Nic Duncan’s photography work is not the glamorous kind. Far from it. Nic travels to the back of beyond to capture her subjects within their natural habitat. There’s no fictitious backdrops, no wardrobe assistant and certainly no makeup artist. It’s all about reflecting a person’s natural state. Raw and real, regional and rural she seeks the opposite of city and suburban.
With her camera, caravan and trusty canine Nic rolls into regional towns, outback stations and all manner of places looking for faces that make her shutter-finger twitch.
“I love quirky; faces with life lines and ones that emanate something other than good looks. We’ve all heard about people who look like their dogs. Well, I look for faces that look like the landscape in which they live,” Nic says.
The setting for her photographs can be large or small; it can be in the vastness of the outback or in the compact interior of a pokey shack and she says that even a cluttered kitchen works to add information about the person’s life.
And her ‘models’ are rarely people that she knows – they are usually just people who catch her eye. There’s no doubt many of us would recoil at the thought of a stranger asking if they could take our portrait but Nic says in her many years of photographing faces she’s only ever once had a person decline.
“To be honest, because I shoot everyday people in everyday settings, it can be something completely different to what was happening in their day. I simply approach them, tell them I’m a portrait photographer and that I’d like to take their photo. I always get a bit of the person’s backstory as a record of context. People feel heard, they feel seen when I take their photo and I always, always send them a copy of the image.”
Nic’s knack for this style of work has seen her become a three time finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize and named as the 2015 AIPP WA Professional Portrait Photographer of the Year. She has also had images exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.
But it’s not accolades that drive Nic; it’s the journey, the people she meets and the places she goes. It’s also the opportunities her camera opens for her and Nic’s work kicked into high gear three years ago when she went on the road with no agenda, no destination and no timeframe. Over six months she clocked up more than 22,000 km and tens of thousands of images.
Word soon got out amongst her professional peers that she was “shooting on the road” and it wasn’t long before she was offered an opportunity to exhibit 100 of her images on 14 metre high LED screens in Perth’s CBD.
The WA State Library soon jumped on board and contacted Nic about obtaining a permanent archival collection of her work.
“It’s extremely rewarding that an institution like the State Library sees the historical value of images depicting people and places. These images are like a time capsule; a snapshot of a moment in someone’s life.
“I’ve also done behind-the-scenes photography for films. I went to Bremer Bay to work on the Blueback film, the Pilbara for the filming of Sweet As and Kununurra for a TV series about Indigenous police officers. I reckon I’m the epitome of ‘have camera, will travel’.”
Just recently Nic returned from the red dirt of WA’s Pilbara region where she was mentoring a young Indigenious photographer, Jess Allan, as part of a collaboration with Big hART and the Ngarluma Yindjibarndi Foundation.
Like anyone passionate about their craft Nic is totally “in the moment” whenever she raises her camera to her face. Peering down the barrel of the lens, she composes, adjusts, then holds her breath. Faster than a blink, a moment is captured and a new environmental portrait is created.
You can see more of Nic’s portraits at www.nicduncan.com