PETER DARREN MOYLE

By Nick O'Malley

From a vantage point on Sydney's streets, from squats and council flats, Peter Darren Moyle has spent the past decade photographing the city from the ground down.

His work, shown publicly for the first time at Photo Technica earlier this year, has been compared to that of two of America's most famous chroniclers of alienation and mayhem, Diane Arbus and the so-called Murder Inc photographer, Weegee.

Moyle's portrayal of Sydney began in 1991 when he fell in with a crowd of itinerants living at Mrs Macquarie's chair, having left country Victoria when he fell out with the local cop after a neighbour shot his dog.

He arrived in a VW van with a medium-format camera, half a welding apprenticeship, a string of odd jobs and a year of photography classes under his belt. He quickly met a retired biker who took him to the Cross to meet crew that used hang around in front. Each night Moyle would leave the van and hit the streets with his camera, learning the city.

After a year, he moved into a squat in Darlinghurst's Wisdom Lane with Pedro Pedretti, an Italian immigrant 40 years his senior, one of those who came off the ship and never made past the city. The two soon built a father-son relationship. ``He was a great man, I was honoured to be invited to live with him,'' Moyle recalls. ``Wisdom Lane used to be volatile, you used to get murders going on, bikies, a fucking crazy sex scene of a night-time with the trannies from William Street.''

During his five years at Wisdom Lane Moyle developed the working pattern he has stuck to since: snatching sleep and queuing at soup kitchens through the day, taking photos at night and early morning. When he managed to scrounge chemicals and printing paper, the squat became a dark room; an old enlarger was powered by electricity filched from street lights, prints were washed in water drawn from a tap behind a brothel.

As the curator of Moyle's exhibition, photographer and Sydney Morning Herald critic Robert Macfarlane, points out: ``Just the mechanics of taking photographs while living in those circumstances, let alone printing them, is difficult. It's incredible he's managed it for so long.'' But Moyle rarely questioned what he was doing. ``I've always known what I was doing was important. It was just a matter of time [until the work was recognised]. These are people who need a spokesman, and I'm willing to do it, to go and get the information. It's almost like being a war correspondent the people back home get to see what's really happening.''

Today Moyle, whose life and work are the subject of a documentary being shot, lives in a Woolloomooloo council flat. He has a constant stream of visitors, many of whom many if whom find there way in front of his lens. Documentary director Sascha Ettinger-Epstein explains, ``His flat is the first port of call for his friends out of jail. There is always a prostitute who needs a roof crashed on the couch. He's as much a social worker as a photographer.''

As McFarlane observes, ``His photos are essentially about pain ... but everything he photographs he has experienced. Look at the photo of Chris. He is absolutely vulnerable, but comfortable with having PDM take his photograph.''

PDM is not unaware that his life and background grant access that is simply not there for other photographers. ``They have to hide in their car with a long lens and steal their images, like a sniper. I'm out there on the street, I just have to take them.''