The Moran Prize-winning photograph that was almost lost in the post
The themes present in Trent Mitchell’s Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize-winning photograph of 2015 resonated with huge swaths of the Australian populace. At the time, the debate over sharks in this country and how best we deal with them after a string of attacks during the previous summer was raging. Adding to the ever-lengthening list of environmental issues serving to divide the major political parties, the issue was debated furiously and at length. Which, ironically, only served to somehow heighten the sense of tranquility and humour in Mitchell’s image of a boy surrounded by giant plastic sharks at a museum on Queensland’s Coast.
As part of his on-going body of work Australia Seriously, the image employs a sense of humour in line with the series’ overarching proclivity for Australian absurdities but perhaps also hints at the hyperbolic nature of arguments employed by advocates of shark extermination. While surrounded by a trio of lipsticked, grasping sets of jaws, the boy remains perfectly distracted by his phone. In 2015, the image was an astute observation and well deserving of Australia’s richest photographic prize of fifty-thousand dollars but as Mitchell recounts, the photograph was very near to never seeing the light of day as a mislabeled postcode on an envelope to the lab meant his negatives from the day disappeared into the postal system ether for nothing short of five weeks.
The road to Mitchell’s shark-boy image began with an equal mix of memory and chance. An assignment to Lady Elliot Island meant that the Gold Coast based photographer would need to drive to Hervey Bay on Queensland’s mid-coast to catch a flight to the Whitsunday Islands. When alerted to his stopover destination, Mitchell was reminded of notorious shark hunter Vic Hislop’s traveling museum that came near to his home on the Northern Beaches during Mitchell’s childhood. A memory that prompted him to seek out the new premises of the museum in downtown Hervey Bay. “I arrived in Hervey Bay at around 2pm the afternoon before we were meant to fly out. So I only had the afternoon there,” says Mitchell. “I drove past the museum and just thought ‘shit, this thing is amazing’. But it was early winter and mid week so there was no-one around which meant there was no real focal point to any potential photos outside.”
After a stroll around the interior of the facility where he advanced through his only rolls of medium format film, Mitchell was leaving the museum when he noticed a young boy walking down the street wearing red and blue. “I had one roll left of 35mm [Kodak] portra. All my other medium format film was back at the caravan park because to be honest I didn’t really expect such a cool situation to unfold,” he recounts. “I actually ended up only taking two pictures at that distance from the boy. I’m not the kind of photographer to get into people’s faces as I’m pretty shy. I usually photograph people from the back or the side. So, I remember just standing there watching this kid play on his phone, I lifted my camera, took one shot and thought ‘oh, I think that’s pretty good’ so I took a backup photo just in case. I finished off the roll while just chatting to his parents but I certainly didn’t feel like there was any wow moment for me. Then I just went back to the caravan park and had a beer with my mates.”
Following the afternoon in Hervey Bay, Mitchell would go onto shoot his assignment on Lady Elliot Island, return home to the Gold Coast and send the film for processing a few weeks later, only realising a month after doing so that he had miscorrectly labeled his return post code on the order form. “I remember putting an ad out on facebook asking if anyone had received film that was sent to the wrong address. It ended up being lost for a few weeks and then was eventually a return-to-sender. After the lab received it again they contacted me and I eventually received it,” says Mitchell, adding that at the time, having not seen the processed negatives his concern for the fate of the images was far from in abundance. “At the time, I was like ‘oh shit, my road trip photos are lost’ not like ‘oh fuck, my fifty thousand dollar photo is lost.’ I just thought oh, it’s fine, it’ll turn up.”
Following his final retrieval and scanning of the work, Mitchell’s image, close to the last frame on his last roll of film to go through his battered Contax T2 would go on to make the finals and eventually take the winning place of that year’s Moran Photo Prize; an experience that he freely admits has contributed to his diminishing fondness of analogue photography. “I actually feel myself learning towards not using film at all soon. I’ve stuck with it for some time because my early surf photos were shot on film and I didn’t want some of my work to look disconnected from when it started,” he says. “I love film and I love how it slows you down but at the same time I’m certainly not as attached to it as I used to be. It’s a lot of hard work.”
