Dancers in the Attic

Bourbong Street Bundaberg is the main strip of the town, the CBD, with two story buildings lining both sides of the street. Busy shop fronts occupy the ground floors with their signage layered over the early 1900s buildings that still stand beneath them. The upper stories, however, are rich in their original architecture, embellished with gorgeous arch windows. Bundaberg is my hometown and for as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to get upstairs and see what those spaces looked like or were used for. Since picking up photography, I knew those windows would enable incredible lighting and second as a unique backdrop.

My friend worked in one of the shops below and asked her manager if I could take photos upstairs. She remarked, “Yes, of course, but I don’t know what is so appealing, it’s so dirty up there.”

Myself, and four others that I was to photograph (three of which are dancers) made our way up the dusty, broken timber staircase and entered the top floor.

The room seemed like it was once a functional floor long ago turned into an unkept attic, with rods through the floor upholding the shop signage and lights below, a mountain of the shop’s tax files and documents, a boat, a box of old hardcover guiled books, clothes that had been written off, two box TVs, mannequins, and stacks of VCRs, one labeled ‘Billabong Ad 2002’. All this, but nothing seemed out of place. Nothing matches the aesthetic of the early 1900s architecture that encompasses it all and yet everything in my frame was contemporarily present.

The dust on the timber floors was an inch thick and all over me by the end of the shoot – we all found it in our nostrils respectively that night when we showered too.

The space was simply magic. It was the studio space of my dreams – minus the dust. I cannot believe it is left unused, unrented to artists, unkept, unappreciated.

The shots from this day are some of my favourites that I have ever taken.