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A local creative

A local creative

By Meg Hill

“12 years in one place is a long time for me,” says Fabrizio Evans.

He’s referring to his old job, as co-owner of a graphic design company, but he means it literally as well. Fabrizio has travelled a lot, which suits the switch to photography.

In fact, when he first moved to Australia 15 years ago he lived in Sydney. He came to Melbourne for a couple of days, and spent six hours walking from St Kilda to the city. After that walk he’d decided he wanted to move to Melbourne.

“I graduated in 1996 in England, travelled the world and worked in New York and London. I met my wife, who’s Australian, in America,” he said.

After moving to Australia, he met the man who would be his future business partner.

“12 years later we had an office in Southbank and 15 staff, behind the Casino off City Road, and I’d just had enough. I’m a creative and it was all too business, too corporate.”

He sold his shares to his business partner and travelled a bit again, while renewing his old hobby of photography gear.

He went back and forth over the decision of doing a photography degree. Although he knew photography made him happy, he wasn’t sure if he needed a new qualification or if he should just experiment and learn on the job.

But he ended up at PSC: “It was the best decision because it forces you to do work you wouldn’t otherwise do.”

“I recently presented a print at town hall to Councillor [Susan] Riley. It was for an exhibition Faces of Osaka, Faces of Melbourne run by the City of Melbourne to celebrate the relationship of sister cities.”

“She said she liked it. But that’s not the kind of work I would have done had I not come to PSC.”

The print is almost photojournalism, and incorporates architecture in an innovative way. Fabrizio had previously been most comfortable in portraits and fashion shots.

“The brief was basically what do you think the face of the city is? I thought well, you’ve got faces, but architecture is the face of the city as well,” he says.

“I spent the first day in Federation Square taking photographs of people. Then I realised I was supposed to be focusing on architecture.

“The second day I took photos of the architecture, but then I realised I still had to incorporate people into it somehow.”

“So, I went back and sat down on Flinders St and took photos of people walking past different faces of the architecture for about two hours, and then I superimposed them with other parts of the architecture.”

Fabrizio has a year left of his degree, and has an ongoing project to finish.

“I started shooting cans of Spam as a project which is really interesting because it took something mundane, a can of Spam, but then I did all this research,” he says.

“I found it is over 80 years old, came out in 1937 and was massively important to the war effort. Over a hundred million cans of Spam were sent to the fronts in World War Two.”

“Then, as part of my research, I started looking at lab grown meats. You can grow a piece of meat in a lab, but where do the ethics lay?”

“Will they only make the meat we eat now or, because you don’t endanger the animal, can we potentially eat anything we want?”

Fabrizio wants to capture this novel, but somewhat uncomfortable, dilemma in product photography like it’s a real business.

“Lab grown canned meat, but it could be like iguana flavour.”

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