Brett Leigh Dicks shuffles his feet and tripod slightly to find the exact spot where another photographer stood 100 years earlier.

Metaphorically, it’s the same amount of digging, just a different kind.

Mr Dicks, a Fremantle-based photographer, is artist in residence at WA’s Museum of the Goldfields.

He is recreating photographs taken between the 1890s and the 1920s by two photographers, John Joseph Dwyer and Thomas Faulkner Mackay, who had a studio on Kalgoorlie’s main street.

On the Goldfields’ dusty streets, he looks for four-walled relics.

Some of the buildings portrayed in the Dwyer-Mackay collection are easy finds, federation-style landmarks that shape the cityscape, like the York Hotel, a St Mark’s Basilica of the outback.

But locating anonymous houses requires some digging, using tools as old as telephone records from the 20s and 30s, or as modern as Google Earth.

He looks for distinguishing elements, details that can help identification, following clues that survived time.

Even reflections in the windows of buildings opposite the road are markers.

In their footsteps

It’s a grey afternoon in the Goldfields. The light, filtered through the clouds, is soft on the rounded façade of the Palace Theatre.

It’s the light Mr Dicks needs to recreate Mackay’s picture.

He scribbled in his notebook it was taken on an overcast afternoon, as he wants the new pictures to be shot under the same conditions of the original ones: same angle, perspective and lighting conditions.

Sometimes that means rolling a wheelie bin out of frame, waiting for an orange car to zoom past or reschedule the shooting because you find the site cordoned off by forensic detectives.

Mr Dicks says photography is subjective, a personal view of an objective reality.

But this project puts the photographer, quite literally, in someone else’s footsteps. 

Delegating every choice — from framing to timing — to Dwyer and Mackay gives him insight into their work.

“One of the things that’s really come to light is that John Joseph Dwyer wasn’t a morning person,” Mr Dicks laughs.

A reflection of the past

This comparative study reveals more than the preferences of a photographer who lived at the turn of the last century. It illustrates how society evolved.

Mr Dicks’s lens is magnifying — exposing by contrast — the changes that shaped architecture and lives.

“Towns and cities will change given the needs of society,” he says.

It is apparent in the disappearance of laundries, draperies, and tailors, replaced by today’s big-box stores.

Mr Dicks says these changes are enlightening, but he can’t help getting a little romantic looking at those old pictures and lamenting what has been lost.

He is struck by the absence of large areas for social gathering in his pictures. They have vanished, or been turned into museum pieces.

“We seem to have lost that, social interaction has gone online.”

He believes these old and new photos, put side by side, give a few hints for the future.

But the Australian-American photographer also thinks his work should make the community feel proud that many of the buildings photographed in the early 1900s are still standing, and well preserved.

“In America, the downtown is decaying, forgotten. The centre of town moved to the outskirts, in box stores,” Mr Dicks says. 

Overseas, he got used to the occasional door being shut on his face, but, in the Goldfields, he found them all open.

Continuing conversations

The public’s interest in the project inspired Mr Dicks to involve the community. He asked people to respond with poems to selected portraits.

He wants others to continue the dialogue he started with Dwyer and Mackay, now, and in the future.

“I hope this project becomes a continuing conversation,” Mr Dicks says.

He likes to picture someone else, in 100 years from now, standing in his footsteps, chasing the same angle and the same light of this grey afternoon.

Warning: This story contains images depicting nudity.

“Start your day with a good breakfast together,” reads the title of one of Pixy Liao’s photographs.

In it, Liao sits at a kitchen table eating a strategically placed papaya. (It’s giving Samantha does-nude-Valentine’s-Day-sushi-dinner, for any Sex and the City fans.)

It’s the kind of tongue-in-cheek relationship advice the Chinese multidisciplinary artist delivers through her ongoing photo project Experimental Relationship: a series of staged self-portraits of Liao with Takahiro Morooka, aka Moro: a Japanese musician and artist – and Liao’s partner of 17 years.

The photos are variously erotic, tender, playful — and captioned with pithy one-liners and double entendres (including the series’ title).

Experimental Relationship has proved hugely popular with audiences; works from the series have been exhibited in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific, including Australia at the National Gallery of Australia, in 2020, and Sydney’s temple of postmillennial Chinese art, White Rabbit Gallery, in 2022.

This month, Australians can see Liao’s work in Sydney at the Powerhouse Museum, Melbourne at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, and Perth at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

A different kind of ‘muse’

In front of the camera, Liao assumes a dominant role with Moro as her submissive.

It’s a dynamic that grew organically from her romantic partnership with Moro, who is five years her junior.

“Because I grew up in China, I always had this doubt [about gender roles]. ‘Why do men have to act one way and women have to act the other way? Why do we always have to date older men?’ But I never had an answer for that, and I didn’t know what the alternative options [were] for me,” Liao says.

“When I met Moro, I suddenly realised there can be another way; maybe I can try a way that I like.”

With that, Moro became Liao’s muse.

Traditionally, the role of the muse in art is to inspire the artist. But the artist-muse relationship is an historically gendered one.

The concept dates back to ancient Greek mythology. The ‘Muses’ were the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne and considered goddesses of art, science and literature. They were also the lovers of Apollo, the god of the arts.

Writing about the feminine muse, Germaine Greer put it this way: “A muse is anything but a paid model. The muse in her purest aspect is the feminine part of the male artist.”

Liao’s photography blithely up-ends this dynamic.

Meet-cute

Before she took up photography full-time, Liao worked as a graphic designer in her hometown of Shanghai. Disillusioned with her job and craving greater creative autonomy, she quit in 2005 and moved to the US to study a Master of Fine Arts in photography at the University of Memphis (UoM).

That’s where she met Moro. He was there on exchange from the University of Alabama, studying music.

Speaking to ABC Arts over Zoom, Liao lights up when asked about their meet-cute: “That’s a story I like to tell!

“On the first day of school, there was an international student orientation. I spotted him in a group and he was introducing himself to everybody, [saying] ‘I’m here to study jazz.'”

Liao swoons; Moro, who is sitting beside her, blushes.

“[I thought], here is this beautiful young musician who is really my type, and I remembered him from that first day of school and always hoped I [would] see him again,” she says.

A year later, Liao found Moro at an art event on campus.

“I was like, ‘I’m a photographer. Can I talk to you? Can I take photos of you?’ That’s how we met,” she recalls, laughing.

Moro nods: “I liked her too, the first time I saw her. I was trying to talk to her but I was too shy.”

Liao continues: “I was just pretending I had a lot of photo assignments. I [would] always ask him for help, [saying], ‘I need to do another photo. Can you model for me again?’

“I created many opportunities for myself.”

‘A game we play’

The inspiration for Experimental Relationship came a year into their relationship, in 2007, while they were living in Memphis. Liao was working on a photo project that involved staging crime scenes.

“I was asking Moro to play dead bodies. Sometimes he’d have to get naked and climb into a suitcase,” Liao says.

“At first, I thought this was completely normal, for a boyfriend [to be] helping his girlfriend with photos, but then I realised: This is not a normal boyfriend.”

Liao’s photos capture a sense of play. There is an easy intimacy between artist and muse that is palpable in their off-camera dynamic too.

“Moro was very supportive and very open to my photo ideas. I started thinking, ‘There must be something special about our relationship,'” she says.

“At the same time, I [felt] like people didn’t understand it and I wanted to show how natural it is for us to be together, so I started taking photos of us together.”

After graduating from UoM, the pair moved to Brooklyn, New York, where they have lived for the past 14 years. Most of the series has been shot in the three apartments they’ve shared during that time.

Liao was very particular about planning shoots in the early years of their collaboration, but her approach is “looser” now, she says.

“It’s more like a game that we play because we [have] collaborated for a very long time and Moro really understands me. Sometimes he will give me a very good idea during the photo shoot, so it’s half [what I’ve] imagined and half improvised.”

Subverting expectations

Much of Liao’s work is subversive. It’s as if she’s winking at the audience; letting us in on a joke. But audiences didn’t understand Liao’s humour when she first started exhibiting, she says.

“Especially in the US, and [being from an] Asian minority – people see your work and think, ‘Here’s this Asian couple doing Asian things.’ So whatever we’d do, [the audience] felt very remote.

“Then around 2015, 2016, we started to have this movement of MeToo and people [paying] more attention to female voices. Then people started to find a way to talk about my work.”

While Liao has exhibited widely, her work has resonated most strongly with young Chinese women, she says.

“Because it’s not what they’re used to seeing. In China, [the general public] usually thinks there is a right way to do things; a right way for a woman or a man to be.

“I feel like people respond to my [photos] mainly based on their values. They are [asking], ‘Does this type of relationship match, or is it accepted by my values?’

“There’s a big difference with younger women, especially in China. They really understand my work compared to the [older] generations.”

The series also captures what Liao describes as a “love-hate relationship” — in part, a facetious reference to a socialised rivalry between the pair based on Liao’s Chinese heritage and Moro’s Japanese heritage.

Liao explains: “In a relationship, it’s not always nice. A lot of the time, there’s competition going on and sometimes you really dislike each other.

“But I generally like you,” she says, looking at Moro.

“Generally?!” he exclaims.

Liao twinkles at this reaction, then continues: “There’s always that negative side, but I think that’s also part of what really attracts me in a relationship too.

“Besides being [a] partner and collaborator, you’re also rivals to each other in a way. I think that’s really interesting.”

Liao plans to continue the series – she hopes, into her old age.

“I’ll do it as long as Moro lets me take photographs and as long as he doesn’t break up with me,” says Liao.

“Never!” Moro chirps back.

Experimental Relationship runs at Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne from April 21 to July 9. I have not loved (enough or worked) runs at AGWA, Perth until April 23.