David Porter

In the early 1970s David Porter was a contributing photographer for some of the most influential Australian Rock music and underground publications of the day including Go-Set, Daily/Planet, Rolling Stone (Australian Edition), and The Digger. Based in Melbourne, Porter’s focus was the zeitgeist of that city’s Rock/Pop music, underground theatre, and counterculture scenes.

With a shrewd eye for subject and story, Porter documented the energy of the 70s, and the pressing political, social, and cultural issues of the day in Australia – conscription, the war in Vietnam, women’s liberation, sex, drugs, the counterculture, and music. David Porter used different by-lines for competing publications. For some the photo attribution was “David Porter,” for others “Jacques L’Affrique” or “Jack Africa,” sometimes there was no by-line. 

There is great humility in David Porter’s work. His observational depth, and his ability to capture candid moments of honesty and sensuality equals that of Australian peers Carol Jerrems and Rennie Ellis, and the American Annie Leibovitz with whom he sometimes shared the pages of Rolling Stone magazine’s Australian edition. Porter’s career was a short three years. 

Inexplicably, in 1973 he turned his back on photography and left Melbourne for good. 

From hundreds of photographic prints and thousands of negatives three hundred photographs were selected that best explored the energy of the period 1971/72 – with a focus on international Rock acts, Australian bands, festivals, counterculture aka ‘head’ venues, and audiences.

In May 2003 Unreal Rock: The Photographs of Jacques L’Affrique (aka David Porter) opened at Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of The Lewers Bequest (and subsequently toured to galleries and museums in Sydney, Melbourne, and regional NSW until June 2010).
 
At each venue audiences delighted in the work. Older visitors were stirred by the recollection of their youth, music, politics, and rebellion. What intrigued and amused younger audiences was the fashion and wildness of the period, and how different the country seemed.

David Porter didn’t see his photographs as art. His interest was reportage; semiotically, his photographs were semaphores as to what was happening around him. Even the most anodyne images carried layers of depth and prescient observation. Importantly, Porter’s photographs act as talismans as to what went down in the 1970s and the significant role Rock and popular music, alternative performance, and youth culture played as the times changed.

In 2009 David Porter donated all prints exhibited in Unreal Rock: The Photographs of Jacques L’Affrique (aka David Porter) to the Collection of Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of The Lewers Bequest. Sadly, it is believed David Porter died c. 2015. Exact dates and details are currently unclear.

In 2021 the Penrith Regional Gallery undertook a two-year of process of researching, re-cataloguing, and digitising the collection. Working on-line, in the gallery’s archives, and the research stacks of The NSW State Library and the National Library of Australia the provenance, events and subjects of Porter’s works was properly identified, checked, and recorded. What emerged was further confirmation as to the cultural significance, aesthetic integrity, and historic value of the Porter photographs.
 
This process of curatorial exploration and re-assessment gave proper credit to a unique photographic recording of political, social, and cultural shifts in Australia as it moved from the seemingly never-ending twilight of the 1950s to the excitement of the 1970s. Likewise, it honoured a photographer who had produced an extraordinary photographic archive of Australian Rock music at moments of radical change.