Photography
Melbourne is its music and, in turn, the musicians of Melbourne have described their city by writing and recording its score. Over the past two decades, another artist, photographer Tim Chmielewski, has held up a mirror to Melbourne’s musicians as they have taken to the town’s underground stages. In the future, when cultural historians try to make sense of the musical soul of our great city, they will thank their lucky stars for the work of Tim Chmielewski.
Since 2002, Tim has photographed over two thousand gigs in and around Melbourne. Those aforementioned cultural historians will be thankful that Tim took a different pathway to the thousands of happy snappers at Rod Laver Arena and the Big Day Out. Tim’s camera has led him into the dark byways of the gigs less-travelled in Melbourne, to the venues where the real musical stories of the town are thrashed out: The Tote, The NSC, The Old Colonial, The Corner, The Caravan Music Club.
At those venues, Tim Chmielewski has captured the faces of some of our more obscure, but no less talented, musicians as they strutted and fretted their hour across the beer-sogged carpets of the backstreet pubs.
Tim’s obsession with the music of Melbourne is raw and real: he was retrenched from one of his day jobs for ‘spending to much time looking at photos and bands’. Tim says that the person who sacked him from this position was the same office manager who told Tim to ‘get more friends’.
‘I can’t have it both ways, but I have been a lot happier since then, even though I have been a lot less employed…ouch!’
https://www.facebook.com/timchumaphotography/
https://www.facebook.com/timchumart
https://www.instagram.com/timchuma/
]]>
Comments are closed