My friend, Paulus Henrique Benedictus Cox, photographer/filmmaker
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 favourite images which Paul created from the period when we lived next door to each other and afterwards...
let's start here:
SUZI
SUZI was hanging in Paul's studio window on Punt Rd with another superb image of a nude woman (Judy) which I can't find, and these two astonishing nude images caught a lot of eyes! In the film I made with Paul he tells the story of how these two images changed his life when a distracted driver crashed into his front window. Fortunately Paul was out the back or upstairs when it happened and he came down to see a car and its surprised male driver right in the middle of his studio!
This event changed Paul's life because it stopped him from taking a trip he'd booked to South America and the "accident" kept him here in Australia, so you could say it changed my life too, because if Paul had gone to South America at that time we might never have met!
Serendipity plays a big part in many lives!
Another amazing moment of serendipity occurred many years later when Paul was ill, awaiting a liver transplant... he held an exhibition which included this photograph. A woman came up to him whom he did not immediately recognise, and she introduced herself by the number attached to the image... let's say number 27!
And she was Suzi.
I never met Suzi face to face, but when Paul was in hospital immediately after the liver transplant operation, I called him from my home in the country and what do you know? He was being looked after by Suzi! It was Suzi who answered the phone for him and we struggled through a brief conversation and that's how Suzi entered my life and took the cover page of the film I made with Paul when he was recovering from that incredible ordeal.
I had a friend named Chris who fell in love with a lady named Jan and by co-incidence Jan was modelling for another image taken by Paul at the time, on his kitchen table!
Jan also featured in a most beautiful photograph with Carol Jerrems which won much acclaim:
Carol was one of the many budding photographers Paul taught, he helped her when she was creating her famous Vale Street series...
Calcutta!
During the years we lived next door to each other Paul was planning a trip to Calcutta. He was tossing up whether to take his 16mm Eumig camera and make a film over there. My dear friend Jim Wilson and I encouraged him to do it, eventually convincing Paul that he could get a great result using 16mm Kodachrome II, and that he could record reasonable audio on a tinny portable Sony cassette recorder he owned. It really was a cheapie for 1970 cassette recorders, nothing like the excellent HiFi ones which came out in the 80s. Another person who encouraged Paul in this was James Clayden who experimented with every medium of expression in those days, including applying leather working dyes to filmstock! We were all mucking around with everything at that time.
Kodachrome II was not favoured by the techs at the Film Labs in those days because it was not designed for printing, it was considered too contrasty when copied, and it didn't have edge numbers which were required when matching the negative from your cutting copy.
I was planning a trip to Indonesia so I was experimenting with it. I showed Paul the best test results I was getting from KII when printed, so he decided to take a few rolls with him to Calcutta.
When he returned with his wonderful footage I helped him edit that film and it proved to be remarkable! Of course I'm biased, but I love that little film very much, and I'm so glad I played a small part in its coming to be!
Here's Paul talking about being in Calcutta:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d6LzftLlxl75JoL4LA1Pr-emo4ZKP2wS/view?usp=drive_link
How can you know when you are influencing another person,
or when they are influencing you?
Paul introduced me to Athol Shmith. I've mentioned this in a previous post. I loved his work, I was in awe of the quality of his images.
I met him.
Although Athol was already quite famous I was not overawed by him, he was such a gentle unassuming person. I think it was at that time that Paul introduced me to the work of Jacques Henri Lartigue and I suspect that Athol also had something to do with that! There was much common ground between them there, especially the playfulness.
Also at that time my friend Jim Wilson introduced me to the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson! Another huge gift from the Great Cosmic Jester!
We were all having an influence upon each other, even if we didn't know it.
"THE HOME OF MAN"
This book was Paul's great disappointment!
When the first copies of this book arrived at Punt Road Paul was greatly distressed.
He had enjoyed a wonderful collaboration with Ulli Beier when creating the book as a partnership.
We all knew how good the images were because we saw them before he sent them to the publisher. But the quality of the images in the published book were nowhere near the quality of Paul's original prints.
You can see a rough approximation of this discrepancy if you compare just the cover image with the version of the same image presented inside the book:
I only present this comparison because I know how deeply upset Paul was after the publication of this book.
Here are some images Paul gave me from the New Guinea photographs when I was making "The Nude In The Window" with my friend Kriszta Doczy.
"Human Still Lives from Nepal"
From James McArdle:
Today also marks the birth of the charismatic Paul Cox who died in 2016, one of my lecturers at Prahran College of Advanced Education, an unforgettable influence on nearly all that he met. His teaching method in his film classes was powerful; he collaborated with his students, putting them to work on his crew while he directed.
When I first encountered him, Cox was moving into film, in which he was to become a significant but controversial player in Australian arthouse cinema. From a background in photography started before he migrated to Australia from the Netherlands, he made stops on his journey here, including Nepal and New Guinea, where he made remarkable photographs.
At the launch of one of his exhibitions, Bill Henson cited Cox’s slender volume Human Still Lives From Nepal as having a major effect on him. Its printing in duotone made effective use of the solid, warm blacks that the double inking affords; figures picked out in bas-relief by the near-vertical sunlight sink into the deep shadow of doorways and windows of whitewashed buildings, fixed against the mysterious, unseen interiors from which they emerge, or into which they disappear.
Cox thus reinvents street photography to treat our transformation from the state of privacy, into the public being: the conventional street subject.
Then one day Paul visited me at my place in the country, he had just been diagnosed with liver cancer and was in need of a transplant!
He had no idea of what costs might be involved and he had not much in the way of savings, so he decided to hold an exhibition to raise so money towards the medical expenses which might come his way.
While he was waiting for a suitable liver to arrive he held the exhibition and sold quite a few prints, some came from old photos in B&W and there were newly produced nudes of Delia which were in colour.
One of those old B&W images was the shot of Suzi which I presented earlier in this blog, and it was she who came up to Paul after a gap of many years and told him she was No. 27. And it was Suzi whom I spoke to for the first time when I phoned Paul in hospital soon after his transplant surgery.
Paul had been most fortunate because the liver which became available came from a person with a rare blood type which happened to be exactly the same as Paul's blood type, so he "jumped the queue".
Another serendipitous moment in our lives.
The exhibition (for fundraising prior to Paul's liver transplant)
at
2009 Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne: Paul Cox, 6 – 29 August
When I moved into my new home in Kyneton Paul brough me a gift of two images from that exhibition which I will try to present here, but I need to remove them from the frames to avoid reflections.
One of the images of "DELIA"... my print is not the same as this one, but it's similar in some ways.
The exhibition in the Albert Park cafe about 2015
This POST is a work in progress.
I'm publishing it now but I expect to add more to it later.
PT
13.11.25
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