Pictures reach into the night
Ayoung man and woman run down a footpath at night, past a house with eerie red lights glowing through the window. Hovering in the distance, a shadowy figure peers out.
Who or what are they running towards - or away from? Who is the figure in the window?
This striking, somewhat disconcerting image is part of the Blue Room Theatre's new season campaign, One Night In Perth, which illustrates the seven shows in the 2014 program via young WA photographer Simon Pynt's unsettling, slightly surreal images.
The campaign was dreamt up by the Blue Room's creative team in a series of brainstorming exercises with two goals: to highlight the talents behind the shows (who actually feature in the final imagery) and to pique the curiosity of a wider audience. "The season program is there well before the campaign launch, so we were looking to see if there was some kind of thematic through-line," explains Blue Room producer Susannah Day. "A lot of people are really telling Australian stories, and specifically West Australian stories. We wanted to honour the storytelling and represent that in our shoot."
The images were shot over two nights around Perth, from Girrawheen and Brentwood to Maylands and Dianella (the houses of the shows' producers, writers and directors). Each photograph captures a moment in time: who are these people and what are they doing? Can we see something in these images that relates to our own experiences of suburbia?
"We didn't want the images to look too set up but we also wanted a sense of dramatic tension, for the images to pose more questions than they answer," Day says.
"The idea of someone running out from a house, for example - are they running away from a party? Are they fleeing a burning building? Are they running late for something?"
The Blue Room has had a bumper couple of seasons thanks to the popularity of the Summer Nights program and Day admits the team are beginning to think on a much bigger scale.
