Friends of the Armchair Traveller

                     My friend,  Paulus Henrique Benedictus Cox (16 April 1940 – 18 June 2016) How can I say "my" friend?  Paul had hundreds of friends, thousands, everywhere. He did not "belong" to just one single person. Our friendship came about because we happened to live next door to each other for a couple of years and it grew from there. I find it extremely difficult to make this post, just as I find it extremely challenging to see any photographs of Paul, either from the time we met, or later in life, especially when he became devastated by his liver failure and transplant, his partial recovery, then another close call with an agonising abscess on the liver which tore him apart, and his last years following that. Has it really been 9 years? I don't want to "summarise" his life. I don't want to give you more information because there's heaps of information out there...  This is just to display some of my f...

Athol Shmith in his South Yarra apartment .  Paul Cox (c. 1979) Gelatin silver photograph 24.6 × 24.0 cm. Department Australian Photography, National Gallery of Victoria.  Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by the Shmith family, Governor, 1996 F ollowing the two recent posts by Peter Leiss on Robert Rosen and Jill Gocher.     These posts triggered my memories of the good old days when I lived next door to  Paul Cox in Punt Road, South Yarra... Paul and I became great friends. Although Paul passed away about 9 years ago,  I have not created a written tribute to him. I did make a film about those days with Paul,  "The Nude In The Window". Despite his initial nervousness about the film, Paul was very pleased with it. https://youtu.be/047V_T9OYU8 In those 1970s days Paul introduced me to many people including Athol Shmith, whom  I met only on a few occasions. I was aware of Athol's exceptional portraits. I found him  incredibly ap...

In September this year Peter Leiss went to Bali to film an interview with photographer  Robert Rosen and also to make a short film called   ‘BALI beyond the cliché’    (see below) While he was in Bali Peter met photographer Jill Gosher  who had also been a student  at Prahran CAE, one year later than Peter had been there. Peter sent me these notes about his meeting with Jill: Jill Gocher's interview I produced this past September as one of 22 photographers I've interviewed since 2017. All 22 were involved in the unique experiment in making an educational course in Photography, highlighting it as an art form rather than as a commercial endeavour. The Photography Course at Prahran CAE from 1966 to 1980 was a whole new approach designed to bring forth this medium as an intense personal objective. The outcome of all my interviews displays a rich and diverse expression in an Art School during a period of conservative values when some desperately wanted ...