In 2001, photographer Ben Storrier joined a large contingent of artists on a month-long trip funded by a wealthy Melbourne businessman to Lake Eyre and the Central Desert region for a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. During the first seven days at Lake Eyre, they had a helicopter at their disposal. “Strapped into a harness, I hung out the doorway,” Storrier says. “I shot roll after roll of film on my Mamiya7 and a friend’s Art Panorama 6x17.” Storrier recalls that as the sun rose, they took the helicopter up as high as they could go, and then swooped down to hover only a few inches above the water.
Some of the images that Storrier produced ended up in a book, William Creek & beyond: Australian artists explore the outback (Craftsman House) but he admits that the vast majority have been “hiding away in my archive since then”. At the time, the project was big news with some of Australia's most well known artists involved.
About Ben Storrier
Coming from a very creative family, Ben Storrier says that he was determined not to compete with them on that level, and so went in the opposite direction, deciding to study computer science. Although he says that he enjoyed his IT studies at university, he kept getting involved with “all the creative types”. The result: he stopped the course and instead went in for a more artistic field of study - film, theatre and TV.
By the end of 1996, Storrier says that he’d had enough of formal study, and left to work in the film industry as a runner and PA, which proved to be both enjoyable and educational. In 1998, he turned his hand to film location scouting. “Nobody seemed to want to hire locations, but they loved my photos,” he says. “I started working for photographers, including Grant Matthews who founded Mondo Digital, and studied photography at TAFE in the evenings.
Storrier has been shooting for about 14 years, and is the technical director at Mondo Digital. Besides shooting, he also designs and manages the workflows and systems. Over the last 10 years, he’s helped create a raft of systems technology that allows them to manage huge volumes of imagery with ease, and integrate tightly with their clients.
Mondo Digital runs a quarterly project showcasing some of the talent they have on staff. The latest one is call space. The images in this series were part of that showcase.