PLEASE NOTE All prices on this website are in US dollars. (RRP $89.95) ISBN 9780645866223

What does the word “garage” mean to you? Did you know it was adopted from the French language in the early twentieth century and means "shelter for a vehicle"? Nowadays a garage can be many more things; a cluttered storage space attached to a house, a man’s retreat, a workshop, or the place you take vehicles to be repaired—what Australians generally call “the mechanics", filled with the hum of tools and the scent of grease and rubber.

Garage explores some of these usages, as well as different eras and styles of the mechanic in his environment. The book features new work shot in old classic car garages in Los Angeles and Las Vegas and in other styles of garage in London, Miami and country Australia. It is also blended with previously unpublished photos from recent years—shot in the same locations—to craft a seamless new narrative, structured in distinct chapters. 

One unique aspect of Garage and Backwoods is that several of the men from the new shoots appear in both books—transformed into distinct characters through changes in location, wardrobe, and setting. While most of these chameleons are new faces, a couple of familiar ones have returned to my lens after years away.

One such return is Tom, who was featured in my 2009 book Outback Currawong Creek. Not a professional model, Tom hadn’t been in front of a camera since then—but to mark the 20th anniversary of publishing for Paul Freeman, he got fit for new shoots. With his real-life experience across multiple trades and outdoor sports, he is the perfect embodiment of both the rugged country town mechanic in Garage (and the untamed frontiersman in Backwoods).

This book seeks to capture the raw, natural beauty of the male form in evocative settings, many of them seemingly bleak and unforgiving. “As with much of my work, the book is a study of elemental masculinity and of men at ease in tough surrounds. These are portraits of resilience, simplicity, and the timeless allure of lives lived menially.”

“It’s also a celebration of craft—both mine as a photographer, and that of the men who travelled to work with me and help me re-imagine these tough lives and shape them into photographic fantasies.”

Garage has a hard cover with dust jacket, is large formatted at 330mm ( 13”) x 265mm (10 1/2”) x 24mm (1”) and has 160 pages of art stock matte coated gloss paper with over 160 photos. The book comes cling film sealed.

PLEASE NOTE All prices on this website are in US dollars. (RRP $89.95) ISBN 9780645866230

The word backwoods is probably more familiar to Americans, referring to a remote or culturally isolated area far from the city. For me it evokes another place the working-class men I like to eulogize, might be found. It also neatly encapsulates the book’s theme, tying together the variety of locations I’ve used.

The lush, verdant hills of upstate New York—featured in Backwoods—were an exciting new landscape for me to explore. I had the opportunity to shoot there over the course of a week last summer, thanks to a generous patron who opened their estate to me and several models.

Whether in these dense forests and their rough-hewn stone and timbered clearings, the dusty rural terrain and rivers of Australia’s outback, or in the shanty timber cabins of the desolate American West, the backwoodsman of these rugged landscapes are self-reliant, a bit rough-hewn, shaped by and happily immersed in the environment they inhabit.

Backwoods  is a fresh body of photography blended with some carefully selected images from my archives, that flesh out the theme.  It seeks to capture the raw, natural beauty of the male form in evocative settings, many of them seemingly bleak and unforgiving. “As with much of my work, the book is a study of elemental masculinity and of men at ease in tough surrounds. These are portraits of resilience, simplicity, and the timeless allure of lives lived menially or close to the land.”

“It is also a celebration of craft—both mine as a photographer, and that of the men who travelled to work with me and help me re-imagine these tough lives and shape them into photographic fantasies”.

Backwoods has a hard cover with dust jacket, is large formatted at 330mm ( 13”) x 265mm (10 1/2”) x 24mm (1”) and has 160 pages of art stock matte coated gloss paper with over 160 photos. The book comes cling film sealed.

PLEASE NOTE All prices on this website are in US dollars. (RRP $89.95) ISBN 9780980667585

“Vagabondo is a humble odyssey traversing landscapes and locations, seasons and moods, but whereas an odyssey implies grandiose feats and suffering of a hero on his journey, for the most part the making of this book involved my own fairly tame wanderlust, as a photographer, across Europe and America in a quest for locations. And though I did portray my subjects  in stories of some hardship and itinerancy, the courage they show is mostly in suffering various discomfort in filthy locations.

Since quite a bit of the book was photographed around Italy,  Vagabondo seemed an appropriate title, evoking for me the dishevelment of an unpretentious, timeless labouring man, leading both with his soul and unencumbered raw sexuality, transforming menial suffering and unconscious beauty into splendour.  There is something of a heroes progress too, even if not reaching the status of odyssey; one of the main characters is literally elevated, from menial peasant worker to Bacchus-like god, bathed and pampered in ancient palazzos, finally ascending into lofty volcanic Hades bleakness and immortality. Well that’s how I romanticised it over the many hours of editing.”

The story begins in Ireland, in spring time, with farmhands cavorting in lush fields and around farm yards, then moves across to industrial London and a brief interlude of fighting athleticism before cutting to Italy where building labourers work and camp out in derelict palazzos in Sicily and Puglia. With their grace and beauty revealed amidst the gorgeous rustic decay they finally wrestle in cleansing showers and submerge in Sistine waters.

The middle eight of the book’s song is the trek of our heroes up black mountains and amidst burnt forests which lend a winter melancholia, and our vagrants shine in a grim Biblical wilderness, before volcanic rock formations and ancient ocean cliffs reveal, at the end, a happier contemporary summer setting around the ocean surf, where they can revel. 

Vagabondo has a hard cover with dust jacket, is large formatted at 330mm ( 13”) x 265mm (10 1/2”) x 24mm (1”) and has 160 pages of art stock matte coated gloss paper with over 160 photos. The book comes cling film sealed.

Check out Gayety Magazine’s review of Vagabondo.