A REAL LIFE
I’m sitting in the POOL Collective office at Enmore in the inner suburbs of Sydney. On the walls around me are displayed images by Sean Izzard, Ingvar Kenne, Simon Harsent, Juliet Taylor and several other long-standing Collective members. Sean walks in with a glass of water for me as I ponder whether Simon Harsent’s portrait of John McEnroe is toned or black and white? However, I’m not here to discuss that.
I first noticed Sean Izzard’s name in the first Fuji ACMP Australian Photographers Collection published in 1995, and he had images in all of the nine subsequent books. Sean was inspired by the images in Richard Avedon’s book, In The American West, Sebastião Salgado’s An Uncertain Grace, and by Helmut Newton and Irving Penn. He has a love of India and of very early mornings on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Sean grew up in Bundeena, a small beachside village on the southern outskirts of Sydney, adjoining the Royal National Park. At the time, his dad was working at Murray Publishers and would often bring magazines home. Sometimes in the school holidays, Sean went to work with him. The printed page engaged Sean and he used to muck around in the art department, designing and laying out pages.
“It wasn’t photography then,” he tells me. “It was drawing, but it was definitely an introduction to design and what looked good. I remember dad talking about the ‘flow’ of a magazine.”
When he was 10 years old, Sean took some photos out in the country using his dad’s old Hanimex camera. The black-and-white film was processed at Murray Publishers and they also produced some 8x10-inch prints. His dad said the pictures were
