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Back home and showing his work in the Melbourne International Arts Festival, Matthew Sleeth talks to Louisa Whitehead about countering chaos with his camera.

What do pot plants, fire extinguishers and umbrellas have to do with anything? I pondered this question as I clanked up the never-ending staircase to Matthew Sleeth's studio. 

When I finally reached the top, the studio door opened and a man dressed in jeans, converse runners and a hoodie greeted me. He looked like the kind of guy who never gets dressed up. One of those guys with a cool job, who works for himself and wears expensive 'bum' clothes everyday of the week.

For the past fifteen years Melbourne photographer Matt Sleeth has traveled the world with a camera in his hand, and made a living out of it. I'm drooling. 

As an 'aspiring artist' in a 'competitive field', I asked Sleeth for a hot tip on how to 'make it'. He is, after all, one of Australia's 50 most collectable artists (according to Art Collector magazine), a fact that makes Sleeth go all squirmy in his chair. 

"Well I'm not into giving advice, but the people who tend to do well are the people who believe there isn't any other alternative." 

At the age of 35 Sleeth's only job has been snapping photos. "I spent a lot of time in my 20s broke, but I always had complete faith that there was no chance I'd do anything else. To be able to make a living in the city that you want in the medium that you want, it's important as any decision you make. I knew that if I wasn't doing that then I was working in a bank as a teller." 

Sleeth's done some really cool stuff; worked in East Timor, lived in Denmark, has work in a gallery in New York, and I've been flipping burgers in Melbourne? Damn. 

But back to pot plants, fire extinguishers and umbrellas. They're everywhere in the studio. Photos of them, I mean. As are security cameras, Mona Lisa's and really random people sleeping in public places. Come October these photos will adorn Melbourne's art gallery walls, billboards, tram stops, city walls and video screens as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival. 

What will Melbournian's think of such random objects, I wonder? But as Sleeth tells me, having to explain the meaning behind a series of photographs is like having to explain a joke. 

But seeing as I'm interviewing him, Sleeth's a little lenient.

"Something in isolation isn't to be trusted," he begins. 

Throughout his travels Sleeth's found commonalities in every country he's visited. You guessed it. Broken umbrellas strewn in parks, on footpaths, roads and under bushes in every country from Belfast to Tokyo. Although such objects appear to be quite trivial and nothing remarkable, they are, he insists, "remarkably consistent." 

"Trying to understand the big random things is too complicated. We need to look for patterns in the simple things to make sense of the chaotic world around us. One abandoned umbrella is just one abandoned umbrella, but if you see a culture consistently abandoning umbrellas, that talks about consumption and waste and destructibility and the environment." 

Ok, so it's like September 11 was just like, 'what the hell was that?', but a whole bunch of wasted umbrellas all over the world is like, 'we all use umbrellas and we are all consuming pigs and we are all killing our planet with waste.' 

I sense Sleeth prefers to be a little more subtle with his approach. 

"A lot of photography tries to make grand statements, but I want this to accumulatively build, rather than telling people what to think." 

In 2001 Sleeth became famous for showing the world another side of Australian troops in East Timor with his Tour of Duty project. Living in Belfast before he left, Sleeth heard no build up to the deployment of the troops. 

"What I expected was, 'Woops sorry for the last 25 years, how can we help?' And what I found was that we weren't there to help the Timorese at all. We were there to stage a public relations exercise for the government." 

Sensing something cheesy, constructed, or fake when he arrived in Timor, what he describes as a 'jingle of the week' kind of feel, Sleeth was incensed to photograph the real lifestyle in Timor. He exposed soldiers posing for each others cameras like tourists, nude women plastered on walls in the barracks, shooting targets decorated with reminders of home and parades of popstars and politicians pimping themselves for the media. 

In Tour of Duty, the brave, hard working, respectable soldiers that we come to know are shown as mere propaganda.

Responses to Timor and Tour of Duty are bound to be complicated. The army actually tried to buy the whole series at first, assumedly to bury the content somewhere dark and dusty. And yet some of the work has ended up on display in the war memorial at Canberra! 

That's not the only place his work is hanging. From the National Gallery of Victoria to the decadent halls of Deutsche Bank, selling for sometimes $11,000, Sleeth's left his broke lifestyle long behind in a gutter somewhere in Denmark. 

It goes without saying it must be fabulous having a job with the freedom to travel the world. Sleeth's a free spirit. He makes a point of choosing a project that fits where he is, rather than the other way round. "I'm less interested in having a career and more interested in having a life." 

Cheers to that, Matt. 

Leaving his studio I bound down the metal stairs, through the old factory yard in Footscray and into my sisters bashed up Mazda. I'm so inspired by his attitude that I nearly call up my boss and quit my job, "I have to focus on my artistic endeavours," I imagine saying. Then I remember all those umbrellas, potplants and fire extinguishers again and my head starts to spin. Rolling down from the clouds I crawl back into my sludgy, greasy, gutter with fries. Maybe I can survive on flipping burgers for a little while longer.

Sleeth's work will be around Melbourne on tramstops, billboards and other public places, as well as; 

Sophie Gannon Gallery
2 Albert Street
Richmond 3121

Thu 9 - Sat 25 Oct
Tue - Sat 11am - 5pm 

FREE