THE STUART SPENCE FILES

I’ve known about Stuart Spence for decades, but only finally met him recently to do this interview. But here’s the tricky part – there are three parts to him and they all cling to each other. Images, writing and performance.

“It was a mixture from the beginning,” Stuart says. “I had performance in my soul. They tried to get me to do drama at school, but we all thought it was uncool so peer pressure pushed me out of that. Writing was always bubbling away with imagery. I should have gone into film-making.”

Stuart Spence grew up in the Sutherland Shire (better known simply as ‘The Shire’) south of Sydney during the 1960s. He believes a strong sense of symmetry is inherent in his DNA and emerged in late high school. It manifested itself as “the need to capture things”. However, he didn’t study art at high school and was, he recalls candidly, “… shithouse at maths and science, but up to year ten I was really good at composition. I recall writing a composition and the twenty-something teacher triple-ticking it and commenting, ‘Very funny’. That made me think there’s something going on here. I was pretty annoyed that it wasn’t encouraged later”.

He says he felt cloistered and trapped in high school, “…as if wearing a suit that didn’t fit”. His brother was a teacher in the country and keen on photography. On one occasion when he returned to Sydney, they took his SLR into the city to take photographs and then Stuart stated to get interested in the darkroom at school… and magic started.

The first photography book Stuart bought was Helmut Newton’s Big Nudes. “Those Amazonian women,” he recalls. “That grainy, contrasty feel and those plush locations. The surreality. It was irresistible.”

Developing The Passion

Stuart started working with Peter Simons at the Grace Brothers Camera Bar on Thursday