Autobiographical essay 6

My late friend Peter Dombroviskis

My journey into becoming a landscape photographer really began in 1974, when I first came across the life and work of Tasmanian landscape photographer Olegas Truchanas in a biography by artist Max Angus. Soon afterwards, I discovered books about other conservationist-photographers such as Americans Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter. In 1978, I brought my brother Richard’s Pentax Spotmatic 35mm SLR for $15 and enrolled in a six-lesson darkroom photography course.

Published facsimiles were one thing, but it was sumptuous originals by Peter Dombrovskis, who had been mentored by Truchanas, that affirmed my desire to follow all these photographers’ example. Alerted to his extraordinary oeuvre by a friend, I wrote to Peter, and within days I received a courteous typewritten invitation to visit, that August of 1979. Impeccably hospitable, he was waiting at Hobart Airport to drive me to his house. In his upstairs studio, he laid out his latest colour transparencies on the light-box. He handed me a glass enlarging loupe, and through it I could see the sparkling beauty and exquisite detail of the 4 x 5 inch (10.2 cm x 12.7 cm) colour film transparencies. He explained why and how he recorded a particular scene of winter ice and alpenglow at Cradle Mountain just days before. He showed me his camera, lenses and film-holding apparatus and demonstrated his light-metering method. We discussed what it took to become a professional landscape photographer. Within a year, I saved enough from my junior town planner’s wages to buy a pre-loved version of Peter’s ‘Linhof Technika’ system and set about teaching myself the arcane peculiarities of view camera technique.

In April 1981, I returned to Tasmania to get Peter’s feedback on a portfolio of images I had made that summer at Milford Sound in New Zealand. After perusing the slides, he made a short phone call and asked me to wait. As his neighbour, fellow landscape photographer Chris Bell, walked in, Peter introduced me as “our new colleague”. I had found my truer vocation. Thereafter, Peter and I would meet up most years either at his home in Fern Tree, whenever I came to Tasmania, or on the mainland, often at my place when he came over to organise the production of his annual Tasmanian Wilderness Calendar. Peter once told me emphatically he was not a photographer. He had little interest in photography as recreation or business and even less in photographic equipment or technology. Like Adams and Porter, but unlike most other professional photographers, he used the camera primarily to record and defend nature. If he couldn’t do that, he would give up the medium. Unlike Peter, I accepted the odd paid assignment and had begun to teach photography to earn an income, but fundamentally felt the same.

Peter’s devotion to the natural world was evident in his garden as well as his photographs. Whenever I visited, he escorted me through the carefully tended grounds festooned with southern hemisphere rainforest, alpine and sub-alpine flora. Tree ferns, waratah, pencil pine, cheshunt pine and king billy pine, Tasmanian, New Zealand and Chilean Nothofagus grew vigorously in the cool climate and humus-rich soil of the 400-metre altitude hillside property. Peter had lovingly created a sanctum of biogeographical connection. A miniature Gondwana.

Peter was a quiet introvert. When we did talk at length, it was about places, photographs and philosophy. Our mutual obsession was images of wild nature and what they communicated, not gear or technique. We discussed the lives and works of photographers we admired. Paul Strand. Ansel Adams. Eliot Porter. Sebastiao Salgado. Imogen Cunningham. Edward Weston. Linda Connor. Philip Hyde. Shinzo Maeda. Galen Rowell. Michael A Smith. Robert Glenn Ketchum. John Blakemore. Thomas Joshua Cooper. Minor White. Paul Caponigro. On a visit to him in early 1983, he sought my opinion on his pre-press mock-up for Wild Rivers, which went on to establish his international reputation as one of the world’s finest landscapists. He greeted my decision in 1992 to turn from camera-based to camera-less photography with calm understanding. Almost every time we met, wrote or phoned, he implored me to move to the island. I dearly wanted to, but feared there was no room for another local landscape photographer and teacher. Peter was convinced I could make a living.

The last time I saw him was at his home in Fern Tree. Over drinks, our conversation turned, as it often did, to the problem of the human relationship to nature. Warming ourselves in front of the stone-framed wood-burning fire box in his living room, I handed him my copy of Martin Buber’s I and Thou, opened at a passage about encountering a tree empathically, which I thought he would find arresting. Peter read the essay again and then again. Moved by the philosopher’s words, he asked me to send him a photocopy, and he said we must make time to talk more about it when we met again. Driving me back to Chris’s place, where I was staying, he asked three times if I would accompany him on a photography trip to the Western Arthur Range planned for autumn. A fortnight later, he phoned, repeating the question, adding he looked forward to being in the mountains together and being able to talk more about Buber’s insights. I was keen to accompany him on the trip, but reluctant to make a commitment because I wouldn’t know my work schedule until the week before term began. I was surviving on a shoestring, juggling three precarious part-time photography teaching jobs. I couldn’t afford to turn down any contract if it came my way. We had often discussed the idea of bushwalking and photographing together, but my erratic employment schedule always seemed to get in the way.

Over the years, I observed Peter’s outlook darken. He had become increasingly pessimistic about the state of the environment and his abilities as a landscape photographer. This was exacerbated by the awareness that he had a congenital heart anomaly that could shorten his life. Six weeks after I last saw him at Fern Tree, Chris Bell phoned to tell me Peter’s body had been found near Mount Hayes in the Western Arthurs. It was the trip Peter had wanted me on. Peter had died, Chris said, crying, from a heart attack on 28 March 1996. We both knew Peter died doing what he was devoted to in a place he loved.

Shouldering his casked remains aloft in the crying rain at the crowded funeral, it occurred to me that our affinity had been more than shared interests. Like me, Peter was undemonstrative and private. An outsider. A fatherless Baltic emigre, his mother, like mine, had steered his sensibilities and values. Moreover, it was never said, but for each of us, our chosen vocations reflected a lifelong sense and search for the sacred.