Heart of glass
The day photographer Hugh Stewart started taping print-outs of portraits to his gallery windows, he didn’t think too much about what would happen next. Nor did he have an inkling of what would occur once he put a call out to his photographer friends to join the spontaneous exhibition.
“We are in lockdown. We have a gallery. It’s on a laneway and has big windows,” Stewart wrote on his Instagram feed, asking for people to contribute images. “The madder and more controversial the image the better.”
What happened next was the bit that astounded Stewart.
“Suddenly I was inundated with pictures,” he tells Local Paddo. “We started hanging photographs up, not in a traditional sense that we normally would in a gallery but just printing them out at Office Works on cheap paper and sticking them up with tape.”
Stewart brought in his friend Rachel Knepfer, a former photo editor at Rolling Stone magazine in New York, to help spread the word and curate the images. And the pop-up exhibition was born.
For Stewart and Knepfer the idea was to make the range of images as broad as possible.
“We have distinguished photographers and people who follow us on Instagram who sent us a picture of themselves,” says Stewart. “I wanted it to be the Democratic Republic of Woollahra. So a photograph of Obama can be next to someone’s cat.”
The collection is indeed eclectic. Images range from portraits of the famous — Bono, Courtney Love, Heath Ledger, Barack Obama, Henry Rollins, Iggy Pop, Dawn Fraser and one of Stewart’s own photos of a young Leonardo DiCaprio — alongside images of frontline workers, elderly waitresses, sleeping babies, puppies, mushrooms, pumpkins, models, clouds, trees and families amusing themselves during lockdown.
Photographers involved in the exhibition include Derek Henderson, Polly Borland, Kurt Markus, Ben Watts, Max Doyle, Tim Jones, Jamie Wdziekonski, John Feely, Glendyn Ivin, Garry Trinh, Michaela Skovranova, Matthew Abbott and Ben Baker.
Stewart — a favourite photographer of Baz Luhrmann— launched the gallery six months ago with his wife Emma Warburton. But he says the pop-up exhibition has changed his mind about what he can do with the space.
“It’s not a bad thing sometimes to be pushed into a corner and think your way out. I kind of enjoy it. This has given me an idea I might not necessarily have had.”
The exhibition will stay up until lockdown ends, after which Stewart is thinking of having a street party and inviting everyone who has contributed to, or admired, the windows. And then he may sell the images for charity in the same way organisers sold small images for charity in the recent Incognito Art Show.
“It’s had a great reception,” he says of the exhibition. “I mean, we get all sorts of retirees from Woollahra who say, ‘We love this!’ And people are pulling up in their cars to look at it for a while. It’s great.”
HALLS LANE GALLERY AND PORTRAIT STUDIO
Halls Lane, Woollahra
hallslane.com.au