Design and Art Australia Online

Ian Tippett was born in regional Victoria’s Ballarat in 1958. Teaching himself the basics of photography gave Ian the ambition and means to leave school, and provincial Ballarat, then worked at Latrobe Studios black and white lab in South Melbourne. In 1977 he enrolled in the Preliminary year of the Art and Design Diploma at Prahran College of Advanced Education.

After Prahran Ian exhibited in a group show Matters of Personal Choice in 1984 at The Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney. Employed in different roles not related to photography he returned to study over 1996–98, in a Bachelor of Design at Swinburne University.

After graduating and five years of undertaking freelance commissions, he showed Day to Day in the group show Time-Movement-Space at Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts in St Kilda 29 October–23 November 2003. His Ground Level, shown in 2005 at both Conical Inc., and Rocketart galleries attracted attention: reviewer Jill Stark in The Age 25 April noted its unique perspective in capturing Melbourne streetscapes from the pavement level in eight images that truncate the lower limbs of passers-by—’the businessman’s polished shoes waiting obediently by the kerb…the raw sexuality of a young woman’s bare calves radiantly bathed in sunshine’—and present them within a darkened domain of ominous ‘territorial-looking’ pigeons.
Ian is quoted on his desire “… to create some sort of tension…a cinematic atmosphere.” Robert Cook also reviewed the show in Photofile (September, 2005) describing the work as being “ruled by shadows”.

5 Apr – 15 Apr 2006 Tippett next exhibited Black Day, solo, at Seventh Gallery, 155 Gertrude Street Fitzroy for which Rosalind Middleton wrote the catalogue essay describing how Tippett takes advantage of the effects of a rainy, gloomy day on both the Melbourne cityscape and its inhabitants through his elevated camera angle and selective flash for a cinematic atmosphere overlain with the tension of urban surveillance and the scrutiny of security cameras. Self-awareness and withdrawal are embodied in the defensive postures people adopt in public spaces, a psychology made visible by their sheltering from inclement weather.

3 March – 9 April 2006, Tippett participated in a group show ‘If you leave me, can I come too?’ with the series The Last Cigarette continuing an “interest in the rituals and details of the CBD”

His series Magnolia appeared at the Queensland Centre for Photography 25 Aug – 16 Sep 2007, titled for the magnolia as a beautiful garden plant that was slightly diminished by suburbia. Images of the flowers accompanied the street photography. Ray Cook’s essay on the workappears in the QCP catalogue.

Tippett’s entries were shown in Queensland’s $25,000 Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award, in both 2007 and 2008, and also in 2008 the State Library of Queensland exhibited his work in Memoirs, Selected Photographs from the Daryl Hewson Collection.

In 2009 Ian showed Lightness at the Queensland Centre for Photography of which fellow Prahran alumnus Peter Milne wrote the catalogue.

During 5 – 27 June 2009 at Kings ARI, Melbourne Tippett joined David van Royen and Vivian Cooper Smith in We Were Young which the artists developed collaboratively in conversation, agreeing to hang three large-scale prints each, insinuating undercurrents of fear and anxiety through a juxtaposition of ordinary and imaginary, and the calm and the anxious. Tippett’s young people block the world with music from their iPod earphones, escaping into musical fantasia.

At the C3 Contemporary Art Space at the Abbottsford Convent in Melbourne Tippett was represented in the 2010 group show Golden Mountain, then after a brief hiatus showed Still Motion a HD video animation there in December 2012.

Over 3 April – 8 June 2014 Monash Gallery of Art (now the Museum of Australian Photography) presented in New Photography From The Footpath the work of Melbourne based artists Glenn Sloggett and Catherine Bell with Ian Tippett to represent diverse approaches to the ubiquitous genre of street photography. For the work acquired for the Museum of Australian Photography collection Tippett provides this insight: “This street portrait is only a fleeting view where a moment in time relates to transitory ideas of self…The photograph holds time, but the subject slips away with the shifting of identity.” That same year Ian self-published the book I Want You Back
 which continues his twist on street photography at an intimate distance with his camera angled down onto the bodies of young people; as if we are behind their own eyes. The book appeared in the Photo Independent art fair 1–3 May 2015 in Los Angeles in a section, called Photobook Independent.

Jackie Higgins and Max Kozloff’s 2014 The World Atlas of Street Photography (Yale University Press) features the work as an example of: “A younger generation of photographers from Melbourne [who] have further expanded and complicated the street milieu. Ian Tippett’s work uses a particular, fragmentary vantage point of his young protagonists as an allegory in exploring the psychology of personal space and exhibitionism among the ‘selfie generation.’ His photographs pulse with color and energy, expounding and abstracting its subjects in the one breath with high flash. His I Want You Back series captures an intimate view of young revellers and their dazzling T-shirt prints, fashions, and abundance of bare skin.”

Rainbow Jelly is a current project of work collected over a period of 10 years, up to 2020.

Writers:

James McArdle

Date written:

2024

Last updated:

2024