peter Leiss and Mimmo Cossolino, and then on the 24th of May, the day before the end of the exhibition, the performance portrait with Angela Connor, who I think was the curator of the exhibition.

Paul: There are two curators, Angela Connor and Stella Loftus Hills. Angela is the senior curator at the Australian Museum of Photography.

Chris: And there’s a book?

Paul: Yes, there’s a book. They’ve put together a publication. I haven’t seen it yet. No one has. It’s still at the publishers, but on its way to be launched, I think it is on the 15th?

Chris: So I guess if people want to go and see the exhibition, the book will be on sale there, but the Museum of Australian Photography website will no doubt have links to be able to lay your hands on that book. Paul Lambeth lovely to catch up with you, thanks. And hear about your teen years, as a fledgling photographer and well done sticking at it all these years.

Paul: Well, yes, it’s like most things. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, but thanks, Chris. I appreciate the chat.