Robin Sellick
Robin Sellick began his professional photography career at the age of 15, taking portraits of friend’s dogs for cash. After choosing photography as an elective at Broken Hill High School and liking the way it allowed him to be an observer as well as an artist, he was hooked. Studying people, Sellick discovered, was his way of understanding himself and the world. His talent and his drive to excel has led to him becoming Australia’s leading celebrity photographer.
The son of a miner, Sellick was born in Broken Hill in 1967 where, like many other places in 1970s and 80s Australia, professional photography was largely associated with taking wedding portraits. And this is what he ended up doing for a time when he went to Adelaide in 1988 looking for work. He trained in Doug Banks’ photography studio and, when he accidentally developed slide film with the wrong chemicals, ending up with vivid, dramatic colour, he pioneered a photographic style called ‘cross processing’, which became his signature stylistic device. Doug Banks was a mentor to Sellick, personally and professionally, at a time when he didn’t yet know who he was. Learning the foundations of professional photography saved him, Sellick says, but he also had the courage and confidence to believe in his own potential. When he said: ‘I’m going to be the best photographer in the world’, Banks said ‘OK’.
Sellick won a young achiever award and the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Grant in 1991-92 and used this as a calling card to do what he had always wanted: to take portraits of public figures and celebrities, and to travel. The first high profile portrait he took was of Don Dunstan, and soon after he was photographing Sir Donald Bradman and Justice Robin Millhouse.
A chance meeting with the iconic American photographer Annie Lebowitz in upstate New York gave Sellick the opportunity he’d been waiting for. He stayed in touch with her studio, waiting for an opening to be one of her three assistants. As soon as the call came, he sold everything and was on the next flight to New York to spend 6 weeks with Lebowitz. Next, he found the Manhattan white pages and rang every professional photographer he knew of in the U.S., which led to working with Mark Seliger of Rolling Stone magazine fame, Mary Ellen Mark and, along the way, shooting the likes of Jerry Seinfield. He asked each photographer the same question: ‘how can I be the best?’ The answer was always: ‘take pictures every day’.
Back in Australia, Sellick lived in Sydney, finding work with Vogue, Who Weekly and Australian Style, and shooting covers for Q Magazine and Rolling Stone, his ability and determination to be the best sustaining him. He saw the same quality in the celebrities he has photographed, including Cate Blanchett, Steve Irwin, Kylie Minogue and Molly Meldrum: the capacity to work hard and keep believing in the dream of achieving something meaningful.
Always at the heart of Sellick’s journey was his interest in how people inhabit the world and their own skins. ‘Every portrait you take is a picture of yourself’ he says. He sees his upbringing in Broken Hill as a significant factor in creating the unique filter through which he himself sees the world: the isolation and the desert backdrop that he describes as a ‘uniquely lit set’. Light and subject are everything for a photographer, and in Broken Hill, Sellick says, there are many larger than life subjects. The vastness of the landscape gives people permission ‘to fill the space – we talk about the effect people have on the environment but not about the effect the environment has on people.’ Broken Hill taught Robin Sellick to see as a photographer.
In 2011, he collaborated with author Jack Marx on a large-format photographic book called Life and Times in the Republic of Broken Hill. In its pages he has captured the spirits of others who, like Sellick, were made by living in Broken Hill, each subject uniquely placed in their own environment. It is a brilliant and beautiful body of work that tells its own story of the people of Broken Hill. Sellick’s former publication, facing (2004) was launched at the National Portraiture Gallery in Canberra, where his work has been featured many times.
Robin Sellick is now also General Manager at the Barrier Truth, which has been Broken Hill’s independent newspaper for over 100 years. This is another calling that has meaning for him; another way to understand the world, and another opportunity to serve the community.
Audio transcript available.