Gallery works
Represented by YellowKorner, and sold in their galleries worldwide.
I'm Richard Hirst, and for most of my working life the whole plan was to photograph Sydney, which isn't a plan with an international arm to it. So the gallery side of all this still catches me out. YellowKorner is a French company, they sell fine art photography out of their own shops, and somewhere in Paris, in Tokyo, in Santiago, there's a picture of your local rock pool hanging on a wall.
They carry sixteen of my photographs. Not a shifting selection, not a trial, but sixteen works held in the network, and every gallery in it stocks them. That's the part I'd want to know if I were you, because 'sold internationally' can mean almost anything, and it usually means one shop in one city agreed to hang something once.
The bit that took a while to believe
YellowKorner carry about a hundred photographers worldwide. I'm one of them.
That's a curated list rather than a marketplace, and nobody applies their way onto it. Somebody picks you, or nobody does, and the people doing the picking are looking at photographers from everywhere at once. So a bloke who shoots the same forty kilometres of coastline, over and over, in the dark, is not the obvious inclusion.
But I think that's actually the reason. Photograph one place for thirty five years and you stop taking the postcard, mostly because you've already taken it, and roughly four hundred other people got there first. What's left is the version that only turns up in July, at half past five, with nobody watching. And that one seems to travel better than the sunny one does.
Hung in galleries around the world
Paris · Amsterdam · Madrid · Athens · Dubai · New Delhi · Beijing · Shanghai · Hong Kong · Tokyo · Mexico City · Santiago
A represented artist
Not a print licence. Representation, in their own name, in their own shops.
A gallery with its own reputation has staked that reputation on the work.
There's a real difference between selling a print through somebody and being represented by them, and it's worth spelling out, because the two get muddled constantly. But a licence is only a transaction, and it ends. Representation means they've put me on their roster, written a biography, and now vouch for the work in every gallery they own.
Their own page describes me as one of Australia's leading landscape photographers, which is generous, and which I didn't write. So if you'd rather check that than take my word for it, their site is right there, my name is on it, and so are the sixteen pictures. You don't have to come through me at all.
“Richard Hirst is one of Australia's leading landscape photographers.”
YellowKorner, artist biography · https://www.yellowkorner.com/en/richard-hirst/
Where they hang
Every gallery in the network carries the work, from Paris to Santiago.
Distribution is network-wide, not a single shop in a single city.
YellowKorner describe their network as more than a hundred galleries worldwide, across better than twenty countries and territories, and my work is in all of them. Every one of them, not a selection, and not only the ones near home.
It's a strange thing to sit with, honestly. Every one of those photographs was made within about an hour of my house, usually before the sun came up, usually with nobody about but a couple of swimmers. So somebody in Mexico City is buying a morning at Mona Vale, and they've never been, and they're probably never going. You'll know the morning I mean if you've swum there, and that's the odd part. But I've stopped arguing with it.
The sixteen
Four of them are named below. The full set is on the YellowKorner site.
- “Dr. H”, Sydney Harbour
- “Dreaming”, Bondi
- “Sunset Swells”, Bronte
- “Double Rainbow”, Mona Vale
See all sixteen at YellowKorner
Also stocked at Bondi Pavilion
Closer to home, and about four hundred metres from half the pictures.
YellowKorner isn't the only place, though. Bondi Pavilion sells the work as well, which is a smaller thing on paper, and privately it's the one I like better. And the Pavilion sits right on the sand, at the end of the beach I've photographed more than any other, so you can walk out of the surf and buy a picture of the thing you were swimming in.
Buying one here instead
The gallery works are YellowKorner's own edition, sold in their shops and on their site, and that's the right route for anyone living near one of them. Everything here is the other thing. It's printed locally, it's sold by me, and it's usually a picture of somewhere you could walk to before breakfast. So if you already know which beach it is, and which morning, this is probably the side of the fence to be standing on.
