Dancing on My Bed
An image of a woman's bare back, bisected by the leather of a bandolier strap, contrasts against an insanely blue sky. As people mill about in the background, the heat of the day is almost palpable from viewing the photograph. "That was with a friend of mine," Cara Stricker laughs. "We'd gone to the Big Day Out in Melbourne. It was in a really dusty area," she says, almost apologetically, as though I may get a bit of dust in my lungs just from looking at it. "That image tells the story of the whole day."
The photograph is one in a series of Stricker's work on display at the Absolut Stairwell Gallery in Kings Cross this month. Dancing on My Bed is a collection of images exploring both the intimacy and the anonymity of the live music experience, from enormous multi-band festivals to private, smaller gigs and quiet backstage areas. But Stricker emphasises that this isn't an exhibition of concert photography. "You're not going to look at it and say, ‘Oh, that's so-and-so on stage,'" she says. "It's more about closing your eyes and dancing around the room – that moment when you're just removed from everything."
Based in Sydney, Stricker initially studied filmmaking, but found that she was also intrigued by the immediacy of photography. Now she works as a freelance photographer and filmmaker, showcasing her video clips, short films and photographs around the city. "I pretty much take whatever job interests me or comes my way," she shrugs. She has plenty to choose from: earlier this year, she travelled to New York City to shoot Fashion Week.
Her photographs meld the solitary and the communal, often highlighting single figures picked out of crowds of hundreds. The images in the show are sometimes dreamy and ethereal, sometimes bright and bold, but always brimming over with emotion and power.
So what's with the title of the show, Dancing on My Bed? Stricker laughs. "My personality is big into getting taken away with the moment. You don't want anyone to see you when you get really excited and dance around on your bed. When you're out shooting [photographs], it's like that: you're really happy and you're really excited and you just want to tell everybody but you just can't, because, you know, they might think you're retarded." Michelle Lamont
Cara Stricker exhibits 5 Nov-11 Dec at Absolut Stairwell Gallery, The Sugar Mill, 37 Darlinghurst Rd, Kings Cross 2011.
You've read what we think. Now tell us what you think.