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Art & Design
Painting with Light in a Dark World
Documentary on the work of Peter Darren Moyle, photographing Sydney's seamier side
Writer/Director
Sascha Ettinger Epstein
Cinematographers
Mark Bliss
Justin Malinowski
Producer
Renata Schuman
Peter Darren Moyle is an extraordinary photographer. Having arrived penniless in Sydney in the late 1980s, he took to the streets, armed with just a 1936 medium-format camera, and began to record the chaotic seamy underbelly of city life. In a remarkable photographic odyssey through the frontiers of this grimy underworld, he tells the story of the homeless, the destitute and the dispossessed who slip between the cracks of regulated society and whose voices are seldom heard.
In this moving documentary, Moyle is followed by the camera crew in the lead-up to his first exhibition, (curated by his mentor, renowned photographer and critic Robert McFarlane) observing him as he organises his photographs, meets up with some of the subjects of his images, and reminisces about his last ten years on the streets.
Such is his determination to document his experiences of living on the streets, he has willingly gone to extraordinary lengths to produce his photographs, including sleeping rough, eating from dustbins to save money for film, and syphoning power from streetlights to set up a darkroom in his squat.
This is an intriguing and revealing insight into one man's attempt to record the way of life of those inhabiting the urban wilderness. It is a dimly-lit world which is at once prevalent and mysterious, and it is fitting that Moyle's determination to document his life and the lives of those around him has enabled him to rise from the twilight of the city's seedier frontiers into a much more hopeful kind of light.
Sascha Ettinger Epstein
Cinematographers
Mark Bliss
Justin Malinowski
Producer
Renata Schuman
Peter Darren Moyle is an extraordinary photographer. Having arrived penniless in Sydney in the late 1980s, he took to the streets, armed with just a 1936 medium-format camera, and began to record the chaotic seamy underbelly of city life. In a remarkable photographic odyssey through the frontiers of this grimy underworld, he tells the story of the homeless, the destitute and the dispossessed who slip between the cracks of regulated society and whose voices are seldom heard.
In this moving documentary, Moyle is followed by the camera crew in the lead-up to his first exhibition, (curated by his mentor, renowned photographer and critic Robert McFarlane) observing him as he organises his photographs, meets up with some of the subjects of his images, and reminisces about his last ten years on the streets.
Such is his determination to document his experiences of living on the streets, he has willingly gone to extraordinary lengths to produce his photographs, including sleeping rough, eating from dustbins to save money for film, and syphoning power from streetlights to set up a darkroom in his squat.
This is an intriguing and revealing insight into one man's attempt to record the way of life of those inhabiting the urban wilderness. It is a dimly-lit world which is at once prevalent and mysterious, and it is fitting that Moyle's determination to document his life and the lives of those around him has enabled him to rise from the twilight of the city's seedier frontiers into a much more hopeful kind of light.