Made in collaboration with women working in St Kilda’s street sex industry, Red Light Dark Room combines photography, interviews and first-person material to push against the usual documentary arrangement in which a photographer arrives, extracts an image, and leaves with authorship intact.

Turnbull began the project through an Australia Council residency with St Kilda Gatehouse, but increasingly shifted control toward the women themselves, teaching photographic skills and incorporating their own images and accounts into the finished work. It is a collaborative portrait of its social world: money, children, violence, safety, stigma, intimacy, ordinary domestic life; particularly insightful on the gap between public stereotype and the administrative reality of a life.

The photographs range from Turnbull’s portraits to participant-made images and handwritten observations, while the interviews retain the texture of individual speech rather than being flattened into commentary. A genuinely interesting document of St Kilda, but also of the ethical arguments around documentary photography itself. 

Self-published, Melbourne, 2011. First edition. Hardcover. Illustrated pictorial boards; extensively illustrated throughout in colour. Light shelf wear and rubbing to boards, with some wear at spine ends and corners; otherwise very well preserved. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.