My father, Rudi Carrell, was a television entertainer in Germany, so I grew up around studios and learned the craft early. I was doing tape-to-tape edits by twelve. It could have been a strange way to grow up; my mum made sure it wasn't.
My mother, Anke, lived with severe rheumatoid arthritis for as long as I knew her. It set in around the time I was born and never let go. She was in pain for most of my childhood, and she was the steady centre of it all. When she passed away, something shifted. I understood I was free to go and see what else was out there. I don't think I would have left while she was alive.
At twenty-three I came to Sydney to study film and television production. Photography arrived almost by accident. Film stock was expensive, and the school wasn't about to hand a room full of twenty-somethings rolls of 16mm and 35mm, so they gave us stills cameras first, to learn how to see before we were allowed to roll. The stills stuck.
And then there was Kylie. As much as I've come to love this country, I wouldn't have made it home without her. She's why I stayed. The coast did the rest. Sydney's light, its beaches and national parks and waterways, was nothing like the manufactured images I grew up inside. It was the real thing, and I haven't stopped looking at it since.
Twenty years on, I've built a life out of paying attention. Kess Media, the studio I run, has made work for Austrade, Australia's Nation Brand, the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Reconciliation NSW, Supply Nation, and Human Ability. Alongside the commissioned work there's the personal kind: the coast at first light, the city from above, light painting, drone, the experiments that begin with "what happens if".
Lately I've started building tools as well as images, small pieces of software for problems I kept hitting that nobody had solved the way I wanted. It turns out to be the same instinct that makes a photograph. Notice what's missing, then try to make it.
There's one more thing. I have aphantasia: my mind doesn't form mental images. Ask most people to picture a red rose and they see one. I get the idea, but no picture. I'd been working for decades before I had the word, so it didn't change anything. It just named something. Maybe it explains why I've always trusted what's in front of me more than whatever's in my head. If you want that story in full, I wrote about it: The Empty Canvas in My Head.
Home is Oyster Bay now, on Dharawal land at the southern edge of Sydney. Kylie and I ran a little coffee shop in Jannali for a while; these days I make my own on a temperamental Gaggia and shoot when the light's worth it. The coast is the studio. The rest has just been showing up. Day after day.
If something here lands with you, or you'd like to make something together, get in touch.
Alex