Vale Ian Dodd

This afternoon I attended a celebration of the life of Ian Dodd, who died last month. Ian was a much loved member of Sydney’s photographic community, and the celebration focused on his extraordinary career as a photographer. His most famous photograph is probably Wet Hair (1974), which is in the collection of the Art Gallery of NSW (you can see it here). More recent work is up at the website of the now defunct and sadly missed Stills Gallery, where he had a solo exhibition in 2006.

Ian and I knew each other through the School Magazine, a monthly literary journal for primary school students published by the NSW Department of Education since 1916. In the 1980s, the magazine’s editor Kath Hawke set out to overhaul the look of the magazine. She wanted something better than what she described as blurry postage-stamp sized drawings. Ian was a childhood friend who had been art director of a small adult magazine. When Kath offered him the challenge he rose to it, and when I started working at the magazine soon after he was designing lay-outs and coming into the office a couple of days each month to be the de facto art director. He continued to do the job under Kath’s successor, award winning children’s book author Anna Fienberg, and then me. It was a far cry from the sophisticated and often erotic work for which he was known in the world of photography, but we all learned a lot from him, and enjoyed his warm, wry humour.

I wasn’t able to stay for the speeches this afternoon. I hope someone told the story he once told me about a mother who asked him for help. Her teenaged son had his heart set on becoming an artist, and she asked her friend Ian, himself an artist and photographer, to have a chat with him, explaining how important it was to get a trade of some sort rather than dive straight into the precarious life of an artist. Ian agreed, and gave the boy a pep talk. As I remember him telling it, the gist of his talk was to tell the boy that if he wanted to be an artist, life would probably be hard, but if he didn’t do it he would probably regret it for the rest of his life. The boy was George Gittoes, and it’s fair to say that the world has benefited from Ian’s advice.

Here’s a photo Ian took of me and the Emerging Artist in Hyde Park, well before she set foot on the artistic path. I treasure it.