Photographer Adam Ferguson’s new book, Big Sky, showcases images of 21st-century Australia that reframe the ‘romance’ of the outback
Kardu Yek Diminin Country cousin sisters Shauna and Bridget Perdjert from Kardu Thithay Diminin clan and Murrinhpatha language group sit on Air Force Hill after practising cultural burning on Kardu Yek Diminin Country, Wadeye. Photograph: Adam Ferguson, showcases images of 21st-century Australia that reframe the ‘romance’ of the outbackrom New York to Kabul, photojournalist Adam Ferguson made a career documenting other people’s countries.
Ferguson’s medium format film camera lingers on a young cattle worker posing tentatively in front of a grove of pink bougainvillaea; a drag queen under a Hills Hoist preparing for a Priscilla: Queen of the Desert tribute show; and a pair of young Aboriginal women in Taylor Swift T-shirts looking out over Wadeye, in the Northern Territory. Many of Ferguson’s portraits invoke and subvert well-worn national iconography familiar from Wake in Fright to Baz Luhrmann’s Australia.
Ferguson was similarly drawn to the mythic figure of the sheep shearer, but his shirtless portraits of tattooed 30-year-old contract shearer Conan Wakefield and his 50-year-old father, George Smith, deliberately pushes back against the old romance of the shearing shed. “It didn’t matter what I did, it just felt like I was making an image that we’d already seen,” Ferguson says of his initial attempts to capture the men at work. “And that was beautiful, in a sense, I wanted to veer away from that.
One striking image sees Pastor Simon Dixon, a Pintupi-Luritja and Lutheran priest, standing arms outstretched in front of the rolling hills of Ikuntji/Haast Bluff, Arrernte Country, the colours straight out of an Albert Namatjira watercolour. Ferguson had met the pastor months earlier, and envisioned taking his portrait out on Country in the vestments of a coloniser’s religion. But the pastor had other plans first.
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