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David Tatnall
David Tatnall has been making fine art photographs in Australia since the mid 1970s. He has worked professionally as a fine art photographer since the mid 1980s. His passion is photographing the land using a large format film camera.
David Tatnall’s photographs have been collected by The National Gallery of Victoria, The State Library of Victoria, Monash Gallery of Art, Australian Embassy in Washington USA, RMIT University Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam as well as many regional art galleries in Australia.
He has been awarded a lifetime achievement award for ‘an outstanding contribution to nature conservation in Victoria through photography’.
He is the editor of View Camera Australia
a site dedicated to the promotion of large format photography and photographers working in darkrooms in Australia.
Chrysalis Gallery represents him in Australia.
The Black Range series by Australian photographer Ian Lobb and collected by the National Gallery of Victoria, has always been a great source of inspiration to me. A great number of photographs of European or North American landscapes show lush and ordered scenes that are easier to photograph and look at. But the scene photographed by Ian Lobb shows a very different landscape; a much drier and harsher scene. There is order and rhythm here, although difficult to be seen at first by eyes unaccustomed to it.
Ian first came upon this stand of Casuarinas (also called She-oaks) on a car trip with his parents when they stopped for morning tea; thermos tea with fruitcake. Ian wandered a short distance from the road and came upon these trees. He returned to the car for his camera and tripod and a short morning tea stop become a much longer stop.
Ian didn’t drive a car; he never got a driving license. To return to the Black Range, Ian went by train from Melbourne to Horsham. He then took an hour-long taxi trip to the site. He arranged with the taxi diver – who, for the first time, thought it all rather strange - to pick him up in time to return for the train trip home. Over the three year period of making these photographs, the same taxi driver looked forward to taking Ian to the “middle of nowhere” to make photographs of “nothing in particular”. I asked Ian about his motivation for making these images; he replied he “wanted to see what the lay of the land was… “ When arriving home, Ian would often go straight into the darkroom to develop the film, regardless of the time of day, always excited to see if the spirit of the land was there.