Paul Dodd Chair Project

Melbourne photographer Paul Dodd asked me to take part in his photo project The Chair. I was one of 40-odd subjects, each photographed in his studio, seated on the same chair, under identical lighting conditions, and captured in timeless black and white. We were encouraged to wear something true to ourselves and could bring a single personal item that reflected our identity or story.

The people Paul photographed included an acrobat, several models, a mime, a pole dancer, an anti-duck shooting campaigner (got to approve of that), a bird photographer (several more of Paul’s subjects were involved in birding occupations), a conservationist/ environmentalist, a restaurateur, an orchestra conductor, a film maker, a caterer, a flamenco guitarist and a rock guitarist and a punk rocker, plus a number of photographers of different types.

◄ We could each choose our own pose and rather than sitting on the chair I decided to stand on it, looking towards something on the horizon and holding the notebook that travels with me most of the time. Yeah, I also takes notes on my phone, but I really prefer to write things down initially.

◄ Of course any ‘person on a chair’ photograph of this type is going to remind you of Australian Lewis Morley’s photographic portrait of Christine Keeler, the star of Britain’s infamous ‘Profumo Affair’ sex scandal. Ms Keeler died in 2017, aged 75, but the 1963 photo is one of the iconic images of the 1960s. The photograph and the chair are both part of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection in London and it’s usually pointed out that although it looks like it the chair is not an original Arne Jacobsen design, Morley thinks he may have bought the chair, a cheap copy of the iconic original, in a Heal’s furniture store. Paul Dodd’s chair came from Ikea although it may have been even cheaper if indeed he picked it up from a roadside.

Supposedly Lewis Morley’s photo session with Christine Keeler took all of five minutes and that was about all the time it took for Paul to photograph me. It took rather longer for me to answer the questions for the interview which followed each of his photo sessions. Here’s my interview but click here for the projects website and then ‘subjects’ for all the other people and their photographs and interviews:

Q: Thank you for sitting—and standing—for me, Tony. When you were at school, did you have any sense of how your life would turn out? What was the plan back then?
A: I was a very standard kid. I was going to be a pilot. My father was a pilot—RAF in World War II and then a pilot trainer. After the war he did his pilot training in Canada, went back to the UK, and when they dumped all the RAF pilots he got a job with BOAC, who promptly sent him to Pakistan. I followed soon after. I was born in the UK, but I was brought up in Pakistan, the Bahamas, and the United States. My first five years were in Pakistan—pretty good way to get a travel bug started.

Like any pre-teen, my ambitions were vague—pilot or something glamorous like that. But I was fascinated by places. My kids tease me because when I was about eight, what I wanted most for Christmas was a globe, so I could spin it and look at all the countries. The next thing I wanted was a filing cabinet to store all the information. Looking back, I was already on the way to being a travel publisher.

Q: When did you first really start travelling?
A: Properly? I always say you can’t call it your first travel experience if it’s with your parents. That’s not really travel, that’s being taken somewhere. But for a piece I wrote for a British paper, they wanted an early trip, so I dug out a family holiday to Italy when I was about 15. I even found old photos. Still, my real “first travel” in my mind is when I went off during university vacations, travelling under my own steam.

I’m a big believer in the gap year. Young people going off by themselves, doing something slightly intrepid—that’s where the real learning happens. There was a case in the UK recently where a woman let her 15- or 16-year-old son and his mate go off with Eurail passes, staying in youth hostels, and she got absolutely trashed for it. People calling her a bad parent. I thought she was brilliant. Kids learn more in that year—finishing school and travelling, even somewhere like Australia—than they do in their last five years of school or the next two of university. We’ve become such a nanny state.

Q: When you started travelling, the world was a very different place. You could go to Afghanistan, for example.
A: Yes, absolutely. Our first book came out of travelling through places like Afghanistan along what later became known as the Hippie Trail. We never called it that—we called it the Asia Overland Route. At the time it was perfectly okay to travel through Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, all of that.

It’s a shame how much has changed. But some things are still possible. Just today a friend of mine who organises trips is taking a group to Afghanistan to visit the Minaret of Jam—right in the middle of nowhere, incredibly dramatic. When Maureen and I first went to Afghanistan in ’72, we didn’t know about it until we saw a tourist office poster. We didn’t have the time to go then, but it stuck in my mind. When I went back in 2006, I finally got there. It was amazing.

Q: Are you still travelling a lot now?
A: Yes. I’m disappointed if a year goes by and I don’t visit at least one new country. I’ve got friends who’ve been to every country on earth—I’m not in that club—but I’ve been to a lot. If I don’t add somewhere new each year, I feel like I’ve slacked off. Last year I went to South Sudan and Nigeria. This year I’ve ticked off Jamaica, Seychelles, Mauritius, Réunion, and Algeria—five new countries. Next year? I don’t know yet. I’ll think of something.

Q: I don’t want to rehash the whole Lonely Planet story—that’s well documented. What’s life been like since Lonely Planet?
A: We sold, we left, and we moved into a lot of other things. Maureen’s very involved in music and opera—she supports a young artist programme with Opera Australia and various other opera projects.

We’re both involved with the Wheeler Centre here in Melbourne. I’ve got a project with Warwick University—where I was an undergraduate—around travel writing and history. So there’s a mix of philanthropic, cultural, and academic things.

We still travel, of course. Maureen travels less than I do. None of those five countries this year did she come to. She was off on an opera thing in France while I was in Jamaica. The rest I did either solo or with friends. There’s no shortage of things to do. I hate when people say they’re bored. If I find myself watching too much television, that’s the danger sign.

Q: You mentioned Maureen watching Korean dramas…
A: Yes—Korean soap operas. They’re amazingly popular. It started with one called Crash Landing on You. I watched that one. It’s about a wealthy South Korean businesswoman who goes hang gliding to promote a fashion line, gets caught in a gale-force wind and blown across the border into North Korea. She literally lands on a North Korean army patrol, falls in love with one of the soldiers, and over 14 episodes he tries to sneak her back to South Korea. It got a lot of attention because it showed North Korea in a more nuanced light than usual—still obviously controlled, but more human.

Q: Have you been to North Korea yourself?
A: I have. It’s the weirdest country I’ve ever visited. Turkmenistan is the second weirdest. Both are visually remarkable—photographers would love them. North Korea is very strict, but in odd ways. They’ll stop you photographing something mundane, but let you shoot something extraordinary without a second thought. You can actually take a lot of photos there. You can’t really go independently—you need a local operator. There’s a British guy based in Beijing who is essentially the “man with the key to the door.” I joined one of his trips—the most extensive one he’d done at that point—two weeks, all over the country. Everyone on the trip was a travel nut.

Just before COVID I went to Socotra, an island that technically belongs to Yemen but is closer to Somalia. It’s called the Galápagos of the Indian Ocean—not so much for animals, but for its plants: dragon’s blood trees and all sorts of strange vegetation. Another trip that attracts nutcases. There were seven or eight of us.

We just made it in before COVID really hit, then had to scramble to get home. I landed back in Australia the day before the borders shut.

Q: What does the future look like for you now?
A: Personally? I’m going to live a little bit longer and then die. I’m very old—or at least I say I am. I’m about to turn 79. But I plan to keep doing things and keep travelling. I have a tendency to say yes to everything; Maureen tends to say no to everything—unless there’s opera at the end of it. So I get myself into all sorts of adventures, and I intend to keep doing exactly that.

Q: Looking back over everything, do you have any regrets?
A: There are always little things: moments where you think, “I wish I hadn’t said that,” or “Oh God, that was embarrassing.” But overall? No.I’ve had a really good life. I’ve been incredibly lucky. Some people say, “The harder I work, the luckier I get,” and there’s truth in that. There was hard work, but there was also timing. As a boomer, I caught an incredible wave: long-haul travel expanding, jumbo jets arriving, people starting to venture further afield. I was lucky enough to get on that wave and ride it.

I’m proud of what we built. Lonely Planet was an Australian business that became globally recognised, which I love. It helped travellers, helped small hotels and guesthouses, helped staff who often say it was the best job they ever had.

It was an inherently positive business. Not a casino, not something exploitative—just something that encouraged people to see the world. We’ve still got a shelf full of Lonely Planet guides at home. I still use them. No regrets.

◄ And another chair, when Lonely Planet’s Journeys travel literature series launched in the 1990s we used this chair as an indicator that the series was all about armchair travel.