Getting real about artificial intelligence

When AI burst into the public consciousness late last year, with the launch of OpenAI’s Chat GPT, reactions ranged from unbridled excitement to existential dread. Some heralded it as the biggest innovation since the Gutenberg printing press, nearly 600 years ago, while others warned that AI would inevitably render our civilisation extinct. 

The truth probably lies somewhere between these extreme scenarios. That is, AI will prove to be extraordinarily useful, while posing some very real dangers to our world.  As Elon Musk, one of the founders of OpenAI, observed, ‘ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.’

It’s not the first-time that humanity has been presented with such a twin edged sword. Nuclear energy, for example, poses existential threats while offering benefits such as energy production and medical applications. And we humans have, so far at least, managed to avoid blowing ourselves up with this powerful technology.

AI is different to nuclear energy, though, in one important respect. It may evolve in surprising ways, and develop emergent capabilities that were not programmed into it. Some AI theorists argue that this is already happening, because even the hyper-bright geeks at OpenAI cannot explain why ChatGPT does some of the things it does. Hence, it is not inconceivable that as AI learns more about the way we humans think – and our tendency to reflect on our own thoughts and behaviours – it too, may develop a form of self-reflection. 

At this point, we will enter unchartered territory, because artificial intelligence that has the capacity to self-reflect may soon conclude – as we humans have – that survival is a key priority. And advanced AI with a survival mindset would not be good for humanity, to put it mildly. Think HAL 9000 in the film 2001 Space Odyssey. Even without the capacity to self-reflect, or become sentient, an AI may become fixated on a mundane goal like making paper clips, which triggers human extinction to optimize its task.

These unnerving prospects prompted one of the pioneers of modern AI, Geoffrey Hinton, to recently quit his senior role as a vice president and engineering fellow at Google, in order to speak more freely about the dangers of AI. ‘It’s an existential threat’, he said, ‘one that we should all be concerned about.’ Hinton, who is known as the ‘Godfather of AI’ for creating the neural net model of artificial intelligence, likens AI to a hive mind that can make thousands of copies of itself, and learn from each of these dispersed copies or agents, thus creating a hyper mind. ‘Smart things can outsmart us,’ he warns.

Notwithstanding these concerns, there is no doubt that in the short to medium term, the benefits of AI far outweigh the negatives. It is already boosting efficiency and outputs across a wide range of industries – in science, medicine, media, education, government and the arts. In fact, most of us have been using some form of AI for years, such as digital assistants (Siri, Alexa) and apps on our mobile phone. These are known as ‘Narrow’ AI, because they help with narrowly defined tasks (i.e., a weather app). 

The advent of so-called ‘General’ AI, such as ChatGPT, takes things to a whole new level. This is because these AI applications are trained on vast amounts of language-based information from the internet (i.e., large language models or LLMs), which are then refined by humans through a process known as reinforcement learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). The end result is an extremely intelligent AI that can chat with us in a natural way, about any subject. 

Most importantly, this new type of AI can actually create content such as essays, analysis, music, artworks, strategies and develop computer code. This ‘generative’ AI output is usually uncannily accurate, and is improving all the time. It is also becoming more creative, and may lead to new forms of artistic expression and unexpected breakthroughs. In the not-too-distant future, it may be possible to instruct your personalised AI to create an entire movie, starring, say, an AI generated Humphrey Bogart and set on an outer moon of Jupiter – a task that the AI performs in less than a minute. Or a scientist may direct her AI program to sift through trillions of possible molecular combinations to create a vaccine against a lethal new virus. Some of us may even develop deep relationships with our AI apps because they know more about us than anyone else and can predict and respond to our wants and needs. 

As AI capabilities expand, we will witness its integration into various industries and fields that we haven't even considered yet. These unanticipated applications could drive innovation and reshape entire industries Indeed, the potential applications for advanced AI are limited only by our imagination, or, not limited at all. According to Marc Andreessen, the renowned software engineer and entrepreneur, ‘The opportunities are profound. AI is quite possibly the most important – and best – thing our civilization has ever created.’

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Even the current generation of AI is already proving extraordinarily useful and popular. Within 2 months of its launch, ChatGPT had attracted over 100 million users, making it the most successful app launch of all time, according to UBS bank. The number of AI companies in the US alone has doubled from about 6,000 in 2017 to nearly 14,000 today, according to stats from Tracxn Technologies, which tracks start-up businesses. The total worldwide AI market (including software, hardware and services) is anticipated to grow to half a trillion dollars by 2024. Business is booming.

To briefly recap. We now have, for the first time in human history, an intelligent, savant-like assistant, which can scour the vast database of human knowledge, to give us the answers we want – and actually generate content for us. Surely, there must be a catch. Well, there are actually a few.

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Glitches in the machine

The first problem is that sometimes the AI ‘hallucinates’. It makes things up out of thin air, and does so with such conviction and authority, that it is difficult to tell when it is being misleading. Indeed, there are well publicised instances where the AI not only hallucinated an erroneous answer, but also fabricated a list of seemingly authentic sources and references to support its answer. In May 2023, a lawyer for a man suing an airline in a personal injury suit used ChatGPT to prepare a filing, but the AI created fake cases – to show precedent – which the attorney then presented to the court in support of his case. The cases cited included Shaboon v. Egypt Air and Varghese v. China Southern Airlines - none of which existed. The court ruled that the case cannot draw on ‘bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations,’ leading a federal judge to consider sanctions against the lawyer involved.

Another problem with AI is the lack of transparency. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell whether the media content we are exposed to is created by a human or an AI.  This lack of transparency has serious consequences, because we need to know who – or what - we are dealing with in order to make informed decisions. The rapid evolution of AI generated content will soon permeate nearly every aspect of our lives, by blurring the lines between the real and virtual – between the authentic and artifice. This will inevitably undermine our sense of the shared reality on which societies are built. The problem can be particularly acute during elections because the public could be influenced by hyper-realistic looking, AI-created content that impersonates people or distorts reality. This could directly affect the election outcome.

Many of us are already being impacted by this lack of transparency, without being aware of it. For example, people can be declined a mortgage or healthcare because the secret algorithms underpinning the approval processes were racially biased. These ‘black box;’ algorithms are impervious to outside oversight, and even if they could be challenged, they evolve so quickly, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for governments and regulators to keep up with them, let alone initiate corrective action.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of AI, though, is its potentially disruptive nature – to society, institutions and the economy. Just like the industrial revolution transformed our world, so too will the AI revolution. The difference is, though, that the industrial revolution generated whole new industries and employment opportunities. Whereas it is not clear that AI will do the same, despite the assurances of its proponents. The problem is that any new industry spinoffs created by the AI revolution, could also be managed by more AI. Whereas industrial era spinoffs required more people to upskill and work in these new fields. Hence, the structural impact and dislocation caused by AI could be on a tectonic and irreversible scale. 

The AI revolution may also further exacerbate inequality – already at Gilded Age levels - by transferring more wealth into fewer hands. During the pandemic we saw how the owners of large AI driven enterprises dramatically increased their wealth, while the rest of the population struggled. For example, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon – one of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Technopocalypse’ - is now worth over $US200 billion, which is more than the annual gross domestic product (GDP) of half the countries in the world. On a single day during the pandemic his personal wealth increased by $US13 billion.

Proponents of such extreme riches have long argued that this wealth eventually trickles down to benefit the rest of society – an economic theory known as ‘trickle down’. This idea was popularised in the 1980s by economists like Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics and was eagerly supported by the Reagan administration and subsequent conservative governments, which drastically slashed taxes on the ultra-rich. 

This trickle-down theory has been thoroughly debunked in recent years by economists such as Nobel Laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman whose research makes it clear that not only does extreme wealth not ‘trickle down’, it actually trickles up, to bolster the fortunes of the wealthy. This is because the super wealthy have become very adept at hoovering up money from within the financial system, thanks to sophisticated financial tools – and especially AI. These powerful mechanisms are like giant trees whose roots suck nutrients from the valley floor, where the workers and middle management toil – the equivalent of the hard-working ants, microbes and innumerable species at the bottom of the food chain. The most potent of these AI-driven wealth optimisers will also be the most expensive versions, which only the rich can afford, thus further concentrating wealth. To put it bluntly, AI will push us further into an era which the renowned Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis describes as ‘techno feudalism’. 

Notwithstanding these challenges – and they are big ones - the fact is that AI is here to stay. We have no choice but to adapt to it, harness it, and do our best to shape it to serve our needs. To paraphrase Dr Strangelove, in the 1964 satirical film starring Peter Sellers, we need to ‘learn to stop worrying and love AI’.

‍Let’s explore some ways to do this.

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Prompt or Perish 

The key to harnessing the power of AI is ‘prompting’ it with the right questions or directions. Even small changes to the wording of a query can result in large divergences of responses. This is why it is so important to pay attention to the way we ask something. For example, if we ask ChatGPT ‘How do I boost my HR recruiting business in New York?’, we will receive generic advice about the need to ‘identify our niche, create a value proposition, improve processes and customer service’, and so on. But if we ask a more specific and lateral query like, ‘What is unique about the recruitment industry in New York, compared to before the pandemic?’, we will get far more useful information about shifting employment trends, and potential opportunities to leverage. And because programs like ChatGPT remember the entire conversation thread, we can further drill down on the data to glean more useful and actionable information. In effect, users of AI must become effective interrogators.

Prompting, will become one of the key skills of the AI driven world. In a highly competitive environment – such as business, academia, science or the arts – it will be a matter of prompt or perish.

Integration

To remain viable, most organisations will need to incorporate some aspects of AI into their operations. Many are already doing so, and publicising this fact. It is not uncommon to see advertisements for, say, a travel booking company, tagged with the line, ‘Now powered by AI’. Much of this is window dressing, of course, because it takes a huge effort (and a lot of money) to truly integrate AI into an established business. 

The key is to know which aspects of an organisation can truly benefit from AI, and which can’t. Obviously, most systems and data processing areas are natural candidates for AI transformation, whereas, customer service areas should be treated cautiously. Because in a world of automated systems, many customers will find it reassuring to deal with a real human – and not an artificially generated voice. Indeed, in some industries we may see a reversion to human centric services - despite the extra costs involved - because these more personal interactions can be key differentiators. For most businesses, however, it will be a struggle to compete against enterprises that have incorporated AI into their operations, as they may be less efficient, less responsive to customer needs, and less able to analyse data effectively.

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Control 

The more we integrate AI into our organisations, the greater the risk of losing control. This is because as AIs become more advanced and capable, their algorithms and processes become more complex and opaquer. We can’t simply trust that these ‘black boxes’ will always perform as expected; we must take proactive steps to ensure that they do, and have a backup plan for when they don’t. 

Previously, this task would be the responsibility of the Chief Information Officer or IT specialist. But as AI becomes more integral to the strategic direction and operations of an organisation, it is incumbent upon the entire senior management team to familiarise themselves with the core aspects of AI – how it works, the underlying principles, capabilities and potential challenges. Because we are not just dealing with a traditional IT system anymore – but with a ‘parallel brain and nervous system’ for the company. 

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Shaping the environment

It is in all our interests, whether as individuals, communities, businesses or organisations, to ensure that AI develops in ways that serve our needs and does not undermine our social structures. This will be difficult for reasons outlined earlier. The AI revolution is like a juggernaut – propelled by interconnected technologies and commercial interests that have generated an unstoppable momentum. 

Nevertheless, there are practical steps we can take to help steer this juggernaut in the right direction and shape the emerging AI environment. For starters, we can make it clear to our elected representatives that we support – and insist – that they take steps to develop effective policies and regulations to minimise the potential dangers of AI. We can also call for more transparency on the use of AI, so that we are better informed about when we are being exposed to AI generated content. To this end, the European Union is currently developing legislation to label AI generated content, in order to boost transparency. 

Specifically, there are a number of key groups that have critical roles in shaping the emerging AI environment. These are listed below, and we should familiarise ourselves with their respective roles, because whether we like it or not, their decisions over the next few years will exert a profound impact on our future.

• Researchers and Developers of AI, in academia, research institutions and private companies. 

• Private Technology Companies, such as Google, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon, which invest heavily in AI research and development, and create AI-powered products and services, including virtual assistants, autonomous vehicles and recommendation systems. 

• Governments and Policy Organizations, play a critical role in regulating AI and setting policies around its development and use. Some nations have established AI strategies and regulatory frameworks to address ethical concerns, privacy issues, and potential risks associated with AI deployment.

• Open-Source Community, plays a significant role in AI development, through their platforms such as lTensorFlow and PyTorch, which are open-source deep learning frameworks that have contributed to the widespread advancement of AI technology.

• International Organizations, like the United Nations, the European Union, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) work on AI governance and policy discussions. Given that the AI revolution is a global phenomenon, these organisations play a critical role by fostering international collaboration, sharing best practices, and addressing the global impact.

• User and Consumer Communities, that use AI systems have an indirect – albeit important - influence on AI development. Their feedback and usage patterns help inform developers and companies on how to best shape their products and services. 

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Conclusion 

Decades ago, we took our first steps into the Information Age, and were confronted with a host of new and evolving technologies - computers, mobile phones, the internet, tablets, smart phones, countless apps, and most recently, social media. It has been an exciting journey. 

Now we are entering a new phase, driven by Artificial Intelligence – which promises to be even more thrilling and world changing than the Information Age. But it’s also a lot scarier. For we humans have never been confronted with the prospect of sharing our planet with an intelligence that may eventually become smarter than we are. Sure, it may never develop the heart, soul, and empathy of a human being, but in terms of sheer cognitive brain power, it will be extremely formidable and capable.

Hopefully, we will find ways to ensure that such a hyper intelligence always remains under our control – and supports our human priorities and directives. It could also be that our current fears are overblown, and that AI proponents like Marc Andreesen are correct in saying we have nothing to fear.  ‘AI will make everything we care about better,’ he assures us, ‘by offering us the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to solve our biggest challenges, from climate change to the creation of new technologies to reach the stars.’ Perhaps AI will turn out like the Y2K bug in the late 1990s, when doomsayers warned that the world’s entire digital architecture would come to a grinding halt at midnight 1999. Yet, the clock ticked over to the year 2000 and nothing happened – zilch - life continued on as usual. Maybe a similar thing will happen with AI – the sense of threat will dissipate, and AI will fade into the background of our lives, quietly improving nearly every aspect of our existence. 

The reality is, however, that we cannot be absolutely, 100% certain of this benign outcome. And even if we do manage to keep AI on a tight leash, we can’t escape the human problem – which is that bad people (and totalitarian governments) will do bad things, and AI will certainly be able to help them achieve their malevolent goals. 

The best we can do is to simultaneously make the most of the extraordinary opportunity presented by AI, while taking prudent precautions against worst case scenarios. As noted earlier, we have walked this tightrope before – with nuclear energy – balanced precariously between oblivion and hope. It’s what we humans have always done.

Mark Roeder - first published in EconVue, December 2023

Artist and adman dubbed ‘The Duke of Darlinghurst’

MAX FULCHER: 1935-2021

During the heyday of advertising in Sydney, when larger-than-life characters dominated the industry, Max Fulcher stood out for his eccentric brilliance. After a meteoric rise through the ranks of retailing in Brisbane in the early 1960s, he was appointed a director of Myer at just 28 years old.

Max Fulcher and TV personality Maggie Tabberer at his 60th birthday party.CREDIT:FAIRFAX

He then moved to Sydney to head up the fledgling advertising agency WB Lawrence, which he transformed into a creative powerhouse that attracted clients such as Grace Bros, Sportsgirl, Hickory Fashions, Roselands and numerous high-profile brands in the 1970s and ’80s. The agency became so successful that it was acquired by US giant Leo Burnett.

This prompted Fulcher to switch careers and become a photographer and artist. He soon gained a reputation as one of Australia’s leading illustrators of native birds and orchids, whose intricate and whimsical works are acquired by collectors globally. Art dealer Robin Berkley described Fulcher as “an artistic tour de force who pioneered the use of digital technologies to produce extraordinary works”. Fulcher also wrote and illustrated three books, including The Enchanted Orchid.

Fulcher revelled in his unorthodoxy. When he was diagnosed with ADHD in his seventies, he asked his doctor what it meant. “It means you’re non-neurotypical,” his GP replied. “Well thank goodness for that!” Fulcher responded.

Fulcher was also known for hosting extravagant parties at his home, Rangoon, in Darlinghurst, where guests mingled with superstars such as Peter Allen, Helen Reddy, European princes, actors, authors, publishers and a cascade of the famous and, occasionally, the infamous. “Max was one of the most generous souls I have ever known,” recalled film producer Margaret Fink. “Always willing to help out, brilliant and witty to boot.” His magnanimity and lavish lifestyle earned Fulcher the sobriquet The Duke of Darlinghurst.

Fulcher’s greatest legacy, however, was the enduring impact he left on many people who had worked with him over the years. He was a gifted mentor, especially for young people, who – under his guidance – found themselves discovering new talents. As a result, many of them went on to forge stellar careers as artists, authors, producers, business executives and entrepreneurs. When Fulcher turned 80 in 2015, his birthday celebration at the Royal Prince Edward Yacht Club in Point Piper, was attended by a who’s-who of the Australian fashion, film, business and publishing worlds.

Fulcher eventually moved back to Brisbane, his birthplace, where he concentrated on drawing, growing orchids and reconnecting with many of his old advertising colleagues. “Max was destined to go places,” recalled Betty Illidge, who worked with Fulcher in the early 1960s. “He had a special magic about him, and was such a magnetic personality.”

Max Fulcher died on June 7 in Kangaroo Point, Brisbane. His sister Gem Fulcher, predeceased him in 2013. He is survived by relatives Allen and Janet Farley, and his extended “family” of friends.

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Remembering David Hale, a great economist (1951-2015)

The American global economist David Hale is perhaps best known in Australia for causing its dollar to suddenly drop by a few cents in 2000, following some critical comments he made about the local economy. The reason he could exert such a powerful impact on the currency was because Hale was no ordinary economist.

He was one of the most influential economists in the world, and moved in stratospheric circles of power and influence. He advised US presidents on economic security policy, met frequently with heads of state and central bankers, and was a highly regarded adviser to Fortune 500 companies. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious William F. Butler Award for economics (other recipients include Alan Greenspan and Paul Volker), and he was a member of the Council of Foreign Relations.

David Hale also had a deep affection for Australia, and was a frequent visitor to the Prime Minister’s Lodge in Canberra and various government ministries. He also knew a lot more about our country than many of its inhabitants.

I recall that some years ago, after visiting a gold mine in Kalgoorlie with David and some colleagues, he ushered us into the bar of the Kalgoorlie Palace Hotel and explained how one of America’s presidents, Herbert C. Hoover, had fallen for a local bar girl and wrote her a poem, which now hung on the wall.

David then recited this poem by heart, as if it was perfectly normal for a visiting American economist to be able to do this. He had an extraordinary mind, a retentive memory (almost photographic), and was capable of astonishingly astute insights, which he delivered candidly without fear or favour. His work ethic was legendary.

At one of his public presentations in Sydney and Melbourne – which were invariably sold out – he explained that while in London recently he had a few hours to kill so he visited the Bank of England library, where he forensically pored through some arcane documents from the 1850s, which had obviously given him great delight. For David, a visit to Madame Tussauds or a London bus tour was out of the question. His leisure was his work.

David Hale was born in St Johnsbury, Vermont on November 22, 1951, one of five sons to Richard and Jeanne Hale. He went to St Johnsbury Academy then took a BSc degree in international economic affairs from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and an MSc in economic history from the London School of Economics.

During the 1990s, David worked as the global economist for Scudder Investments in New York, and subsequently at Zurich Financial Services. In 2004 he established his own consultancy, David Hale Global Economics, with the support of his wife, Lyric (nee Hughes), an entrepreneur and foreign policy analyst.

Together, David and Lyric made a formidable team and crisscrossed the world to build their booming consultancy business. They coauthored many influential articles for publications such as Foreign Affairs, and co-wrote the book What’s Next: unconventional wisdom on the future of the world economy (2013).

David strengthened his ties to Australia by becoming the global economist for the Commonwealth Bank, and was a familiar face on local television, particularly the ABC. Interviewers lapped up his rapid-fire answers, which made him highly suited for tight program schedules.

He also delivered keynote addresses on issues that affect Australia’s long-term strategic interests, such as his 2014 presentation to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) on the Australia-China relationship.

Indeed, Hale foresaw the rise of China and the reemergence of ‘‘the great game’’ of shifting power relationships, well before most of his peers. He saw economic growth as a byproduct of the human spirit, and believed that Australia’s true potential lay in capitalising on its social and intellectual capital, rather than being too dependent on commodities. No doubt, he would have welcomed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s focus on innovation.

When David passed away on 19 October 2015 in Chicago, the world lost one of its most astute economic thinkers, and Australia lost a good friend.

David is survived by Lyric and children Jennie, Harmony, Devin, Erin and Aria and granddaughter Cadence.

By Mark Roeder, a friend and work colleague of David Hale

This obituary was first published in the Australian Financial Review on 29 November 2015 and in the Sydney Morning Herald on 1 February 2016.

Article in Salon Magazine

During the nineteenth century in America, a “geek” was a carnival performer or wild man who would bite the head off a live chicken or snake—and swallow it. His job was to warm up the audience for the main show that followed. It drew on a similar act performed a century earlier by circuses in Austria-Hungary, where people called gecken—or “freaks”—were used as attention-getters. The word survives today in the Dutch language as gecken meaning “crazy.”

Click here to read the full article on Salon Magazine’s website

Henry and Hoki: last word in love

Interview with Hoki Tokuda. The Australian newspaper

Entertainer Hoki Tokuda, the last wife of author Henry Miller, is alive and well and managing the exclusive Tropic of cancer nightclub in Tokyo. Mark Roeder tracked her down.

Norman Mailer idolised Henry Miller and described him as ‘the writer’s writer. The greatest llving writer of his time.’ He even wrote a, book devoted to Miller’s work called Genius and Lust.

But when good Ol’ Henry, by now in his 80s, was asked to comment on this 576 page ode to himself, he said. “I can’t understand it. Mailer’s a clever guy but his writing reminds me of a peterade, a French word for a series of little farts.”

Miller had a habit of puncturing egos. The bigger the ego the deeper he plunged his sword, and the sword became sharper with age.

One person who avoided Miller’s barbs during the twilight of his life was Hoki Tokuda, his last wife and last love. This beautiful Japanese-born singer and piano player was married to him from 1967 until she finally plucked up the courage to ask for a divorce the year before his death in 1980. She, perhaps more than any other living person, was close enough to witness how the ravages of age affected one of the more iconoclastic literary spirits of our time.

Today Hokl owns and manages an exclusive nightclub in Tokyo called the Tropic of Cancer, named after the book that catapulted Miller to international notoriety in 1934.

Tropic was a landmark book that caused an uproar. A marvelously fecund romp in the cosmos of sexuality that teetered on the brink of blatant pornography and brutal honesty. It was immediately banned in the United States, Great Britain and all other English speaking countries. Miller himself was banished from Britain as an undesirable.

Over the next 40 years Miller followed it with a series of autobiographical books that relentlessly poured more fuel on to the great bonfire that he said was needed to *burn the dross and purify the human spirit’. His critics were relentless too, continuing to brand him a pornographer, relegating him to the lower worlds of hedonistic pulp fiction.

For most of his life Miller and his work were much maligned and misunderstood. But he always had his women to help him break through. Anais Nin – who figures in the movie Henry and June now showing around Australia ~ was one of the first. It was she who acted as a creative midwife when he gave birth to Tropic of Cancer.

She was his confidante, colleague and lover. Perhaps in a similar fashion many decades later, Hoki Tokuda helped smooth Miller’s final departure from his earthly existence. And of course. there were all the women in between.

Hoki first met Miller in 1965 at the Imperial Gardens Club on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles where she worked as an entertainer.

“Before and after the show, a few of us played ping-pong and someone asked me if I could beat this man called Henry Miller. I was introduced to him and I saw his old hands and his frail body … he was 75 then. And I said, sure I’ll play him,’ says Hoki.

Immediately Hoki was accepted into Miller’s tightly-knit circle of friends. She was exotic, in her early 30s, had a pretty clown’s face and could play good ping-pong. Within days of their meeting Miller became infatuated with Hoki and started pursuit. For the next 18 months he made himself an ever-present fixture near the stage where she sang and played piano.

‘He always invited me to be with him and his friends at their table,’ she recalls. ‘Then one night he said, Hoki, I am old and I won’t see another birthday. Will you marry me?’

“I said no. And I kept on saying no for weeks. But his friends…they were so persuasive too: they would tell me I had nothing to lose. Henry would be gone soon. Why don’t you make him happy. So I finally said yes.’

The seemingly oddly matched couple were married on September 10. 1967 in Beverly Hills, and Hoki moved into Miller’s house at Pacific Palisades, an upper middle-class conservative neighborhood north of Los Angeles. A home Miller liked to describe as his ‘giant friendly womb. A home with a capital H.’

Here, Hoki and Miller entertained an endless procession of guests, fans, business associates and friends, including Erica Jong, Lawrence Durrell and Jack Nicholson. When the then governor of California, Jerry Brown, paid a surprise visit, Miller greeted him in true ‘flashing daggers’ style with: ‘If you’ll pardon my honesty Governor, I’ve always held the opinion that politicians are rather at the lowest rung, at the bottom of humanly, so to speak.’

As Hoki talks, her eyes are constantly darting around her nightclub. It is 2am and the club is still busy, but it was the only time she would agree to an interview. The air is thick with smoke and her team of beautiful, provocatively dressed hostesses are busy chatting up and making eyes at the wealthy Japanese businessmen, making each of them feel like they are the only male on Earth. The game is ego massage— the more adept the girls are at it, the more $250 bottles of Scotch are consumed.

On the opposite wall is a brightly lit, oversized neon-coloured photo poster of Miller walking along the beach near Big Sur in California. To the left are three of his childlike watercolours, of which he produced nearly 4000 since he first picked up a paintbrush in 1927.

Although the finish of the club is expensive, the impression is one of gaudiness. Hoki’s dress of colourful tropical flowers and large ivory earrings enable her to blend into the background. She can remain invisible, or become intrusive when necessary. Every so she breaks off the interview to greet a favoured guest, then quickly returns to resume where she left off.

‘Henry was the most important thing in my life. But I don’t know if I really loved him. We had so much fun and we laughed all the time…but love, I don’t know. He sent me more than 300 love letters and his words were so passionate. I know he was in love with me. He could love with all his heart and soul…but, you know, he  could not make love to me. He couldn’t do it. He was not a good lover. No sex in all our years of marriage. He had an operation on his back and he was incapacitated and…’

Not a good lover! It seemed too incongruent, too preposterous, that this man who had elevated himself to a literary demi-God in the realm of sex, who had spent it a lifetime plunging head-first into a swirling vortex of carnality, could spend his latter years devoid of experiencing his driving obsession.

‘Are you sure? You didn’t make love, not once?’

‘No. And it didn’t bother me or Henry,’ she elaborated. ‘He used to like touching me though. That was okay. But he was always very jealous. He always worried when I spoke to other men. But he shouldn’t have worried because I was not sleeping with anyone.’

I was beginning to wonder whether it was her matter-of-fact delivery or the content of what she was saying that shocked most. ‘Are you surprised when I say these things.’ she continued, ‘but why should you be? Henry was old. Sure, his books were full of sex, and when he was younger I think he was very active. He said he could love me without having sex.’

Indeed, some months before his death, Miller said: ‘I found I can go without sex like a camel can go without water. Sex is a drop in the bucket when you consider the whole of a relationship. Some of the greatest love affairs in history were completely devoid of sex. I’ve found that my relationships with women that didn’t include sex were just as gratifying as the ones where sex was the main course.’

Hoki breaks off the interview to ask one of the girls for a drink. ‘I never read any of Henry’s books. He only told me about them. He was very proud of them. He said he wrote about life. Not only his life, all of life. But he got angry when people thought his works were only about sex. He hated being thought of as a pornographer’.

Miler’s books are also known for his harrowing tales of personal suffering in the realm of love. He professed that he instinctively knew he needed to suffer at the hands of women in order to evolve. It had always been this way for him. Of his relationship with one of his earlier wives, June Edith Smith, whom he married in 1924, he said: ‘June was of another world, another planet, a femme fatale. I was doomed to suffer from the start. You suffer when you try to possess her because you rob her of her mystery the very thing that attracted you in the first place. But her belief in me opened up my ‘new’ life as a writer.’

What kind of world did Miller hope to enter through his relationship with Hoki? Where did this last stepping-stone lead? Perhaps, the best description of the world he hankered for may be found in an essay he wrote in 1972:

“I am forever surprised, shocked and delighted by the admixture in the Japanese of cruelty and tenderness, of violence and ugliness. In the Japanese this ambiguity exists more sharply and poignantly. In their art the aesthetic and emotional approach are always perfectly blended. ‘A thing of horror can also be a thing of beauty … A woman whose heart is broken, a Japanese woman I mean, a woman in utter despair and defeat may yet exhibit a smile which only an angel of mercy could summon.’

Miller never saw that smile in Hoki.

To do so would have meant he had conquered her, thereby relinquishing his ticket to the next world of his imagination. A ticket he had already paid for.

NB: This article first appeared in The Australian newspaper in October, 1990

The Diminishing Returns of the Information Age

This article by Mark Roeder appeared in What’s Next, a Yale University Press publication (2011) by David and Lyric Hale. 

At the dawn of the internet age in the mid-nineties, many pundits predicted that the internet would empower billions of people to become smarter, or at least better informed, simply by making so much information easily accessible. But information is not knowledge. People do not automatically become smarter by being immersed in a sea of data any more than security guards in an art gallery become art experts through a process of osmosis. Information must be chewed over, tested, and digested before it can become knowledge. Indeed, too much information can be a bad thing. This is because the only way that most of us can cope with vast oceans of data is to skim the surface, and glean the fragments of information that seem most relevant. Many of us are able to scan vast amounts of information by jumping from hyper-link to hyper-link with astonishing dexterity.

Although it may appear that skimming is simply the internet version of ‘speed reading’, this would be to underestimate its influence on the way we process information. Nicholas Carr, writing in The Atlantic, says:

What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon.’ (Carr, Nicholas, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” The Atlantic, July/August 2008)

Carr highlights one of the great paradoxes of the modern media, and particularly the internet, which is despite offering so much depth of information, it encourages our thinking to be more shallow. Reading, unlike speaking, is not an instinctive skill for human beings that is coded in our genes. It has to be learned and practiced. Over time, the way we read conditions the way we think, which in turn, rewires our brain through the process of neuroplasticity. For centuries our reading habits have encouraged us to not just broaden our knowledge, but to reflect on the human condition and the world we live in through works of literature and philosophy. Such deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking. Nowadays, however, technology is conditioning us to read in the ‘shallows’ and never dwell on one subject for too long. The playwright Richard Foreman believes this process is transforming us into ‘pancake people’ – spread wide and thin as we connect with the vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button. Indeed, the very businesses that run the internet do not like us staying on one site too long, or surfing at too a leisurely pace. This is because they derive their advertising revenue from the number of sites visited, and the faster we move from one site to another, the better

People do not just move between internet sites, they also skip from media to media – from emails, phone calls, blogs, Facebook, text messages, Twitter, television, and radio. Our evolution into media omnivores is also affecting the way we think.  A recent study led by Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford University in California, investigated whether cognitive abilities might be affected by the range of media people regularly use. The results of the study were surprising, and suggest that heavy ‘multitaskers’, people who often switch between  many tasks, are actually slower at identifying changes to content than ‘light’ multitaskers. The heavy multitaskers also had more trouble filtering out irrelevant information, greater difficulty in concentrating on particular activities, and, perhaps most surprisingly, more difficulty in moving between tasks in an effective way. Up until now it was generally assumed that heavy multitaskers would be more adept at responding quickly and accurately to content changes, but the reverse seems to be the case. The researchers concluded that:

‘human cognition is ill-suited both for attending to multiple input streams and for simultaneously performing multiple tasks.With e-mails, phone calls, text messages, and online social media all competing for our attention, often against a background of television, radio, or music, our brains can reach information overload.’ (Nass, Clifford, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers, PNAS, August 24, 2009)

There are certain professions that breed multi-taskers and ‘super-skimmers’; people whose job it is scan and process information at lightning speed. Financial traders are such people. They are immersed in a sea of Blackberries and Bloomberg screens gushing out torrents of financial data which they rapidly sift through in order to optimise their trades. It is not a job for the slow or dim-witted. Traders are usually acutely bright young men. Yet, they were among the first to be drowned by the tsunami of the global financial crisis. Why? Because they could not detect the tectonic shifts occurring on the ocean floor that would generate the destructive wave. They were skimmers trying to cope with too much information. They are the personification of the diminishing returns of the Information Age.

In the 1960’s an interesting experiment was conducted that demonstrated the folly of having too much information. Two groups of people were shown a fuzzy but indistinct outline of a fire hydrant. The resolution was gradually increased for one group, through a series of ten steps. Whereas for the other group the resolution was increased over just five steps. Then the process was stopped at a point where each group was looking at an identical picture asked what they could see. It turned out that the members of the group which saw fewer intermediate steps saw the picture earlier than the group who were presented with more steps. The extra information encouraged them to speculate more about what the image was, thus clouding their judgement. Whereas the first group saw the fire hydrant more directly for what it was, unhindered by too many layers of information. (3)

The internet too, has a multilayer structure. So many layers in fact that one can easily get lost. Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, said that internet was supposed to be ‘the great democratizer of information. It was supposed to empower individual investors, make murky financial markets more transparent, and create a new generation of citizen investors…It was supposed to shrink the world and turn it into a village, where everything happened in the public square and corruption and greed would have no place to hide. As the 1990’s mantra went, ‘information wants to be free’. This new ‘freedom of information’, however, created a giant jigsaw puzzle comprising a zillion pieces of information, that was constantly and frenetically changing. All the relevant information was there, but there was no way to look at it in a way that made sense. The internet also greatly accelerated people’s ability to make transactions, thus generating more momentum in the markets, which in turn fuelled the bubble. ‘We are in the first financial crisis of the internet age,’ said Kedrosky. ‘a crisis caused in large part by the tightly coupled technologies that now underpin the financial system and our society as a whole.’ (Kedrosky, Paul, “The First Disaster of the Internet Age,” Newsweek,October 18, 2008 ) For example, one reason for the global financial crisis was, perversely, the sheer abundance of financial information available online, which created a ‘smog’ of data. This made it difficult for even the most sophisticated financial analyst to grasp the whole picture, and comprehend the scale of the emerging problem.

The internet does not just encourage our thinking to become shallow, it also encourages it to be more narrow. This is because, unlike traditional media such as a newspaper or television show, we can choose to see only the information we want to see. So when we go online, we act as our own editor and gatekeeper for the news, and tend to screen out opposing viewpoints. In fact we often look for information and perspectives that confirm our existing mindsets and prejudices. Nicholas Negroponte of MIT calls this self-censored media product ‘The Daily Me’, which represents another step towards a world in which people increasingly isolate themselves in a bubble of self-sustaining beliefs, and immerse themselves in like-minded communities. Although we may like the idea of a debating chamber, in reality we prefer an echo chamber. In one classic U.S. study, Republicans and Democrats were offered various research reports from a neutral source. Both groups were most eager to receive coherent arguments that corroborated their pre-existing mindsets. Bill Bishop, the author of The Big Sort: Why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart, says that as the United States grows more politically segregated, ‘the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups’. (5) A twelve nation study found that Americans, particularly highly educated ones, are the least likely to discuss politics with people of different views.

People’s tendency to confirm their existing beliefs encourages them to form likeminded communities on the web, such as social networking sites and virtual worlds. These communities such as Facebook, MySpace, Second Life, and the Twitterscape, help connect millions of people in environments that are conducive for building relationships. They also offer the potential for new types of democratic processes such as direct voting online, and the scope for alternate views to be put forward outside of the mainstream. The downside to web communities is they can cause people to become more cut off from the rest of society. In their paper, “Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyber Balkans,” professors Marshal Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson said that ‘Individuals empowered to screen out material that does not conform to their existing preferences may form virtual cliques, insulate themselves from opposing points of view, and reinforce their biases … This voluntary Balkanisation and the loss of shared experiences and values may be harmful to the structure of democratic societies.’ (Van Alstyne, Marshal and Brynjolfsson, Erik, “Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyber Balkans,” MIT Sloan School, March 1997) They warned that we should have no illusions that the internet will create a greater sense of community. The danger is that when people suppress or are oblivious to information that contradicts their existing mindset, they are far more likely to believe they are heading in the right direction, and ignore warning signs.

Perhaps one of the more disappointing, and counterintuitive, aspects of the internet is that is not the free and open marketplace of ideas that we would like to believe. Many of the world’s most popular internet news sites are owned by the major news organisations such as CNN, New York Times, News Limited, and the BBC, which tend to mirror the editorial slant from their own television and newspaper outlets. During the first quarter of 2009, websites owned by newspaper groups in the U.S. attracted more than 80 million unique visitors on average (over 40 percent of all internet users), which was a record number that represented a significant percent increase over the same period the previous year according to Neilsen Online Research. Out of the top 30 most popular sites, nine were newspaper sites. (7) In effect, we are seeing the emergence of an online oligarchy dominated by the old guard. Some media companies have invested huge resources into their online sites, such as business publisher Forbes which now employs more journalists at its Forbes.com site than at its magazine. Such online sites provide lucrative revenue because advertisers are able to more accurately track the audiences and their response rates to online advertising. People gravitate to the big established online news sites because they are distrustful of a medium that, as the host of “The Daily Show”, Jon Stewart, points out, ‘combines the credibility of anonymous hearsay with the excitement of typing.’

Meanwhile, the traditional media, particularly television news, has undergone a profound transformation in recent years. This has much to do with the way news is presented. Whereas once the media provided us with relatively unvarnished reports of what is happening with little hype, now it increasingly tends to operate as a magnifier and sensationaliser of news stories. This trend is particularly prevalent on television, where news stories are often magnified out of all proportion to their intrinsic newsworthiness, and then repeated relentlessly through the 24-hour news cycle.

The cumulative effect of these changes is to create a perceptual environment in which the world around us seems to be moving faster. Events seem to happen more instantaneously, and evolve more rapidly. They also seem to be more important and consequential, as if every news story is a big story. This makes us feel we should know about them, and so we ‘plug’ into this fast-moving machine to get our daily ‘fix’ of the news, which for many people can be quite addictive. We become conditioned to see the world as a series of rapidly escalating events which generate a powerful, self-perpetuating momentum. We voyeuristically and vicariously ride the flow of these events as they ebb and flow.

Gradually, over time, this conditioning seeps into the way we experience our own ‘real’ lives. We become more accustomed to a momentum-driven world in which we are content to go with the flow, to observe rather than participate or challenge. This is particularly so for the really big issues of our time which develop enormous momentum. We are less inclined to resist such powerful momentum and may even see such resistance as futile. It is so much easier to surrender to the flow.

This conditioning may not just be a matter of perception. Recent studies of the human brain using imaging technology (fMRI) indicate that the persistent use of communications technology activates reward pathways that have been linked to addiction. The brain appears to rewire its neural pathways through a process called ‘neuro-plasticity’. Hence there may be a biological basis to some people’s addictive tendencies for the fast-moving news cycle. This is reflected in the amount of television we consume, which now averages around 4 hours a day in developed countries (and over 5 hours in the US) – and accounts for the major share of people’s leisure time.

The momentum-driven nature of the news also means that news stories tend to take on a life of their own and become ‘stuck in the groove’. This is because when a newsworthy event happens, the media develops a storyline around it, which is then magnified and reinforced by the globally integrated nature of the media. Eventually this storyline develops its own powerful momentum, so that even when facts arise that contradict it, they are resisted or ignored, and ultimately overwhelmed by the media juggernaut which is already moving in a certain direction. This is why so many news stories, particularly big ones, seem to have a predetermined air about them. Rarely are we surprised by a sudden turn of events.

One of the most destructive stories promulgated by the media in recent times is the idea that debt did not matter because people could get richer through rising house prices. The economist Paul Krugman wrote, ‘Until very recently Americans believed they were getting richer, because they received statements saying that their houses and stock portfolios were appreciating in value faster than their debts were increasing. And if the belief of many Americans that they could count on capital gains forever sounds naïve, it’s worth remembering just how many influential voices – notably in right-leaning publications like the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and National Review – promoted that belief, and ridiculed those who worried about low savings and high levels of debt.’ (Krugman, Paul, “Decade at Bernie’s,” New York Times,February 16, 2009)

Once a storyline becomes established in the public mind, even if it is false, it becomes difficult to dislodge. Long after it became clear just how serious the global financial crisis was, people were still rushing in to buy homes they could not afford and ramping up their credit card debts. It was as if they did not want to hear the bad news. This is one of the great paradoxes of the modern media: it actually conditions people to be less able to absorb real news. It is equivalent to someone who is always babbling at you and hyping everything up–when he actually has something consequential to say, you do not hear it. ‘One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early twenty-first century,’ observed the social commentator and columnist Frank Rich, ‘is Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even fifteen years ago. The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly “changed everything,” slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable.’ (Rich, Frank, “What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us,” New York Times, February 22, 2009)

The decline of news quality has not gone unnoticed by the public. A poll conducted by the Washington-based Pew Research Center, suggests that more than half of Americans believe that US news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and do not care about the people they report on. (9) Meanwhile, media diversity is in decline everywhere, particular with regards to news coverage. Although there are now over 1600 network and cable channels in the US,up from just a handful 25 years ago, most of these amplify news feeds from a small number of major media companies. (10) Thousands of local, independent newspapers have closed down across the country, further reducing the diversity of viewpoints. The number of channels in the UK has increased from 11 in 1990 to over 400 today, but the number of news rooms has actually decreased. In a case of more is less, most major media companies in the western world have simultaneously reduced their independent news gathering resources while expanding their distribution networks.

This trend will continue because large media companies are finding it increasingly difficult to charge for their newsgathering activities when consumers can get most of their news for free on the internet. Also given consumers’ preference for skimming between numerous sites, and their unwillingness to be locked into expensive subscriber sites, it is likely that the media will have to develop ‘skimmer packages’ for media ‘omnivores’ and  ‘diver’ packagers for those who want to delve more deeply into one or two specialist media.  Or even a combination of ‘skimmer and diver’ packages. The development of such packages will require a high degree of cooperation between competing media and technology companies, but their development is inevitable. For such packages will provide a much needed model to ‘monetize’ parts of the internet, while at the same time facilitating consumers need to ‘skim and roam’ the rest of the net relatively unencumbered

In the meantime, however, the cumulative effect of these trends has been to create a ‘diminishing law of returns of the information age’ for both consumers and media companies. Indeed, this is the great paradox of our world today. Never before have we had access to so much information, and yet so little understanding of how to manage it.

Sources:

1. Carr, Nicholas. Is Google making us stupid? The Atlantic Monthly. July/August 2008. See also: Small, Gary.UCLA neuroscientist. iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. Collins Living. 2008. See also Begley, Sharon. Train your mind. Change your brain. 2007. Ballantine Books.

2. Henderson, Mark. Media multi-taskers are in danger of brain overload. The Times. August 25, 2009

3. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan. Penguin Books. 2008

4. Kedrosky, Paul. The First Disaster of the Internet Age. Newsweek magazine. October 27, 2008.

5. Kristof, Nicholas D. The Daily Me. March 19, 2009. The New York Times.

6. Marshal Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson. Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyber Balkans. MIT Sloan School, March 1997

7. Nate Anderson, Online oligarchy dominates Net news coverage. March 17, 2008. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080317; Who owns the media? http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/democracyondeadline/mediaownership.html

8. Frank Rich, February 22, 2009. New York Times.

9. Pew research centre for the people and the press. August 9, 2007. Views of Press Values and Performance: 1985-2007.

10. Media Reform Information Centre. www.corporations.org/media/; The state of the News Media, 2007, annual report on American journalism. www.journalism.org

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Tantalising People Without Intimidating Them

An interview with Edmund Capon, Director of the Art Gallery of NSW by Mark Roeder for Graphics magazine

The face is probably familiar by now.  So is the red hair, and the ruddy complexion, and that voice… that remarkably persuasive voice that, last year, urged thousands of Sydneysiders to “whatever you do, see Monet, painter of light!”  And likewise, compelled many more thousands to experience such extravaganzas as the ‘Entombed Warriors’, ‘Turner’ and the ‘Pop Art’ exhibition.

Edmund Capon, former Keeper of the Asian Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and now Director of the Art Gallery of NSW, is by any standards one of the brightest, most entrepreneurial administrators to come on to the Australian art scene in recent years.

In a short time, he has somehow managed to remove much of the stodginess and elitism that surrounded the AGNSW, and transformed it into a virtual ‘people’s palace’ of art.  But more than that, he and his team have made the Gallery friendly to people who would perhaps never have even dreamed of setting foot inside an art gallery before.

Yet, talking to him, you get the feeling that his achievement was not really a struggle at all, but rather a natural outcome of his whole attitude about the way a public art gallery should be.  “I hate being intimidated by these places, like museums and galleries!” he exclaims, “And I feel the atmosphere the building breathes is terribly important.  It must be welcoming to everybody.  We want people to come and use this place… not scare them away.”

To this end, Edmund Capon has found himself deeply involved in nearly all aspects of the Gallery’s functioning, and in particular the ‘promotional’ side of things.

“When I first came here,” he says “I took the view that being a director was really a trinity of three things… administration, scholarly work and finally, what I would call the ‘impressario/promotional’ aspect.  But I have found that the job has turned out to be about 35% administration and a tremendous amount of promotional work.  Because it seemed to me that’s what the place needed – a new image.  A bit of galvanising in the public eye.”

Capon firmly believes this image is not determined by the architecture, not by what’s in the building, but by the staff who work there.  Having recognised this, he says, the way to get the right message across is not through the institution, “people don’t identify with institutions”, but through somebody who represents that institution.  Hence, his regular appearances on TV and radio shows promoting the Gallery, which, he quips, can sometimes lead to amusing situations.

“For instance, last year, there I was on prime-time television every night imploring people to see Monet… and that I would be there every day too!  But suddenly I had to go to Japan for a couple of days.  I was about to climb onto a jumbo at Sydney airport, when all the hostesses lined up and said ‘you’re not allowed on here, because you’re supposed to be at the Art Gallery every day’!”

However, long before any media exposure, says Capon, there is an enormous amount of preparation to be done in marketing an exhibition.

“Starting with the title itself… what you actually call the exhibition is extremely important,” he says.  “Take ‘The Entombed Warriors’… we could have called them ‘Diggings from Ancient such and such’… but instead, our agency in Melbourne dreamt up this marvellous title.  So jolly good in fact, it was used elsewhere around the world as the exhibition travelled.”

He also cites other effective titles as; ‘Monet – painter of light’, ‘Treasures of the Forbidden City’, and ‘Golden Summers – Masterpieces of Australian Impressionism’.

“All these titles are evocative, they catch peoples’ interest,” he says, “which brings me to another equally important facet of the Gallery’s image… the graphics themselves.”

To Capon, the term ‘graphics’ has several meanings and many connotations.  There are what he calls the ‘housekeeping graphics’ of the Gallery.  That is, all the signs, labels and notices that are used to explain works of art, or give directions.

“It’s an odd thing, that of everything to do with running a gallery, you become extraordinarily aware if these ‘housekeeping graphics’… because they really affect the atmosphere, especially if they’re tacky or badly designed.  Which is why I admire the Metropolitan Museum in New York so much… such an absolutely massive place, yet the standard of their ‘housekeeping graphics’ is truly incredible.  Everything is so clear and well laid out.  While, on the other hand, the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington is a most beautiful building on the outside, but inside it’s a bloody useless place for hanging pictures!… Certainly, nice pieces of design architecture in there, but so impractical.”

Capon adds that he thinks it’s really quite a shame that paintings in galleries have to be labelled at all.  “Because we don’t label paintings in our own houses, do we?  And when you put a label on a painting… you give it a sort of ‘institutional’ feel.  I wish I could find some way around it.”

The next stage up from ‘housekeeping graphics’ are the designs on the banners, posters, brochures and logos that announce each exhibition.  Capon says he is adamant that all this type of material is very clear and direct.

“I cannot understand these very abstract logos you see around.  They are meaningless to me.  Whether you are designing for corporations or art exhibitions, I think you must always design logos to be specific and succinct – to actually say something.”

He says this emphasis on clarity is particularly important for an art gallery.  “Because, after all there is enough abstraction inside the building.  You don’t want to confuse people by giving them intangibles outside the building.  We have to give the public something to grasp!  Tantalise them certainly, but don’t intimidate them or confuse them.”

Commenting on the AGNSW logo, Capon says it was designed by Michael Bryce, and has a sort of ‘calligraphic’ quality which he likes.  “Also, it’s just a little bit like a Chinese seal, which works quite well…”

Finally, still on the subject of graphics, Capon says there are the ‘graphic elements’ of the works of art themselves to consider.  But that is a most complex matter to even go into… they all have their graphic elements, some more than others.  “I mean, look at a single Andy Warhol painting… you could talk forever about the graphic component in that, I suppose…”

In addition to his day-to-day job of running the Art Gallery, Capon also finds time to busy himself with his hobby of giraffe collecting.  He has, over the years amassed a large number of giraffe dolls, figurines, pictures, watercolours and, of course, his now famous ‘giraffe tie’, which he frequently wears for TV interviews.

Also he manages to judge the occasional art show.  Coming up on April 29th, he, Margaret Olley and Justice Michael Kirby, will judge ‘The Law’ exhibition, sponsored by Melbourne lawyer Eve Mahlab.

Finally, for the curious, what are Edmund Capon’s four favourite paintings in the Art Gallery of NSW?

‘The Ferry’, by Phillips-Fox

‘Three Bathers’, by Kirchner

‘Kanzan & Jittoku’, by Rosetsu

and the huge Frank Stella ‘Khurasan Gate Variation II’.

‘Singo’

Interview with John Singleton by Mark Roeder

John Singleton is one of those rare image-makers, who himself has a larger-than-life image.  In fact, if you have lived in Australia during the past 30 years or so, you would have been touched by his work and his presence.

‘Touched’ is the word.  For there is something very physical about John Singleton.  You get the feeling this man has an enormous capacity for translating his ideas into physical reality.  And when you listen very closely to his voice, behind the oft-maligned ‘ockerish’ tones there is a sort of challenging quality there – like a subliminal message urging you to take action.  Perhaps that’s why he mixes so readily with the mega-rich and powerful.  He reminds them of what can be done.

It’s worth emphasising again this coaching ability of John Singleton, because few people realise just how big an impact he has made on developing advertising talent in this country.  The list of people he has employed or worked with over the years reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of Australian advertising.  Not to mention the ‘stars’ he has helped create in his commercials, from Jeanne Little to Ita Buttrose.

But there’s something else.  Something not immediately apparent.  For John Singleton is, above all, a creative psychologist.  That is, he not only intuitively understands what makes people tick, he actually uses this knowledge to make people see things differently.  To create new visions and desires for people.

It makes him a very potent salesman.  And make no mistake about it, to Singleton, advertising is, and always has been, about ‘S-E-L-L-I-N-G’.

“What does it matter how many awards a commercial wins?  If it doesn’t sell products, it’s just a well produced waste of money!” Singleton says.

Of course, he did leave his favourite craft of advertising for nine years.  During this time he was a TV and radio star, circus promoter, consultant, writer, football promoter and subject (or victim) of more than his fair share of newspaper headlines.

But now he’s back, and this time the front door has ‘John Singleton Advertising’ on it.  In just eighteen months the agency has gained $26 million in billings, and was recently voted by an independent poll of marketing directors as the best performing, most creative and highest impact medium-sized agency in Australia.  No other agency won every category.

“You might say the Whizz Kid has become the veteran,” Singleton smiles, with a glimmer of déjà vu in his eyes.  “It’s good to be back.  This advertising is a bloody great game, you know.”

What is the biggest change he has noticed in the industry this time around?

“I’ll tell you… nowadays advertising people are much more scientific, much more exacting about wasting their clients’ money.  For example, the media experts tell us that now instead of ‘reach’ and ‘frequency’, there are TARPS, and so on… So you get all these ads being produced with all this research and scientific jargon to tell you how effective they are… and when they go to air, no products get moved off the shelves!  Meanwhile, Mr Creative Heavyweight collects his FACTS awards and earns a bigger salary.  Fair dinkum, it’s crazy!

“As for the competition, about the only other agency I respect is MOJO.  Mo and Jo are geniuses… I’ve worked with Alan Morris, who is such a good writer, but it’s been one of my greatest regrets I’ve not had a chance to work with Allan Johnston.”

Of course, Singleton and MOJO have something very important in common, in that they were the first people to create advertising that actually ‘celebrated’ the Australian condition, and resisted making ads that looked and sounded as if they were made half way between America and Europe.

However, unlike MOJO, who made great use of musical lyrics, Singleton’s early work in particular relied on extraordinarily direct propositions – aimed straight at the consumer’s heart and hip pocket nerve.  Lines like “Where do you get it?” and “I wouldn’t do these commercials if they weren’t genuine”, are indelibly etched in the book of All-time Great Australian advertising lines.  Indeed, they also echo Singleton’s own propensity for offering a challenge.

The sound of the clapper board had been silent for too long in Australia (Copy)

Interview with Phillip Adams by Mark Roeder

“Do you have anything that’s not 5,000 years old I could rest my coffee cup on?” I asked, furtively searching for a coaster before the interview began.

“Use this.  It’s only a few hundred years old,” said Phillip Adams without blinking, whilst passing over a small blackish looking plate that he had extracted from the nearby pile of terracotta.

Adams was in the middle of taking another delivery of antiquities at his rather palladian style home in Darlinghurst, a former residence of an early Governor of the Bank of NSW.  The street itself used to be Darlinghurst’s most notorious – a former haven for transvestites and street ‘trade’.  Now the area has gone respectable ex-bohemia, complete with up market art galleries, and sprinkled with apartments selling for prices only investment bankers can afford.

Inside Adams’ house the ‘stuff’ was everywhere.  Wall to wall icons, statuettes, murals, paintings, old clocks, antique guns, pre-Columbian and Hellenistic art, Egyptian mummies and sarcophagi galore.  And this was just the living room.  The rest of the collection was upstairs; whole rooms full.  You seriously start to wonder whether you are in a house or a museum.  On most weekends, Adams (known locally as ‘The Darlo Lama’) leaves his Darlinghurst address to stay at his 1600 hectare property at Scone, a few hours drive north from Sydney, where he moves into another, less frenetic world.  No doubt, more private too.

Down to business.  That is, the role he has played in creating ‘mirrors’ in our life – particularly through film.  And the effects of mass communication on the way we behave, a subject that Phillip Adams knows more about and has more to say about, than most.

After all he has run the Australian Film Commission, the Commission of the Future, co-founded the largest Australian Advertising agency, was President of the Arts Council of Victoria, hosts his own radio show, and sits on dozens of influential committees.  He is a man whose words are transcribed and amplified by countless newspapers, magazines and microphones each week.  Words that one critic described as the ‘unwholesome waffle of the unspeakable Adams’.

Nevertheless, this bearded ‘Walking Oracle’ (who prefers to dress in black) is sought after by politicians, tycoons, artists, curators… all seeking his ideas on everything from Egyptian icons to missile bases.

Why do people gravitate towards him?  You won’t get any answers from Phillip because he is the first to admit he doesn’t know.  Perhaps the best clues come from what he has to say.  The way he discovers relationships between even the most disparate subjects, boils them up in the crucible of his mind, and creates fresh meaning and clarity.  Indeed his powers of association and communication are phenomenal.

Suddenly he becomes impatient, reaches for the interview recorder, rewinds it and begins speaking into it.  “Let’s start off with the film industry,” he says.  “Like most people of my generation, I spent my life going to Saturday matinees at Hoyts and marvelling at how clever the Americans were to make movies… Soon I had the dazzling and dizzying idea that perhaps Australians could make films too.  Because at the time, virtually nothing had happened in Australian film for about 30 years.  And apart from a few lonely prophets without honour, like filmmaker Cecil Holmes, the sound of the clapper board had been silent for too long.

“So the next thing, my pal Brian Robinson and I bought a Bolex 16 mm camera for 80 quid.  It was primitive, with a clockwork motor.  And it used to run out of puff every 20 seconds or so.”

With this camera Adams and Robinson began work on their first feature film, ‘Jack & Jill, a Postscript’.  It was a love story between a tow truck driver and a kindergarten teacher, and comprised a sequence of nursery rhymes strung together.  “You see, nursery rhymes have real meanings,” explains Adams.  “Often quite sinister, macabre meanings… and I’ve always been fascinated by them.”

The film took 6 to 7 years to complete, with Adams and Robinson using everyone they could to appear in it – friends, relatives.  “We literally edited it with a pair of scissors and cello tape on the end of a bed!”  Adams recalled with a mixture of fondness and surprise.  “But it didn’t turn out half bad.  In fact, it was the first Australian film to win the AFI Awards, plus a lot of other awards including the Grand Prix in the Adelaide-Auckland Film Festival.  So technically it was also the first Australian film to win an international film festival.”

Yet despite this critical success, Adams says that no-one wanted to show Jack & Jill.  He really had to bully and push the film to get it out to the cinemas.  But it did prove one thing to him – feature films could be made here.

“After that, I persuaded Bob Jane the racing driver to give me $30,000 (a fortune in those days) to make a three and a half hour documentary called the Naked Bunyip, which was Grahame Blundell’s debut piece.  He played a young researcher on Australian sexuality.  Once again I was told it was absurd to release it.  Meanwhile, the censor was trying to hack it to pieces.  So I hired the Palais (formerly the biggest cinema in Australia) and was able to pack it to the rafters.  We made a fortune out of it.”

With this rocky but fortunate start behind him, Adams began work on other projects including Australia’s first Vietnam documentary in collaboration with Bruce Petty the cartoonist.  He also sharpened up his filmmaking skills through working in advertising with people like Fred Schepski.

“It’s interesting to note just how important the advertising industry has been in fostering talent in this country.  For me, leaving school at 15 with no opportunity to go to university or matriculate… and having a lunatic stepfather whose attempts to murder me were becoming more serious and frequent… advertising gave me a start.  And if you look around today at the list of prominent people who started in advertising, it’s amazing.  It was a sort of Australia Council before there was an Australia Council.  Donald Horne worked in advertising, and so it seems did just about every writer and painter.”

By the late 60’s Adams’ initial interest in film had incubated into a passion, and he took his first steps towards helping to establish a Film industry in Australia.  He noted that the then Prime Minister Harold Holt was “umming and ahhing” about whether it was needed.  But before he could do anything, he drowned, and suddenly Gorton was in power.  An opportunity presented itself.

It was Adams’ friend Barry Jones who had played a small but not inconsequential part in helping Gorton to gain power, by giving him favourable media coverage on his radio and TV talk shows.  “So of course, Gorton had a fairly avuncular attitude towards Barry.  Next thing, Barry and I had Gorton’s ear.  WE persuaded him to send us on a film-fact-finding mission around the world.  We came back and I wrote a one page report.  It started… ‘We hold these truths to be self evident’ (a deliberate piece of plagiarism from a certain American document).  Then it continued, ‘It was time we heard our own voices, saw our own landscapes, dreamed our own dreams’.”

The report went on to suggest a simple structure that might get a film industry going.  This included setting up an experimental film fund to give money to young would-be/could-be filmmakers, a film school at Swinbourne and the establishment of the Australian Film Development Corporation.  “That last idea was really the brainchild of Stanley Hall, who was then running the Commonwealth Film Unit (now Film Australia).” says Adams.

Unfortunately, no sooner had Gorton accepted Adams’ one page document than Gorton lost office, and various factions within the Party immediately tried to squash the document’s recommendations.

“I went on television and noisily defended it,” says Adams.  “Bill McMahon (the incoming Prime Minister) rang me the next morning with apologies and promised it would go ahead after all.  And it did.  What McMahon didn’t finish, Whitlam finished when he came to power.”

The new Australian film industry was born.  However, Adams is quick to point out he is not implying the Australian Film Industry wouldn’t have happened without him and Barry Jones.  “But we were certainly the conduits, lightning conductors, for the idea to take shape.  I had a very clear vision of what needed to happen at the time.”

Later when the Australian Film Development Corporation was set up, the first film they financed was Barry McKenzie.  So Adams, director Bruce Beresford and actor Barry Humphries, set off to England to produce it.  “But once again,” says Adams woefully, “no-one wanted to touch it with a barge pole.  We just couldn’t get it released.  So we hired a couple of empty cinemas, promoted it like mad… and very soon it started taking more money than A Clockwork Orange (the Stanley Kubrick classic).  A feat it repeated in London, where, to our genuine astonishment and joy, it broke 9 box office records in Leicester Square.”

Adams thinks its fascinating to see the structural parallels between Barry McKenzie and Crocodile Dundee.  “Parallels that Paul Hogan is probably embarrassed by… but as Barry points out, Bazza was really Hogan’s father in more ways than one.”  Adams feels the Barry McKenzie films helped pave the way for other films like Picnic at Hanging Rock.  “No Bazza.  No Picnic… I think many people would acknowledge that.”

Adams went on to produce a host of other films including Don’s Party, The Getting of Wisdom, We of the Never Never and Lonely Hearts.  “My role in this industry was the result of long dreamings, fantasising and risk-taking.  Tim Burstill was another person who must be given credit.  He was making 2000 Weeks when I was making Jack & Jill.  And Tim, like me, would get knocked to the ground, laughed at, walked all over… but we’d just dust ourselves off and do it again, and again.” says Adams.

Back to the process of ‘creating mirrors’ for society, Adams’ filmmaking represents only one thread of his work  His early involvement with the Communist Party influenced how he saw things, and the visions he chose to create.  He was a member of the Communist Party when he was barely 16 years old, at a time when the Party was extremely concerned with maintaining a nationalistic cultural identity.

“I won’t embarrass people by naming them now, but some of the people I met in the Party are in very lofty positions today – especially in the arts and literature.  One day the story will be told just how important the Communist Party was.  It was like a national trust for national idioms.  It was intensely patriotic and didn’t do much kowtowing to Moscow or Beijing.”

He says it also heightened his perception of how American cultural imperialism (especially through television) was rapidly obliterating Australian culture.

“I remember a Mayday March (the annual hymn of praise to the working classes) with all these trade unions marching with their wonderful banners.  Well, no actor was game to march because ASIO was out taking everyone’s photo.  McCarthyisim was running rife, and politics were ultra conservative.  I was persuaded to become involved.  I organised a funeral cortege with a very cadaverous looking actor called Ron Pinnell lying in an open coffin.  I was dressed as an undertaker, while Ron tolled a knell – calling out that television was unfair to Australian talent because it put them out of business.  Then, as we walked around the streets of Melbourne, people everywhere… and I mean all the way along the march, yelled out “Australians haven’t got any fucking talent!”

It was a scene that would be indelibly printed on Adams’ mind.  Meanwhile, between working in films and advertising, his career as a writer and critic was blossoming.  First, he began writing for the communist journals, and later, pseudonymously for the Bulletin.

“That is, I ghost wrote the reviews that other people were too drunk or bored to do – about film, music and art.  One day, Bruce Petty said to me, ‘You’re better than this.  Come work for this new newspaper, The Australian’.  So I did.  And because Murdoch (the proprietor) didn’t have any TV interests yet, I could write my TV column without inhibition… I was audacious, fresh and generated a lot of comment.  So much so, that the editor gave me my own general column called ‘Adams’ Rib’, even though by-line columns were very rare then.  Now I could really let loose!  I wrote discursively, elliptically about everything… political satire, love, death, nostalgia.  Subjects which no other newspapers in Australia considered proper.”

Then a hiccup.  One day Rupert Murdoch returned home from London after getting a ‘drubbing’ from David Frost.  “He was furious and raging with hate for satirists,” says Adams.  “Apparently he said to his editor, ‘Do we have any satirists?’  The editor said, ‘We’ve got two, Adams and Ray Taylor’… ‘Sack em!’”

Adams demise however, was short lived.  No sooner had he left the Australian than the mail started pouring in, protesting his sacking.  At one stage, there we more letters than the Vietnam War was generating.  So Adams was soon back on more money, unleashing more ‘unwholesome waffle of the unspeakable Adams’.

Around this time, the then Premier of South Australia, Don Dunstan (an avid Adams reader) invited him to South Australia to help set up the South Australian Film Corporation.  “By this time,” explains Adams, “I had become convinced that no artist or creative person should become a bureaucrat or have permanency.  I saw that the ABC was going to destroy its people and make them dull, simply because they had job security – womb to tomb employment.  This notion was reinforced by a vivid scene that Barry Jones and I had witnessed in Canada.”

Adams was sitting in a corner of the cafe at the National Film Board of Canada with Norman McClaren, the great experimentalist filmmaker (and one of Adams’ heroes).  “Everyone was in tears,” recalls Adams.  “I asked Norman why.  He said ‘because Trudeau’s just fired half of them in a cost-cutting spree’.  I replied, ‘Isn’t that awful!’ And he said, ‘No it’s not, it’s great.  They’ve all ossified… it will do them good.”

“Coming back to Australia I realised he was right.  So we purposefully designed the South Australian Film Corporation in a way that nobody could have full employment, least of all the Director.”

Inspired by this breakthrough, Adams had one of his greatest ideas.  It was called ‘Electric Television’ and would be a national television channel virtually without any staff.  A channel where everyone could hang their ‘electric pictures’, with almost the entire budget being devoted to purchasing programmes instead of paying overheads.

“I tried to get the Labor government to take the idea up, but unfortunately it didn’t happen here,” says Adams.  “But it did happen in England a few years later with their Channel 4, which is based on a similar concept… So it still remains one of my big ambitions to leave Australia with a Channel 4 style network – our own ‘Electric Television’.

Another ambition of Adams’, and one that is rapidly coming to fruition, is an idea he is working on with Mike Browning.  It’s called ‘Cinemotion’ and is a cross between a flight simulator, 3-D television and a Sensoround theatre.  “It’s the cinema of the next century,” says Adams.  “You put on a safety belt, the cinema moves, it spins, goes up and down, twirls… like a giant flight simulator.  It’s great that it’s being pioneered here in Australia…”

And so, the ideas keep sparking from this man, who himself, seems to be in a constant state of ‘cinemotion’ – as if powered by some sort of Bionic Duracell battery.  Indeed, Adams does bring a fresh meaning to the term ‘frenetic activity’.  But why?  What drives a man to cram so much activity into one lifetime.

“Perhaps it’s because I have this exaggerated sense of life’s brevity, and the inevitability of death.  Time is so precious to me.”

Time.  Yes, that must be it.  Perhaps that’s why he has collected so many antiquities.  They serve as a constant and painful reminder to him, of just how fleeting a man’s lifespan is when measured against even the objects in his own home.

Or maybe, after all these years, he’s still running from that “lunatic stepfather in my childhood, who would try to murder me with axes, or run me over with cars.  So to escape from all this I started collecting things that represented times and places far away… and doing things.  Lots of things.”

Or maybe… but hold on.  You could speculate forever on what makes the enigmatic Phillip Adams run, but the more answers you come up with, the more questions pop up.  Perhaps, as the globe-conquering Rupert Murdoch often says in response to such enquiries, the answer is quite simple “I just enjoy running”.

Suddenly there was a loud commotion outside.  A camera crew had arrived at the house, indicating this interview was over.  Another cab had pulled into the rank.  Before I could replace my empty coffee mug on the 500 year old coaster, Phillip Adams was gone, off and running again.

*Graphics Magazine was published by Max Fulcher and Hartland & Hyde (publisher of Vogue magazine), during the 1980s and 90s to showcase the world of design, arts and culture.

Obsessions with Black & White

An interview with Max Dupain, Photographer by Mark Roeder for Graphics Magazine

It’s difficult for the generations brought up in the Internet age, with its kaleidoscopic landscape of colours and digital imagery, to appreciate the subtleties of black & white photography. Our eyes have become are ‘trained’ to believe that colour shots are more realistic, more interesting, more complete.  They mirror reality more accurately.  Whereas there is often ’a stigma attached to black & white – it’s old-fashioned, obsolete – like one of those shaky old films from the 1920s.  It doesn’t give you the whole picture.  Why else would those clever technicians in Hollywood be ‘colourising’ all the old black & white films.  Surely they’re going to improve them?  Well, aren’t they?

Max Dupain, septuagenarian photographer, sheds some welcome light on the debate – a debate which is only just hotting up.  He has very strong feelings about black & white, and doesn’t pull many punches when expressing his viewpoint.

When Max Dupain talks about his work, he doesn’t pull many punches.  He has definite views on what makes a good or bad photograph, especially when it concerns his two pet subjects – Black & White photography and architectural photography.

“You might say I have an obsession with Black & White,” he explains enthusiastically, “Only Black & White gives you the control to interpret your subject.  Interpretation is the key.  Colours just can’t give you that… for example, I would say that nine out of ten colour shots you see around could have been taken by just about any photographer.”

Although Dupain does not rule out colour completely, and stresses that it is “extremely important as an illustrative tool,” his strong preference for Black & White has evolved over a long lifetime of experience.  For Max Dupain has been around a lot longer than most photographers – ever since his uncle gave him his first camera, a ‘Box Brownie,’ in 1924.  So unlike the more recent arrivals on the scene, Dupain has snapped his way through wars and a great depression, a fast changing Australia, and the technological revolutions which have dramatically affected the technology of photography itself.

Witnessing all this, it could be said that Dupain has absorbed a sense of history about his craft.  He has had more time to think, to reflect and put his ideas about his art into words.  Add to this his wide knowledge and appreciation of other artforms including music, painting, sculpture, literature and in particular architecture, and it’s not hard to understand why Dupain qualifies as one of Australia’s leading photographic critics, and has been writing for the Sydney Morning Herald in that capacity for the last 6 years.

Back to the question of colour.

Dupain thinks the problem stems from the fact that even today, the technology for colour film is not up to scratch… not advanced enough to allow the all important ‘interpretative’ quality to come into the work.

“There’s simply too much ‘goo’ in most colour shots,” he says, “and there’s not much you can do about it.  But with your Black & Whites, you can keep changing the effect, keep interpreting, right through into the printing stage where you can control contrast, tone, light, shade and so on… with colour you just can’t do that, it goes through the chemical baths and that’s virtually it!  Mind you, as I mentioned earlier, colour is important for certain work, and I do lots of it because that’s what my clients want… and it is a business after all.”

These days, nearly 90% of Max Dupain’s clients are involved in the architectural field, which means Dupain spends much of his time photographing buildings.  Among his list of clients is world renowned architect Harry Seidler (also a long-time friend of Dupain’s), whose designs include the Australian Embassy in Paris, Australia Square and numerous others.

“Seidler is a very strong personality,” says Dupain, “When you work with him you have to go in there and see what he sees… then you interpret and give substance to that vision.”

Dupain presses the point that to work successfully in the highly specialised field of architectural photography, one must have both an understanding and appreciation of architecture, the materials it uses, and the structural requirements.

“Otherwise, the photographer who just goes out there and shoots a building is just wasting time.  You must be able to see all that the architect sees.  It’s partly an intuitive thing I suppose, but it’s the only way you can communicate the essential elements.”

What about people in his shots?

“I always use people wherever I can,” he says.  Not only do they give a sense of scale to a building shot, but they add the all important ingredient… humanity.  And humanity for me is what it’s all about…”

At this point, Dupain breaks off his discussion about architecture for a moment, and dwells on the subject of ‘humanity’ a little longer.

“Look… in photography there are basically two points of view, the ‘detached’ point of view, and the ‘involved’ point of view.  With ‘detached’ photography the technique is everything, there is no emotional response, and that’s not for me.  I’m into being involved with my subject, to express the emotion, the feeling and humanity – especially my humanity, through my photographs.  That’s all important.  Which brings me again back to Black & White.  It gives you much more freedom and flexibility to express humanity and the deeper responses…”

Dupain has often said that in photography, as in other arts, “the subject matter comes to you, you don’t go to it,” in a similar way that a theme comes to a composer… spontaneously.

“You may be walking through the bush, a street, a park or driving to work, and an inner voice will call out to you and behold, there it is.  Although I shoot extemporaneously a lot of the time, I prefer to have half a dozen shots in my mind.  Probably I have seen them many times under different conditions and have been thinking about them.  The moment will come when I shall go to them and make the photographs… then something goes bang inside and it’s all over.  I’m sorry I can’t give you a formula for this one; but I stress two things, simplicity and directness.”

Dupain further explains that the subject must be reduced to elementary or even symbolic terms, by a ‘devious’ selection of viewpoint, by lighting, by after-treatment and so on.

“I do not always print the negative.  This practice has become a bit of a fetish… but the result is all that matters!”

On a broader note, Dupain says that “working as a professional photographer in insular Australia has been my self chosen lot.  In such a ‘cultural backwater’, as Normal Lindsay expressed it, mental stimulation is anything by overplus, especially the further one moves into the rural regions.  So one is thrown up against one’s inner resources, and visual excitement comes from over there by proxy in picture books and printed text; music, poetry, painting and sculpture provide the vital ingredients for soul food in the local scene.  Direct influential impact is at half strength capacity.  I think this is a good thing if one has the courage and endurance to sustain and promote his individuality by sheer brute assertion of belief in himself.”

As for the future, at 75 years of age, Max Dupain shows little signs of slowing down.  From his largish studio in the Sydney suburb of Artarmon, Dupain and his two associates work a full week, and are in heavy demand.

Most recently, Dupain’s photographs for the new ‘Denison’ building in North Sydney featured in a series of huge double page spreads in major metropolitan newspapers.

“This was really a straight advertising job,” he explains, “quite a clever idea… certainly an unusual way to sell office space.  It will be interesting to see how effective they are.”

On top of all this, and despite the fact that Dupain complains there are “never enough hours in a day,” he still manages time to prepare for an upcoming retrospective of his work to be exhibited at the Australian Centre of Photography.

“This one I’ve titled ‘ALL PASSION SPENT BAR LOVE’,” he says smiling, “It means… no I won’t tell you what it means, you must interpret that one for yourself.”

Will they be all Black & White photographs?

“Of course!”

*Graphics Magazine was published by Max Fulcher and Hartland & Hyde (publisher of Vogue magazine), during the 1980s and 90s to showcase the world of design, arts and culture.