Author(s): John Ogden

Australian

This new release by Cyclops Press celebrates forty years of photography by renown filmmaker, photographer, publisher and author John Ogden, and serves as a cypher to better understand his work. It is important to occasionally look in the rear vision mirror while hurtling headlong into the future, and Ogden's thoughtful work reminds us what is lost in the rush. Ogden's career began as a photojournalist in Southeast Asia towards the end of the Vietnam War, later extending his practice to cinematography in multiple genres of filmmaking. His photographs are often direct yet quietly subversive, choosing not to shy away from political and social commentary, or provocative dark humour. In 1999 Ogden began Cyclops Press, an independent publishing house specializing in small edition art books that promote Australian photography, and has since published many award winning works. The foreword to Slightly Dangerous is by Tim Page, one of the world's best-known war photographers. His career began in 1964, recording the start of the civil war in Laos. By coincidence, Ogden would find himself in Laos a decade later recording the last days of that war. Tim's exploits in Vietnam were inspiration for the Dennis Hopper character in Apocolypse Now. Amongst other significant photojournalist awards, he is the recipient of the Robert Capa Award and the American Society of Media Photographers Award. He received a citation for bravery from a US military division and he was also named a Vietnamese Cultural Hero of the Revolution. In recent years, Tim has worked as a photographic peace ambassador for the United Nations in Afghanistan, and currently shoots for the Finnish Government in Cambodia. Here is some of what Tim has to say about Slightly Dangerous: "This is a life well travelled of a baby boomer who surfs an existential path across six decades, waxing the best of nostalgia against the odds that are self mitigated by the excesses of those times. It is a heritage of the hippest, most gonzo 'down-under' attitudes, rendered by images we all wish we had snapped. As if Hunter S. Thompson and Richard Neville shuffled photo cards with Robert Frank'ian images throughout the deck."