BOOK:Beautiful Ugly, Thames & Hudson Publications
John Gollings in 2016 has been appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his “Significant service to photography through the documentation of iconic architectural landmarks in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region”. He studied architecture at the University of Melbourne. His freelance work as an advertising specialist in fashion in the ‘60s brought together his interest in photography and the discipline of architecture.
By Dimitris Lempesis
The book “Beautiful Ugly – The Architectural Photography of John Gollings” from Thames & Hudson Publications takes a look, in words, pictures and recollections, at of Gollings’s photography as he has made his remarkable journey around Australia’s architectural landscape. For more than 40 years John Gollings has been the photographer of choice for scores of architects. A John Gollings photograph reveals a great deal about the aspirations, aims and beliefs, and the zeitgeist of a building and its architect’s intentions. This is based on and expressed through Gollings’s own knowledge of architecture his understanding of light and weather, and the way buildings work and how they inhabit their sites. As, Joe Rollo writes: “In Australia, John Gollings has been making pictures of architecture for going on 40 years. For nearly all the last third of the 20th Century and all of this to date, he has recorded the progress of modern architecture here and elsewhere… He is the consummate professional, who can be relied upon to capture the essence of a building, time and time again, to best reflect the architect’s design intent. Practical and pragmatic, one of his great skills lies in his ability to almost always compose the best shot, the one defining image that makes a building memorable, etches it into the psyche”. The images, personally selected by Gollings for this book, open a door into the art of architectural photography as interpreted through the lens and eye of one of Australia’s greatest architectural photographers, a true maker of pictures. It takes a special kind of photographer to evoke the true character of a building and to convey the emotional intensity that is the soul of all good architecture. John Gollings is that special kind of photographer.