By Hazel Dooney
“This photographer is a realist in the documentary tradition. He sees, he understands, he interprets. He knows that words in a picture add dimension to the image…”

The late, legendary American photojournalist, Arthur Rothstein, wrote this about Creed O’Hanlon’s photography when O’Hanlon was just 25 years old. However, O’Hanlon is best known (or, more accurately, notorious) in his native Australia as the founder of the country’s first and, for a time, most successful web content company, over a decade ago.

Maybe that’s why, despite having published several hundred essays, diary excerpts and short stories, and exhibited a diverse portfolio of photography in half a dozen group and solo shows in the USA, the UK, Italy, Japan, and Australia over the past four years, he looks uncomfortable when someone refers to him as an artist.

“I don’t have the technical skills or the imaginative capacity,” he says. The few who know him well would disagree.

Born into privilege, the son of a best-selling Australian novelist, O’Hanlon has travelled the world almost constantly since birth, not just moving through cities and countries but scores of different social groups. His several lives have ranged from the shockingly unconventional to the tediously suburban. Still, he has documented them all in words and pictures.  What’s revealed is the sort of obsessive/compulsive attention to emotional detail usually associated with outsider artists.

It’s not always easy to read or look at.

The key to the power of his work is that it’s underpinned by real world experiences. These experiences are the real work of art. Rich, varied, exciting but not always happy, O’Hanlon’s personal narrative has been punctuated by debilitating mind tricks – he has battled an occasionally severe bi-polar disorder since childhood – as well as indiscipline, hubris and wanton destructiveness.

Lately, he has been, by his own description, “a misanthropic recluse”, indulging a self-negating inclination to get lost even to close friends. He strays far, living for years at a time in places like Brighton, in Southern England, or Hiroshima, in Japan, or Tulsa, Oklahoma, or the shores of the South China Sea (where, it turns out, he is now).

When he returns, excerpts from strange, dislocated diaries circulate among editors of highly respected literary journals and voyeuristic black and white photographs are delivered in a package with no return address to the respected art gallery in Melbourne that represents his work. In many respects – not least, in his travels, the duality of his lifestyle and the diversity of his social connections – he is like a darker Peter Beard.

In the same way that Beard is committed to the cause of conservation (or rather the dismantling how conservation is now managed) in Africa, O’Hanlon is committed to real-life models of minimalist, low impact, mobile living and self sufficiency – including, notably, what is called ‘sea-steading’, or homesteading on the sea.  To argue his theories, he lives small in very large spaces, often on or near the water or in the middle of a desert.

Dooney: You’re thought of as an outsider but you’ve successfully infiltrated the mainstream several times. Nevertheless, you don’t appear to be motivated by fame, money or even acceptance.

O’Hanlon: Oh I wouldn’t exclude fame, money and the love of beautiful women – Freud was right about all these being the real motivation of a creative mind. Just before the dot.bomb, when I headed a well-known web agency, I was almost entirely consumed by a lust for money and a very shallow kind of celebrity. Then I underwent this radical epiphany about four years ago and after I’d gotten over the soul-shredding mind-fuck of it, I had to rethink nearly everything in my life, to find another way not only of working but of being.

Dooney: At different times, you’ve lived large and very extravagantly. What interests you now about minimal, mobile living?

O’Hanlon: Simplicity. If I can strip back the requirements of my daily life, if I can limit my need to consume for consumption’s sake, I might be open to many more vitalizing, spiritually enriching opportunities.

In many ways, though, minimal isn’t new for me. I’ve traveled all my life. Such a nomadic existence necessarily means one has to pare things down, live light, and be practical in the choices of what (and who) travels with you.

Simplicity doesn’t exclude fun and self-indulgence – I’m still a big fan of them.

Dooney: You’ve spent a lot of your life since childhood living in hotels, as documented in your ongoing photographic monograph, Hotels Are My Real Home. You don’t seem to do it as much anymore, even though you’re still very much a nomad. Why is that?

O’Hanlon: Two answers: Firstly, I don’t have as much money as I used to so I can’t afford (as I once could) to live in any hotel, let alone a good one, for months at a time. I would still much rather live in a hotel than a conventional apartment or house. Secondly, I live on a boat, which is not only compact and comfortable but also mobile. I think a good shore-bound alternative would be a customized, Airstream trailer (but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as environmentally friendly.)

In many ways, hotels are the antithesis of the self-sufficient, independent style of life I enjoy now. They’re like serviced wombs for adults.

Dooney: You’re a hard man to actually locate. I have about four different phone numbers (all in different countries) and about the same number of email addresses. Where are you now?

O’Hanlon: A boatyard in the jungle inland from Jomtien, just south of Pattaya, in Thailand.

Dooney: What are you doing there?

O’Hanlon: I’m building a 38-foot double canoe or catamaran inspired by traditional Polynesian voyaging canoes. The intention is to create a sea-going platform on which to experiment with some ideas I have about sea-steading and self-sufficient living.

Dooney: What inspired you to do this?

O’Hanlon: It’s hard to locate a particular… thing.

I’ve always had a close relationship with the sea and boats – I sailed a dinghy by myself at age eight and I have spent long periods at sea at different times of my life. However, increasingly, lately, I have been living on a boat as a means of escaping some of the less palatable aspects of urban life, particularly in the developed world, not least the slow destruction of our social and moral fabric by technology, the collapse of genuine urban communities and cultures into petty tribalism (particularly among the white-bread middle classes), and the decay of any real self-reliance… God, I sound like some blood-and-thunder fundamentalist. I’m not.

I came across some interesting ideas about sea-bound communities written by a pioneer of multihull sailing in England, a guy called James Wharram, and it led me to his designs. I decided to build one and try out some ideas of my own.

You used to be widely acknowledged in Australia as a provocative thinker on future technologies …

O’Hanlon: That was back in the late ‘90s. A long time ago.

Dooney: Yet you now almost completely reject technology. You don’t even own a cell phone…

O’Hanlon: Actually, I do. I have this neat little Blackberry.

Dooney: You never turn it on.

O’Hanlon: That’s true.

Dooney: Have you lost faith with what you one referred to as the “millennial religion of network technology ” ?

O’Hanlon: I think the context of that line was the almost evangelical righteousness I saw in many technologists, and their sense of infallibility: I mean, just because they could do something, they never questioned – still don’t – whether they should. As a result, networked technologies are beginning to erode some of the elemental fabric not only of social environments – especially where it enables increased surveillance, breaches of traditional privacy and data-mining by governments and corporations – but also of cultures. There is an increasingly dense and impenetrable cloud of data acquisition that hangs over our lives like a shroud and yet very few, relatively, even recognize its threat.

I still engage with technology. I just refuse to fetishize it or to rely on it. I discourage others from relying on it too. At sea, I avoid it almost completely.

Dooney: You’ve been a qualified marine navigator for 32 years.

O’Hanlon: Yeah. Old school. Paper charts, compass, sextant, clock.

Dooney: You appear to approach your observations of culture and society like a navigator – a lot of painstaking plotting of history, anthropology, geography and even archaeology.

O’Hanlon: In learning navigation, you are always reminded that there are only two things that are important: where you are now and where you’re trying to get to.  The former is elemental to resolving the latter. However, to figure out where you are now, you have to be able to plot a track from where you last were, taking into account all sorts of variables, none of them precisely measurable, that might have driven you from your intended course.

Pretty much like life, individually and collectively.

Dooney: You were the founder and CEO of what was, for a time, one of Australia’s first and most successful web content companies …

O’Hanlon: A very short time, before I completely fucked it up [laughs].

Dooney: But you describe yourself as a Luddite at heart. Do you think it’s possible – or even practical – to try to reverse engineer society’s acceptance of computer technology in order to regain some simplicity…

O’Hanlon: …and privacy and intimacy and unsynthesized, unappropriated creativity. No, I don’t think so. However, I think you can redefine the role it plays in the individual life, hopefully as a part of a broader re-design of one’s personal approach to living.

Dooney: I remember this passage from an essay you wrote for the Australian news magazine, The Bulletin, in 2003:

“A few years ago, at the height of the dotcom boom, when technology was almost a cultural fetish and we couldn't wait for everything to be what we called "instant-on", instantly accessible from everywhere, all the time, a fashion magazine included me in a group of people from different occupations - fashion, architecture, interior design, entertainment, technology - to offer ideas about what would define luxury in the ultimate 21st-century lifestyle."

“My contribution was simple. A windowless, padded room in the middle of your home or office, densely insulated from sound and microwaves, noiselessly ventilated, which would have no furniture other than maybe a few white pillows. The walls would be colourless, even opaque. There would be no decoration, no phone, no television, no stereo, no computer, not even an architectural feature to arrest the attention. When the light was switched off, the darkness would be absolute."

“And that was it. An empty, soundless room.”

So, do you really think that more people will desire slower-paced, noiseless, disconnected lives?

O’Hanlon: Jesus, don’t you? Doesn’t everyone see the isolation and dehumanisation proposed in a pair of iPod ear buds?

Dooney: I take it you don’t ‘do’ digital when it comes to your own creativity?

O’Hanlon: No. My cameras are old-fashioned, mechanical Leica range-finders and Nikon F2s and F3s – I love film, despite it becoming an anachronism – and I write by hand in leather-bound notebooks. I use a computer for research and long-distance communication but that’s about all.

Dooney: Why do you document your life?

O’Hanlon: In order to keep track.

Dooney: I remember another thing you wrote:

“… the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once argued that if two people dream the same dream, it isn’t a dream anymore – it signifies the existence of an alternative reality ... The insane always occupy multiple realities: their internal narratives are always different to their actual or external experiences. For me, that can be complicated by the fact that, when I was unmedicated, which was for most of my 49 years, the character I adopted for one experience was very different to another that I adopted for a different experience somewhere else. The process was so compulsive that I would, for extended periods, devise a complex network of different characters and different lives in different parts of the world, with different relationships, then live intermittently in and between them, while blending them all into a fluid mutability that had the parallel narratives and multi-tiered options of a computer game. And the game engine was an invisible “real” me, solitary, sentient and more than a little crazy."

“These days, medication gives me the possibility of sustained reason, of a reliable perception of the present. But the same cannot be said of what I remember, so I am disenfranchised from my past, condemned to roam in search of a future.”

When did you begin?

O’Hanlon: With the madness, the medication or documenting myself? [laughs] As far as taking pictures is concerned, I guess when I was about 10. I wrote simple diaries and took snapshots on an old Kodak Box Brownie.  I became more dedicated when I was in my late teens.

The medication came much later. Probably too late, truth be told.

Dooney: You weren’t very interested in exhibiting your work until other people almost begged you to.

O’Hanlon: I’m still not. I’m not making art. As I’ve said, I’m creating and archiving information about my own life, to keep track of where I am, who I am, and why, and who with. This information is, in some respects, elemental to a map of my self, from which I can figure out who I am and where (and why) I am going.

Dooney: A lot of your work contains words – whether it’s a sentence from your journal scrawled on the print or text in the image itself: graffiti, signage, brands and so on. Why is this?

O’Hanlon: It’s not a conscious thing. I suppose I subscribe to Samuel Beckett’s view: “Words are all we have”.

Dooney: Most artists try to explain their work. You don’t, in anyway.

O’Hanlon: Because it’s not intended as ‘work’. Besides, I am certainly not looking to make any excuses for it – or myself – or anything else I do. Not anymore.


A solo exhibition of b&w images, handprinted form 35mm and 6x4cm negatives, by Creed O'Hanlon will open at Melbourne Art Rooms (MARS), 418 Bay Street, Port Melbourne, Australia, on 29th July, this year, and run until  24th August.


For the first time, Creed O'Hanlon's book, Instant Picturers is available for download:
Instant Pictures (1.3 MB PDF - contains explicit content)

To learn more about Creed O'Hanlon's boat building adventures, visit the following blogs:
From The Jungle To The Gulf
A Tiki In Thailand


About Hazel Dooney:
Hazel Dooney is one of Australia’s best-known and most controversial young painters. Her blog, Self Vs. Self, can be read at www.hazeldooney.blogspot.com