One of the not to be missed events in this month’s Northbridge Festival is the opportunity to take part in the Pet Photo Booth. The project, which made its debut as part of the influential Supermart exhibition, documents the relationship between Australians and their pets – snapping them in front of gorgeous/hideous 70’s and 80’s backdrops. It’s a project created and developed by Perth photo-artists Yvonne Doherty and Justin Spiers. Yvonne caught up with us to tell OUTinPerth all about….
The inspiration behind Pet Photo Booth. I’ve got a terrible portrait of my poodle from when I was a teenager – half of his head is shaved. He looks horrible and psycho, and it’s basically all I have of him. So I thought it would be nice to provide people with nice portraits, and I worked on the idea with Justin. Together we developed the idea of using backdrops and travelling around with it.
Favourite Pet Photo Booth Images. I think my tastes are really different to Justin’s which makes a good balance. He goes for the darker images which have something kind of strange, whereas I’ll go for the cutesy, more adorable images.
Crazy times at Pet Photo Booth. We had a little girl have a tantrum and throw her bag of sea monkeys on the ground…. That was pretty scary. Going out to Dog Shows we got to see the way dog show people treat their dogs quite different to normal pets. They treat them more as objects, and they’ll arrange their tails and the angle of their legs for you. We’re like ‘just relax’ and they’re like ‘no, no, the dog’s tail is not right!’
What’s next for Pet Photo Booth. We want to travel around Australia with it – visit every state and document each state everywhere from different communities, like regional communities to mining communities to other cities. We’ve already been to Sydney, we’re going to Adelaide for the Feast Festival later in November and we’ve done Perth a few times, so we need to get up to the Northern Territory, over to Queensland and over to Victoria.
We’ve got a two month residency up in Darwin [next year] at a place called 24 hr Art where we’ve got a place to live so we can travel out to different communities. The plan is to leave probably next March-April, drive up through Western Australia, visit some mining communities, go up to Darwin, across to Queensland and then down to Melbourne and then we’ll make a book of it.
