Newsletter #10 - Stills, Sprints, a Store Opening and a Sontag Spiral
Hello all,
Silly season’s greetings. Hugh here. I hope this newsletter finds you well.
I’ve been meaning to write this for quite some time while absolutely flat out, so at this point I’ve not only tested the patience of everyone at Machine, but some of the things I had planned out are also now completely irrelevant - like even more than usual. For example, one of my key bits centred around the limitless love of Olivia Jade Giannulli and Jacob Elordi. Damn shame.
Anyway here we are with Newsletter NUMBER TEN! By golly gosh, do I have a banger for y’all today - and by “banger”, I mean just bulk word count. I’m strictly making up for lost time.
To start with, a quick update on what we've been working on at Machine HQ of late, then a medium dive into some sick event projects I’ve had the pleasure of running recently, finishing with a few thoughts on Susan Sontag’s On Photography through a current lens. Pun heavily intended.
So we’ve been in 7th gear for the past few months, putting together all types of projects across all of our capabilities and we’ve been loving it.
We finally got standing desks. I fully never realised how fun they are…
Our resident animation boss Damien has been charging ahead on two crazy new projects, one involving a cute skeleton hanging out at a music festival, and the other for a new speedboat manufacturer client due to launch their flagship (unintended) model next year, for which Dame is putting together some wildly realistic CGI product shots and animations. Let me tell you, right now there are full on hurricane sounds coming from his computer as it tries to keep up with his blistering pace.
Sam has been busy on several podcast and tech explainer briefs that he and Rory turn around extremely quickly at super high quality, and he’s also been bouncing around the east coast on a spec job which is looking sick as it comes together. Sam and Rory have also been shooting and editing a bunch for Aussie icon Akubra, food chain Oliver’s, and tech startup Brainfish.
Lastly, I’ve been shooting heaps of stills projects lately, which I’ve been enjoying so so much. I cut my teeth as a photographer way back when, so it’s nice being able to sink said teeth into back to back stills-heavy months. There have been ecomm shoots for our buds at Ester Spirits in Marrickville, lifestyle refreshers for Melbourne Rakija brand Kabina distilling, some product stuff for social/tech biz Blinq and a bunch of editorial for Uber and UberEats through Sydney agency History Will Be Kind including a Smize & Dream shoot with Tyra which was… interesting…
On top of this, I’ve shot a bunch of super varied events projects - some video, some stills.
Events
As a content partner/supplier on events, you kind of get to just waltz in at the last minute to take on the fun creative side of capturing a space and the people in it, and chop it up for almost immediate delivery while it's all fresh. I mean there is a lot of preproduction to lock looks, shotlists, key personnel etc but the heavy lifting putting an event together is always with client and production/PR agency. To me the pace and immediacy of these briefs makes every step super fun and engaging, and usually also means low drag, quick approvals and one fluid motion from end to end of the production - something that I think feels really natural for a team like ours at Machine. I like to shoot and edit these projects almost like music videos where interesting shot types and textures fit together to a beat with emphasis on flow, dynamism and technique. It’s all about the feel imo.
The Iconic kicked things off (in August lol) with their “Got You Moving” week of health and fitness, brilliantly produced by Team Event. The week had that immediate turnaround thing dialled up to twenty-three trillion with 30-45 second edits delivering every day at 4pm for a week. That means wake up 4:30am, travel to location, bump in, shoot, bump out, travel home, edit, deliver, pass the f*** out. Repeat. For a week. It was so turbo I can still feel the DOMS.
So imagine a stunning Centennial Park sunrise, a group of runners invited to the event, decked out in new Hokas, me sprinting behind them with a full weight camera rig trying to keep up and not sound like I’m dying. Or imagine Tama SLSC, also at sunrise, pilates in session, beautiful people head to toe in New Balance gym gear, me trying to get flexy on interesting angles while full pretzel and testing ligaments. The whole week was situations like these, immediately followed by quick coffees with Luke Latty who was shooting stills (and doesn’t drink coffee so I shotgunned two), then straight into the edit. The whole thing was completely bonkers. I was extremely into it - mostly because I broke my 5km PB.
Next up, Dyson (together with Bailey the influencer golden retriever) decided to take over a Bellevue Hill mansion to give it a really reeeeally deep clean ft their new HEPA purifier, a “Pencilvac” (ie the world’s slimmest vacuum), and a bunch of other new products, again expertly put together by Team Event.
I was very keen to learn about all the new gear, too, as I’ve often said my Dyson V12 Detect Slim Absolute Vacuum Cleaner is one of my favourite tech purchases ever. Exactly that, verbatim. Anyway this shoot was pretty stunning. Beautiful home, beautiful light, great crowd, creative control and a dream client.
Then there was the new Balenciaga store opening at Westfield in Sydney’s CBD, which was one of the most spectacular events I’ve ever shot.
They did a showcase of “The Woman Behind The Dress”, an exhibition celebrating the women who wore and inspired the late couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga's iconic designs throughout history (including Grace Kelly, Marlene Dietrich, Hélène Abecassis and Annabel Buffet to name a few), and the Sydney store received six of these wild pieces accompanied by plaques explaining the stories of the dresses and their wearers.
Watching guests’ jaws drop while they went dead silent walking into the room was pretty special. The store opening event was awesome to shoot, which isn’t exactly surprising given the ginormous label and historic angle to the evening, some sick new keychain pieces celebrating Balenci in Sydney and one of the most bonkers retail store fit outs I’ve ever seen including a (maybe 40 foot?) daylight LED panel high over the stairs. BLACK Communications are very well known for putting on an incredible show and this was certainly no exception as far as the guests and event production went. All in all, it was again creative freedom from a bucket list client as well as a proper A List PR company full of total legends in BLACK Comms. Doesn’t really get much better than that.
Now the last event I’ll jump into here was a fun lil plot twist from our friends at Hatrik House, shooting stills at a Swim Club themed party for a new Kinder product - chocolate ice cream no less - at Wylie’s Baths in Coogee. Given the client, the guest list was a little different from the previous, with the average age being roughly 5. They weren’t wasting any time either - everyone bee-lined to the ice cream stand and got right into it. This was a sun drenched afternoon celebrating all things summer for the kids and it was great intel for what to bring for the kids to my family Christmas this year. Kinder chocolate ice cream is firmly on the list.
On Photography (now)
Ok so hear me out, this whole train of thought started in the most ordinary moment when mum asked me to take a family photo on my phone at my brother’s birthday last week. I’m talking low stakes with literally my immediate family smiling in the backyard. As I lined up the frame, I realised how much I wanted to get it right and it was a (minor) spin out. Why was I so keen to crush the job? It wasn’t even a job.
A week earlier I had shot a major campaign with high stakes, talent, logistics, multiple approval stages on and off set, several lighting and framing setups and crazy deadlines among all the usual moving parts. That kind of environment doesn’t even register as tricky 90% of the time and for some reason I kept thinking about the contrast of the two situations after this family pic. It wasn’t deep angst or anything, it was just that kind of random moment where you catch yourself doing/thinking something human and slightly funny and think, why did that feel like anything at all?
So this otherwise entirely inconsequential thought process, followed by a Reel pull clipped from a podcast sent me back to a few photography and technology texts I read for uni subjects years and years ago. I was suddenly in search of answers, like full on Robert Langdon styles minus the illuminati. Together everything seemed to circle the same idea: something has shifted in how we take photos, how we see ourselves in them, and how the camera now shapes the moment - long before anyone presses a button. Seems like a long bow. It probably is, but let me explain with one of photography’s heavyweights up first.
Susan Sontag wrote a collection of six interconnected essays over several years, titled “On Photography”. The book was published in 1977, very obviously on the topic of photography and way before smartphones. The crazy thing about this book is that her ideas somehow feel even more relevant in today’s context. She writes,
“A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer. The picture is the event itself, and the photographer is part of the picture whether he intends to be or not.”
and
“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”
She expands on these ideas by arguing that a photograph doesn’t just freeze reality, but that it also alters it. Hello Schrödinger's cat? Positioned behind the camera, the photographer tries to capture what is in front of them, yet the act of photographing changes the meaning of the moment entirely. Another way, a photograph is never neutral, as it’s a little act of control over time. Obviously this is pretty wild, but it goes on.
In Sontag’s day, the photographer mostly stood outside the frame, observing and shooting a scene (apart from self portraits but let’s skip those for the sake of the point). Today, photographer and subject are very often the same person. Just ask anyone in my group chats on a Friday night. The camera is no longer a witness, but is now a participant and legitimately part of the scene. The moment becomes a mini performance for the future. So here was the first little click in my mind. My weird family photo hesitation wasn’t even really about the photo.
Now obviously we have to talk about smartphones and the digital camera etc, so I reckon we need some help from Sherry Turkle. Turkle is an American sociologist and Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, and TL;DR - she studies what technology can do to our internal selves. In “Alone Together”, her 2011 book on technology and its impacts on basically all societies, she says,
“Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies, shaping not just what we share but how we imagine connection itself.”
She describes how digital tools shape the emotional space between people, and the point gets especially spicy when you apply it to the camera. Before smartphones, photographs were a way to understand the external world and before digital, were printed on photographic paper in a dark room after a hell of a lot of pondering over limitless decisions. I first worked with photography in a dark room when I was a kid and I can first hand confirm it can be a painstaking process. Now though, photographs help us understand, maintain and narrate ourselves, and in ways they’ve become more throwaway - phone eats first/the photo dump/AI slop. Images are micro identity updates or versions of who we think we are/want to be.
My family photo wig out starts looking like an instinct shaped by the quiet merging of photography and self perception. Ok, long bow strike two, but srsly.
“Where is this rant going?”
Here’s where the clip from Theo Von’s podcast “This Past Weekend” comes in. I’m not a follower of his, but I guess Instagram seemed convinced I needed a somewhat existential detour via the recent TPW episode with Matthew McConaughey, who I am not usually a fan of. Shock horror.
At a point, McConaughey goes on about modern people living a moment while also watching themselves live it, using the analogy of someone watching themself score a touchdown on the Jumbotron while in the act of scoring said touchdown. I think the analogy is at least semi-cooked, because it's borderline impossible, but it’s also unexpectedly spot on when illustrating our not uncommon desire to witness ourselves witnessing ourselves.
Across Sontag, Turkle and Von/McConaughey’s chat, you get a clearer timeline. First, images shaped how we saw reality, then they started to shape how we saw ourselves, and now they can fully alter how present we are inside an experience. The camera becomes like a third layer of consciousness, standing between us and our own life.
After all of that thinking prompted by one tiny moment at a party, I ended up somewhere that actually feels kind of sensible. Photography isn’t just pressing a button, especially for someone who does it for a living. The camera may look casual in someone’s hand, but for someone who understands what a good shot can do, the act of making one is never entirely casual.
That feels like the heart of it I think (and thankfully we have now completed the long bow trifecta). Photography sits at this crossroads of identity, performance, presence and whatever the algo happens to feed back at us that day. It’s fast and disposable and everywhere but the instinct to get something right, even when the stakes are sub-zero, comes from the same place that makes the medium feel alive. You want the thing to matter more than the throwaway and there’s something super comforting about that to me. It means the work still weighs up. People still care how things are seen or at least how things are captured. Even in a world overflowing with random flat bread and martini shots at all hours, a single photo can still make someone stop.
So I don’t know, but if something as simple as a spontaneous family pic can pull all of this out of me, surely that says something of photography’s staying power? Or maybe I’ve just finally lost it. The latter is at least partially likely.
Oooook that’s quite enough. Watch this space for Newsletter #11 shortly, I hope you have a lovely break if you’re taking one, and don’t be like me when you’re asked to take the family pics.
Byeeeeeeeeeeee x
