Risk-taking and seeing the world anew at 50

Alex Frayne on film, Manifest Destiny and creative reinvention

Interview by Olivia Williams

Turning fifty has a way of sharpening perspective, especially when you’re looking through a lens. For acclaimed South Australian photographer Alex Frayne, the milestone coincides with Manifest Destiny, a bold new exhibition premiering at ILA | Immersive Light and Art as part of the 2026 Adelaide Festival.

Blending analogue film photography with 3D digital environments and original composition, Manifest Destiny unfolds across three journeys through the United States. The project interrogates the mythology of modern America, its contradictions, beauty and fractures, while quietly holding up a mirror to Australia’s own national identity.

For Frayne, age hasn’t brought certainty so much as adaptability. “It’s not just every milestone year or decade that passes,” he says. “It’s every day that passes when I’m forced to shift how I see my work… tomorrow you might re-evaluate everything artistically depending on what you might see, hear or experience today.” Photography, he adds, is inherently social, “just as jazz is social music.”

That sense of responsiveness is sharpened by decades behind the camera. Frayne describes the photographic eye as a “visual memory”, a muscle strengthened with every image made. “Each time I take a photo I’m exercising that muscle,” he explains, allowing instinct to guide the work more quickly and precisely. His continued commitment to manual film cameras plays a role here too. By avoiding digital menus and distractions, “my mind isn’t cluttered with new technology that’s hard to navigate by design.”

Reinvention, a theme resonant for many readers in their fifties and beyond, is something Frayne approaches with characteristic bluntness. “Reinvention for me involves a sense of adventure; high adventure even!” he says. Risk, he believes, is inseparable from creative life, “being risky, profligate, irrational and sometimes counterintuitive.” His advice is equally direct: “Avoid the 24-hour news cycle… If you buy into that you won’t leave your own house.”

The United States has long fascinated Frayne, and Manifest Destiny is his most sustained engagement with the country to date. “The exhibition interrogates and examines America through my cameras and asks the question: What is this place and what has it become?” Rather than offering neat moral binaries, the work asks Australian audiences to see America honestly and, in doing so, reflect on themselves. Frayne and his partner Katie drove across the West and Deep South, photographing as they went. “America fascinates me… I’ve never seen anything like it.”

What they encountered was a nation marked by stark contradiction. “Especially in the deep south I saw whole areas that are kind of ‘failed states’ with no industry and huge swathes of poverty,” he says. “America projects strength but is like a huge wounded animal.” And yet, beauty persists. “The South is quiet and beautiful despite all this… laced with the sounds of gospel and jazz and funk, music which was exported to the world.”

While Frayne works across analogue and digital forms, his loyalty to film remains firm. “It is not nostalgia,” he insists. “It’s simply down to quality.” Film, he says, “outguns digital in all the metrics that count.” Crucially, developing and scanning his own negatives gives him “control over all aspects of the craft”, something he sees as essential to artistic integrity.

Audience reactions, he notes, are often instinctive rather than technical. Interestingly, younger viewers don’t see analogue as retro at all. “They see it as new!” he says, a reminder that innovation often lies in rediscovery.

For Frayne, the greatest lesson of a long creative career is clear. “The great lesson is in acquiring the ability to take huge, counterintuitive risks,” he says. “Without risk, your life in the arts will be dull and horrid.” As for legacy? “Photography is the ultimate legacy artform… and at 50, there’s a long way to go.”