Climbing the undulating terrain of Federation Square is like an arthritic pensioner trying to climb Ayres Rock. I was having a real hard time getting to the Bill Henson exhibition at The Ian Potter Centre. With lower back pain, a walking stick for support and Panadeine Forte every four hours. The trek was torture. But we got to level 2 without event.

When you enter the exhibition, the one thing you notice is the darkness. The first series of black and white photographs from his early work in the 1970's are 10x8's and they go right up the wall. I am leaning backwards, looking up, and supporting myself from behind with the walking stick. This is killing me. I am awestruck at the gloomy beauty of the portraits. The later aspects of Henson's work that are mostly in colour get bigger and more powerful, this ethereal gloom continues right through his work.

Some of the shots are so dimly lit you can hardly see them. The subjects look damaged. Emotionally. The huge skyscapes are so immense you could fall straight into the void. All look as if they were taken on the brink of twilight.

Where do those feelings come from, Bill Henson? To produce such images of melancholy - some say they are disturbing, overrated. I say neither. I say they come from a certain time in the 1970's. I say those feelings are akin to many other people, who, like Bill Henson were feeling the same way. I felt the same way. I also took photographs and also attended Prahran Arts Building, even though it was for a very short time.

My photographs were themselves looking for that certain gloom, that beautiful sadness. Melbourne in the mid to late 1970's for me was a boring grey and awful place. Especially in winter. My Pentax spotmatic swinging from a bony shoulder, banging against my jutting hip. Always in physical pain. I took my camera everywhere. I shot roll upon roll of grainy black and white tri-x. I developed hundreds of rolls of film myself. Ratio 1:1 Kodak D76 developer. Harsh, solid blacks. Shitloads of grain. I was looking for beauty in a wasteland that was Melbourne.

Wheelan the Wrecker had destroyed anything that was culturally significant since the 1956 Olympic Games. Thanks to Bolte and a few other fuckwit Premiers of Victoria. The only thing left was Flinders Street Station and other sparse Victoriana era icons scattered here and there in the CBD grid. I took a lot of drugs then. It expanded a second sight to the realms of what I wanted to see. Of course this "sight" was always there, I just wanted to kick start it a little earlier.

Places like Brunswick Street and Smith Street Fitzroy were not the vibrant and diverse avenues of groovy eateries, cafes, specialist and fetsh clothing shops that exist today. But long corridors of empty vacant shops, bankrupt department stores closed since the sixties, now inhabited by junkies, brothels and struggling artists living in decrepit and crumbling hovels. This is the landscape and people I photographed. These influenced the feelings of imagery, which I am sure both Bill Henson and to a slightly lesser degree Carol Jerrems also felt.

It's the latter artist who was probably my greatest influence on portraiture.I was lucky enough to see probably the only retrospective exhibition of Carol Jerrems at Prahran College in 1981 - a year after her death. These grainy and technically superb photographs left a huge impact on the way I went about photographing people. To me then, seeing such well crafted photography was like looking at the work of a master alchemist. Photography was magic. I wanted to know so desperately how to acquire this magic.I know of no other retrospective that has ever been done of her work until now. The new documentary on Jerrem's life, "Girl In A Mirror" features 73 original Carol Jerrems prints, 166 new prints made from negatives in Jerrems' archive. It includes first-run footage shot by Jerrems for her own short films, "Hanging About" and "Schools Out".

Eighty to ninety percent of the photographs I took at that time are now gone. Stolen by my uncle Rodney, the fraud and conman, changing his name to Michael (my name) and claiming them as his own work.

I still continue to photograph, though without the warrior sense of adventure I once had.

Hindered by a body which refuses to do what I tell it to do. I can still see the beauty of this ethereal world around me,

both in waking dreams

and God's gift of a secondary sight.