Joe Ruckli

January 19, 2020

Documentary Photographer

Brisbane, Australia

What is your relationship to photography – a hobbyist, a passionate aficionado, doer of happy snaps, selfie obsessed? At some stage in your life you must have been on one side or other of a camera. Either as the person being screamed at “don’t squint” or enthusing everyone “smile, say cheese”. Meantime, technology has put a camera in every mobile phone users’ hand making the question, does that now make you a photographer?

Standing before Joe Ruckli’s images presented in his documentary photographic exhibition you know there is more going on here than a mere happy snapper. Lightning Without Flash, the title itself loaded with meaning. Lightning is the prospecting township of Lightning Ridge. Miners spend years underground seeking “flash” the lightning streaks of brilliant colour found in opal gemstones. To spend a life searching and come up without flash is what drives miners to burrow and scratch underground. This town does not warm to flashy behaviour. Big-noters, and people of pretention are kept on the outer; great store is placed in the integrity of genuine miners. Lightning Without Flash is also a smart nod to photographic style; the shoot pared back to essentials. No tricks, no enhancements. Joe documents life with time and light. No flash.

Joe’s pathway has been less than orthodox. Swiss by birth before spending part of his childhood resident in New Zealand finally making home in Australia and finishing high school on Queensland’s Gold Coast. At this stage he’d shown no interest in photography; he didn’t even own a camera.

“I’d mucked around with video and film making at school,” Joe said. “My real interest was acting which I pursued to acceptance into University.”

“In the months between completing high school and entry to Uni I worked as a glazier and it was here I was given my first camera.

“A client handed me their Canon EOS 300 and the creative independence this gave me had me changing direction entering as a student in Photography at a completely different Uni as well.

“I respond to performance and the strength of storytelling, and I’ve discovered how powerful a medium documentary photography is for me.”

In the photojournalism folio sits news, reportage, and documentary photography. Each area is underpinned and directed by the specific purpose it serves in telling a story. With Joe’s sense of inquiry, searching eye, and determination to find the story behind the obvious, draws him to serve documentary style.

As he says, “A documentist recasts the situation; it asks a deeper level of inquiry from me, demanding time, observation, and dialogue to ultimately deliver a story visually.”

To quote Robert Frank (November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019), also Swiss by birth, also a photographer by profession one of the most influential documentary photographers of the mid-20th century, noted for his ironic renderings of American life – “there is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.”

Which returns us to Lightning Without Flash, a poignant and startling look at life prospecting in the opal mines of Lightning Ridge, a desolate outback town in western New South Wales. Joe’s impressions of the place, “Lightning Ridge has become an escape for hopeful miners, restless drifters and broken recluses looking for somewhere to disappear. Derelict cars, makeshift camps and precarious mineshafts dot the barren and hostile landscape.”

The project’s location determined the equipment. The series of colour photographs, shot on a Hasselblad camera, is slow and deliberate, held at chest height to best frame and capture the essence of his subjects. No hiding behind a camera and peering through a lens enabled Joe to remain in open communication with the residents of the town. Residents who are with good reason largely cautious of newbies and blow-ins.

The male and female portraits are compelling. They look at you with unabashed honesty. Returning your gaze with a complexity of unfiltered emotion you almost feel ashamed for staring at them. Surety of purpose. Hardship etched into every face. Unshakeable faith. Resigned contentment. Belonging. Security of community. Loners. Determined outsiders. Earthy. No-nonsense. Bold. Pioneers. Humour dry as the surrounding landscape. Portraits not made in-camera but between subject and artist. It is all in the seeing.

“Life on the minefields is slow,” Joe says. “Simple. Modest. There’s not much to do but drink and dig.”

“Those that mine live a subterranean existence only to surface for more diesel and beer. It’s backbreaking work fraught with injury and occasional fatality. Finding an elusive ‘flash’ of opal is much of a blind lottery.

“Some prospectors inherit claims worked for years and deemed futile, only to dig a metre more than their forerunner and emerge with a life’s fortune.”

Prospecting is a gamble, a game of chance. Strewn keno tickets evidence of doubling down on luck.

In time, Joe plans to return to the Ridge. In the works, an extended photographic collection, interviews with prospectors, the opal sellers and merchants, the workers above ground who keep Lightning Ridge open and on the map. Each has a unique story to tell.

“I also want them to see the exhibition, to see the labour of our work,” he says. “I want to honour them.”

It’s not only a keen eye but his sense of humanity that separates Joe’s work from the snappers.