Fellowship

At the Australian Institute of Professional Photography Dinner on the 28 May 2012 at the Regent Theatre, Melbourne I was awarded the honour of Fellow of the Institute (FAIPP). I have received many congratulatory communications, for which I am certainly grateful, but also questions about my acceptance speech. What follows is the text of that brief speech, including citations, which I hope answers those questions.

It is a great honour to be acknowledged by the Australian Institute of Professional Photography, a wonderful surprise in fact, and quite humbling. I sincerely thank the Institute and the AIPP Honours Committee for this prestigious honour of Fellow of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography. I’m also delighted to be here sharing your celebrations, and I am most grateful for the support and encouragement the institute has shown me over many years.

We certainly live in interesting times. When “all our reality has become experimental … and when everything is on display … we realize there is nothing left to see.” (1) We are no longer working at the speed of a dripping tap, but at the speed of electrons, and will soon be working at the speed of light I’m told. We desperately attempt to find stable moments amidst the uncertainty and scarcity our world delivers us. Putting the word digital in front of photography certainly has buggered up more than a few things.

When I was growing up there were huge gaps between all the different photographies, especially between commercial and contemporary art, and we made our choices as best we could.

But by the late 1990s the enumeration of the world, its computation and digitisation, began to take us over. It was also digital processes that brought us all back together, that reunited all the photographies into the one fold. Without digital processes I most certainly would not be here tonight.

Making friends with the digital world also meant making friends with many of you. I can count John de Rooy, Tony Hewitt, Peter Eastway, and Christian and Michael Fletcher as terribly close friends, brothers who now share inseparable bonds. I’m so grateful for these friendships, and all the others I share with many of you.

I also wouldn’t be here today without the friendship and incredible support from so many manufactuers and suppliers. I especially want to thank Robert Gatto from KayellAustralia and Damon Rulach from Hasselbald and C.R.Kennedy, Matthew Bauer and Penny Swinfield from Eizo, and Glen te Wierik from Canson, and Bruce Williams and Derek Mobbs from Epson, as well as the generous research support I have received over decades from RMIT University, the Australian Research Council, and CSIRO.

It is also customary to conclude a response like this with a cursory acknowledgement of one’s partner, but that seems hardly adequate in my case. Instead I’ll paraphrase one of our favourite thinkers, Stanley Cavell: Dear Anna “what this couple does together is less important than the fact that they do whatever it is together, even waste time together, not that any time together could be wasted.“ (2)

Thank you, and I wish you all a safe and memorable evening

Les Walkling 28 May 2012

(1) Baudrillard, Jean, (2005), The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e), New York, USA.
(2) Cavell, Stanley, (1984), Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Harvard University Press, USA.