Iggy Pop and The Other Side of the Lens

Six years ago, I stood just off the barrier, camera in hand, shooting Iggy Pop at Bluesfest in Byron Bay under brutal stage lights and the weight of 50 years of rock and rage. These photos, sweat-soaked, muscle-laced, blurred at the edges from movement, not mistake are from another life. Or maybe just another part of the same one I still live now.

For years, this was the other side of my life. I first photographed Iggy Pop at The Patch on the Gold Coast when I was 17. This time, I was 48, shooting him at Bluesfest, a festival I’d covered on and off since I was 19. While I was building Safe on Social and speaking to rooms full of educators about digital risk, the rest of me was in photo pits like this where I was shoulder to shoulder with strangers, earplugs in, eyes through the viewfinder, waiting for the stage to explode and something real to break loose.

Music photography wasn’t about perfection. It was about catching lightning. Anticipating the breath before the scream. The lean of a guitarist just before the solo. The second a frontman looked straight down the lens and knew.

That’s what this night with Iggy was. It was pure feral presence.

He didn’t just perform. He poured. Every muscle. Every nerve ending. Every rasped lyric dragged from the gut. Shirtless and stripped back, not as some kind of statement, but because it’s who he’s always been. Raw. Unedited. Incapable of faking it. And you could feel the history in him. Every mile, every gig, every night he nearly didn’t make it through.

There’s a moment I captured, one of the shots you see here, where he’s walking the edge of the crowd, eyes like a warning, chest heaving. He’s not posing. He’s daring you to look away. And no one does. Not even the security guard behind him, who looks like he’s seen this before but still isn’t sure what’s coming next.

That was the thrill of it. Nothing was guaranteed. Not the focus. Not the frame. Not even safety (Iggy pushed me out of the way hitting me hard in the boob in the process).

And that’s why I shot music. Because it was presence under pressure. Emotion turned all the way up, no filter, no do-over. You either got the shot or you didn’t. You either saw it or you missed it. My Dad taught me how to shoot on wet film, how to process my own photos in the darkroom we used to set up in the bathroom at home. A slow process is the reason I am fast now. No editing required. I know how to use the light gifted to me, no flash, hard and fast.

I don't shoot concerts like that anymore. Not because I lost the love for it but because covid happened, I moved to Italy and my lens shifted. I started turning my camera toward different kinds of moments. Slower ones. Still ones. Street ones. Moments that asked more of me in a different way.

But I look at these photos of Iggy now and I remember the electricity of it. The rawness. The absolute refusal to be anything other than completely alive. And in a strange way, that’s still what I chase with every frame.

Whether I’m documenting the rain on the sea or the last howl of a punk god, the intent is the same, to catch truth before it disappears.

Photography has always been that for me. Not content. Not vanity. Just a way to say, I was there. I saw this. It mattered.

There’s something sacred in that. Especially now when so many images are generated, simulated, crafted for algorithms, designed to disappear. These shots of Iggy didn’t go viral. But they’re real. They did sell out at a limited print run exhibition. They carry time in them. So yes, this is the other side of my life. And it still runs deep.

Every time I pick up a camera whether I’m shooting a rock legend mid-scream or a stranger lost in thought on a street somewhere I’m doing the same thing I did six years ago, waiting for that moment when someone stops pretending.