Art News New Zealand, Winter 2022.
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John Lethbridge was born in Wellington in 1948. In the early 1970s, he moved to Auckland to study at Elam School of Fine Arts, becoming part of the post-object-art scene in the sculpture department under Jim Allen, and presenting his show Formal Enema Enigma as part of Auckland City Art Gallery’s 1975 Project Programme. In 1976 he moved to Australia, and, the following year, he bought a Hasselblad camera and began to concentrate on photography. The iconic, staged photographs he made in the late 1970s and early 1980s had one foot in the literalism of performance documentation and the other in the glitz of fashion photography. Equal parts Joseph Beuys and Helmut Newton, they scrambled psychological and spiritual enquiry with camp theatrics, and would come to epitomise the postmodern turn.
In the late 1970s, Lethbridge’s photos featured his then partner Jane Campion, who would go on to become the celebrated director of the films Sweetie (1989), An Angel at My Table (1990), The Piano (1993), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Holy Smoke! (1999), In the Cut (2003), Bright Star (2009), and The Power of the Dog (2021)—for which she won the best-director Oscar this year—and the television series Top of the Lake (2013–7).
Robert Leonard: How did you meet?
Jane Campion: We first met in about 1970. I would have been about sixteen. It was in Wellington, at a casual dinner at the film producer John O’Shea’s place. I was boarding with the O’Sheas, because my parents had just moved out of Wellington, having bought Te Ko ̄ whai Farm, about three kilometres out of Waikanae. John [Lethbridge] was there with his then wife, Lindsay, a graphic designer for Pacific Films.
John Lethbridge: It would have been 1970, because in 1971 I moved to Auckland and went to Elam art school. It was a brief but memorable encounter.
Jane Campion: I went on to complete a degree in anthropology at Victoria University, but I didn’t want to continue in an academic way. My aim was always to go to art school. First, I went to art school in Venice for a few months, but my Italian wasn’t good enough and I got depressed. So I went to London and did the foundation year at Chelsea, but I found myself missing home, my parents, and my New Zealand friends. But I needed space from my family to find myself, so I decided to complete my fine-arts degree in Australia. I looked at a few art schools there, including Prahran in Melbourne. But, when I visited Sydney College of the Arts, John was teaching in the sculpture department so at least I knew someone. That made the decision for me.
What was your art practice at that time? What kind of art did you make?
Jane Campion: I was in the painting department. I was naive. I didn’t understand much about making art. I was copying other art I thought was good, art I liked. Then I went through that difficult process of realising I didn’t know anything. Whatever love of art had brought me there, I knew I’d have to let go of it, because I’d have to find my work within myself. The whole of my class was like that. Hardly anybody did anything, because we saw that everything we did was so derivative and ridiculous that we froze. This time of confusion—of not knowing, of being really scared—was incredibly important for me in my career. Then, at a certain point, I just made the decision to go for it and used everything I had. I started painting my thoughts about love and relationships, and the ironies of them.
John Lethbridge: I remember your paintings. You were already visualising narratives, telling stories about particular events in your life.
Jane Campion: There was a real change in my energy. I shifted into a way of being that was present, committed, and at risk. And I had enormous energy for the work, because I put everything in. I could work eighteen hours a day. It was about that time that John and I became a couple.
What was the creative context of that period?
Jane Campion: Sydney College was a wild place. There was a lot of performance work going on. Richard Dunn was my painting teacher. He was a great teacher and encouraged my eventual focus on film.
John Lethbridge: It was a radical art school. For a long time, it was the art school. In 1978, Jim Allen came over from Elam, and he was very liberal. Jane started making Super 8 films. I remember her going up to her studio with a flask of tea to write scripts and never coming out. It was real commitment.
Jane Campion: Film was my first love, but I never thought I’d have the capacity to make films. They seemed to me to be the work of geniuses. But I started to turn my little plays or performance works into films. I learned filmmaking from a manual.
Your parents—Edith and Richard Campion—were New Zealand theatre royalty.
Jane Campion: That had a lot to do with it. My interest in performance came from their obsession with it. I used to go to the theatre a lot when I was in England. Performance intrigued me.
When did things click for you?
Jane Campion: There were a couple of clicks, but the most important was making that decision to commit, to expose myself, to be vulnerable. From there, the learning was fast. When it happened, it was like every resistance was gone, and, even though my work was primitive, it was going somewhere. It was exciting to not feel trapped and unable to express myself, worried about not being really present in the world. It was exciting to be expressing this wholehearted feeling about life and what I was doing. From there, everything went fast, because, once you’ve released that energy, you can work every minute of the day and it feels like play. And I think that was John’s and my connection too. We were really playful together. We laughed a lot and had fun.
When did you start to make photos together?
Jane Campion: Was it when we went to the farm or did it start before that?
John Lethbridge: I think it started a bit before.
Jane Campion: That’s right. And then, in 1977, we were going on a Christmas holiday to my parents’ farm and John decided to shoot some photos there. That’s when we made Farm Life. We took some items of costume and props, and we added items from my mother’s wardrobe. The gold lamé pants, the Paris booties, the gold cowboy boots, and the rabbit boa were hers.
I love the way you were mimicking or responding to animals from around the farm: chicken, turkey, rabbit.
Jane Campion: We were just playing around, intuitively building up an image that had a mysterious surrealist quality to it. Mystery was a big thing for me. I wanted it to be ambiguous and resist literal decoding. John was definitely the artist, and I was his support person, his performer. Sometimes I understood what was happening, other times he’d just tell me what to do. But I did whatever he asked.
John Lethbridge: It was creative play—intuitive, experimental image making. Jane had a wonderful innate presence, which gives these images a real edge. I love how photographs can be imprinted with a psychic presence.
Jane Campion: Even with a pillowcase on my head?
John Lethbridge: Even with a pillowcase. Covering the head was an established theme in my art, suggesting an internalised inquiry. We identify with our heads—but that’s outward looking. The pillowcase was about going inside. I was trying to symbolise that.
I think of Magritte’s The Lovers II (1928) in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, where the couple’s faces are shrouded.
John Lethbridge: I love the surrealists. Magritte was my favourite.
Jane Campion: And I used that in The Piano, when Holly Hunter’s character, Ada, has a cloth over her head when she’s learning to speak.
So how did your thinking about the series develop? How did you understand your character?
Jane Campion: I don’t know if I was terribly aware of it, because I was in it, I wasn’t looking at it. Now, when I see the images, I have more insight into them. My favourite one from Farm Life is The Ride, where I’m on the saddle with the carrot held out in front. It’s got strength and ambition.
John Lethbridge: Blinded by ambition!
Jane Campion: Chasing a carrot. When you are looking ahead to some goal that you never get to. The Ride has a great feeling of the craziness of life, of things going full pelt with a great determination. It’s a Don Quixote-type thing.
Full pelt, yet standing still. There’s also the riding crop. I like the element of carrot and stick.
Jane Campion: I remember seeing The Ride again about five or ten years ago, and thinking how strong it was. It’s a good portrait of me. It’s got a lot of vigour. There’s just something I love about it. I think the best thing is when you can’t quite put your finger on it.
This image was made over forty years ago, but you’ve just made The Power of the Dog, which involves the psychosexual implications of a saddle.
Jane Campion: That’s true. I hadn’t thought about that. That’s funny.
John Lethbridge: Synchronicity.
Jane Campion: Growing up, I always had a pony. I loved riding on the farm. That helped me when it came to making the film, because I had some experience of cattle and farm life. It’s incredible how things come around.
At that time, in New Zealand art and literature, the rural, man-alone ethos was coming unstuck. Your figure in Farm Life seems like such an alien and urban presence in this rural setting.
John Lethbridge: And I love that about it.
Jane Campion: The character’s androgynous quality has always been attractive to me. I think I’m androgynous, more or less.
John Lethbridge: Me too.
Jane Campion: Being playful about stereotypes of gender.
John Lethbridge: I love the ambiguity. I was totally into shamanism—masculine and feminine, yin and yang, the receptive and the active coming together. I have my own interpretation of the images, but whatever readings others make are okay by me. I wanted to make dream- like images capable of holding different interpretations at the same time.
There’s a punky, fetishy, queer quality, like Jane’s character has just stepped out of a nightclub.
John Lethbridge: Well, that’s me.
Jane Campion: I didn’t think you’d ever been to a nightclub.
John Lethbridge: No, I hadn’t. I was very innocent, but I loved the look. Fetishes are objects loaded with psychology. When I saw your mother’s shoes, I thought, wow, I could spend my lifetime photographing them. I’m reminded of Max Klinger’s surrealistic print series about the glove.
I find those shoes fascinating, too. They’ve got stiletto heels but lacy-looking uppers. They’re conflicted.
John Lethbridge: Those shoes and the gold lamé pants are at odds with the rustic setting. It’s not a pretty landscape. It’s a very basic farm.
Jane Campion: I kept those gold pants for a long time. They were retired just after film school. The shoes I passed on to my daughter.
John, you presented your photos in art and in fashion contexts, in art galleries and fashion magazines.
John Lethbridge: I always saw myself as an artist first, as bringing art into a fashion context.
Jane Campion: Guy Bourdin was one of your great drivers.
John Lethbridge: I usually cite Helmut Newton, but, yes, Bourdin’s amazing tableaux in Paris Vogue were the strongest influence. But I could never succeed simply as a fashion photographer. I couldn’t submit myself to the demands of a fashion editor. I clashed with all my editors, except at Pol magazine, where they gave me complete freedom. Most of my best images were in Pol. There were images of Jane in the show Pol: Portrait of a Generation at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, in 2003.
How were your photos received in the art scene?
John Lethbridge: I thought I was doing great, progressive images. They were put in lots of international shows, but they weren’t really picked up by the Australian scene at the time. There was resistance to my particular blend of art and fashion.
In the Divination pictures—made back in Sydney, on the Harbour Bridge—Jane’s in a suit, sunnies, and bathing cap, sitting in an inflated inner tube, with a divining rod, from which dried sardines dangle. There’s a broken boomerang.
John Lethbridge: That was 1979. The images were of Jane, but represented psychological states I was going through at the time, adjusting to leaving New Zealand. I saw that I was on a journey and couldn’t return home. There’s Piscean symbolism, that I was a fish out of water, a fish trying to find water, trying to find my heart, my feelings. And the broken boomerang was ‘no return’.
There’s also a boomerang in your Searching for Beuys photos. They look like they’ve been shot at night with a flash. Where were they taken?
John Lethbridge: In Hyde Park, after they’d pruned the plane trees. It was so surreal. It looked like the trees had been turned upside down, roots up. I would often look for locations that would be successful as photographs in their own right, then add in the performer and all the symbolic paraphernalia. Jane’s wearing a uniform, her grey suit, just as Joseph Beuys had his uniform, with his fishing jacket and fedora. The sausages trailing out of the suitcase are another Beuys connection.
Jane Campion: I loved that suit. I don’t know where you found it, but I kept wearing it for so long. It was my favourite going-out outfit. I wore it when I won my very first award—the Rouben Mamoulian Award at Sydney Film Festival—for A Girl’s Own Story (1984). I felt super comfortable in that suit, because of its androgynous quality. I liked to combine my golden locks and the Beuys suit. It made me feel free. Being in frocks never felt right.
Why Beuys?
John Lethbridge: Beuys was my art hero. I was interested in shamanism and symbolism.
Jane, you’ve also noted Beuys’s influence.
Jane Campion: He’s one of my favourite artists, but I don’t pretend to be anything like him. I love artists that I can’t be like.
The title Searching for Beuys suggests travelling abroad, but the boomerang suggests travelling into the Australian interior. I noticed that the boomerang also turns up in the performance Gold Found by the Artists that you, John, worked on with Marina Abramovic and Ulay in 1981, after they spent time in the outback.
John Lethbridge: Around that time, there was little Aboriginal art around. Boomerangs were seen as tourist items, which was how I was referring to them. Marina and Ulay were trying to reenergise the boomerang as a symbol.
Jane, your film Holy Smoke! also links a spiritual quest in a faraway place—India—with the Australian interior. Do you share John’s interest in Eastern philosophies?
Jane Campion: I do, but I come from a different place— mostly meditation and yoga. Early on, I was curious about the connection between mind and body. I realised my mind was a problem for me. I dreamed of enlightenment from age seventeen, when I first heard the word. It felt like the most exciting possibility, but I didn’t understand that there was a path there. Right now, I have a meditation practice, where I do thirty minutes to an hour every day, and I do Ren Xue and retreats. For me, it’s sanity and a good community.
Farm Life has an improvised, performative quality. But in the Divination and Searching for Beuys works, you operate more as a model in tableaux that John has devised in advance.
Jane Campion: I felt a little less engaged in those later ones, because they were more symbolic, and there wasn’t much for me to do.
John Lethbridge: We started to go in different directions. I was dealing with a reluctant Jane, who was moving on, going her own way, on a totally different journey. She was powering into writing her scripts. And, for me, I was beginning to get more symbolic and shamanic. There was a serious shift there.
So, when did it all come to an end?
Jane Campion: It hasn’t. We’ve always been friends.
John Lethbridge: After 1979, Jane wasn’t in my images. She was making her films. There was a wonderful coming together in Farm Life, then a natural separating out. I went to New York, where I had the Australia Council’s Greene Street residency. Jane went to AFTRS, the national screen and broadcast school in Sydney.
John, how do you feel about your images of Jane now?
John Lethbridge: After forty-plus years, they still stand up and look fresh and mysterious. I’m excited to see them again.
Jane, was making these images important in your artistic development?
Jane Campion: Working with John—seeing how seriously he took on the business of learning about photography and photographing subjects—really informed my practice moving into film. I saw how John worked every minute of the day, learning from others and getting me to model for him—which in the end I got a bit sick of—but it taught me what hard work is. From John, I learnt what it means to develop work—or to develop yourself to do the work. I learned from him and copied his work ethic. And that’s been absolutely essential to how I’ve been able to make my career.