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| When he first asked me to write a few words
about him for his website, Patrick Brown and I were on assignment for
TIME magazine on the rugged China-Burma border. We had gone there to meet
the former head-hunters of the Wild Wa, a tribe who lived in a Wilderness
far from Patrick's current home in Bangkok -- and even further, it would
seem, from his origins a decade before in Perth, Australia. Back then,
it was dancers, not head-hunters, who inspired his work. |
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Chrissie Parrot Dance company and 2 Dance Plus, a discipline
which gave a fine-art feel for form and movement that has influenced his
photojournalism ever since. A career-launching project took him to Malawi
where, after selling his surfboard and car to fund the trip, he spent
six weeks documenting the work of the remarkable Australian surgeon who
had once saved his own life. His images became a major exhibition back
in Australia, which raised thousands of dollars for charity and won him
the Australian Kodak Photographer of the Year |
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award. In 1999 he moved to Southeast Asia, then mired in
post-boom chaos, and was soon covering Vietnamese coal-mining strikes and
the sky-rocketing methamphetamine trade. Encounters with Burmese dissidents
in Thailand, his new home, sparked an abiding fascination with the refugees
and rebel armies along the rugged Thai-Burma border. It is intriguing to watch Patrick work. His style is a combination of intense observation and a quiet, undemanding attitude |
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towards his subjects. Instead of imposing his own personality or agenda during a shoot, he prefers to wait for an unspoken rapport -- a mutual respect and acceptance -- to develop between himself and his subjects. Sometimes this happens quickly, sometimes it takes a while, but Patrick is not concerned with time. The Australian art curator Paola Anselmi has seen Patrick's work grow over the last ten years. She says: "Patrick's images demand involvement and invite contemplation. A finely tuned sensibility to his subject matter creates | |
a prefect balance; the photographer and his camera become
almost imperceptible, without ever being either invasive or distant."
Patrick Brown's photography regularly appears in Time, Der Spiegel magazine, BBC, The Australian, Marie Claire, The Guardian, Liberation, The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), UNICEF International, among others. His current work includes an upcoming book on the pan-Asian trafficking of endangered species, a project which has taken him from the jungles of Assam to the |
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brothels of Ho Chi Minh City. Recently he was nominated for
the 2003 World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. Patrick's work is in
numerous international collections, including the Holmes a Court Collection
and The Photography Gallery of Western Australia Collection. Andrew Marshall |
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