Abenteuer Reportagefotografie – Podcast über visuelles Storytelling Cover

Abenteuer Reportagefotografie – Podcast über visuelles Storytelling

Kai Behrmann: Visueller Storyteller und Fotograf
Since 11/2016 428 Episoden

Beyond the Outback Myth: Adam Ferguson’s “Big Sky” and the Ethics of Documentary Photography (Interview in English)

In this episode, Pia Parolin and I sat down with Australian photographer Adam Ferguson at the Media Days of the "La Gacilly – Baden Photo"-Festival, which runs until mid-October 2025 in Baden, near Vienna.

31.08.2025 71 min

Zusammenfassung & Show Notes

In this episode, Pia Parolin and I sat down with Australian photographer Adam Ferguson at the Media Days of the "La Gacilly – Baden Photo"-Festival, which runs until mid-October 2025 in Baden, near Vienna.

Our conversation centers on “Big Sky”, his decade-long exploration of Australia’s interior. What began in 2013 as an attempt to move beyond the romantic clichés of the Outback grew into a complex portrait of rural life—shrinking towns, enduring Indigenous connections to land, and the pressing realities of climate change and globalization.

In this episode, Pia Parolin and I sat down with Australian photographer Adam Ferguson at the Media Days of the "La Gacilly – Baden Photo"-Festival, which runs until mid-October 2025 in Baden, near Vienna.

Adams combines a documentary eye with a conceptual approach to visual storytelling.

A World Press Photo and American Photography award-winner, he has made a name for himself capturing stories from conflict zones and cultural frontiers around the globe.

Our conversation centers on “Big Sky”, his decade-long exploration of Australia’s interior. What began in 2013 as an attempt to move beyond the romantic clichés of the Outback grew into a complex portrait of rural life—shrinking towns, enduring Indigenous connections to land, and the pressing realities of climate change and globalization.

Inspired in part by Richard Avedon’s "In the American West", Ferguson expanded the idea of portraiture to include landscapes and environments, weaving them into the lives of his subjects. "Big Sky" is both personal and political: a reflection on his own homeland and a meditation on the broader forces shaping identity and belonging in the 21st century.

Adam’s photographs have been published in prestigious media outlets such as The New York Times, National Geographic, and Time magazine. His work can also be explored directly via his own website at adamfergusonstudio.com

And one more note: although this podcast is generally in German, from time to time we publish conversations in English with renowned photographers such as Martin Parr, Steve McCurry, or Brent Stirton.

More information, links and images: https://www.abenteuer-reportagefotografie.de/podcast/adam-ferguson


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Transkript

Adam Ferguson
00:00:03
And I think that's why when I did discover photography or discover documentary photography all of a sudden it felt like a very clear and easy expression of some of the questions that I had about the world so I was very much gravitated towards photography that explored social issues and conflict and geopolitics.
Kai Behrmann
00:00:30
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Abenteuer Reportage Photography podcast. In this episode, Pia Parolin and I sat down with Australian photographer Adam Ferguson at the media days of the La Gassili Baden Photo Festival, which still runs until mid-October this year, 2025, in Baden, near Vienna. In his work, Adam combines a documentary eye with a conceptual approach to visual storytelling. A World Press Photo and American Photography Award winner, he has made a name for himself capturing stories from conflict zones and cultural frontiers around the globe. Our conversation centers on Big Sky, his decade-long exploration of Australia's interior. What began in 2013 as an attempt to move beyond the romantic clichés of the outback grew into a complex portrait of rural life, shrinking towns, enduring indigenous connections to land, and the pressing realities of climate change and globalization. Inspired in part by Richard Avedon's In the American West, Ferguson expanded the idea of portraiture to include landscapes and environments, weaving them into the lives of his subjects. Big Sky is both personal and political, a reflection on his own homeland and a meditation on the broader forces shaping identity and belonging in the 21st century. Adams' images have been published in prestigious media outlets such as the New York Times, National Geographic and Time magazine. His work can also be explored directly via his own website at adamfergusonstudio.com. And one more note, although this podcast is generally in German, from time to time we publish conversations in English with renowned photographers such as Martin Parr, Steve McCurry or Brent Sturton. Check out the show notes in your podcast app for links to this episode and further information. And now let's dive straight into our conversation with Adam Ferguson, recorded live at Lagasili Baden-Photo. Enjoy! Well, hello, Adam. Good morning. Thank you very much for taking the time for this interview. It's a pleasure to be talking to you.
Adam Ferguson
00:02:50
My pleasure, Kai. Thanks for having me.
Kai Behrmann
00:02:53
Adam, you have a big exhibition here at the Baden Photo Festival. And it's always a great opportunity to meet many interesting photographers from around the world. This year, Australia is the focus of the festival. Before we get into your work and what you're showing here, let's go back a little bit. How did you originally get started in photography?
Adam Ferguson
00:03:22
I kind of fell into photography in my early 20s. I was a bit of a lost young man and I met a photographer and had this crazy idea that I would be an extreme sports photographer. I was 20 years old, living in my hometown, and applied for art college where this photographer I'd met had studied and shot a portfolio on my mother's camera in a day. I didn't even have a camera at the time. I had actually been kicked out of photography class in my last years of high school because I was misbehaving. And if only that teacher could see me now. And then I went to art college and instantly at art college I was exposed to documentary photography and photojournalism and art photography and started looking at monographs by some of the great photographers. And I'd never looked at long form photo essays before or serious press photography. And when I saw it, I just knew that that's what I wanted to do with my life and never really looked back.
Kai Behrmann
00:04:33
What does being lost mean?
Adam Ferguson
00:04:36
I think I was a bit disillusioned with the state of the world. I had gone from a studious young kid who was school captain to basically dropping out of high school and feeling a lot of frustration and anger with the state of the world, the state of the environment. And I think that's why when I did discover photography or discover documentary photography all of a sudden it felt like a very clear and easy expression of some of the questions that I had about the world so I was very much gravitated towards, photography that explored social issues and conflict and geopolitics.
Kai Behrmann
00:05:21
Photography is a wonderful medium to discover the world and to kind of make sense of what you see. It ties into what you said, this feeling of being lost and not knowing what direction to go into. What is it particularly about photography that you find so fascinating that you picked it up as your tool to tell stories and to express yourself? I mean, there's other forms. There's video, there's writing, painting.
Adam Ferguson
00:05:54
Yeah, I really don't know how to answer that question. It was probably circumstantial, I think. It just, that was the mode of storytelling that I stumbled across. And it wasn't painting, and it was, I think there was, I was intrigued by the idea of interacting with people and making pictures through that. The very first project that I did in my first semester of art college, my response to the world was to go out and make portraits of humans in situ, in their environments. And everyone in the class responded completely differently. Like some people went out and took fine art kind of detailed pictures and were much more conceptual. But I made portraits of real people. So I think the camera being this kind of tool to converse with people and collaborate with people, I found quite exciting as a storytelling technique.
Kai Behrmann
00:06:59
And the photographer that you got in contact with that opened up this world of photography for you, who was that? And what was it that you saw that ignited this?
Adam Ferguson
00:07:15
You know, I mean, that photographer, he was really just a commercial photographer who was a friend of my good mate's, older brother. And he had his medium format cameras and we were skateboarding all weekend. And I was intrigued by the equipment and the process of making imagery. And my mother had taken a lot of imagery. She always had cameras when I was a kid that I remember. So I think there was something that resonated. There was like a latent childhood experience in there around the camera. And so I felt drawn to that. But it was really towards the end of art college when I started to engage with more serious photojournalists that my world opened up as a photographer. And I had a lot of really great mentors. Was Gary Knight, Christopher Morris, Antonin Kratocheville, Yeah.
Pia Parolin
00:08:16
And when you started to take portraits, what exactly did you look for in these portraits? Do you remember as a 20-year-old kid? Because it's sometimes difficult to take portraits. You have to really step in front of a person that you don't know. You have to open up. The person has to open up with you. What did you look for there?
Adam Ferguson
00:08:36
I think I was looking for a view behind the curtain, so to speak. I was trying to make portraits that you don't necessarily see. I was trying to enter worlds that you don't see on a day-to-day basis. So as an art student, I was hanging out with homeless people on the streets of Brisbane in Australia. And I was making what felt like to me at the time quite intimate portraits of the places where they slept late at night. I spent time with nurses, car salesmen, builders but I always kind of photographed them in a way that felt like it was, transcending the obvious representation of who that individual was and I think that's something that for whatever reason I've kind of carried into the portraiture that I'm perhaps showing here. When I sit with people and talk to people there's always a long interview process and I let the photograph come out of that process and look for like signifiers in their environment which makes sense to the kind of things that they tell me or their experience and there's this, collaboration that happens um through that conversation um and i well i i attempt to at least of course sometimes i fail but i always strive to make a portrait which kind of looks beyond the obvious and shows something that um transcends the everyday and is intimate and tells us hopefully tells us something that we we didn't know as humans yeah.
Pia Parolin
00:10:16
And and this implies that that you really get into a conversation with a person? Or do you also take pictures without asking the people, just, you know, unposed pictures where you think you understand the situation and then carry on? Or do you always ask the person also what is really going on?
Adam Ferguson
00:10:40
I mean, it's a bit different every time, I would say, and depending on the project or the body of work that we're talking about. With the Australia work, my series Big Sky that I'm showing here in Baden, some of the portraits were very premeditated. I had reached out to a subject in advance and kind of negotiated a meeting and an interaction. But I always start with an interview and a conversation and then see where it leads from there. But then there's other portraits within that body of work and in the monograph where I just met somebody randomly, you know, and took their photo five minutes later. And so it's a real mix of interactions. But I would say the majority of the time it comes out of a longer conversation. Yeah, but then sometimes for whatever reason you just stumble across, you know, an individual that wants to talk and it all happens very intuitively and fast. Mm-hmm.
Kai Behrmann
00:11:45
And these skills to interact with people and to open up people to make them feel comfortable or, yeah, to feel recognized, it's something that's, I think, the hardest to learn in photography. It's easy to pick up a camera, learn the manual, know how to, well, use a camera, but then to really take the pictures that you're taking and to make it really stand out, to get to these pictures, it's a long way. It's interactions, it's knowing people, knowing the psychology of people. And can you tell a little bit about that, how you approach that and how, yeah, for someone who wants to get into photography at that level, how do you get there?
Adam Ferguson
00:12:32
I mean, as a young photographer, I think I was guilty of being very focused on the image and very focused on the product of photography, so to speak. But as I've kind of grown up and practiced now for, I'm going to sound old, like two decades, I've kind of learned that emotional photography is just a byproduct of an interaction or a personal journey. So I think that is always key for me in the way I work now. I get less fixated on the image and really try and invest time with people or be very immersive in the way I navigate situations and very immersive in the way I kind of approach my own experience. And then I think through that, good photography can come rather than going out and trying to make a good picture, so to speak.
Kai Behrmann
00:13:32
Before you turn your focus on your home country, Australia, you went out into the world, you photographed in many regions, conflict, photography, Afghanistan, for example. What was it that made you leave Australia for the first part of your career? uh and then
Adam Ferguson
00:13:53
I mean as i very much wanted to travel as a as a young man i was very kind of ambitious and wanted to go out and interact with the world and you know work for the global media and participate in big important stories that felt like you know very important for me um in conjunction with that um the media industry in australia was not healthy um and i couldn't get a job as a young photographer working for any newspapers. There was very few jobs. So I decided to take off into the world and start freelancing. And that's what I did. So I built my career abroad, not in Australia. And that felt important to me because part of that disillusion I felt as a young man, I very much wanted to participate in big geopolitical stories. I wanted to photograph the you know what felt like the most kind of pressing issues of the time which was the post 9-11 wars um you know i'd protested against the war in iraq and afghanistan while at university and i wanted to go out and and participate in those conversations as a photographer and as a storyteller um so i had my i had my sights very firmly set on that and and and did it i lived in in south asia for four years and southeast asia for another five years lived in paris and worked pretty extensively. But I had a bit of crisis, a crisis of confidence. It was in 2011, actually, I was working in Afghanistan. And it was the decade anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. And I was in an ambush with U.S. Army troops. And Sergeant Daniel Quintana, who I was with, he was shot, killed quite close to me and um and i had this moment of just being like what am i doing with my life like what what is you know why am i rolling around in the mud on the afghanistan pakistan border risking my life for pictures and i'd very much prescribed to the the the ideology that you know pictures change the course of the vietnam war and photojournalism makes a different but difference and you know well there's arguments for and against that i definitely hit a point in my life where I felt a bit of an existential crisis, where I started to question the efficacy of conflict photography. And it felt like a lot of the images that I was making as a war photographer. Couldn't help but exist within a larger framework, which ultimately kind of validated the war in many ways. You know, it was very hard to cover the insurgency, but the process of embedding meant that I, you know, humanized the American soldiers immensely, but the enemy was never kind of humanized. So I started to have very conflicting emotions around my role as a photojournalist and what that meant and the impact I was having. And out of that crisis came the decision to move home. Well, not move home, but to start a project at home. I'd worked for years through translators and in foreign contexts and started to also question the colonial and imperial nature of the kind of storytelling that I was participating in. And so it just felt like I did what every artist does when they have a crisis. They go and make work at home, I guess. So I started traveling to home on a regular basis and working in Australia.
Pia Parolin
00:17:34
Yeah, I'm wondering, you have to put the photos that you take into a larger context because you maybe or many people maybe start with a specific vision of something and they arrive in a place to take the photos and Maybe they don't really correspond to what the reality is, because we have such a preconcept in our heads. This is what, I guess, happens to many people who are not journalists, but who just travel and take photos. So I wonder, how can someone avoid this? I mean, is it by reading a lot before, by talking to the people? How can you really be open-minded to what is really going on, what people really want to tell you, instead of just putting your own view on top of them?
Adam Ferguson
00:18:33
Well, I think it's important to be aware and educated and well-read, but I think that can be a double-edged sword. I think sometimes being naive can be quite liberating and you experience stuff freshly. And you're informed in a way that's very kind of like firsthand rather than going into context with preconceptions. And of course, the way you process that intellectually is different. To the way you end up photographing as well um the the executing a story visually is is something that happens kind of in parallel to kind of that that knowledge that you have about um a human or a particular social context or a country um so i think it's very important as a photographer to be always kind of like questioning um the role of the image and the types of images uh we all make um And kind of holding it up to a set of standards which is constantly evolving over time as artistic dialogue changes and as modes of storytelling change. And I don't know, it's important to, I guess, try and subvert historical narratives as much as we can and try and bring new perspectives to stories rather than reinforcing old ones.
Pia Parolin
00:20:00
In fact, I think what is key to making photos that really help people make an opinion, that is maybe one of the important things that we have to understand. And maybe you found some of these keys. How do you transport reality through your camera, through your photos, so that people can make their own opinion by watching your photos?
Adam Ferguson
00:20:34
I don't think you can ever capture reality. It's an absolute, you know, I think all photography, even in many ways the purest form of press photography, is still an abstraction of reality. So i don't believe in in any truth in photography it's a very kind of complex layered um, kind of visual conversation i mean a photographer makes an image uh you know that person who's in the photograph has their own experience the photographer has an experience this image then lives in the world separate to the person in the picture and separate to the photographer and then has its own life as an image and then the audience brings their own experience to that picture so oh, it's this big, it's an organism, I guess, or an ecosystem of knowledge, which in many ways you don't have a lot of control of after you've put that image into the world. So, I mean, all you can do is attempt to make a statement, that you believe in, and then the rest is up to the audience participation in that conversation. Yeah.
Kai Behrmann
00:21:46
Maybe something that ties into that, what kind of responsibility do you feel towards the subjects you photograph? I mean, you bring your vision of the story and you express that in your images, which might, in some cases, not have anything to do with how your subjects would tell their stories. Is that something you think about?
Adam Ferguson
00:22:10
Yeah, I've thought about that a lot, especially covering stories that are difficult for the individuals. Like, you know, I've worked with migrants in Mexico and, you know, groups of Yazidis in Iraq that have been kidnapped by ISIS and Afghans. So and you know you make you make one image which is representative of a person but of course their life is so much more layered and dimensional than that one picture so that's something that has haunted me a little bit I must say like you know feeling like this single abstraction, or and it's you know in many ways photography can be inherently exploitive you kind of this one picture kind of is taken from somebody and then that person lives on and this image kind of lives on and sometimes those images become iconic. I'm not saying minor iconic, but we can think of a lot of iconic images made by other photographers that they kind of live beyond the human in them and they actually become a symbol for something else. They're not even about the person in the picture anymore. So I don't know if I've answered the question, but it's something that I've thought quite a lot about. Yeah. I made a project a couple of years ago in 2020 with migrants in Mexico. And I guess I tell this story because I guess it comes out of the question you're asking me, which is a question I had for myself. What is the role of... I guess the sitter um so i decided to let migrants make self-portraits in mexico um and for me that was a way of um you know trying to subvert my role as a documentary photographer instead of going in and gazing and and extracting a picture on one of the the people i was working with to participate in the act of documenting their own lives um so i you know i very i deliberately used a very traditional uh visual language that kind of referenced the you know u.s farm administration classic you know dorothy lang you know documentary photography um and just set you know i worked on black and white film and set a camera up on a tripod um but then gave all the migrants a cable release to photograph themselves so it was um yeah it was a bit of an experiment i guess to see what happened when i like actually didn't make the picture myself i I became more of a facilitator or a director in the process.
Kai Behrmann
00:24:48
What other questions are you grappling with related to your work as a photojournalist?
Adam Ferguson
00:24:54
Oh, wow. I mean, in many ways, I'm at an interesting point in my career because I guess you would say I'm at a midpoint in my career. Um you know i'm in my mid-40s and i've been working as a photographer for you know two decades mostly as a photojournalist and in some ways i'm stepping back from photojournalism now and the work that i'm showing here kind of i guess sat on the fence a bit between you know more traditional documentary photography and um work that was more conceptualized and personal and, I had very clear ideas about what that story would be and in some ways that story is a fiction that comes out of myself more than going out purely being a documentarian who's very deliberately trying to highlight issues that are anchored in data or the real world. So again, I'm not sure I've answered your question but I'm very much interested in making artwork that's conceptual now. And I think maybe that's just a symptom of growing up a bit too, you know, like as a practitioner you kind of change and it's important to try new things and evolve and move in different directions.
Pia Parolin
00:26:19
Related to this, I would like to ask you about assignments. I mean, as a young photographer, you probably also had the need to take up assignments just to earn money or something. But when I listen to you, I feel a very strong personality. Like you always knew what you were looking for and what you wanted. So your intrinsic motivation is very high, very impulsive maybe even. And how did you deal with assignments then that maybe did not fit 100% your perspective or your interest?
Adam Ferguson
00:26:56
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I think ultimately I, well, I mean, obviously it's not the case all the time. I definitely have done some assignments for the paycheck because it was a job and it was, you know, an interesting enough story and all the rest of it. But I'd say for the majority of the work, I tended to engineer assignments around the issues that I wanted to photograph. So I've always been independent. I've never worked as a staff photographer. And when I wanted to work in Afghanistan and cover that conflict, I traveled there myself and started working independently. And then I took assignments. And I only really worked in that area for the best part of five years. And then a lot of the work that I did after that kind of came out of that then I started working in Iraq because I wanted to go to Iraq, I'd watched the whole US military after 2010 kind of migrate to Afghanistan from Iraq and all the international press community migrate with it, and I was very curious to see what a country looked like after that kind of power vacuum had happened So I started to work in Iraq when no one else was really working there and started to engineer assignments back there to keep that going. And then I did the same with my Australia work. I started that as a personal project, but at some point, it's very expensive to travel and sustain personal work. So I started to engineer magazine assignments in Australia that would allow me to create personal work simultaneously. So, yeah, I've always tried to make assignments work for me, in a sense, and have the assignments align with my personal vision and the kinds of issues and stories that I've wanted to cover.
Pia Parolin
00:28:47
Yeah, it's great if you can do it, if you succeed in that. I mean, it's not given to everybody, I guess. So that's something that keeps the motivation going also, right? I mean, you spoke about your little breakdown and things, but you're still a photojournalist because you have this strong motivation. I think this is linked to this attitude, to this intrinsic motivation that you have. But maybe on a more, let's say, not personal, but global scale, what do you think about photojournalism? How is it changing today? And are you concerned about this?
Adam Ferguson
00:29:30
I mean, photojournalism has been, I guess, has been changing since the moment it was conceived. But it has changed more rapidly in the last two decades, you know, with the transition from, you know, analog technology to digital technology. And then, of course, the smartphone or the cell phone revolutionized not just photojournalism, but journalism in general and the dissemination of information. Because everyone's a documentarian with the phone in our hands. And we watched some of the most important pictures of the Iraq war were taken by US service people on point-and-shoot cameras and cell phones. And we saw that play out in various conflicts And obviously we've watched, you know, Gaza, some of the most important war photography of this recent war between Hamas and Israel has been made by citizen journalists. And then that is, you know, ultimately photojournalism. So I think, you know, photography is the most consumed visual medium that we have or the most consumed storytelling medium in general, really. So it's, you know, it's an exciting time for photography. It's the most accessible, vernacular, and shared global language. But as far as the traditional models of working as a photojournalist, I mean, they've completely broken down at the same time as photography has become more important than ever. You know, the magazines have all declined and social media has changed advertising models, which means there's no advertising budgets to support magazines and newspapers. Of course, there's still a select few that are thriving, but the majority of them have crumbled. So... But photojournalism and the state of it now, it feels less important for someone like me to travel to a foreign context and make a story when people within that story themselves and have a much more intimate relationship with that story are documenting and posting it in real time. So, I mean, in some ways, the role of the photojournalist traditionally, when we talk about photojournalists, is kind of redundant, I think, in many ways. And I'm not saying that with any cynicism or saying that's a bad thing. It's kind of the way it is.
Kai Behrmann
00:32:13
Is that reflected in how, for example, the World Press Award has changed over the last couple of years, giving more room to photographers from the different regions around the world and not to photographers traveling from the Western world to those countries?
Adam Ferguson
00:32:35
Uh yeah i guess i guess that it that is a reflection of that there's like priority given to yeah to storytellers specific to regions um rather than you know traditionally like you know anglo men um traveling on assignment for for you know the the leading kind of european in American magazines. And, you know, I guess that's, I mean, it's exciting. I mean, you know, photography has kind of been a tool of imperialism, you know, from the very early days of colonization and as much as we can idealize the notion that documenting, you know, foreign cultures is important, And, you know, it can also keep those mechanisms of imperialism in place. So I think it's very important that local storytellers have the opportunity to make their own work. The pitfall is that a lot of them are educated on the pictures that have been made by white storytellers. And it would be better if they were making pictures without ever having seen National Geographic. But maybe I shouldn't have said that out loud.
Kai Behrmann
00:33:55
But that brings us to your project here, A Big Sky, where also this narrative, the existing narrative of the outback in Australia, the colonial history that ties into all that, and that you're very conscious of that and deliberately trying to move beyond that in your work.
Adam Ferguson
00:34:18
Yeah, that was the aim. I went... I started Big Sky in response to my own story, in a sense. I spent the first few years of my life in a small country town, and my mother's grandparents were from a wheat and sheep farm. So I've very much grown up with this kind of Anglo-settler identity, which I didn't really consider until I started returning to Australia and working on this project. But there's always been these kind of cliches around, you know, the bush and the outback And especially living abroad, watching like an American perception of Australia You know, Crocodile Dundee and these tropes And the way the outback is kind of romanticized in a sense, And this notion of the, you know, the bush This kind of, this concept of the interior of the country And it's very similar, I guess, to the notion of the American West in Australia. And it's romanticized politically in Australia as well. We hold our pastoralists, our farmers very kind of dear to our hearts. So when I started to work, I wanted to make a series of images which was an update of that narrative, like a contemporary portrait, if you like. Something that wasn't cowboys and sunsets and heroism, but something that unpacked, I guess, the global trends affecting the interior of Australia and that landscape. And they're the same trends that are affecting rural communities all over the world, mechanization, climate change, centralization. And the place that is romanticized, you know, these thriving farms and, you know, roost shooters and pastoralism and, you know, sheep and cattle and, you know. It's all been in kind of rapid decline in many ways. There's large parts of the outback that are in population decline and, you know, big conglomerates by the cattle stations and there's not the community out there that there used to be. And of course all this is on top of the inherent fact that, you know, Australians are still living on stolen, unceded Aboriginal land. And I think Australia as a nation is still processing and grappling that, you know, such recent history. So part of the work is looking at that as well, this kind of post-colonial legacy and what that looks like on stolen land. A big part of the project was also engaging with Indigenous Australians and spending time with them on country and hearing their stories and making portraits of Indigenous Australians. I really struggled, well, not struggled, but, you know, I had a big question on how I would approach that as a white photographer. You know, like what business do I have as an Anglo settler going out making pictures on Aboriginal land? So I ended up really just asking for permission. That was the, I mean, it's always the most important thing regardless of who you're spending time with. But I asked for permission and then I sat and I waited and I tried to, and this relates to what we're talking about before, I tried to drop all my preconceptions. And instead of going in kind of knowing what I wanted, I kind of sat and listened and let the people I spent time with kind of guide those interactions and waited to be invited to places. And then I sent the images that I liked back to the communities, for them to culturally sign off on the image and deem that they were culturally safe and those individuals in those photographs were happy for those pictures to be used, which I didn't do with any of the Anglo settler Australians or the non-Indigenous Australians in my book, of course. But that felt like an important part of the process, just to give people in the photographs a little bit of agency. And of course, Indigenous Australia is steeped in social issues and poverty and incarceration and the statistics are incredibly alarming but I also made the decision to only use portraits of Indigenous Australians where they felt dignified and proud where they felt strong and of course I made pictures where people didn't look like that but I didn't keep them in my edit.
Kai Behrmann
00:39:01
And somewhere I read in an interview that you were telling a story how you got invited to photograph indigenous people. You went to a cultural ritual and wanted to photograph there and everybody said no. And they didn't agree to be photographed. And then when someone asks you to take them with you on a ride and you spend more than 600 miles driving back a family and that opens the door for you to photograph them. And it's, well, I think it's, maybe you can tell the story behind that, but I think it reflects this huge amount of patience you need to get access.
Adam Ferguson
00:39:54
Yeah, I think you're perhaps referring to a portrait in the book by a Warra Kerner elder by the name of Daisy Ward. And yeah, I traveled to Warburton in Western Australia and it was secret men's business time. And what happens out in the desert in Pichinjarra country is that they still initiate the young coming-of-age men, the young boys, as part of their rite of passage. So the elders and the initiated men will move through the different communities and gather all the men, all the young boys. And it changes seasonally and the location changes each year depending on many things that are beyond my comprehension, to be honest. And they get to a place and then they have the initiation ceremony. So I turned up to Warburton when this was happening and I couldn't be there as a white fella. It just wasn't my business. I didn't have strong relationships with the elders and even if I did, I think I would feel quite complicated about photographing that. But of course I'm still a photographer and of course I would love to photograph that if I was invited. But I couldn't. So I had to basically hide out the back of the petrol station or the gas station for three days until it had finished. I couldn't move. It would have been incorrect of me to move and be on the road. So I just had to hide. And every night I could hear things going on in the community and felt very frustrated as a storyteller that I just had to. And selfishly, of course, I had to sit out of that. And then all the ceremony, the men's business finished a few days later. And all the men would come to the petrol station to buy some food. And they all had faces painted with ochre. They all had these kind of red faces. And of course, I wanted to take an image at the petrol station too. And I went to lift my camera at one point, actually, because I thought maybe it was okay. and one of the men just kind of like looked at me and kind of motioned for me to put the camera down so I didn't pick it back up. And I felt a bit defeated and I was filling up the car with petrol and getting ready to hit the road. And then Daisy, this woman approached me and asked me where I was driving to. And I said I was driving back into the Northern Territory. And she asked me for a lift. And coincidentally, I'd met her very briefly, like about 300 kilometers away. A few weeks earlier. We'd had a quick interaction because I was actually, I was doing a New York Times magazine, sorry, a New York Times newspaper assignment. And she'd come up to me and asked me what I was doing. And I was like, I'm taking photos for the New York Times. And she was like, I've been to New York. And she just kind of kept walking. And I didn't think much of it at the time. I kind of thought maybe she was joking, but she had been to New York for an Indigenous conference. And then after giving her a lift back to Orokerner, I kind of realized that And she was one of the most important female elders in that area, or the most important. And when I dropped her off, she was so grateful for the lift that she asked me to kind of stay. And she would show me her country, her birthplace, and tell me some stories, her dreaming stories about her land. So I stayed and spent the next few days with Daisy. And yeah And I guess a lot of the work That I made kind of comes out of that Process of, Just surrendering to people that want to spend time with me and talk to me and are happy to share stuff.
Pia Parolin
00:43:54
Yeah, that's wonderful. I mean, she understood your personality so that she knew she could trust you. That's the most important thing about photography in the end, that people can trust you,
Adam Ferguson
00:44:05
Right? I think it is, yeah. I think it's really important to forge, I guess, sometimes immediate and quick rapport and trust with people.
Pia Parolin
00:44:17
I have a question that is maybe very European focused. I mean, you are in a difficult position from my point of view, because as you said, you are a white European descendant, but you are an Australian also. So from my perspective, I think, is it enough to change the name of Ayers Rock to Uluru and these things? Or does the change to really leave this colonial perspective that dominates start when the local First Nation people get their own cameras and make their own reports?
Adam Ferguson
00:45:00
Yeah i mean there is first nations uh artists working um not enough of course but no there is a few making making work and i mean with the with the name changes um you know i made the decision in my monograph big sky to the indigenous place name everything and then put the european name afterwards and you know sometimes it feels a bit um tokenistic you know it feels a little contrived um to do this um but i think it's better than not doing it because it's an important uh recognition i think and i think that process of recognition is like a first step in a direction if you like to um to giving agency back to people that have been marginalized and persecuted um.
Kai Behrmann
00:45:54
This project big sky is a very long-term project very complex and takes a lot of time and patience how much of how the project has evolved had you mapped out when you first got started and how much has evolved along the way from the things that you'd learned
Adam Ferguson
00:46:12
You know when i first started i very much had our richard avidon's in the american west as my reference point i wanted to do a portrait survey of the Australian bush. But of course, Australia is an America. And when I got out there and I started to make portraits, I was working in colour film, but I wasn't making compositions this similar to Avedon. I was very much trying to do a colour version of that, if you like, my own version of that. But I realised very quickly that the... It was very important to show the land and that part of that story in Australia was about the landscape and the country and the human relationship to land, the Anglo settler relationship to land and the indigenous connection to country. So I started kind of pulling back instead of making tight portraits and positioning people in their environments to kind of show that space and that landscape um and that very unique environment and then of course it's such a huge country um, that the distances and the travel was so immense that um it then also morphed into this kind of you know the the great photographic road trip if you like where i was driving for you know sometimes it was like hundreds of kilometers every day generally and i in total i probably drove I don't know the exact number, but it would be over 200,000 kilometers over 10 years. I drove 70,000 kilometers in 2022 and 2023 to finish the project. So it became this, you know, portraits from this, you know, the original concept of making portraiture to expanding into, you know, landscape images. And of course, there's a sprinkle of more candid reportage, if you like, in there as well.
Kai Behrmann
00:48:07
Yeah, you show the people within their environment and you give a lot of context. And I think somewhere you also said that you try to make each picture also to be a metaphor for something else. There's one picture here, for example, where you see chairs hanging. I don't know what it is. kind of elevated they're not on the ground yeah
Adam Ferguson
00:48:41
Well you know funnily enough it's actually, I guess it is a metaphor, but it's also anchored in absolute reality. I made that image on a cattle station where the owner had suicided. And those chairs, that is a dry lake. But in the wet, it can just flash flood and turn into a wetland. So the chairs are hung in the tree. So when the rain comes and it comes quick and intensely, the chairs don't get washed away. Um but it so happens the farmer on that station also had suicided um and male suicide in remote parts of australia in the bush and the outback is is quite high globally um depression is high and um so you know the chairs i guess in my mind um are a metaphor for for that farmer um and that kind of mental health issue in the Outback. But, you know, I guess I think the most interesting photography is often ambiguous. And I try my best to do that throughout the other photos to make images which don't necessarily, you know, say exactly what's happening, but they allude to phenomena or allude to a bigger issue.
Pia Parolin
00:50:04
Did you have to to leave your own country in order to really understand it
Adam Ferguson
00:50:08
I think i did yeah i think i had to come back as a foreigner to my own country, and have i had so much distance um and so much other experience that in many ways uh you know after living overseas for 17 years felt uh you know a bit like an expat living in my own country when I returned and I think that was important for me at least to give me perspective and I guess to see it like I couldn't if I'd stayed there.
Kai Behrmann
00:50:42
You already alluded to this point in Afghanistan this existential crisis that led you or that pushed you towards focusing on your country and all the time you spent abroad gave you perspective and you couldn't have done this work without having been abroad. What other lessons were there that you learned that kind of enriched the work that you're doing now in your home country?
Adam Ferguson
00:51:13
I mean, I think just from a very basic craft perspective, I'd worked a lot in... You know, a camera in my hand kind of feels like second nature. So I'm not necessarily, when I go out working on stories now, I'm not very focused on the photography. The photography can just kind of come naturally, which is important. But I think, I mean, I think I've just learned to be a bit more humble and patient with people and realize that it's always about the person sitting in front of the camera. It's not about you and your camera I think as a young photographer, I probably didn't do that in some situations you know, you get a bit kind of swept up in the moment and the emotion of especially working in adverse contexts, you know, it all happens so fast and you kind of push through the world in a way, but I think having those experiences and then returning home to photograph, I'd learnt to slow down and wait and watch and listen and I guess let the people in front of the camera guide the photography more than try and guide the picture myself.
Kai Behrmann
00:52:36
Let's talk a little bit about influences. You mentioned a couple of names.
Adam Ferguson
00:52:41
Oh, so many.
Kai Behrmann
00:52:42
Yeah. Richard Avedon, James Nachjoy is also very important.
Adam Ferguson
00:52:48
Yeah, I think, you know, when I was starting out as a photojournalist, I mean, you know, all the great photojournalists were, you know, I mentioned... Uh gary knight and christopher morris before and that the whole crew at seven you know photo agency which i used to be part of um and then you know beyond that uh i definitely influenced by colleagues of my own generation who i learned a lot from like standing alongside working with um you know peter van agmel um and then you know and and you know i've also had the privilege of like standing next to some of my heroes, you know, out working and covering stories. You know, I've worked with James Natchway, who has always been an incredible influence and spent time with, you know, Eugene Richards and Paolo Pellegrin. Yeah, so many great photographers. Moses Saman. So, yeah. And then there's also been a lot of people that have influenced the work that I haven't had direct relationships with, I guess, you know, with the Australia work specifically. I mean, Alex Soth's work was obviously a big influence. His portraiture was a big influence. And I could go on and on. I'm a photography fan and there's so many great practitioners out there.
Kai Behrmann
00:54:12
When you look at the works of these names or these photographers you mentioned, what is it that you take away from them? Is it more on a conceptual level or on the way they compose their images?
Adam Ferguson
00:54:27
I think it's both. I think it's a conceptual level. It's like looking at a broad visual execution of an idea that is cohesive and makes sense. So it's always, when you see a project done like that, I find it very inspiring. Yeah, I think it's a combination of both things.
Kai Behrmann
00:54:50
And there's one famous Australian photographer also having an exhibition here, Trent Park. And I think he once said that he doesn't like to photograph outside of Australia. And that he's very, very happy to be in Australia. He doesn't like to travel very much. Can you relate to that now a little bit?
Adam Ferguson
00:55:11
I mean, you know, when I started out, when I was talking earlier about when I went to art college and, you know, I picked up Trent Park's book, Dream Life, which was street photography from Sydney. And that is probably one of the most influential books of my life because I'd never looked at a monograph of street photography before. And of course, then I discovered the whole genre of that kind of candid found photography. But yeah, I mean, Trent and his partner, Narelle, who's also exhibiting here, who is a wonderful photographer. Yeah, they've very much never... Photographed a lot overseas um and i think that's great that's wonderful i think i had to stretch my legs before i could stay focused on australia that that was uh i was curious to wonder um but i very much um respect that process of just photographing in your own backyard and i think um, i think that's that's an important lesson for young photographers too you know i often have young photographers ask me for advice and i'm like you know start working in your street like you know that's if you can photograph your own street you can photograph anywhere um it's easy to go and be seduced by you know exotic foreign things um and in some ways it was hard for me to come back and photograph australia and kind of learn to see something again which was you know not as exotic as the places i've been not as um, not as heightened politically um a little banal in many ways so um yeah a lot of respect for people that photograph in their own backyards last.
Kai Behrmann
00:56:55
Year here in baden we we sat down with martin parr and he said exactly the same thing that you have to learn how to photograph in your own backyard and and don't go out and it's it's about the picture about the story what you want to tell in your pictures and you don't have to travel very far but I guess it's always yeah there's this allure of foreign places and to discover things that are exotic and that spring to our eyes that call more attention than the things that we are so familiar with that we see everyday and to see beyond the everyday life and to see the specialness in them
Adam Ferguson
00:57:37
Yeah i mean i think there's a time and a place for photographers to or artists to travel to contexts that aren't their own and there's some i think there's some really significant work done by by people that have worked in context outside of their the one that they kind of have ownership of so to speak but you know coming back to that you know the role of the photojournalist before like i think it's more more important than ever to to work in your own context and, and have some, I guess, ownership over your own story and be able to work on your own story.
Pia Parolin
00:58:15
I have a question about your awards. You won quite a lot of awards for World Photo and different things. And I perceive you as a very humble person. And I ask myself, did these awards change something for you, your personality? Did they affect your career? Or is there one award that was particularly meaningful to you?
Adam Ferguson
00:58:47
I mean, I think they definitely, I think winning awards as a younger photographer helped me build a career. I think they were quite important. You know, winning a World Press Photo Award and things like this, it kind of helped me cement a career and get exposure, I guess. And it also gave the stories that I'd worked on, like another life and another audience beyond the publication of them. So I think winning awards and applying for awards or submitting to competitions was important as a young photographer. As I get a bit older, I'm less concerned and I enter less awards. But I think they served a pretty vital function in building a career for me. And it was always just an honor to have your work recognized and going to the ceremonies. You know, it was a good way to meet other people and share stories and hear how other people are practicing and the things other people are doing and learning from colleagues is probably one of the most important parts of it. Yeah.
Kai Behrmann
00:59:58
You moved through many stages within your career. You've been abroad now back in Australia. Looking forward, what's ahead of you? Are you excited to spend the next years?
Adam Ferguson
01:00:15
You know, I published Big Sky last year and then was so exhausted I couldn't even think about ever working again. But I'm just hitting that point now where I'm like, I can feel my feet tapping a little bit on the floor. I'm like, there's something missing, I'm ready for my next project. And I've got a few ideas, one in particular that I'm thinking I will start pursuing in August. But to answer your question, I'm going to keep photographing Australia.
Kai Behrmann
01:00:49
Now you've mentioned the shifts in photojournalism and how photojournalism is changing. Where do you see visual storytelling going? What other venues or possibilities are out there for photographers to show their work if it's not the big magazines and news media anymore?
Adam Ferguson
01:01:15
I mean, there's less and less avenues, I think, to show conventional photojournalism. And I also think that a younger audience doesn't respond to photojournalism like my generation does or our generation does. I think digital natives that have grown up consuming imagery on their cell phones, they don't look at the landscape picture that we look at on a double page of a magazine or they see pictures vertically and they respond to video and motion more than they do still. So I think as far as making meaningful storytelling, I think maybe photojournalism isn't the most... Adequate tool to do that and to reach an audience that engages through very different channels than my generation did. So, but I think it's still important to, you know, tell stories and I think it's still important to make work. I think making work in a, you know, an artistic capacity is still very valid. That's obviously a more fickle business model as a practitioner to work artistically than to work for National Geographic or Time Magazine or Stern or one of the traditional magazines. So, yeah, I don't know. It's a big question. I'm not sure I've answered that adequately, but yeah.
Kai Behrmann
01:02:40
How do you see yourself positioned in that or turning this body of work, Big Sky, into a book? How was that process?
Adam Ferguson
01:02:48
It was a total privilege. I published it with Gost Books, and we printed at EBS in Italy, which is a really great print house. But, you know, we printed 2,000 books, which is a big run for an art book. But also when you look at the way information is disseminated and consumed digitally, you know, 2000 is like barely a drop in the ocean of like sharing my story. But, you know, I guess it feels a meaningful way to share a story though because it's a solid object and it's tactile and it's, you know, you can have it in your library and it sits with people that care about photography and care about the story. So it has a I guess a more permanent place than than something that exists digitally, but I but I think I was very drawn to making a photo book because, I was originally inspired by photo books so you know part of it is out of nostalgia and wanting to kind of make this photo book myself yeah.
Kai Behrmann
01:03:54
The stories that you are telling now, they are very intrinsic in nature. And you said that once the pictures are out there and the work is out there, it's not in your hands anymore what people make of it. How important is that or the reception of your work in the public? How do you think about that part?
Adam Ferguson
01:04:15
Yeah, I mean, you can't think about it too much. Otherwise, it stifles, I think, the creation of work. So I try and construct imagery and frame the stories that I work on and the textual relationship between the picture and the caption or the plate text and make a statement about something that I hope or believe will resonate in a way that I have intention for or the way I intend to. Sorry um but then yeah after that it's it's definitely out of out of you know it's out of my control i guess you can stand in front of the work and and speak about it and that influences the way people engage with it um or speak like i am now to you guys and kind of you know share my perspective on it but when people approach the work uh and see it you know on their own you know it's of course all out of your control and which is part of the beauty of photography You know, it's this polyvalent medium that people bring their own experience to and that's part of the magic.
Kai Behrmann
01:05:26
Talking about perception here in Baden, it's a very special venue. The photos are exhibited in an open-air environment within the city, within the park of Baden. Have you seen your images here?
Adam Ferguson
01:05:43
I have. Yeah, yeah. I've walked through the park a couple of times and had a look at a lot of the exhibitions. It's quite beautiful to see the work in plein air like that, surrounded by trees and greenery. It feels a lot less stuffy than looking at it in a gallery.
Kai Behrmann
01:05:59
And the beautiful thing here is that a lot of people that normally don't come in contact with photography, they see it on their way to work, doing grocery shopping or just going for a walk and they come by these images from all over the world, which I think is something that makes a festival like this special and can broaden maybe the perception or the reach of the images and the stories behind them.
Adam Ferguson
01:06:30
Yeah, I think you're totally right. If you can position a work so the general public can see it, who wouldn't normally stroll into the gallery to look at a specific body of work, I think that's an incredible platform to share stories and put them out there and let people just kind of wander across them and engage with them in their own way.
Kai Behrmann
01:06:52
So maybe the last question do you still have hope or do you see a future in the still image or what is the future of the still image oh
Adam Ferguson
01:07:03
Really I have no idea I have hope I think the still image will continue to exist. I think our. Interaction with it as documentation or fact is already, I mean, decades ago, kind of shifted. I think our understanding of photography shifted, oh God, maybe in the 50s. Yet somehow we still kind of think about the still image. It still has this kind of credence as like documentation or recording reality. Yet, you know, we've known that it was never the case that photography does that. It's like a subversion of reality and an abstraction of reality. But I think it's exciting. I said before that photography is the most consumed medium of communication globally. It's universal. And more and more people take pictures now than ever. Each day, the data of how many images are being captured on phones just keeps skyrocketing. So, I mean, the still image is more important than it's ever been. The notion of author, I think, is what's changing more than the photograph itself, and the power structures around who gets to control narratives and what it means to be an author and who has the right to be an author and the traditional dynamics of the way we consume the still image and assign it meaning and celebrate photographers and authors. I think all that stuff is actually changing more than the photograph itself.
Kai Behrmann
01:08:51
That's interesting. Let's stay with that. The authorship that you mentioned, what do you mean exactly by that?
Adam Ferguson
01:09:03
Well, I mean, when I say author, the person that, you know, makes the capture. But of course, you know, and this is a whole other conversation we can talk for hours about, but of course, you know, the elephant in the room of artificial intelligence, which has now, you know, consumed, you know, the global archive of photography and is trained on, you know, everything that's been made before. And is now learning to create imagery out of algorithmic programming. So that's a whole other mode of image creation.
Kai Behrmann
01:09:45
Yeah, you're right. That's a totally different topic and maybe a good reason to do a follow-up on this to talk about artificial intelligence and how that is going to shape photography and, yeah, the consumption of visual imagery.
Adam Ferguson
01:10:04
In some ways it might validate it because I think people want to, I think people, you know, as flawed as the concept is, people still like to believe in the notion of an image having integrity, and being a true rendering of something that existed in front of the camera or in front of the author. So I don't think artificial intelligence can ever compete with that.
Kai Behrmann
01:10:27
Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you very much, Adam. It's been a pleasure talking with you about photography, learning about your work and getting a glimpse into your head and into your thinking about photography. Thank you very much.
Adam Ferguson
01:10:42
My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Music
01:10:45

2025 - Kai Behrmann: Visueller Storyteller und Fotograf

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