Award-Winning Photojournalist Jon Rendell

Jon Rendell was born into an auteur/photog family in Melbourne, Australia in 1957; his grandfather owned a Paillard Bolex 16mm movie camera in the 50s and his father always had his Braun 35mm loaded with Kodachrome 25. At age 8 his parents gave him their old Kodak Box Brownie. He paparazzied birthday parties, friends at school, and their vacations. At high school he learned basic darkroom techniques and decided he had to have his own darkroom. His family knew that on certain evenings the kitchen (his makeshift darkroom) was out of bounds. In the 70s he had the sublime pleasure of being tutored by renowned photographer Athol Shmith. He was always captivated by shadows. It was Athol who one day selected one of his negatives as an example of perfect exposure and development. He cringed because his ever-present cigarette was dangling dangerously close to the negative as he held it aloft to the class. That photo depicted a structure with an unusually shaped shadow across its facade. To this day he cannot tell anyone what made that shadow, but from that day forward he found himself hard-wired to focusing upon the transitory, abstract shapes that come and go with the available light.