‘Left of field and fringe dwellers’: Denmark’s storytelling photographer Nic Duncan shares her own story

Denmark photographer Nic Duncan has spent most of her life making sure the people she points her camera at feel comfortable in front of the lens — but that doesn’t mean she feels that way herself. “I’m terrified,” Duncan admitted when Inspire first arrived to interview her at her Ocean Beach home. As it turns out, she feels much more at home behind the camera than in front of it, and even admitted to having a Rescue Remedy to calm her nerves before fronting up for the camera. Renowned for her portraits of everyday people taken throughout regional and rural WA, Duncan is a three-time finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize and was crowned the Australian Institute of Professional Photography WA’s Professional Portrait Photographer of the Year in 2015. She won the 2017 Fremantle International Portrait Prize People’s Choice Award, having been a finalist in the awards four times. Duncan had a passion for taking photos since she was a child, growing up between Cornwall and Warwickshire in the UK. “All I ever wanted for birthdays and Christmases was flash cubes and films and that for my camera,” she said. “So it was kind of a no-brainer — how I didn’t get into photography earlier, professionally, is just a mystery because it was just so obvious in hindsight.” Born in Australia to English parents, her family returned to the UK when Duncan was 18 months old. As a young adult in the 1980s, Duncan worked for a music magazine and lived in a squat in Hackney, London. Members of rock band The Mission started living there with her, and she was eventually made the band’s assistant manager. Duncan admits she led a rock’n’roll life that was “a bit wild” at times, in contrast to her upbringing. “My very proper mum and dad had to come to help me move in (to the squat),” she said. “The next time I had to move it was through the streets at night in a shopping trolley.” Everywhere she went, she took a camera with her, documenting the band’s adventures, including meeting Metallica and Led Zeppelin. “The second album was produced by John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin, and I was there in the studio,” she said. “We stayed at Richard Branson’s recording studio for six months in Oxfordshire, a great big old mansion, called The Manor.” Duncan’s camera was never far away. “I just photographed everything,” she said. It was during this period of her life that her photography — which has since graced the pages of the Guardian in the UK and been used to promote movies and TV shows — was published for the first time. “My first published photo ever was when my boss, the manager, said can you get a photo of Wayne (Hussey) and John Paul Jones in the studio together,” she said. “I actually bought a roll of black and white film because I normally just had the colour film in my little camera. “And that was the first photo that was ever published of mine in the music press, and it ended up in their first book.” After working in the music industry in the UK for several years, Duncan returned to Australia for the first time since she was a baby. “I came to Australia and got a job out in a pub in the middle of nowhere, and then I ran away with some shearers in the middle of the night,” she said. “And then I travelled all over the world with them.” Duncan was a roustabout, cooking and mustering, doing whatever was needed. “I went all around WA working with them, and then America, and then the UK,” she said. “And then I was in New Zealand on a sheep station for four years. So it’s been a very strange career path.” It wasn’t until Duncan moved to Denmark in 2003 that she took up photography full-time. She moved to the south coast town after visiting on a holiday from Perth, where she had based herself since 1993. “I just loved it,” she said. “I came down on holiday, basically put an offer in on the house and moved down here five weeks later. “I didn’t know a single person and all my friends in Perth were saying, ‘you’re mad’.” At the time, Duncan was a single mum and she initially worked doing graphic design, after having a sign-making business in Perth. But being the “first person in Denmark with a digital SLR” camera, the locals kept asking her to take photos. “Gradually, the photography took over,” she said. Duncan started by doing photography for local organisation Denmark Arts, and through that met “a lot of interesting people” in the arts scene. She took portrait photos of them, and then expanded her project to include portraits of local elderly people, exhibiting her work at the Denmark Visitors Centre when it first opened. “And that was just so well received, I think, because it was local people,” she said. A wedding photographer friend asked her to fill in for him for a couple of weddings and then quit the business, referring his clients to her and allowing her to establish a professional practice. “I realised what I was good at,” Duncan said. “It had always been a passion, but then people started paying me. So it was kind of an accident — a happy accident.” Now much of Duncan’s time is spent travelling throughout rural WA, taking portraits of the characters she comes across, with a particular passion for people who are “a bit left field” or “fringe dwellers”. She focuses on capturing emotion in her shots, hoping for the moment the person is “looking reflective” or when they elicit “a genuine laugh or a genuine kind of twinkle”. She has just returned from a 3000km trip to the Goldfields, where she parked her caravan in the backyard of a home belonging to Karnivool guitarist Drew Goddard and explored the region. It’s stories like Goddard’s — a rock guitarist who found himself so strongly drawn to Coolgardie that he decided to move there permanently — that Duncan strives to uncover in rural WA. “I just meet the coolest people, I really do,” she said. “I just love hearing the stories and I love taking photographs.” She shares her photos on her website, Facebook and Instagram pages along with short snippets of stories the people have told her, or the details of how she came to take their photo. Her social media pages are also a tool to help her find her subjects. “Sometimes I’ll put something on Facebook saying I’m heading to Cue next week, or Leonora next week, does anyone have any contacts or know any interesting people — can you put me in touch with somebody who’s a local who can help me out,” she said. “Other times, I’ll just turn up and stop someone in the street, or in the supermarket, and one thing leads to another. “So many of my portraits have come from stopping someone in the street and then ending up at their house.” Duncan’s portraits are bought for acquisition into a permanent collection by the State Library of WA, which allows her to travel around the State documenting its people. “I’m capturing tomorrow’s history, because I’m trying to tell a story in the photo and capture them in their environment,” she said. “I love the fact that people’s stories are going to be held. “Everyone’s got a story, because otherwise once you’re gone, you’re gone, aren’t you? “My dad says ‘you can’t do that forever though’. It’s like, well, there are a lot of people in WA, I’ve not done all of them yet.” Duncan also does commercial photography and takes promotional stills for movie and TV productions around WA. Last year, she took photos on the sets of the movie Sweet As, and Bremer Bay production Blueback. It’s relatively new territory for the photographer, who said she enjoyed the creativity of being on set. Last year, Duncan worked on the production of Netflix and NITV documentary series Our Law, which follows Indigenous police officers working in WA. She travelled to Kununurra, Roebourne, Kalgoorlie and remote Indigenous communities, following officers and cadets. She sat in on interviews with everyone from elders to offenders, taking portrait photos over the cinematographer’s shoulder. At times, she was the only production member tagging along with officers while they were on duty. “I would just suddenly find myself in the back of the police car with the sirens and the lights,” she recalled. Duncan said it was an “eye-opening experience” and she heard “heartbreaking” stories. In part, it has driven her to follow through on a plan she has had for a while to mentor Indigenous people in rural and remote communities and teach them how to take documentary portrait photos. “I’ve been sort of putting the message out to the universe that I really would love to mentor someone, because I’ve done a lot of work with Indigenous people over the last few years,” she said. “And I’m always really aware that I’m trying to capture their stories, but they’d be better off capturing their own stories. “They’re going to get a very different and much more real story than an outsider like me is going to get. I mean, I’m not even really Australian.” In October, she will hit the road again, travelling to Roebourne, where she will spend two weeks with a local Aboriginal photographer who is keen to learn new skills and share the stories of the locals in her community. “I love what I do,” Duncan said at the end of the interview, her own “scary” photoshoot completed. “I love the way I live my life.”