The Bondi Years - How Guerrilla Street Photography Saved me from Clinical Depression

The worst mental health crisis of my life, in case you were wondering, occurred about 25 years ago. I descended into a bottomless black hole of depression and basically didn’t leave my room for five years.

At that time I was diagnosed with depression and prescribed antidepressants. Unfortunately the pills made things worse, turning me into an emotionless zombie and after about 18 months I flushed ‘em down the bog. Yes, even suffering from crippling depression is better than feeling like the walking dead.

The reason those pills failed to stop the black dog from nipping at my heels was because the depression was actually a side effect of an underlying ailment, not the real problem. It was like being treated for a stubbed toe when the real issue was a shattered knee.

The real problem was that I had both autism and ADHD and had been diagnosed with neither

Like the generations before us, Generation X didn’t get much of a look-in when it comes to mental health. It wasn’t that it was ignored, it was simply that (at least in the UK where I was born and raised) we were unprepared for the forthcoming revolution in cognitive healthcare.
We’d only just got microwaves and digital watches for fuck’s sake - we weren’t ready for Rainman and fidget spinners! Nobody suggested autism or ADHD might be at the heart of my struggles in life because nobody had heard of them. It’s unfortunate, but true.

I escaped my pit of despair incidentally, by emigrating to Australia. This, I admit, is a kind of extreme solution, but in our defence it was an entirely accidental fix.

The second-worst mental health crisis of my life began in 2013, four years before my diagnosis, when I landed a job with the largest non-profit in this country. The offices were in the famous Icebergs building at the southern end of Bondi Beach and so I’m sure you can work out which non-profit I’m talking about. And no, I didn’t have to wear a bright red and yellow shirt to work.

Before I get into the nitty gritty of this story I would just like to point out that often you only recognise the severity of a problem once you’ve come out the other side. Being inside the eye of a hurricane seems serene and normal until the back edge catches up with you, Dorothy. That was certainly the case with me.

I loved my job. It was varied and demanding and, as cheesy as it sounds, I felt like the stuff we were doing was helping to save lives. What I didn’t like was my boss, because he was a cunt.

My boss was a classic work-place bully. Someone who enjoyed heaping misery on those around him by being an angry, perpetually unsatisfied, belligerent, feckless arsehole. He would lose his temper if there were issues of any kind and everyone around him continually walked around on egg-shells lest he blew his lid.

Now you’re probably wondering why I didn’t just quit. Remember when I said you don’t recognise the problem until you’re out the other side? It was partially that - but mainly it was because it was my first salaried job in well over a decade and, money being very tight, I thought we’d lose our house if I didn’t stick with it. I was deeply unhappy. I wasn’t to realise how unhappy I was until I had a full-blown brain-snap freak-out breakdown at my desk one afternoon … and never worked a day in that office again.

But in between starting that job and my glorious mid-afternoon meltdown, I used photography as a way of temporarily escaping into an alternative world - a quite literal happy place. There you go - here comes the photography bit.

Around that time, interest in smartphone photography was exploding. Instagram was taking the world by storm and the cameras on smartphones were getting better and better.

I loved taking photos with my iPhone 5 and I obsessively collected all the cool niche little photography apps that came out at that time.

LittleSnapper, CameraPlus, Lo-Mob, ClassicSAMP, Morello, CAMERAtan, Filterstorm, SwankoLab, PicTone, ClassicInsta, Pano, Pudding Camera, DipTic, True HDR, PixelCam, Halftone, Luminance, SloPro, Average Camera, Golden Light, Slow Shutter, Cycloramic and yes, the big daddy of them all - Hipstamatic.

I was immediately smitten by Hipstamatic because the amazing filter combinations combined with the low resolution of iPhone photos at that time took me back to my earliest experiences in photography - shooting with a black and white Kodak Instamatic camera. It’s fair to say that I became obsessed with Hipstamatic and it became part of a daily routine that kept me sane for longer than expected.

I didn’t live in Sydney, but commuted there and, being from the UK, was unfamiliar with the city and with Bondi where the office was located. So on my lunch breaks I would go on a walk, for the entire duration of lunch, exploring the area on foot. It was a welcome break from the toxic presence of my boss. Without those hour-long excursions exploring Bondi and the nearby neighbourhoods, I’d have gone postal long before I did.

I began documenting my lunch breaks, with my iPhone and the Hipstamatic camera. Anything that caught my eye, that I found visually interesting, I would take a photo of it with the app.

At that time Hipstamatic had a randomising function. If you shook your phone before taking a shot it would apply a random combination of lens, camera and film effects to your photo. I loved the spontaneous nature of this randomising feature and I would shake the phone before every shot to see what strange combination of filters would be applied.

Every lunch time I would return with a treasure trove of street photographs each with an entirely different look and feel. Bondi, it turned out, was the ideal place to begin taking street photographs.
It’s a genuinely funky part of Sydney that attracts a strange blend of individuals, alongside the wealthy and, of course, international backpackers. There was always something going on, something new to discover, some new location to photograph.

I also wanted to photograph the interesting people in that part of Sydney but I wasn’t a fan of just holding the phone up and pointing it at them in an obvious way. So instead I developed a guerrilla street photography technique specific to Hipstamatic. I would shake the phone, while lowering it to hip-height. Then, as the phone rested casually against my leg, I would point the phone in approximately the right direction and trigger the shutter with the volume button. Often I would completely miss my target, sometimes they’d be on the edge of the frame, often the photo would be at a strange angle, many times the image was an abstract blur.

I would walk along the beach front at Campbells Parade in Bondi, through the streets past the myriad cafes and restaurants with phone in hand. Any time someone or something caught my eye I’d shake the phone and shoot from the hip. Sometimes by accident, the person would be looking at the camera, but more often they’d be doing their own thing, lost in their thoughts or going about their day.

The archive serves as a fairly unique snapshot of life in Bondi about a decade ago. The tourists, the locals, the street life, the buildings, the beach, the police, the council workers, the young, the old, the homeless, the surfers, the joggers, the baristas. Gawd bless ‘em one and all.

I would tour the streets for my full and complete 60 minutes of freedom, happily capturing micro-seconds of time. Sometimes I would return to the same locations and take more guerrilla street photos. I didn’t worry about repeating myself because the filter effects in Hipstamatic rendered every single shot unique.

Over the months I got quite practiced at capturing these street scenes. I learnt how to shoot from the hip both literally and metaphorically. There was plenty of variety on offer within a relatively small geographic region.

If I turned right out of my office I could walk the rugged coastal path towards Tamarama, Bronte and Clovelly Beaches. There were always tourist exploring the pathway, couples out enjoying a walk, locals jogging.

If I headed up the hill I could explore the shops on Bondi Road and the apartments in the suburbs around out.

If I turned left out of the office I could explore the beach front at Bondi, the famous lifeguards, the happy beach-goers enjoying a day at Australia’s most famous beach.

And if I headed into the streets behind Bondi there were myriad cafes and small independent shops.

I used to upload my guerillia street photos to a photosharing platform called EyeEm and in 2010 one of my photos was shortlisted in a competition and displayed in a gallery in Berlin. That was a pretty surreal moment.

My little lunchtime escapes and my joy with guerrilla street photography was brought to an end after a couple of years when the company moved headquarters from what is almost certainly the best office location in Australia, to an industrial estate near the airport. If that sounds depressing, then you’d be bloody right.

On the up-side the new office location took a good half hour off my two and a half hour commute, but it also put an end to my lunchtime street photography sessions because there was absolutely fuck all of interest to photograph at the new place. I did try exploring the streets there, but it was basically a collection of smash repair shops, storage units, nihilistic office buildings and boring suburban neighbourhoods. Instead of hitting the streets at lunchtime, I’d get a foot-long meatball sub (Italian, English cheese, onions, sweet onion sauce, salt and pepper) and watch an episode of a TV show on my iPhone in a storage room so that nobody would try and engage me in lunchtime banter.

Over the months in that new office, my boss became an even more colossal wanker and I dreaded watching that dead-eyed face coming around the corner in the mornings. Without my sanity-saving photo sessions I sank deeper and deeper into a black hole and then … one afternoon … after I’d just received another bollocking for some minor issue … I snapped.

That was eight years ago now.

After my sudden exit from salaried work I rejoined the family business building websites. By which I mean my wife Catherine pulled my arse out of the fire once again. We did not lose the house.

Two years after what they call a ‘mental health crisis’ these days, I was officially diagnosed with autism and then two years after that, with severe ADHD. Both of these neurodevelopmental disorders were impacting my life from the very beginning, but I was utterly oblivious to them until I was in my 50s.

I had forgotten all about my little archive of guerrilla street photographs until very recently when I rediscovered them on an old external drive I found in a drawer. Flicking through them brought back a lot of memories, but I was struck by how nice it was to have this slice of time recorded forever in my photo archives. It was only as I clicked through the photos that their significance hit me for the first time and I suddenly realised how important those hour-long walks on the streets of Bondi really were.

It was, I realised, an entirely different kind of Bondi Rescue. How I’d used those lunchtime escapes to escape from an environment that was suffocating me and in which I felt completely trapped.

I’m in a much happier place these days - but photography still plays a crucially important role in my life - getting me out into the world and keeping me sane. But I will always be grateful to Bondi, to the people I furtively photographed and to the scenes I was able to freeze in time.

Everyone needs an escape sometimes and I count myself lucky that I found mine through the lens of a smartphone camera, shot from the hip.