LIFE and Times in the Republic of Broken Hill, a celebrated book of portraits photographed by Robin Sellick, all came about because of a meeting with James Packer, back in the late 1990s.
Sellick, who grew up in Broken Hill and has since returned to the city, has photographed some of the world’s most famous celebrities, and worked under the guidance of Annie Leibovitz and Mary Ellen Mark.
Kylie Minogue, Shane Warne, and Steve Irwin are some of the people he’s pointed his camera at, but he said he’d always wanted to photograph what he knew best: the people and town of Broken Hill, where he spent his youth and first picked up a camera.
“When I was living in Broken Hill, I developed a mindset that anything was possible,” Sellick said.
“Kind of opposite to the world around me. So, I had no limits to my thinking and I wanted to be the best photographer in the world.”
Sellick studied photography as an elective in high school, and said the camera allowed him to express the way he saw the world.
“I’ve always been able to see things, but I can’t get what I see to come through my arm from pen to paper,” he said.
“I can’t draw to save myself, but I can take a photograph of what I see.”
A shy and awkward teenager, Sellick said he was able to use photography to express himself and understand his surroundings.
“I was fanatical about it,” he said.
“Because I was such a misfit, it gave me the opportunity to look at people through the camera, it was a vehicle to study people and their behavior.”
The world through a lens
Yet Sellick craved more than what the town could offer him, and so at 20 he decided to move to Adelaide.
“I had that kind of bullet-proof-ness you have in your 20s, and I wanted to get out and see the world,” he said.
“I moved to Adelaide and worked for a wedding studio. Once you’ve shot a Greek wedding, you can shoot anything!”
After cutting his teeth in the photography industry in Adelaide, he moved to New York to learn from the world’s best photographers.
When visiting a university in upstate New York he was considering studying at, he came across Annie Leibovitz, who was giving a lecture and signing books.
“Just by pure luck I got to meet her,” he said.
“And I rang her up every month, asking to assist her.”
And so he did, as well as assisting numerous other acclaimed photographers in his time in the Big Apple.
After six months in New York, he said he felt that he’d fulfilled his goals to work with and learn from the world’s leading photographers, and he decided it was time to come back to Australia.
“I wanted to do that sort of work in Australia, because nobody was really doing it in Australia at the time,” he said.
Sellick said he was interested in pursuing extremely successful people to photograph, so that he could learn to understand them.
“I wanted to learn what you had to be to be the prime minister, or a billionaire, or a pop star. I wanted to observe them,” he said.
“And I learned that success is predictable. It’s all about the habits and things you do every day, and the way you approach thing, and the standard you set for yourself and others around you. It’s a commitment.”
Sellick said he discovered many of his celebrity subjects were overcompensating for something.
“At that level, not everybody, but a lot of people come from a place of overcompensating for some kind of trauma,” he said.
“They were the youngest kid in a big family, and no one paid them attention, so they learned how to get attention.”
Sellick said often as a photographer, even now, he’s assumed to know a lot about cameras.
“I know nothing about cameras, but I’ve always worked with people,” he said.
James, Kate and very personal pictures
It was when working for Who Weekly, in the 1990s, that Sellick photographed model, actress and socialite Kate Fischer in a bizarre series of events that resulted in the creation of his book, the Life and Times in the Republic of Broken Hill.
“She was a pretty wild sort of a character,” he said.
“We turned up at the house, a small crew, at her apartment in Bondi. It was 11am in the morning and she wasn’t there.
So the magazine rang around and found her, she was at a party and had forgotten about the shoot.”
“She comes back from the party with a boy she’s dragged back, sits him on the couch, takes me into her bedroom, takes all of her clothes off and says, right, what do I wear?”
Sellick said she decided on short shorts, thigh-high boots, a pink dog collar and some handcuffs.
“We go down into the basement of her apartment block where there’s these little windows with bars on them, and I take all of these photos of her,” he said.
Sellick said the next day upon seeing the photos, the magazine called him, concerned by how raunchy the images were.
“They’re freaking out because they’re worried they can’t publish them because of retribution from James Packer,” he said.
“Kate was seeing James on and off for a long time, and they were afraid there’d be a problem.”
Sellick reshot the images in a more conservative style for the magazine, which were published.
A couple of years later, Sellick said he read an article in a newspaper about James Packer and Kate Fischer’s recently announced engagement.
“The article said the Packer family are going to be buying up all the saucy photos of Kate, to protect her reputation,” he said.
The following Monday, Sellick received a call from a woman asking how much Sellick would sell the photos of Kate for.
“I said they’re not for sale, but I kept getting these calls from people wanting to buy them,” he said.
“The calls got more intimidating and threatening each time, and I didn’t know it at the time but later learned it was Kerry Packer doing it.”
Sellick said after countless threatening calls, he told the caller it was an issue between James Packer and himself.
“If James is worried about these photographs, he can pick up the phone and speak to me, I’d be very happy to deal with him,” he said.
Shortly after, Sellick received a call from an employee of Mr Packer’s, offering to fly him to meet James in person.
He took with him his portfolio of work and his agent.
“My agent was getting threats too, his office got broken into that night,” Sellick said.
“Luckily he’d had the sense to hide the photos in the microwave, but they’d scared the absolute shit out of him.”
Sellick said Mr Packer brought his lawyer with him to the meeting.
“James shook my hand and said ‘look, I hope you don’t mind but I asked my lawyer to sit in on the meeting, I hope you won’t be offended by that’,” Sellick said.
“The lawyer was doing this good copy, bad cop, trying to create doubt in my mind as to whether I owned the photographs, but I knew I did.
“So I interrupted the lawyer and turned to James and said ‘look, James, I don’t really care what your lawyer has to say, I’m here to find out how you feel about it.”
Sellick said that Mr Packer’s body language instantly changed.
“He said ‘look, to be honest with you, I know nothing about this. I know that Kate’s really worried about it. And if we could get these photos, it would save me a lot of hassle’,” Sellick said.
“So I said yeah, no problem, and I reached into my bag and gave them to him.”
The benefits of being a people person
Sellick said his move silenced the room as Mr Packer and his lawyer clearly had been expecting him to be after money.
“Then the conversation changed completely,” Sellick said.
“I showed them my portfolio and he said he was going to give me some work, and when I was leaving, he gave me his business card and said ‘if there’s ever anything I can do for you, let me know’.”
After giving some thought to what kind of favor he might want from a billionaire, he came up with an idea.
“I’d thought long and hard about it, and I wanted to shoot a book about Broken Hill,” Sellick said.
Sellick said he and Mr Packer had many discussions about the book, but in the end, it wasn’t going to make enough money and the council wouldn’t support it, but the idea stuck with him.
“In 2009, 2010, I’d come back to Broken Hill, and I decided to pick that project back up again,” he said.
Life and Times in the Republic of Broken Hill was published in 2011 with photographs by Robin Sellick and writing by author Jack Marx and has since become acclaimed for its honest depiction of life in the town.
Sellick said his passion was never in cameras or photography but in learning to understand people, and his focus now is to continue to work with people, likely without the camera.
“People have always been my primary interest and photography has been the tool I’ve used to explore that,” he said.
“Now I’m looking to do something else, something different, but still, something focusing on people.”
