A seemingly endless cycle of human use/misuse of the natural world
Featuring Noah Thompson Words by Nastasia Khmelnitski
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Noah Thompson explores social and cultural tension and the relationship between humans and the environment through the prism of the historical past that sheds light on current events and the future. The narrative that unfolds holds the viewer’s breath and forces a silent pause of contemplation that raises questions, requesting a pathway to a deeper understanding of the events. Medium and large format, the focus on light and darkening shadows, almost as with tenebrism in painting, creates a dramatic effect and expresses portraits and landscapes in a vivid manner that draws awareness and elevates emotions. Noah shares, “I had an early desire to be a photojournalist but struggled to find a way into this and eventually decided late in my twenties to study photography.” The inner attention to detail, the questions about the state of things, and the future development of humankind eventually led Noah to create his approach to viewing the surroundings more holistically.
Noah Thompson is an Australian documentary photographer based between Melbourne and Tasmania. Noah holds a BA in International Studies from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and a Bachelor’s in Photography from Photographic Studies College. Since 2016, Noah has exhibited his work in Australia, Malaysia, and Kuwait, with the recent exhibit taking place in 2023 at PhotoAccess, the Center for contemporary photography in Canberra. In this interview, we speak about Noah’s project Huon, in which he researched the environmental issues in Tasmania and the relationship between people and nature. Noah draws from his family history of opposing views on the role and purpose of the environment in connection to human use of it that at times can be devastating.
‘With the myriad of forces that influence our lives, such as questions of environment, family, life, death, ideology, colonisation, and politics, I hoped that I could direct the viewer to ask questions or contemplate the overall state of things as opposed to focusing on one issue.’
My Story
Hi Noah, how are you doing? Glad to have you for this chat to discuss your body of work. You’re based between Tasmania & Australia, focusing on documentary projects that cover cultural and political angles. Could you share your story and way into photography, finding the topic of interest and individual approach to making images?
I initially started taking photographs in high school in the Northern Territory, where I was privileged to have some great teachers who encouraged me to spend time with a camera and in the darkroom. This was around 2008-9, when digital technology was beginning to improve but was still too expensive for a school to take on. Luckily, the school I attended had a good supply of 35mm cameras and a great darkroom which, even after graduating, allowed me access to develop my film and make prints. One teacher even gifted me several boxes of black and white film and chemicals for development. I’m immensely thankful for this early encouragement and grateful to have had this initial experience, as I don’t think the medium would have stayed with me in the same way if the process had been digital. I continued to photograph throughout my teens and into my twenties but with no real aim of creating a body of work. I just made pictures of friends, my travels, and people I met — the kinds of things we all photograph as we grow into adulthood ourselves.
I had an early desire to be a photojournalist but struggled to find a way into this and eventually decided late in my twenties to study photography. Through reading the standard entry point texts such as Sontag, Barthes, and Berger and my observations of the 24-hour media cycle, I became disillusioned or cynical about the idea that a single picture or story could affect positive change in the world. Moreover, these books and others like them broadened my understanding of what a photograph could be and how images function in the world. Having always been a fan of cinema and slow-burn narrative arcs, at some point, I drifted toward making work in this way, with a desire to slow things down.
With the myriad of forces that influence our lives, such as questions of environment, family, life, death, ideology, colonisation, and politics, I hoped that I could direct the viewer to ask questions or contemplate the overall state of things as opposed to focusing on one issue, this would be more of a success to me. The disillusionment I felt was partly due to the way issues are often presented in editorial or photojournalistic contexts as if they occurred in a vacuum. I believe the truth to be part of a larger and more complex set of interrelations. It might not always be successful at alluding to these notions, but I feel that I’m heading in the right direction, and like all things, it's a learning process.
‘I came to focus on the wider idea inherent in the work, humanity's relationship with the natural world. I drifted away from the heavy research approach and began following all sorts of tangents and simply spending time in places, going on long hikes, or talking to people in pubs or on the street.’
The Choice of the Theme
You gained two Bachelor's degrees, one from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the second in Photography from the Photographic Studies College. How do studies affect the choice of themes and the way you do research when working on a project?
I will talk mostly about the experience of creating my series Huon as it has been my primary focus and sole creative outlet since graduating from PSC in 2018. I think having academically studied sociology and politics brought research to the fore early on in the work. I sought out journal articles, non-fiction, academic histories, and contemporary works of journalism on environmental issues in Tasmania. I also spent quite a bit of time in library collections, looking at archival materials, still photographs, newspaper microfilm, and moving image sources. This process steered me toward the idea that I almost had to reference these real-world instances of things, causing me to photograph certain areas for their relationship to certain historical events. I found this helpful up to a point, but it later became frustrating. Although research is important, I think it should complement or help suffuse your work with ideas rather than give you a list of things to photograph.
In terms of choosing themes, I had an interest in and connection to Tasmania long before I began the work, so perhaps it was as simple as photographing what I knew. However, I do believe that the combination of that familiarity with the place and a broader understanding of the social, cultural, and economic forces that govern our lives gave me a good base from which to do research. I began Huon in 2018 while I was studying in Melbourne and flying to Tasmania once a month for a week or so to photograph, continuing in this manner for about two years. With that time restraint, it was very easy to fall into the ‘list trap’ I mentioned, and the work plateaued. I realised the only way to move beyond this was to actually live there.
In early 2020 I had just returned from a trip to Tasmania when COVID started shutting most of the world and travelling down. I lost my job and then decided to move back home with my dad in Tasmania where, in my mind, I would work on the project for a few months before moving back to Melbourne. These few months turned into nearly two years, and with the extra time came a change in the way I worked. I came to focus on the wider idea inherent in the work, humanity's relationship with the natural world. I drifted away from the heavy research approach and began following all sorts of tangents and simply spending time in places, going on long hikes, or talking to people in pubs or on the street. In a long roundabout way to answer your question — I think I am moving away from doing research in this pointed way, and I'm becoming more interested in making work that attempts to describe a mood or an underlying feeling of a place, be it psychological, physical, or even spiritual.
‘The initial inspiration for the project was a story my mum told me about her father (my grandfather), who said to her that he would ‘run over you myself’ if she stood in front of bulldozers to prevent the construction of a controversial hydroelectric dam project.’
Huon
The project Huon received a Pool grant, won Charcoal Publishing Prize and was developed into a solo exhibition at PhotoAccess, Canberra. With Huon, you develop a topic that highlights the tension in the community between the voices for the conservation of nature as opposed to development in Tasmania. What sparked your interest in this topic and in researching the way the past affects the socio-political landscape today?
The initial inspiration for the project was a story my mum told me about her father (my grandfather), who said to her that he would ‘run over you myself’ if she stood in front of bulldozers to prevent the construction of a controversial hydroelectric dam project, the Gordon-below-the-Franklin Dam in the 1980s, which would flood a world heritage listed rainforest. Due to the way Australian law was set up at the time, the world heritage listing was not automatically enshrined in law, and thus the area was not officially protected.
This small anecdote from my mother highlighted for me the varied layers inherent in these debates, questions of livelihoods, family dynamics, environmental concern, as well as political and cultural movements. I remember hearing snippets of conversations and heated debates at family gatherings from a young age, predominantly about the logging of old-growth forests and the actions of state-based forestry. This tension was something I had always noticed about Tasmania, and on return visits and short stints living there throughout my teens and early twenties was something that never seemed to leave the place, something was always simmering. Although not necessarily part of the scope of this project, if you go even deeper into history, colonisation and capitalism are inseparable from the wider story. All these observations, conversations, and stories, at some point, coalesced into the motivation to begin the project.
It was through my research that I also found the story of the Lea Tree, a 2500-year-old Huon Pine that was near the staging area of early work for the Gordon-below-the-Franklin Dam. Huon Pine is a conifer endemic to Tasmania and is the tree from which the work takes its title and has also long been prized as a symbol for Tasmania’s uniqueness alongside the Tasmanian Devil and the extinct Thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger. Huon Pine is renowned for its exceptionally slow growth rate, its long life span, and its timber’s high oil content. In the early days of colonisation, the tree was over-exploited for its suitability for boat building, which led to the tree being protected from the late 1800s and eventually to the suspension of licences to fell it in 1882. It is still illegal to cut down a living tree, and can only be salvaged and milled with a licence.
The Lea Tree had become a symbol for the conservationists on what would be lost if the dam was built. In the aftermath of the Australian High Court’s decision to protect the area under Australian law and create a national park, the tree was vandalised by pro-dam interests. It was chainsawed, holes were drilled into it to pour oil into its roots, and finally, it was set on fire. The trunk was scrawled with the words ‘FUCK YOU GREEN CUNTS’ before the perpetrators photographed themselves in front of the still-burning tree. The resulting photograph was then sent to one of the conservation organisations.
Finding this story provided the narrative arc and metaphor that I had been searching for all along. I had wanted to articulate this tension with a real-world example as well as explore it with my own photographs in a less literal way. A dummy photobook that I made in 2018 opened with the archival image mentioned above and ended with my own photograph of the Lea Tree from the same year, after a laboured effort to locate someone who knew its whereabouts and organise the logistics of getting to such a remote area.
To continue the topic, what was your experience of discovering Huon, learning about its history and the opposing forces that shape the current state, in addition, uncovering the family story of your grandfather?
To take it back to the question, this entire experience was coloured by wider socio-political events as well as the experiences of my own family. Both my grandfathers were carpenters, as is my father by trade, all reliant on the use of natural resources for their livelihoods with undoubtedly differing views on the environment. Many people make the best of their lives with what they can, so perhaps the statement made by my grandfather was a knee-jerk reaction to what may have been an affront to his ideals. In this manner, I don’t think anyone has a moral high ground or is right in their beliefs. It's just another layer of complexity. My interest in the topic wasn’t to paint a black-and-white picture of opposing forces but to look at the nuances of how such a topic shapes all people, the community, and in turn, the environment.
After moving back to Tasmania, I was unemployed for a year and struggled to find a job. I ended up finding one making mountain bike trails in the hills above the old mining town of Queenstown on the South West coast. This was also a role that involved exploiting the landscape to accommodate a human desire and often involved cutting down trees and shaping the earth. It was during this time that I learnt that the same grandfather that had spoken to my mother in such vivid terms had worked for the mine that I looked over most days from high on the mountain. His first name is also my middle name, John. John had worked in Tasmania after the death of my grandmother in a car accident. Different circumstances and forces outside our control led us to the same place and to work in industries that, to varying degrees, impact the environment.
It was strange to learn of this personal connection across time, and it reinforced to me the idea that this story is one that started long before I was born and one that will no doubt continue long after I’m gone. I guess, in part, that's what I’m interested in, this cyclical and seemingly endless cycle of human use/misuse of the natural world and the marks we leave on the earth, each other, and ourselves.
‘My main desire is to make work that feels genuine to who I am as a person and artist. I think this is a slower route to take but, ultimately, one I feel will be the most rewarding personally and creatively.’
Photography as a Journey
What defines your desire to continue with your practice of photography, work on personal and commission projects, develop exhibitions, and your voice in the field?
My main desire is to make work that feels genuine to who I am as a person and artist. I think this is a slower route to take but, ultimately, one I feel will be the most rewarding personally and creatively. I think this is why I often feel it takes me a long time to make work, or rather have the work start to feel like it's 'working' — it has to feel honest.
I have also been lucky enough to spend some time with Tim Carpenter at the Charcoal Book Club Chico Review, who said to me (and I am probably paraphrasing - sorry, Tim) that “art is about the ineffable,” this idea that we’re trying to describe things that confound the use of words or even pictures. This quote has stuck with me, and I feel that this idea has slowly influenced my approach and motivates me to keep working and pushing my work.
A Sneak Peek
What project/s are you currently working on, and what should we expect next in terms of themes you’re developing?
I’m still slowly figuring that out, finding a different way to work. I only just finished shooting for Huon at the beginning of this year, and I had a few loose threads I wanted to tie off. If all goes to plan, the book will be out with Charcoal Press sometime in the next year or so (as part of the 2019 Charcoal Book Club publishing prize). This presents a good opportunity to fully dedicate myself to the next thing. Here’s a little something new that I made recently that may give some indication of where I’m heading.
