(Director Gillian Armstrong and actor/singer Simon Burke,
photographs by Stuart Campbell)
Unsuspecting actors sent by their agents to Stuart Campbell's
'studio' were never prepared for what awaited them at the top of
the stairs at 27A Hall Street, Bondi Beach. Before they'd even
reached the landing, a door would be edged open and the
photographer, wine glass in hand, would look his subject up and
down and murmur lasciviously, 'Come inside and take all your
clothes off'.
Stuart Campbell's gifts as a photographer were many but what made
him unique was his ability to disarm his subjects with outlandish
wit, shocking them out of their self-consciousness so that they
revealed more of themselves than they had ever intended as they
were walking up that flight of stairs. To enter his Bondi apartment
was a little like finding yourself on stage in front of an audience
without having learnt the script - a script that was being played
out by Stuart with full theatrical flourish. A trained actor and
NIDA graduate, he never stopped being a performer and that took
some of the heat off his subjects.
Close friend, the actor Simon Burke, remembers 'his devastating
sharpness, his brilliant, dreadful puns, his lethally accurate
assessment of anyone and anything in his path, his knack of saying
exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time'. Few subjects
would have ever forgotten the experience. 'Stuart would have four
or five clients a day,' Burke says, 'and most of these clients
would still be there at the end of the day and stay for dinner and
a free personality assessment late into the night.' The results, as
friend Siobhan Hannah says, were often the best portraits of the
subjects ever taken.
'He managed to catch something about each person's character - the
pretty ones would get a hint of a stronger beauty, the plainer
would reveal their warmth or sexiness, comics would reveal a hint
of their serious intellect.' Given that his portfolio of hundreds
of portraits includes head shots of just about every leading
Australian actor of the past thirty years, such as Mel Gibson, John
Bell, Jacki Weaver and Colin Friels, many of them at the early,
vulnerable stages of their careers, this says much about his
remarkable eye. And yet, he was dismissive of his talent. 'He once
said to me, you have an eye but I have a tongue,' says photographer
Tony Amos.
His 'studio' in his lounge room was almost comically modest - a red
bucket placed upside down in front of a white or grey background on
which his subjects would sit, lit by a couple of tungsten umbrella
lights. He used a Nikon FM manual camera loaded with Ilford black
and white film. He rarely veered from using this film or the Agfa
multigrade RC paper he preferred to print on. His cramped darkroom
was a converted laundry and he hung his prints on the Hills Hoist
to dry. 'He was the fastest high-quality printer I'd ever seen,'
says Tony Amos, who worked with the best in New York. 'He dodged
and burned the images with his hands.'
Born in Ballarat, Victoria, on March 22, 1951, Stuart was,
unsurprisingly, an amusing child who seemed bound for the theatre
at an early age. He graduated from Ballarat High School with
first-class honours in Art, Modern History and English Literature,
having kicked off his acting career with the role of Mr Darcy in
the school production of Pride
and Prejudice. In 1969 he entered Swinburne Technical
College Melbourne as an art student and quickly developed a passion
for photography. In the darkroom, he entertained other students
with his hilarious renditions of songs from musicals. That was the
start of an affectionate forty-year friendship with the film
director Gillian Armstrong, who cast him in her very first film,
Man and Girl, and in
the short comic film Satdee
Nite. Later, he would have small roles in her features
Starstruckand
Unfolding
Florence.
When he was twenty-one he was accepted into the drama school at
NIDA. Not blessed with matinee idol looks like fellow students Mel
Gibson and Andrew McFarlane, he quickly blossomed into a marvellous
character actor. Aubrey Mellor, former NIDA director, recalls,
"Stuart surprised everyone with his in-depth, painfully empathetic
portrayal of Shylock in John Clark's brilliant production of
Merchant. I have
never since seen that play so well realised; and, despite his
youth, no one in my mind, before or since, has ever come near
Stuart's Shylock. His will continue to remain arguably the greatest
performance by a NIDA student". On graduation, he was soon working
with the major theatre companies. He appeared on TV in Certain Women, The Restless Years, Cop Shopand Patrol Boatand in films of
the era like Caddie.
But by the early 1980s Stuart's hobby as a photographer had started
to grow into a profession. He was photographing male centrefolds
for Cleoand
portraits of artists such as Peter Carey for Vogue, as well as artistic
male nudes. "In my opinion, Stuart's artistic shots were in the
same league as Mapplethorpe," says satirist and composer Phil
Scott. Stuart's empathy for actors and his experience of both sides
of the camera, made him the portraitist for actor's headshots. "In
a Campbell portrait the face always glowed against a dark
background. It lifted the skin and brought out the eyes," Gillian
Armstrong says. Simon Burke adds that what made a sitting with
Stuart truly memorable were "those seven shots at the end of the
roll of film that he took that day with whoever you brought along -
your mum or your kid or your nanna or your partner or your dog. He
captured you with them at that moment in your life and that was the
essence of you - headshots come and go but it's that picture that
you'll treasure for the rest of your life."
"He loved the highs and lows of other people's lives. The drama,
the tragedy, and to be first on the phone with the news was his
greatest thrill," says Gillian Armstrong. His Bondi Beach apartment
became a meeting place for actors, directors, musicians and
writers; where firemen and surfers might hobnob with Jacki Weaver,
Richard Wherrett, Jane Scott and Richard Tognetti. But those
hilarious years weren't to last forever.
When Agfa discontinued the paper he loved a few years ago, he
despaired. "He couldn't get happy with anything else in the end,"
Tony Amos says. Agents and clients were demanding digitised images
but Stuart disliked the aesthetics of the new technology and
refused to take it up. He didn't even own a computer. By 2006 he
was fast becoming disenchanted with Sydney and the backpackers that
were infesting Bondi Beach. That year Stuart decided to move to
Ballarat to be with his large and loving family. He took few
photographs, not finding there the subject matter that fulfilled
him. He died in Ballarat after a brief illness in December 2009 at
the age of fifty-eight.
Those who knew Stuart, even fleetingly, were left with the
indelible stamp of his considerable personal charm. Those who were
fortunate enough to have been captured by his camera have a more
precious memento. The distinguished actress Penny Downie, who sat
for Stuart early in her career, says, "With his 'front', angular,
acerbic and witty as it was, he would only just cover a mercurial,
incredibly wise and compassionate soul. His photographs seemed to
me at the time, and now, his window through to a world which he
frequently appeared to be at odds with."
Lee Tulloch
This article first appeared in Portrait Magazine, Mar/May
2011
Stage Portraits: Works by Stuart
Campbellopens at The Wharf on July 28, 2011.
The exhibition was previously shown at the National Portrait
Gallery, Canberra.