David Potts: Colour Work
David Potts' long and distinguished career as a pioneer of Australian documentary photography masks some interesting creative contradictions. Born in 1926, Potts first trained as a photographer with the Russell Roberts Studio in Sydney before moving to London in 1950 to seek work with pioneering publications that were then using documentary photography innovatively - the Observer newspaper, LIFE magazine and Picture Post. From the beginning David Potts saw beyond the orthodoxies of photojournalism. The impressionistic colour work that he first produced during his time in London may seem at odds with his better known witty, often acerbic observations of British (and European) life made then. Potts had refined his craft in Britain, regularly making strong black and white photographs that communicated social comment at the highest level. The young Australian became as comfortable photographing cat shows in London as he did a man striding through the troubled village lanes of the recently partitioned Mediterranean island of Cyprus. During the 1950s one might easily have assumed Potts to be a classic photojournalist, pure and simple. Not so.

Despite his proven ability to reflect British post-war life as accurately as Henley Couple, 1953, and his classic pet show image Best in Show, 1953, Potts had already begun searching for a more free, extravagant, colourful palette, perhaps as a creative counterpoint to his accomplished black and white documentary photographs. His reasons for experimenting with colour at that time and creating such adventurous compositions as Piccadilly Circus, London, 1953,were, he recalled recently, "Very simple. I wanted to explore what the available colour films would do." LIFE magazine were introduced to Potts’ photographs and paid 25 guineas to see his first images. These works slightly predate the elegant colourist compositions of legendary fellow LIFE photographers such as Ernst Haas. In his 1953 image Potts transforms the familiar London landmark into a swirling mandala of colour. "I had a Linhof 5x4 view camera I had bought from Max Dupain with a [film] back that rotated 360 degrees. I simply wanted to see what using the camera’s movements – turning the film around – would do [to Piccadilly Circus] during a long exposure."

The year 1953 proved to be a very good year for the young Australian photojournalist. "I had covered the Queen’s Coronation for LIFE magazine as well as the Festival of Britain – the best festival I have ever been to," Potts recalled recently. "Britain was a terrific place [then]. They had recently announced the first jet airliner, the Comet, and television had just been introduced."

David Potts would flourish in 1950s London, working for all of the great magazines pioneering photojournalism – LIFE, the Observer newspaper and the now legendary Picture Post. But against his elegant, concise documentary style, there was a growing, opposite side to the Australian photographer's creative palette. With a mixture of discipline and playfulness Potts had begun an exploration of hue and form that continues to this day. Despite his accomplished black and white photography, the young Australian photographer, working in the photographic ferment of London in the 1950s, appears drawn to the sensual richness of colour itself – and a liberating visual grammar of longer exposures coupled with a full exploitation of the view camera's ability to control perspective and depth of field.

On returning to Australia in 1955 David Potts soon revealed what he had learned, showing both his documentary images and several distinctly painterly colour photographs in the influential exhibition Six Photographers at David Jones Art Gallery in Sydney.

In recent years David Potts has continued his exploration of colour photography, using mundane subjects such as licorice confectionery and, perhaps with a nod to Edward Weston, a capsicum. "I remember reading where Tina Modotti went shopping and noticed capsicums she thought Weston might like to photograph. After he had taken the picture that became famous Modotti and Weston both dined on the capsicum. Weston remarked later, in his Daybooks, that he felt like a cannibal." Potts then added that the licorice allsorts in his photograph also did not survive – and he understood how Modotti and Weston felt.

In seeing the colourist fantasies and still life images David Potts has made over six decades, it is possible to glimpse the arc of a career that still has the capacity to surprise. This veteran of Australian photography sees well beyond the first urgent, instinctive desire to make a photograph. Whether through social observation, or his playful (and sometimes edible) still life subjects David Potts invites us to appreciate photography with the same sense of wonder he still possesses.

By Robert McFarlane