Hugh Hamilton

In September when I was back in Australia I shot Margaret Throsby for The Good Weekend, which is The Sydney's Morning Herald color magazine. She's an institution downunder, kind of an intellectual Barbara Walters (if you can imagine that). She has a radio show where she interviews everyone from Francis Fukuyama to Suzanne Vega and everyone in between. She was the first female newsreader on Australian TV, and scary for me, she used to be married to a photographer, Graham McCarter. Anyway she seemed quite put out when I told her that her daughter's wikipedia page was bigger than hers (Holly Throsby is a rising indie folksinger in Aust).

I do not have a wikipedia page! She huffed at me. The SMH journalist backed me up. You do, Margaret. You do.

So....this week shot up and coming aussies Teresa Palmer and Ryan Kwanten for the Australian edition of Instyle magazine - Teresa is in the upcoming Disney film Bedtime Stories playing an english princess and Ryan is in HBO's Trueblood as Anna Paquin's brother. The location was a new restaurant in Venice called AK that was perfect, since I had to match my pictures to others that had already been shot in Sydney by Hugh Stewart...I wish I could post some pictures but of apart from the magazine not having been published yet, of course Teresa and Ryan have to approve what gets used. I shall of course try and get both of them for the Rosebud project but in the middle of a magazine shoot did not seem the right time to ask......

Since August last year I've been shooting a series I call Rosebud. The title comes from the film Citizen Kane, in which a journalist spends the narrative trying to find the meaning of Kane's last word "rosebud", which turns out to be Kane's childhood sled. All of us have seemingly meaningless objects we are carrying through our lives, objects that mean nothing to anyone else but symbolise a world to us. The person we once were can be found in the objects that person kept. To my friend Zoe it was the tweezers her mother gave her when she was eleven and with which she still plucks her brows to this day. To Steve Martin it was the hat he bought for his first magic act. I have just linked up with local Los Angeles charity Children of the Night to produce a book of this project for their benefit. It seemed appropriate to use people's childhood memories to help teenagers who have had their childhoods taken from them.