Paul Harmon

I grew up in Los Angeles with Kennedy’s promise and have spent the decades since revising my expectations of what the world is capable of. That tension — between what we hope for and what we find — runs through everything I make.

Starting my professional life as a filmmaker — documentaries, high-end television drama and feature films, through to television commercials across Australia and Asia — I am now following my twin loves of photography and storytelling.

The two were never separate for me. A filmmaker thinks in images before words, constructs a frame before writing a sentence. What changed is not the eye but the medium — and perhaps the freedom that comes from working without a crew, a budget, or a network executive.

My photography is consciously painterly rather than documentary. I’m less interested in capturing the world as it is than in constructing images that ask questions about what we see and why. The series Invitation to Story operates like short fiction — each image an entry point into a world that exists just beyond the frame. Watermarks, an essay on the dying Murray-Darling Basin river system, asks us to consider the distance between its beauty from
the air and the horrible truth on the ground.

My writing does the same thing from the other direction. Both my books begin with a place and a question rather than a plot, and both resist easy resolution. I write about the things not easily resolved either by humankind or myself. That seems the most honest place to start.

Explore the photography at one side of this site, and the books at the other. They’re different expressions of the same restlessness.