Leon Saunders photographs, papers and other material relating to the Shadow People project

fonds

1969-1982

Graphic Materials, Photographs, Textual Records, Clippings, Ephemera

9674928

93 photographic prints (4 boxes) - black and white
0.48 metres of textual material (1 outsize box)
1 audiocassette (1hr. 30 min.)

Leon Saunders (1944-) is an Australian script writer and photographer who grew up on a sheep station near Bundarra, in the New England district of New South Wales. Saunders moved to Sydney in 1960 where he worked in the dark room at the Randle Street studio of Winston Irving (1925-2002). Travelling to Europe in 1964, Saunders returned three years later and took a job in the dark room of photographer Clive Kane (d. 2004), continuing to pursue his own photography practice on weekends.
In 1969, while in search of interesting subject matter for his camera, Saunders encountered two alcoholic men sheltering in a derelict building in the Rocks and asked if he could take photos of them. He subsequently entered one of these pictures in the Salvation Army’s inaugural Art and Photography Competition to increase public awareness of social need in Australia. The photo was among 100 entries exhibited at David Jones' Elizabeth Street store in Sydney in July 1970, during the Salvation Army’s annual Red Shield fund raising appeal, winning second prize and ‘a special award'.
In April 1975 he was awarded a grant from the Visual Arts Board to pursue his ‘Shadow People’ project. Over the next eighteen months, Saunders roamed the parks and places inhabited by Sydney’s homeless alcoholics, in between daily visits to the St Vincent de Paul Society’s Matthew Talbot hostel in Woolloomooloo and the Salvation Army’s ‘Foster Hilton’ in Surry Hills, photographing the people he encountered and listening to their stories.
By mid-1976 he'd drafted text and selected images for the prototype (’dummy’) book used throughout his four year search for a publisher which included approaches to several Melbourne companies. Around this time, the National Gallery of Victoria purchased three images from the ‘Shadow People’ series which encouraged Saunders to approach the Australian Centre of Photography (ACP) in Paddington, Sydney, established in 1974, with the idea for an exhibition.
In October 1976, the ACP showed the ‘Shadow People’ series in its upstairs gallery. Saunders ‘Shadow People’ photo essay was eventually published to some acclaim by the University of Queensland Press (UQP) in 1981. By this time, Saunders had shifted his career focus from photography to writing, first as an arts journalist and later, following his graduation from the Australian Film and Television School in 1979, becoming an award-winning script writer. He published his first novel in 2019

References:
Library acquisition file
'Show on Social Needs'., The Canberra Times (ACT), July 11, 1970. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article110331626

This collection comprises original exhibition/layout photoprints, photographs, correspondence and items of printed ephemera, relating to the personal photodocumentary project undertaken by Leon Saunders in the 1970s.

Series 1
Photographs of homeless people in Sydney taken by Leon Saunders for Shadow People

Series 2
Papers, correspondence and other material compiled by Leon Saunders for Shadow People

Series 3
Sound recording of interviews with homeless people in Sydney compiled by Leon Saunders for Shadow People

This collection is organised into three series by format.

In copyright:
Copyright holder:: Leon Saunders
Please acknowledge:: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and Courtesy Leon Saunders