I took this portrait of Elizabeth Ann Macgregor the other week. She’s the Director of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. It was to accompany an interview Time Out Sydney was doing with her to coincide with the Biennale of Sydney.

I took along some lights and Craig for some assistance. After scouting around the MCA for a bit we decided the best and most obvious place to photograph Ms Macgregor would be underneath the taxidermied horse which has become a focal point for the Biennale. It’s a work called Novecento by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.

After firing off some test shots with Craig we waited for Elisabeth to arrive. I ended up shuffling the lighting at the last minute to make the back light more even and add a bit of a hair halo effect. After she arrived i snapped off about a dozen shots and it wall all done and dusted.

You can read the interview here.

About the complaints the dead horse has drawn she states,

“People get quite hot under the collar about animals and they’re wearing leather shoes! Novecento is a dead animal – a horse that died of old age and would have ended up at the knackery. Yet as art it’s an extraordinary piece – the immobility of it, the fact it’s looking back at the 20th century and the revolutions that went nowhere. Nobody complains about the stuffed hide of Phar Lap.”