Jim Anderson

I am a free lance photographer who used to joke that I was a man who snapped anything that moved or didn’t. Now, as you will see, I have become more of what is called a candid camera street photographer

I spent my early years on the family farm on the Lachlan River near Cowra but my life as a cultural figure of sorts began when as Art Editor of  London OZ magazine, I was, as one of  the OZ Three, unceremoniously thrown, with Richard Neville and Felix Dennis,  into Wormwood Scrubs jail. This was after a sensational six week trial for Conspiring ‘to corrupt the morals of children of the Realm’. This was during the summer of  1971, at the Old Bailey. We beat the conspiracy charge, but had been found guilty of publishing obscene material in our OZ28, an issue we had invited school kids to come help us edit. A few months later the High Court castigated the trial judge for many errors in law and fact in his summing up to the jury, sent him back to the country circuit, reversed the decision and we were free to edit OZ once more: which we did for a couple more years before calling it a day.  Even now, I am still being asked. “How on earth did those naked blue lesbians wind up on the cover of an OZ edited by School Kids”?

To cut a long story short, after a brain and body breakdown after the demise of OZ and subsequent months of Reichian and Primal Scream therapies on Busua Pleasure Beach in Ghana, West Africa, I was well enough to move to California. In 1975, I was invited to become editor of the Bolinas Hearsay News, Bolinas being known then as an ‘alternative’ town on the coast not far north of San Francisco. Every Monday I had to come up with an Illustration for the front cover and it was the pressure of that which led to the discovery of an aptitude for the appropriation art of collage.  The multi-layered photographic prints in this Ochredfern Gallery exhibition have all been created digitally on a laptop, but back then it was a matter of scalpel and glue.