Spying on Dark Dreams

The next time Samantha Everton gets busted for espionage, she intends to get the goods first. And that depends on timing.

Breaking into an abandoned mental asylum in Sydney, Everton noted the security guard’s patrols — once every 20 minutes — and, camera poised, prowled around under cover of night.

And got chased out.

‘ The last time, they said my camera would be confiscated. It is difficult for photographers now,’ she sighs, shaking her ruddy ringlets.

‘ You need permission after permission after permission.’

But Everton is tenacious and — memo to Sydney — she’ll be back. Yet to do the legal thing is remarkably time-consuming, as she found in the year she has spent creating her ethereal, darkly theatrical series, Childhood Fears.

For one picture she found a spooky setting in Croydon, then spent a week doorknocking the residents to ask if she could close their street for a night. They said yes, and stayed indoors as a terrified driver was bailed up by two ghostly girls in white.

The result, Night Without Darkness, is reminiscent of Carrie and The Shining, horror films of unusual elegance. Everton is not surprised they have a cinematic effect.

‘Sometimes I think of myself as more of a set designer than a photographer,’ she says.

‘I am extremely particular; the fine details make or break the image. If it needs to be this colour or that detail I won’t stop short of it. I will seek and seek and seek until I find it. I’ve picked up so many things from op shops and markets that I’ve had to take out storage space at Fort Knox.’

Several Australian photographers work in this carefully staged way, including Tracey Moffatt and Bill Henson. Like them, Everton looks through a lens darkly.

But unlike Henson’s tormented adolescents and Moffatt’s young woman yearning for Something More, her pictures have no sexual charge.

‘ This series is about being 10 years old, that time of life before that understanding,’ she says.

‘Each of these pictures is about the dreams you have as a child. It is not that later age when you are very much aware of your environment and how different you are from other people. Childhood fears are universal.’

Her previous series, Catharsis, featured two women — a European and an Asian — but that, too, harked to childhood.

Everton grew up with five adopted siblings, all of Vietnamese or Thai descent, and sometimes felt the twain did not quite meet.

‘ It’s a big inspiration for my work. It’s about fitting in,’ she says. ‘You know that age when you just want to blend in and be like everyone else? It is about being like the person next to you.’

Everton, as a child, ‘sat around drawing a lot’. That inventiveness found its way into a 10-year career as a ‘terrible’ hairdresser during which she papier-mached her sister’s head, used a cut-throat razor to carve designs into people’s buzzcuts and paid her way around the world for five years.

In 2000 she landed a cadetship at The Melbourne Times, then in 2003 graduated with a BA from RMIT. In 2005 she won the Australian Leica Documentary Photographer Award and last year gained international notice —The New Yorker magazine published her work and the Paris International Photographic Competition awarded her second place.

At 35, Everton has hit her professional stride.

‘So, hopefully, no midlife crisis,’ she smiles. ‘If everything stopped now I would be happy.’