Local News: Lloyd Pereira

Passion is quickly turning to profession for graduating Photography Studies College (PSC) student Lloyd Pereira.

Initially intending to spend a year enhancing his photography skills, Lloyd’s time at PSC has snowballed into a four-year, part-time, Advanced Diploma in Photography, specialising in fine art.

Lloyd who also works as a researcher part-time with the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre said he chose to study merely to fill in some spare time.

“I have always been hanging around with a camera doing stuff, so I thought I’ll just do a year of the course and see how I go. Four years later I’m still chugging away at it,” he said

With two young boys in tow, juggling work, family and study hasn’t been easy, but if his artwork is anything to go by he has done it with great success throughout his degree.

“What you learn and the quality of your work is really dictated by how much effort you put in outside class hours, so I really enjoyed what I was doing and I put a lot of effort in to work outside those class times.”

As well as earning a Bachelor of Science, Lloyd has undertaken a post-graduate degree at RMIT, lived and worked in Holland for several years and has more than two decades of experience in the workforce.

“I have had a background in a learning environment and have taught lots of students as part of my work. So, as a mature-aged student, it hasn’t been too much for me to learn new things.”

“Coming here (PSC), is something I have really enjoyed because it has just been a normal progression for me. I’ve been learning different things, but the concepts have been the same,” he said.

Lloyd’s fascination for photography stems from his teenage years, when his brother returned from the Australian Open with stunningly beautiful stills.

“I was really enamored with the idea that you can capture this crystal clear, beautiful image. So I inherited his (Lloyd’s brother) camera and kept it with me for about 10 years.”

In his own words, Lloyd said he used “metaphors of the everyday and the natural world,” and that his work attempted “to explore the resonance that exists between presence and absence, loss and memory and mortality and decay.”

Lloyd combines his learned technicality with a somewhat unorthodox camera method to capture images of still, seemingly cold, life portrayed with a unique gentleness and warmth.

He uses low quality lenses, shoots into the sun and shakes the camera erratically to produce a kind of focused blur – something that took some time to master.

Inspired by the angelic softness of countless Japanese photographers and the eerie ingenuity of the Starn brothers, Lloyd draws not only on fellow photographers, but also from a number of authors.

“To be told by teachers that anything is possible, then let’s try and turn everything upside down and see what happens. From mistakes you get original ideas and concepts, and just poke and prod, to try different things. I found that really quite inspiring,” he said.

Lloyd will showcase his images at PSC’s end of year exhibition starting on December 10.