Daryl Hewson’s collection of Queensland and Australian Photography is considered to be the most comprehensive archive of photographic art in the state. His contribution to the careers of many Queensland artists links him to the tradition of patronage seen in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. This has spurred the current resurgence of Queensland photography on the national stage.

The following interview of Daryl Hewson by Marian Drew was first published in Perception (Queensland Centre for Photography, 2005):

Interview:
Daryl Hewson and Marian Drew
Sunday 1 May, 2005

Marian Drew:
Daryl, when the QCP introduced to you the idea of producing this book we were thinking about the idea of the photographic art collector but as we continued, that idea seemed perhaps too much of a generalisation. You came up with the title “Perception”. Would you like to talk a little bit about why you chose that?

Daryl Hewson:
Well I didn’t see myself very much as a collector although obviously I had become one, and the reason I started collecting was that it was a way of seeing the world, and interpreting the world and I suppose creating something of my own. I had tried exploring the creative process myself but decided I wasn’t doing such good job and I thought it might be better to get other people’s points of view, but when ever you do that you are actually getting your own point of view. Nothing is ever objective, because when you’re choosing the work, you’re choosing the artist and you’re making observations, ….but also about yourself at the same time. So I thought the idea in the title ‘perception’ encompassed both the act of being a collector and the way in which you view the world.

MD:
Does photography particularly offer you specific ideas that you’re interested in as opposed to painting and sculptures,… more traditional art forms?

DH:
Well I think photography is a relatively new art form and it’s evolving perhaps faster than other art forms in many ways and undergoing many transformations and in that way, it’s a very interesting. It’s also a more accessible art form, if you like, more available to the average person. So I think it had a lot of distinct advantages for me, being something that I could afford to collect and then also something that I thought was at the forefront of art.

MD:
You are obviously a scientific thinker and as a medical physician you must be rational at all times. How do your perceptual interests in art relate to your work?

DH:
Well I think medicine is interesting in that it is meant to be a scientific pursuit and there is an aspect of it that is, but there is an enormous amount of art in medicine and a lot of that is intuitive. A lot of it involves previous experience and previous interaction with people, analysis of personality types, listening, as well as visual observation. So the sort of thing that I’m doing as a physician involves perception that’s very intuitive as well as very scientific. And I think it is not at all different to the way in which an artist would approach a subject.

MD:
Do you find having a collection stimulating intellectually and useful in terms of your working life?

DH:
Well I guess art helps me at home more so much than at work because the work is pretty much consuming I suppose, and I can come home and perhaps disappear into a work of art or I can have things around me that are stimulating and positive views of the world. One of the problems with my job in medicine is that it concerns entropy, everything is decaying, falling apart, and yet for the artist a lot of the time it is the reverse, it’s about creating new worlds. I mean, art can reflect society and also can be degenerative and about decay but quite often its restorative.

MD:
You obviously love to collect things since your house is full of idiosyncratic collections of objects. Why do you find the collections of objects more satisfying or stimulating than individual objects?

DH:
Well there is a dialogue between objects. One object always seems extremely lonely to me. It needs a family and then once you get a family you need a few generations, so they do tend to propagate after a while.

I’ve always like putting things together I suppose. Collectors bring their own sort of orchestration. I think maybe a collector could be a little bit like a conductor of an orchestra you know, using a whole series of different instruments and different performers, perhaps in this case photographers, but then you are putting them together to produce some work of your own. And so that involves orchestration, involves collection, involves organization and it involves the likes and dislikes of the person whose putting it together so it becomes a very personal view.

MD:
It is a very personal view in that sense because you are not making it for someone else.

DH:
That’s right. You’ve got the luxury of really choosing what you like and it’s not like someone who is asked to create a collection for Holmes a Court or Fosters or whatever else, and they’re given a particular brief. The brief here is very general and it’s pretty haphazard a lot of the time. It’s great to have a bit of serendipity,… and coincidence is a nice thing. You can be collecting a work and all of a sudden discover that maybe one of the reasons you like it is that you have a lot of things in common with the artist, that you may not have realised when you started collecting. I guess your work is a bit like that, because I started collecting it without really knowing that we’d grown up in the same place. We had lots of common factors in the background, and so maybe all the visual cues that I was getting are a result of the similar place and time we were lived through, so perceptions we had were moulded and modified by that period.

MD:
So do you think there an aspect of describing or articulating your identity, or discovering your own identity through the collection?

DH:
I certainly didn’t think so until we started looking at the retrospective or the collection rather. I guess you do notice a lot about yourself because you examine the kind of works that you are purchasing and begin to notice some of the subterranean themes.

MD:
So what sort of themes have emerged in your collection?

DH:
Well one of the early themes was water, because perhaps one of the first photographs I chose was the Max Dupain ‘ Newport’ photograph and at the time I was learning to swim myself and so it all coincides with an interest in the water, the beginning of the collection and that Max Dupain photograph. Of course when people think of Australia they think of the beach and they think of water. We’re pretty much an aquatic nation and so one of the early themes was certainly water and I did choose a lot of photographs that centre around the idea of Australians at the beach or at the pool. Also leisure probably featured, and thinking about it now, leisure was a fairly major component and maybe that’s because it supplemented the absence of leisure in my life. I could buy the leisure. I could worship the leisure. (laughs)

MD:
You’ve collected a few big names, in your collection. How much interest do you have in terms of the monetary value of the work versus the idea of it being a personal form of expression.

DH:
Well I actually never collected for the monetary value of the works and its very nice if the works, or some of the works are valuable, but that has no relationship to my personal value of the works. So even though I have a strong attachment to the Max Dupain, which is a very valuable piece of work, it’s more an emotional attachment. It’s something that I really like. Perhaps because of the water theme, perhaps because it’s one of the first pieces I bought. But equally I have an attachment to the Spring Hill Bathers which is taken by a completely, or relatively unknown person who has no profile, and no one can find on an internet search! Both of those works are very important to me because they are different facets of the same thing.

At some stage I did decide to collect some people who were well known Australian photographers because I thought I would like to have the depth of Australian photography so I made a conscious decision to look out for people who are major exponents of Australian photography. I went to look at their work and decided whether or not I’d buy it, and most of the time I did get examples from people who fitted into my personal perceptions and but at other times I may not have found a work that I could relate to and therefore there’s a gap.

MD:
How important have been the galleries and people who’ve be been showing you the work.

DH:
Very informative and very, very helpful. One of the people who was very instrumental in obtaining work for me and introducing me to work was Joe Airo-Farulla from Gallery 482. Initially I approached Joe to get some work for me from artists that I admired, but didn’t quite know how to procure their work. Joe did that for me. Also he was showing photography at a time when very few people were, so I think he introduced the concept of photography as an art form to a lot of people in Brisbane and Queensland. And that was very helpful. Also I often met a lot of the artists and that creates a totally different interpretation of the work because you then know them as a person and you discover perhaps the way in which they are thinking and quite often they will relate to you as well. So it then becomes more of a personal endeavour.

MD:
Do you think it brings another dimension to the experience of the art work?

DH:
Absolutely. That’s why William Yang is interesting because he provides another dimension to his artwork. With his text and his performance pieces he’s communicating to a very broad audience. What I was going to say about photography earlier that I didn’t quite get to was how democratic it was. I think that it, as art form, is extremely democratic. It’s available to the rich and the poor whereas a lot of art forms have become very exclusive and I think everyone needs art in their life.

MD:
So if you had any recommendations to someone interested in starting an art collection in photography what advice would you give them?

DH:
I think first you all you have to find somewhere that shows photography. I think you have to see the real work. I think it’s very hard to buy something that you don’t view particularly if you are starting a collection and I know some people will just buy things from the Internet. Personally I don’t think that’s a good way to go, or they might buy them from a reproduction in a book but I think seeing the original is so different to experiencing a reproduction. So the first thing I’d say is, make sure you see the work, then perhaps, before you start collecting anything, just visit a lot of galleries so that you know what it is that you might like and also know the range of work that is available. And then once you’ve got a little bit of background information you can make more informed choices I think. And it doesn’t have to be informed from a point of view of which is going to be the artist who is going to go somewhere, which is going to be the artist who is the best investment, but I think which artists are the artists that you have the most simpatico with. And that gut instinctive thing of “I like this therefore I should have it” is not a bad way to inform a purchase.

I hate people saying I don’t want to buy that because I‘ve got nowhere to hang it, or it won’t go with the furniture, or you know, what will someone else think about it when I get it home, will my husband like it or whatever. Because I don’t think it really matters, if you like something. It should fit in always. And there will be a reason why you like it and there will be a place you can put it. So I don’t think you should look at art as interior decoration.

MD:
You’re interest in David Hockney is clear throughout our previous discussions and in your library. Hockney was very innovative in his exploration of time in his photographic work, challenging photographic vision as single moments in time. Could you talk a little bit about time and how it relates to your interest in photography?

DH:
Well I think the simple photograph is a snapshot in time but then you can go beyond that as Hockney was saying where you’re looking at adding a dimension of time... Hockney’s multiple photographs per se introduce time because it took a while for them to be completed. I took time to make the photographs… the light changed, things moved, and the photographers’ position moved. I think the other thing that Hockney was working on was multiple perspectives. We tend to think of the camera as akin to an eye, but the way in which it perceives is not like an eye really because the brain is regrouping all of those images and interpreting those images. Usually when we observe an object it is a result of previous observation and different views of the same object, so what he was trying to do there was explode that myth of the one perspective and show us what we were really seeing.

MD:
Yes, his art practice as a painter is so based on the ‘eye’, and he has taken that skill and ability that he has developed, “eye balling”, as he calls it, into photography which has then enabled this whole new photographic representation of time and space.

DH:
Yes, I think there is a little bit of a revolution happening there, sort of like a paradigm shift in the way you think about photography.

MD:
So we pay homage to Hockney in this double portrait of each other, that situates the interview in a time and place and situates your collection in your home. Personally I think it’s really important that a collection is seen to reside in a residence. It’s very different to an institution. It’s that interaction with daily living, the different moods and times of day that brings the experience of an art work to life. The viewing experience, it’s the third corner of the whole creation of the artwork. Its great to think that art work effects peoples lives– that it isn’t just glimpsed or lying in a drawer. I think it’s really a profound experience for artists to see their works reside in someone’s home.

DH:
Yes, the way you react to a work varies entirely on how you feel at a particular time so that’s another aspect to having a collection at home because you may like certain works intensely for a little while, then they go out of fashion. That can change around a little bit and reflect your moods, which is a nice interaction.

MD:
So finally I must ask for the audiences of this book, why the ice pack on the cover of the book?

DH:
Now – well (laughter) because I like the colour and I think it looks a little like a tardus.