The City of Sydney celebrates Sydney’s creativity and imagination with Art & About Sydney, a year long program of temporary art projects in unusual spaces. A feature of Art and About Sydney for the past 15 years has been the Australian Life: Exhibition and Prize which invites amateur and professional photographers to submit images depicting a unique perspective of life in Australia. The finalists’ photos are displayed in large prints the size of bedsheets in Sydney’s Hyde Park - a free outdoor exhibition over a three week period each Spring.

The 2019 Australian Life Judging Panel comprised of Mags King, Cherine Fahd, Dennis Golding and the Australian Life Curatorial Advisor, Sandy Edwards. They viewed 1,450 entries and decided my image of Iggy Pop would be one of the 28 finalists for the 2019 Hyde Park exhibition on show from 19th September to 13th October 2019.

Iggy Pop, the punk with a poet’s heart and one of rock’s greatest frontmen, performed two incredible, riff-laden hard rock concerts with a tight band at the Sydney Opera House in April 2019. Iggy still performs with insatiable energy.

I attended the second concert on Wednesday, 17th April, 2019 just days before Easter Sunday and the proto-punk icon’s 72nd birthday.

I took the photo during the performance of No Fun, a song from The Stooges’ debut studio album which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019. Iggy’s lyrics speak to the boredom felt by teenages growing up in midwest USA at the end of the Sixties. Towards the performance’s end, Iggy may have wanted to avoid that same plight of boredom by yelling to the audience:

“Alright now! Get up here and dance with me!!”

More ‘command’ than ‘invitation’, it resulted in a swarm of people transforming the stage of the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall into a mosh pit of nightclubbing energy. The band, hidden by the revellers, continue playing an improvised outro while Iggy’s assistant, Jos Grain, keeps a firm grip on the microphone stand as he jostles with the horde and protects Iggy’s back.

A fan lunges at Iggy as the song nears its end. Iggy seems unaware of her approach, surrounded by revellers ecstatic to be sharing the stage with a living legend. The woman’s determination matches Iggy’s signature stare and cocksure salute. Her outstretched fingers reward her effort with a touch. Does she believe the touch will gain her redemption? Or is it simply Iggy’s sex appeal that drives her behaviour?

The image has been likened to the works of other artists:

Caravaggio - the 16th century Italian artist who painted with a dramatic use of chiaroscuro.
Bill Viola - contemporary video artist especially his 2004 moving image art work “The Raft”.
Peter Howson - Scottish painter and British war artist whose paintings are crowded with a large cast of barbarous characters - see “Meshuggah” 2015.

The biblical mien of the image heralds the arrival of Easter which was just four days away at the time. Peter Campbell, a friend and fellow photographer, felt the photo resembled the passage described in Mark 5:25-34 and the brief moment I captured at 1/100th of a second mirrors the Biblical woman’s action in the sentence Mark 5:28 which became the title for the photo:

“If I can touch even his clothes”, she had told herself, “I shall be well again.”

AWARDS FOR MARK 5:28

Finalist - Art and About Australian Life 2019. All finalists of the 2019 competition can be viewed at the City of Sydney News website.
Winner - Culture Category of the Sony World Photography Awards 2020 Open Competition. To view the World Photography Organisation gallery click here.
Semi-Finalist - Head On Portrait Photo Awards 2020. To view the YouTube gallery click here.
Winner - Portrait of Humanity (single image). A global initiative by 1854 Media, publisher of the British Journal of Photography. To view the 30 winners click here.
Finalist - The 66th Blake Prize click here.