4 minute read
Reimagining Women
By Andrea Louise Thomas Photos Gary Sissons
Mount Martha photographer Michelle Bolitho hopes to use her photographic art to encourage women to reimagine how they view themselves. She wants to capture their stories and beauty through every stage of womanhood – celebrating their vibrancy and uniqueness.
Older people, particularly women, can feel marginalised and invisible in the current youth-focused culture. This does not sit well with Michelle. She asks, “How do we not fade as women? How do we own our power?” In her next body of work, she wants to address those questions.
As an artist, she is only just beginning. After a long and successful career with Flight Centre Travel Group (Australia and the UK), in 2019 she accepted a redundancy. Michelle then decided to pursue her lifelong passion and started an Advanced Diploma of Photography at Photography Studies College, Melbourne.
During her busy travel industry career, she’d never had time to master the technical skills of photography. “I knew I had a good eye, but I needed to learn how to use the camera, understand light and how to make creative decisions,” she says. At PSC, she learned how to shoot in manual mode. It was then she finally embraced identifying as a photographer.
Being in the company of other photographers and taking pictures of subjects she had never shot before was liberating and instructive. One of her female lecturers had a profound impact. “I loved the encouragement to tell photographic stories about women through a female lens,” she says.
During COVID lockdowns, Michelle studied every day. This time gave her the opportunity to create a photographic documentary series featuring her daughters as models. It resulted in a wonderful time capsule of isolation, languishing, and teenage angst. She exhibited this series at PSC COVID Gallery.
A key turning point as a photographic artist came when Mornington Peninsula painter, Janine Daddo saw Michelle’s photos on Instagram and contacted her. In October 2020 Janine started mentoring Michelle, encouraging her to push herself creatively and explore paints, colours, textures and layering to create photographic collages. Their collaboration resulted in a joint exhibition in May 2021.
That exhibition entitled, ‘She Is…’ observed the innocence and freedom with which her daughters moved through the world before they were aware of their presence and impact, of being noticed and judged. “That time is so fleeting and poetic,” she says.
Exhibiting at The Other Art Fair in Sydney was another confidence booster; representing herself as an artist with other artists. There was great camaraderie amongst them and Michelle felt very much part of the scene. She also realised there that her ambition wasn’t about sales. “I am doing this because I love it, not because I want to be commercial,” she says.
As a child, photography was always something Michelle loved. She remembers taking her first photos with a little Kodak box camera when in Grade 5 during a family caravan holiday. Her brother was also a keen photographer who inspired her to experiment and create in the darkroom which her father had built in his shed.
Her mother often cautioned Michelle not to take too many pictures because the cost of developing and printing was so high in those days. So, Michelle only took pictures on special occasions. That meant the film might be in the camera for a year!
Growing up in the steel manufacturing town of Whyalla, South Australia, Michelle longed for more. She moved to Adelaide to study at the University of South Australia. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Education.
After a year of teaching, she’d saved enough money to pursue her other passion – travel. She left her studies and spent the next two years working and travelling in the UK, Europe, Asia and the USA. It was life changing.
In her early travel days Michelle shot a roll a day. Impatient to see the results, she’d frequently pay extra for expedited printing. With digital photography, that’s no longer an issue. Now, she might shoot 500 photos a day on holiday using her Canon 5D DSLR. Michelle never deletes anything because she never knows what story a photo will tell.
I want to tell stories with my photos
Her favourite photographers are portraitist, Annie Leibovitz, mid-century style icon Slim Aaron, and text over photograph artist, Barbara Kruger – each one a storyteller. Michelle’s style is always evolving, but her aim is the same as theirs, “I want to tell stories with my photos,” she says.
