Easy rider

Taking the bull by the horns

Featured in

  • Published 20231107
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-89-4
  • Extent: 208pp
  • Paperback, ePub, PDF, Kindle compatible

For photographer Elise Derwin, the camera is a form of connection. She’s captured everything from nudist nomads and body builders to the devastating Lismore floods of 2022 and life during lockdown, driven by the desire to explore other people’s worlds through imagery. One world she keeps returning to is that of the Professional Bull Riders circuit, where sporting skill meets spectacle in an adrenaline-fuelled battle of man versus beast. Derwin’s images, which range from action shots to behind-the-scenes stills, convey the complexity of a subculture that’s as mythologised as it is maligned.

CARODY CULVER: You specialise in documentary and editorial photography – what draws you to seek out particular people, places or stories?

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

About the author

Elise Derwin

Elise Derwin is an award-winning photographer based in Lismore, New South Wales, who specialises in documentary and editorial photography. She has also worked across...

More from this edition

Sartre’s lobsters 

Non-fictionIn The Secret Life of Lobsters (2004), Trevor Corson describes how, before the lobster’s status had sufficiently improved for affluent urbanites to desire its meat, ‘lobster’ was used derogatorily to describe British redcoats during the American Revolution and, later, dupes or fools in general.  Which brings me to Jordan Peterson.

The animal in the walls

Non-fictionScrambling the scientific assumptions of the time, fungi and fungi-like organisms also gained new cultural and symbolic meanings. They began to sprout in the claustrophobic houses of gothic fiction and the swamps of horror; in the centre of the Earth and on the distant moons of science fiction; in utopian tracts, revolutionary and anti-revolutionary literature; and in the parasitic infections of the post-apocalyptic.

Mother of pearls

FictionBut we are more animal now than we’ve ever been. We read the water that leaps into our pools; we filter all kingdoms of life through our gills. We understand that the tendrils connecting one life form to another run much longer and deeper than you might expect. And we can entertain the notion that our strange tasks were like the fateful beats of a butterfly’s wings, and maybe the witch was a rare genius, able to perceive how the purloined dog, the pawned bird or the swapped cats would, in the mysterious rippling of the universe, lead to our deepest desires coming to pass. 

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.