Where They Create

As published in (inside) magazine, June 2011.

The visual studies of a curious and wise photographer can be both revealing and full of intrigue. Paul Barbera focuses his lens on interiors, but for other reasons than just pure aesthetics. The place of intimate and creative process is what he seeks. Now having entered more than 90 creative studios across the world, Barbera has prepared a tangible feast – sharing his photographic perspectives with us in a major way.

An assignment cancellation in Milan was the catalyst for Where They Create, an intriguing visual ‘blog’ and personal project of Melbourne-based photographer Paul Barbera – who has spent the last 15 years documenting creative studios around the world. The body of work is a privileged look into the inner working lives of designers, architects, musicians and all those who work in that ubiquitous field of what we consider the ‘creative’ realm. The photo series showcases the interiors of over 90 studios, including that of Opening Ceremony, Olaf Breuning, Wallpaper, Jeremiah Goodman, Cyril Duval and Clive Wilkinson, to name just a few.
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A product of Barbera’s compulsion to document his friends in their studios, the collection of candid still-life images ultimately caught the eye of a renowned Dutch book publisher – known mainly for putting out Frame, Mark and Elephant magazines. Agreeing to an interesting proposal put forth last year, Barbera will now transform his blog into a new book project come September of this year.
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But back to its origin. The impetus for the blog came in the European summer of 2009, when Barbera was in Amsterdam working on a book commission for an interior designer. The job was cancelled just a week before it was scheduled to start and Barbera found himself at a loose end. Finishing up a small photography job, he decided to meet his friend, the artist Jebila Wolfe-Okongwu, in Rome.
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“On that trip he [Jebila] asked me to shoot his studio which I had done many times before,” says Barbera. “Funny thing was that I had been documenting studios for over 15 years. The images just sat on the bottom of my hard drive. With some time up my sleeve, I started the site, and a good friend Michael Nicolaci helped me come up with the name… ‘Where They Create’ just made sense.”
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Shooting creative spaces is, of course, not a new concept, and Barbera is clear to make this distinction. “I do not think it’s unique, I think it’s my take on studios, not really an idea so much, more me documenting the spaces around me.” In over a decade, Barbera has paid tribute to the creative friends around him, using his camera to accentuate what he loves best about them as professionals and their respective work.

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“I am always so surprised by how many people say yes,” he says. “I guess everybody loves to have their space documented.” Though this may be true, the fact that Barbera himself is a creative certainly doesn’t hurt. Add to this his sense of humour and ability to relate to people, and it’s not surprising that he has managed to gain access to even the most private of creative studios.
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“I feel at home very quickly,” he explains, “I’ll sit down and just look around; sometimes I might even stop and start working on my laptop or diary. I feel inspired to work on my own a bit; ideas comes to me so it feels ok to work in other people’s spaces as I feel part of it.”
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A true diplomat, Barbera cannot think of any one studio as a particular highlight. “Every space offers up something I did not expect,” he explains. “An old fax machine holding the door open… or that fact that Washington, Irving, Dickens and Thackeray lived in the same building as the artist Cyril Duval… to the view of a harbour in Hong Kong that can only be seen from that one building.”
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As far as favourite assignments go, Barbera cites his Vogue Living shoot for the 2010 Milan Design Week as one of many. On this particular job, he got to meet his heroes Tom Dixen, Missoni, the Campana Brothers and Tetsuya. But another stand out was the Grazia editorial he did in 2006 on the legendary industrial designer – the late Achille Castiglioni – during which he met Castiglioni’s wife Irma. “It was really lovely to meet her. She had such great style,” he says.

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As a photographer, travel is a natural tool of the trade. It’s where Barbera does much of his work and where he draws much of his inspiration. In the past few years, Barbera has lived a freelancer’s dream, clocking frequent-flyer points between Melbourne and Amsterdam and travelling to all four corners of the globe on assignments.
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But of all destinations, the Melbourne photographer offers the Eastern Bloc city of Warsaw as one of his favourites. “I love the Polish people,” he declares. “There are a lot of misconceptions that there’s not a lot going on there – but there is – and I want to show that.” His photographs of Poland reveal his high regard for the country as an interesting focal point and of course its creative inhabitants.
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Like Warsaw, Barbera explains, the online project offers him the privilege of highlighting aspects of a culture and people he finds interesting, and ultimately the chance to debunk some stereotypes. Where They Create also builds a compelling case for Melbourne as a thriving creative hub still, rather than what some might see as a ‘nascent’ design city. Remarkable photographs of several Melbourne-based studios, including Marc Pascal, 3 Deep Design, Robert Doble, Chris Connell and Nicholas Jones, seem to clearly affirm this notion.
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When asked about his home turf Barbera offers a climate theory to explain why Melbourne is such a creative city. “People in colder climates tend to be creative because there’s not much else to do,” he says. “I also think people outside the centre tend to over compensate. Unfortunately, because we are not at the epicentre, things can be missed… Of course we have our Marc Newsons, but generally people just think of the outdoors when they think of Australia.”

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As a reaction to the more glamorous and often over-stylised shoots, which he’s often commissioned to do, Barbera is sure to have each studio for his personal blog appear in its natural and everyday state – whether sparse and minimal or cluttered disorder. In a series of beautifully articulated shots, Barbera shares with the public every type of studio out there – from the chaotic creativity of graphic design duo Tin&Ed, recipients of the Qantas Spirit of Youth Awards, to the understated black and white avant-garde stylings of fashion designers, Alpha60.

As a photographer and creative surveyor himself, he also likes to use the blog to publicise the good work of others. “There’s a lot going on in our own backyard, and that’s what I want to present to the world,” explains Barbera. ”I’m proud to be Australian – to be from Melbourne. There’s a lot going on here and as a photographer, I can accentuate this.”
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Along this vein, Barbera recently shot Republic of Everyone to highlight the Sydney studio’s work in sustainability strategy. “I like them because they are trying to change the world, a little bit at a time.” Documenting non-commercial projects is nothing new to Barbera, who from 2003 to 2006 worked in poor areas of India and Peru, documenting the humanitarian efforts of Dutch NGO Solidaridad.

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Those who follow Barbera’s work may have also encountered his other, less public, blog – Love Lost. It’s a photographic series that depicts women in soft, romantic and intimate poses. He is reluctant to talk about it, explaining that unlike Where They Create, Love Lost is a project of a very personal nature.
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Like many bloggers out there, Barbera’s success has been helped by social media trends. And he fully acknowledges this. “I feel blogs get me as excited as magazines these days,” he says. “I find so much great work online… the digital arena has democratised photography and anyone can do it now. If the work is being seen and inspires others, then it’s a success!”
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If site statistics are anything to go by, then Where They Create’s 15,000 unique hits a month seem to echo this sentiment. Later this year, Barbera will head to New York to conquer new creative terrain. In the meantime, he’ll continue to divide his time between editorial and commercial work, along with his other personal projects. Although not entirely content to rest on his proverbial laurels quite yet, Barbera is appreciative that his projects have gained such attention. “I am happy with my projects, but I do have another 25 odd ideas I would love to start…” Just going by the first three here, it’s safe to say any of those 25 odd ideas would be interesting to look at.

End.

Where the Creators Are

As published in Broadsheet, 14th December 2010

Melbourne photographer and seasoned traveller Paul Barbera has photographed over 90 creative offices all over the world for his personal project Where They Create, which began as a blog and has since culminated into a book concept for Frame, a renowned book publisher in Amsterdam.

Living an enviable lifestyle, Barbera journeys between two hemispheres, with occasional stopovers in other corners of the world, for that perfect shot. In his photography work, he has had the pleasure of meeting some of his design heroes including the Campana Brothers, Rossellini Missoni and Martin Baas.

But it was a slow start for Barbera, who took a while to find his proverbial calling in life. As a 16-year-old, he did not think much of classroom learning. This was evidenced by the number of hours he clocked up in the darkroom.

“School never made any sense to me – all the kids sitting still in a classroom for hours on end not moving. It was weird,” recalls Barbera. “I ended up spending lots of time in the dark room and weekends working at a lab and taking lots of pictures with dad’s old Minolta SR-T 101.”

Barbera, who has dyslexia, struggled at school and felt that he would never get into university. His work, however, spoke for itself and the passionate Melburnian gained entry and later graduated from VCA in Fine Arts. Barbera went on to do photography professionally, taking on all kinds of jobs shooting commercial ad campaigns.”

A significant career turning point came in the form of his neighbour, a furniture designer whose work, photographed by Barbera, appeared in a Marie Claire magazine; the shots subsequently impressed the lifestyle editor, who asked him to do some editorial for the magazine. Needless to say, Barbera’s career took an upswing from there, bringing him to his current projects and successes. He is careful to state, however, that Where They Create is not a new concept. “It’s more me documenting the spaces around me the past 15 years,” he says. “Also, it’s a complete reaction to shooting for Vogue Living and Elle Decor type magazines, which are super stylised.”

Despite Barbera’s humble admissions, the photographic blog is a fascinating and intimate look into the lives of creative studios in Melbourne and around the world, studios that would often only been seen by a privileged few – either friends or clients. The studios, which include locals Tin & Ed, Tongue and Groove and Alpha60, and further afield Fantastic Man, IDN magazine and Marcel van Doorn, range from the messy and chaotic to the beautifully furnished and well appointed.

“I am a voyeur by nature and most of my work is about that,” admits Barbera. “I use it as a way to go and meet the people I most admire, and it’s a way to explore a city – you get to go to places you would never normally go. The book doesn’t talk about their work, how successful they are, or who they are. It talks about the shared common ground we all have as creative people, and the struggles we go through.”

When asked why the project has been successful, Barbera’s answer is simple but astute. “I guess people like to see other spaces and everyone loves to have their space documented,” he offers. But Barbera attributes much of this success also to social media. “My blog has given my work exposure to so many markets, and to so many people,” he explains. “It’s got me into many magazines and led me to shooting studios all around the world.”

Although Barbera doesn’t generate any money from the traffic that comes to his site, he has built a community around his projects, with the people in these communities acting as ambassadors, bringing his work to the attention of Amsterdam’s Frame, for instance. Known in the design industry for creating beautiful magazines such as Frame, Mark and Elephant, the Dutch publishers will turn Where They Create into a book for release in September next year.

“I think in the past, the power of social media was in the hands of a few who curated a certain view and perspective,” explains Barbera. ‘That’s changed; it’s flattened out so that many more people hold that place and that power, and there are more unique voices and it has made the process of information flow more fluid.” It’s taken almost 20 years of taking on every type of job for Barbera to find his style, but he now feels he is on the right track.“I am really only now at the start of my career.”

For many creative folk, Barbera is an example of a self-made man, someone who has created his own success through trial and error, with a bit of help from his friends. His work, tangible in his blog, is something he has personally crafted, achieved on its own merits. Though he has sought other, less fulfilling, projects he has still managed what most of creative people have struggled to obtain: a life based on a passion and a well-honed talent. As Barbera’s experience of school illuminated, “I think once you’re told you are good at something, you become better at it.”

Projects
wheretheycreate.com
paulbarbera.com
love-lost.net

Mercator Studios in Abbotsford Convent

(As published on indesignlive)

Lieu Pham meets the makers at the refurbished Abbotsford Convent.

The refurbished Mercator building at the Abbotsford Convent provides the public with the chance to go behind the scenes and meet local designers.

“It’s an opportunity to see art in the making and talk about arts practice directly with the makers and buy hand-crafted work,” says Convent’s spokesperson Brenton Geyer.

Launched earlier this year, the Mercator building is part of Abbotsford Convent’s vision to become the new industrial arts sector of Melbourne.

Helen Punton of Zaishu concurs; ‘It’s a wonderful creative community nestled by the river; I feel like I am in a country town but have all the advantages of the metropolis.’

Built circa 1897, the Mercator formed part of the industrial laundries that operated as a major income source for the nuns of the Convent. Today it houses ten newly renovated studios, all individualised by their tenants from various creative fields.

Melbourne jeweller Phoebe Porter says the appeal was obvious. ‘I was drawn by the idea of working surrounded by other complimentary practices and the possibilities of future collaborations between Mercator tenants.’

The Mercator Buliding is located on the eastern edge of the Abbotsford Convent precinct at 1 St Heliers Street, Abbotsford. Some studios are open to the public, subject to the artists’ schedules.

List of Mercator tenants: Painter Pip Davey, Jeweller and Graphic designer Sari Harris, glass-blower Philip Stokes, Cone 11 Ceramics Studio, industrial designers Dhiren Bhagwandas and Justin Hutchinson, eco design studio Zaishu, artists Ralf Kempken and Rona Green, lighting designer Volker Haug, jewellers Phoebe Porter and Shimara Carlow and Katheryn Leopoldseder.

Mercator Studios
abbotsfordconvent.com.au

All photography by Andrzej Nowicki