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Laurence Le Guay - From Fighter Planes to Fashion, Anna Ridley (2002)
Part Five
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| Portugal 1948 |
Introduction / Contents / Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 - lists / Part 5 - interview / Main Page
Appendix 3
Interview with David Mist 24/10/02
Anna Ridley Ridley: I'm most interested in Laurie's fashion work, as you worked with him, anything you can tell me about that would be great.
David Mist: There's so little of Laurie's work really around, it's never been put in under any one roof. Drifted away, you wouldn't find much of his fashion at all.
Anna Ridley: The Art Gallery of NSW has got two and the National Gallery has got two, both have Fashion Queue and one other.
David Mist: There's some I've given to the Powerhouse, and the Powerhouse have got my collection too. But the Powerhouse have got one or two of Laurie's, fashion and nudes, he did quite a lot of nudes, before I came here, he worked for Men Only or one of those, there was a magazine that specialised in them and it was published by K.G Murray and he worked them. Anyway, I don't want to ramble on, you ask the questions.
Anna Ridley: I'm interested in the fashion, because there isn't a lot about the fashion. I was talking to David Moore last week and he thought the fashion was the most important part of Laurie's work.
David Mist: Well it was.
Anna Ridley: But there's nothing about it anywhere - anything you can tell me is great.
David Mist: What happened was, John Nisbett and Laurie started a studio in 1938 and then they both went off to the war. John joined the RAAF and went up to Queensland and then was sent to New Guinea and Laurie went off to do his bit in the army as a war correspondent as a photographer and he was in North Africa for quite some time.
Anna Ridley: Well I've seen all the war records and that's pretty well covered and the War Memorial has over 4000 of Laurie's works in the archive.
David Mist: Really. So then they came back and after the war joined up again, they had a studio in Philip Street just after the war, so it would have been '47, '48 something like that, and they started the old studio but of course this was before I was here. They then worked in advertising and fashion and they worked for Farmers, one of the big stores here. And they built the studio up and they then had a horrendous fire, which complexly burnt the studio out and all the negatives and Laurie then went off to Antarctica.
Anna Ridley: So the fire must have happened pretty early, in the first year or so of the studio?
David Mist: Yes so they then went their separate ways, John Nisbett went up to Queensland and worked for one of the one of the government bodies up there, photographing, I don't know, pineapple farms or whatever it was. He had an assignment and Laurie went off to Antarctica.
So they came back and restarted the studio in Castlereagh Street, 149 Castlereagh Street, and they at that stage worked in fashion, mainly retail, but they worked for a lot of the stores, built the studio up again. Now in 1960 Laurie went to London with his wife and family, well they went to Europe, for a year they were going to live in Spain, but they went over to England, and it was there that I met him, in London and they were going to stay in Spain for six months or whatever. I was going out with an Australian Model at the time and she introduced me to Laurie, who was well known by then in Sydney as a fashion photographer. And he said to me then, if you ever thinking of coming to Australia, let me know kind of thing, and went off to Spain.
I then, for various reasons, decided to come to Australia on a visit. Not necessarily for all time, and I came out on the maiden voyage of the Canberra. There were delays and it took a while because Laurie was still in Spain, he came back and I joined them, as a partner and we worked together for a number of years doing, mainly Laurie did retail fashion. We did Farmers, David Jones, we did Buckingham's, Curzons all these stores that have all now gone, they're not around anymore.
Laurie specialised in doing fashion and beauty heads, which at the time it was very primitive here because there weren't any magazines, the only magazines were Flair, which he did a lot of work for and Australian Vogue, but Australian Vogue was quarterly when I first came here, only published 4 times a year, and a lot of it was organised out England, the it became bi-monthly and then monthly over the years, and Laurie did a fair bit of work for them. He did quite a lot of work for advertising agencies that were fashion orientated accounts and what have you, and we continued working until the late seventies and then he decided that he wanted to go off sailing.
He was keen on sailing Laurie, he loved sailing and he had a boat on the harbour and he lived down in Double Bay in Governor Kings old house right down on the water, which he did up and he was married, and actually we had our engagement party at his house, down there in Double Bay. And he then decided he was going to sail around the world. He went through quite a nasty divorce and that caused him to think I'm going to sail away. He was still a member of the studio when he left.
And he went to... he sailed off around the north and top of Australia, down to South Africa, round the cape of Good Hope, and then round the horn and up to Brazil and then he went into the Cape Town Rio yacht race. So he got as far as Brazil and then wrote to us saying he wanted to get out of the studio and he wanted me to buy the rest of the shares, and take over his shareholding, which I did. He then continued sailing and doing various things. In that time he did a few books, which you might have found out about.
Anna Ridley: I found the book about the sailing trip and Shadows in a Landscape about the Aboriginals
David Mist: Yes and he did another one on Sydney Harbour.
Anna Ridley: Yes
David Mist: Well you found them then. What are you looking for in the sense of what he did in fashion?
Anna Ridley: Well there's not much written about fashion photography, there are only a handful of books on Australian photography, and most of them don't deal with fashion at all.
David Mist: There's one I've got about fashion with a bit about Laurie. Mind, they didn't know much about him, Look, the tragedy of Laurie was that his archives, you've told me something about the war memorial, but in fashion, when he left the studio he took most of personal collection with him. When he came back from sailing he came and collected it, obviously we were all still good mates and he worked for a bit off and on but he didn't do a great deal of work once he came back, I mean he was in his late sixties and he worked out of a place called David Hewisons who was a graphic artists and he made that a base, but he never left his negatives or transparencies or any of his work in any one place.
Now he had two daughters, Melanie and Candy, Melanie sadly died and Candy is still alive. But she got onto me because she was trying to get hold of some of his work. And it's doted around everywhere and he gave some of it to various people. Susie Owens, has a few pictures had a few pictures of his, who he was friendly with, she's a writer for the Financial Review, Susie Owens, used to be on the Herald and she knew Laurie very well. But even then I don't know how many she's got, if she's got any at all. I mean we had some, what we had of his collection, I've given to the Powerhouse. And there wasn't very many, maybe six or eight.
Anna Ridley: Yes, the AGNSW has got six or so and so does Canberra, so does Victoria.
David Mist: There are some examples of his work in the Powerhouse, because we had a recent exhibition, which I was in and Laurie was in, at the Museum of Sydney, Location, well those pictures are owned by the powerhouse. Before you go I'll give you Anne-Marie at the Powerhouse contact details. He doted stuff around everywhere and sadly no-one person knows where it all is or where it is, and that's a pity.
But he was most probably, certainly in his time, probably the best fashion photographer in Australia and if not the best, there were other people like Ray Leighton who just recently died, Geoff Lee and Max Dupain, although Max wasn't really fashion he was commercial and architectural and David Moore was more industrial, commercial and industrial.
There was no Laurie style I don't think he had a style of his own, he liked to do... he went through phase where he did a lot of superimposing and montages, which is what he did prior to the war in his posters, he used that technique in some of his fashion pictures but I don't know where they exist, I only saw a few of them, but he tried doing it with female heads and nude bodies over one another and things like that and there was one I gave to the Powerhouse, which was a nude superimposed upon itself, which he did. He was very good at that technique and those war posters were amazing, submarines down below the ocean and someone up here.
Anna Ridley: There are two on show at the Art Gallery at the moment, The Shadows and Sharp Lines exhibition and one is a war poster.
David Mist: He did a few of those, careful they might hear you and espionage sort of things But his fashion was usually... he was very, to a certain degree a womaniser, he liked women, obviously, if you didn't have that feeling, I don't think you'd be in it. He did a lot of overseas assignments, he used to go over and spend time, do Courtauld's or a fashion collection for Courtauld's he was a wizard at being able to put together trips, he was very good at it. He was very good at publicity, he could get publicity, he was very good at it, always could work a deal for a free airline ticket to get him somewhere, very good at it, which in those days was quite hard to do, because there wasn't the outlets, there weren't the magazines that were interested and it wasn't until the late 70's that all sort of things started to happen and we got Nova and various other magazines that really started to really look for creative photography, it was usually pretty straight up and down stuff.
I remember when I first came here I did a series and the woman who ran Farmers advertising department looked at me in stark amazement because I shot all these swimsuits in caves and she wanted to know why I'd done it, she didn't understand it and that was all there was to it. There was certainly not the opening for the kind of creativity. There wasn't the creativity here then, because half the people in charge of it all didn't, I don't think, knew what it was to do any thing avant guard in the slightest way. And there was also the thing, fashion photography what Laurie was competing against was fashion drawing and that was still on. They slowly phased it out, and what they did was fashion drawings one week and photographs the next, that alternate and gradually the drawings became less and less.
Anna Ridley: What do you think made Laurie so good at the fashion Photography then?
David Mist: Look, the thing with Laurie was he tried everything, he was a great trier. You know he was very good for experimenting, he'd try things, he enjoyed going into the darkroom and getting ferrous cyanide and running it all across the picture and seeing what he could do, he was an experimenter. That's why I say there was no real one type of picture, it wasn't like he did hard contrasty pictures all the time or something like that and that was his handwriting. He was versatile, and he enjoyed working in the darkroom, like I did, I enjoyed working in the darkroom. And those days have now gone, you sit in front of a computer screen and manipulate the whole thing and you can do it far better than you could in our day. What you had do in our day was do it in the camera, and it was more difficult to do and if you were doing double or triple exposures in the camera, its more difficult to control than doing it on the Mac, Then sadly he died, on his boat, and that was very sad, and they had a big wake for him up at Pittwater.
Anna Ridley: He was living at Pittwater?
David Mist: He lived off and on, on his boat, but he had a flat down here in Sydney, which he used to come back to, but he spent most of his time of the boat. Eclipse, and he enjoyed being on it, and I had a house at Pittwater, and I used to go up and see him drifting around. He was a character, and he was well known. He was a Sydney personality, Laurie, he was definitely a Sydney personality. He was always invited to the various social functions, in the early days he did quite a lot of classic portraits of Sydney personalities, and his wife Ann was also in that scene and they were very social and people knew them and they knew a lot of people. I suppose that went hand in glove, to a certain degree, with what he did. But as far as books are concerned, the one I had, the one I've got is Parade.
(gets book and starts to flip through it)
Laurie's in it, and so am I. Fashion Queue is in it, which is... What happened was, he did a bit of work a bit like this in the early days,
That's Max Dupain, and Harold Cazneaux, these are all See the difference with Max is that he kept, his assistant kept, the greatest files of all time and that's why he reproduced all the time, and so has David Moore, he's amazing.
Laurie wasn't like that all, it was all over the place, and he didn't... Rob Hillier was another one. Ray Leighton was the same era as Laurie. I remember when they were doing this book and they came to me and they were finding it hard to get pictures of Laurie's. You could speak to Anne-Marie at the Powerhouse and they may have other images, they haven't got many, but they certainly images I don't think you would have seen elsewhere.
There's one of Laurie's (Hollywood Fashion) I remember when he did that, he brought them back to the studio. It says 50's, but I remember those in the studio, I know he went over to America.
Athol Smith, they have a big collection of Henry Talbot's. That's one of mine. That ones Helmut Newton, he did some like that, Laurie, personalities for vogue, Brian Henderson and pop singers and Billy Thorpe and all that crowd.
What else can I tell you? Those are most probably the only ones they've got, I agree. That was Flair, both he and I used to work a lot for Flair, doing fashion, every month we'd do a six-page spread for them. The State Library would have them. If you look through the seventies. There's a guy at the State Library, Martin Hargas, and he knows me and he would help, he knows where they are. Flair Magazine.
Well the powerhouse have definitely got fashion ones and you could pull some out of the Library. These are more pictorial (looking at Photography a Contemporary View)
Anna Ridley: Did Laurie really take up colour in a big way?
David Mist: Yes he did, most probably in his time he was better know for Black and White, because it was his time, before the war and afterwards, even when I joined, we had to sometimes wait to get colour because you couldn't get it, you just couldn't buy it here. And Eastman would only bring in so many boxes and you've go to bear in mind, even in the sixties, a lot of the agencies and a lot of the retailers, would not accept 35mm, you had to use large format and in a lot of cases it was 5x4, we were shooting fashion on 5x4 which was the big plate camera. And when I was working in London I started off in the 50's, late 50's, and I was working with Beaton and when I first started off I was apprenticed into a studio called Barrons studios and he was a war photographer, and he came back, how ironic, he was known as a Ballet photographer, made his name as a Ballet photographer, and a social photographer, he did society portraits, and it was interesting short spell while I stayed there.
And Laurie was the same, that same era of black and white and then of course in the 60's and 70's it started to change and film became more available and you could do more things. The thing was, once 35mm cameras came in it was readily available for everybody, it became a much easier process, much more natural pictures were being taken, once 35mm was able to be used. You weren't setting up a tripod and putting a bloody great plate camera on top of it, and posing, making things so. You could just wander around and shoot, made all the difference. Laurie's pictures weren't all that static, he wasn't keen on the technical side of photography, he was more interested in the final image. He'd play around and experiment and break all the rules, which was just as well, I mean that's what rules are there for, particularly in photography, is to break them and come up with something different. But he wasn't, well he wasn't interested so much in the technique of developing, he used to say develop the bloody thing and then I'll play with it. That kind of attitude.
(Looking at Photography a Contemporary View)
He was always keen to do things, get things off the ground. This was put out by a magazine called popular photography, and they did a branch off, they published it. That was Laurie's, that would typical of what he tried to do, played around with things, and sailing, and the grainy pictures of sailing boats and things, that's one of the classics, one of the first that really got him a lot of publicity, that picture. In the Family of Man.
I don't know what to add
Anna Ridley: Was he very big on promoting photography, with the books and things?
David Mist: Yes, yes he was keen on promoting photography, but he never really go involved with the... he didn't like the things like the photographic associations, he steered well clear of that sort of thing. Whilst he got a few honours for the various photographs, I think he was an EFIAP, which is the International body, it's awarded from France, I think he got that, and so did I. You had to do a certain amount of work and they would grant you this so called honour. I think he was more interested in the overall photography thing than getting involved in the politics of how photography should be run in Australia, he wasn't particularly keen on sitting on committees or anything.
They had a thing here, called the PPA the Professional Photographers Association, it's now gone, they tried to get him on that and he wouldn't go. David Moore was on that, so was I. But Laurie didn't want to know about that sort of thing, he really didn't, he tried to keep to himself in that sense. He would always involve himself, like that book, he contacted a lot of the photographers and told them about it and told the publishers who should go in it.
He was a distinguished bloke, didn't look like, if someone turned around and asked what a photographer looked like, I don't think you'd look at Laurie and say he was a photographer. Before he went off sailing, he was very much a collar and tie sort of person, strait up and down, quite conservative really.
Anna Ridley: Did you know a lot about his family?
David Mist: Well yeah, I knew Ann and she well, this all happened a long time ago, and she ran off with his best friend, and that caused great ructions, They had a vicious divorce, vicious, and they fought like crazy, it was very ugly. Maybe that's why some of his things aren't around, because it got to, paintings were being hidden from one side or the other, and it was her house and she'd come to the studio, and say, David put these paintings away, and don't tell Laurie where they are. I got caught up in a messy situation, and I liked them both and it was very sad.
Anna Ridley: You don't know what her maiden name was?
David Mist: I can't remember - oh dear... If you really want to know the background you'd be better off phoning Fairly Nisbett, who was his original partners wife. And she's down in Bowral, she knew the ... really she would have known the early days. Being the two wives, I always felt that there was a certain amount of rivalry between the two of them in regards the studio.
He was very popular with all the models, they all liked Laurie and he used to be kind of the... like the godfather image of the model fraternity at the time. He had that kind of image, he was a charmer, but he also liked fathering the girls, I don't know, he was a bit of a... not in a kind of negative, it was a genuine thing. There were people like Lynn Sutherland, most probably Lynn would have been one of the supermodels of the late 70's, early 80's, there's a lot of pictures of Lyn in the Powerhouse. She went overseas and worked internationally, became a big name, well Laurie was very instrumental in encouraging her to go away. He also had strong links with Eileen Ford and he used to... when we got a bunch of good models, what we would do is say to Eileen in New York, there's these three Australian girls we think are worthy and she'd look at the photos and take them over there and look after them and help them get there feet on the ground. It worked. So he was always very friendly with Eileen, and funnily enough they asked me to go over to New York and went to New York for their 50th birthday party and they had an amazing party, and some of Laurie's pictures were there, and they had Avendon and Penn and it was amazing, fantastic. They had it in gallery on Broadway.
But both Laurie and Jack were instrumental in encouraging girls to go over, and some of them made a lot of money. There was Jean Newington, numerous girls went over and Margo McKendry was an amazing classic, she made stacks. But you couldn't do that here because your modelling fee was a couple of guineas to do a shoot, you made a couple of guineas and they worked on a shot basis, if you did six swimsuits, you got paid six times because you did six shots. And they brought that much later into a day fee for modelling, but in the early day's it was guineas. And the retailers paid less than the agencies and magazines paid even less because they'd credit you underneath. And we were the same, we were getting peanuts, gradually it changed. They started doing a rate where the quantity wasn't the thing. And a day rate was brought in, because food photographers who required half a day in preparation of all the food and they were getting paid for one shot, which meant they got 2 guineas and they'd done a whole days work. So that's how it kind of evolved.
They may have images, defiantly phone Anne-Marie, she's the curator of fine arts down there and she could show you Laurie's images which they've got. Of which there must be about six, but there are fashion images down there. I know they've got one of a yacht, with Yamilla Lloyd on the bow of a boat, his boat actually.
Anna Ridley: That's great, every lead helps.
David Mist: Now you've just got to put it together.
Anna Ridley: Well I really needed more on the fashion, I've written up all the war stuff already.
David Mist: The only thing with the war images, was I remember that he showed me a film that he captured in a German bunker, it was a spool of the old German footage and we got a projector and looked at it, but it was breaking down, but it was training film for the Germans, it was amazing, all the Hitler youth all stomping around. And he must of given that I think to the War Memorial because it was a fantastic bit of footage. But they captured, when he was in the war they took this German bunker and they found it in the bunker, but I didn't know there were that many pictures. I suppose over the years, there must have been. Lots of photos of aeroplanes and that sort of thing?
Anna Ridley: Yes, but that reminds me, did Laurie do other sorts of creative things, like paint or make films or that sort of thing?
David Mist: No, out of the studio, I think I was the only one who directed a couple of commercials, but he may have shot some footage when he was down in the Antarctica, he might have done something when he was down there. I never quite know what he did down there, I remember seeing some pictures of it. But it was an expedition, like a regular expedition down there.
I remember seeing pictures of it, but there again, what happened to them all. Laurie, hopeless, they should have been preserved and kept and he never did it. Such a shame. Maybe he was employed by them, it was before my time, I wasn't here when all that happened. So I really couldn't say with any authority what happened there.
Anna Ridley: I got the impression they hired him as freelance photographer.
David Mist: I know it was after the fire, because they both... it was going to take them months to get up and running again, I mean.
Anna Ridley: Laurie seems to have had a few fires.
David Mist: Where else?
Anna Ridley: Unless it was the same one? When he was doing Contemporary Photography he had a fire.
David Mist: Yes, the same one. That was the magazine I was trying to think of, Contemporary Photography. Well they ran it together, John Nisbett was involved too. And there was the guy, K.G Murray publications, was also going to be a partner of Laurie's. He started Flair magazine and Laurie started doing commercial and fashion photography and he actually, K.G Murray, was going to be part of the studio at one stage, he was a photographer too, instead of becoming a photographer as a professional, he went into publishing. He started Flair Magazine. Long before I was here.
Well, I'll give you Anne-Marie's card, Anne-Marie Van Der Fen.
Anna Ridley: Thank you very much for your time.
Introduction / Contents / Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 - lists / Part 5 - interview / Main Page
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