How did you get into photography? Where did it all begin?

I got into photography through my mum. I was always encouraged to be creative, from having a wild imagination playing outside – this is growing up in New Zealand – to painting and drawing. And then I got into skateboarding, and I was getting into music. I remember taking my mum's camera away for this punk festival, and I remember getting the photos back and been really excited by them.

You’ve spent a lot of your career exploring movement and human interaction, can you explain what motivates the pursuit behind your work?
To me I'm fascinated by the many layers involved in sport and more some human behaviour. You have this needle on a gauge that swings between being very performative and physical or you can address a feeling and emotion and then there is the application of style and genre (photographically speaking) from still-life to portraiture to conceptual or documentary. I like zooming out, looking at two or three areas and having them collide to form a new output.

Do you have a favourite shoot that stands out to you?
I remember when we first moved to Europe, a few years ago, we were living in Amsterdam. I basically had to start again; it was really tough. And then I landed my first big job. We got to shoot in Spain for like a week, and it was to date probably the biggest campaign I've ever worked on with the biggest team. There was still some of that naivety, where I was like, ‘I've never been in this scenario before’, but I'm kind of just making it up on the spot and saying yes or no to things that I've never said yes or no to before, but I had enough confidence to be like, ‘Well, they've asked me to be here for a reason’. I believe there is something special in maintaining a type of naivety in certain scenarios, it's like being in a dream where you don't quite know what is going to happen next.

I’ve seen your experimentation in still photography and then last year your short film exhibition on movement. Was that idea in the making for a long time?

This was part of a progression and this journey that I'm taking, visually, surrounding running. For me, I'm intrigued in trying to show something as true to its nature as possible, while also kind of elevating a little bit beyond reality.

Can you talk a bit more about how you would define your work right now?

I've been talking about this with some colleagues and peers, and right now, I am aiming to make it more complicated. For myself and for the viewer… not in the sense that it's confusing, but I'm trying to push myself so that the work is harder to decipher in terms of how it was made. And that might come down to the tools that I use, like cameras and lights, or the direction I applied to it.

Can you tell me a little bit more about good sport and why you decided to create a print magazine?

Everything I do is fairly intertwined. From running as an athlete and the running crew AM:PM, my work photographing a lot of sport and then, obviously, Good Sport as the magazine. They're just different avenues to explore creative pursuits, like having an option to apply different thinking and different ways of communicating ideas. The magazine [has] evolved a lot over the years. The team that we have now is really beautiful, like, really great set of thinkers and people with great ideas. And I guess there's way that we wanted to kind of redefine or challenge what [a] ‘sports magazine’ could be for us and our peers. It's also about giving a platform or a space to stories. Sport is such a great connector, or at least something that can break boundaries down and help people understand a bit more about people they don't know about.

Do you have any exhibitions on the horizon?

I'm about to release a set of graphic posters that will be pasted around Melbourne, this is through the Good Sport Studio and I have a vision to curate an art show, I've reached out to everyone who I want to commission to be in the show, but I need to consider the timing around when it will come to life, let's just say early 2022. I always loved the idea of showcasing work for the public, and for people to experience it in different ways.

With all you’ve achieved so far, what’s next for you in the future?

My ideas are becoming more ambitious. I'm pursuing work on a larger scale, not just in the sense of size, but also time, depth, production and legacy – whether it's performative for sculptural or maybe a whole range of sensory based outputs things that, in my head, I can see clearly. There's always a creative output no matter what it is… it's kind of highly experimental as well. Sometimes I'll have an idea in my head and think I want to make it look like this. I want to try this out. And then that might not happen the way I kind of envisioned it, but I'll change tactics.

I don't think it's sustainable to do every possible idea that you have, but sometimes just having an idea, they can kind of latch onto other ideas, kind of like two cells merging together. It might just be the performance of like running around a track – whether there's no audience involved, it's just for ourselves, I'd still class that under the same umbrella of making work.