John Ogden

John "Oggy" Ogden is an Australian photographer, cinematographer, writer and publisher, whose wide-ranging career has encompassed producing television commercials, international documentary making, music video production, drama, and fine art photography.

Early life Ogden, also known as Oggy, was born in South Australia of Anglo-Irish descent, His work with imagery associated with Aboriginal Australians resulted in the books Australienation (1999), and Portraits From A Land Without People, released in 2009 to coincide with the first anniversary of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to Australia's Indigenous peoples. After graduating in 1979, Ogden began his career in filmmaking and advertising.

Work in film and documentary Ogden credits his documentary filmmaking experience with giving him a good sense of natural lighting, as well as the invaluable experience of witnessing how real people behave in a variety of situations. criticising the near genocide of the Aboriginal populations by the colonial immigrants, and subsequent culture clash, Ogden's 2008/9 work Portraits From A Land Without People is considered to be the most comprehensive pictorial history of the Aboriginal people of Australia produced, honouring fully the Aboriginal cultural code which requires permission to be granted by each individual in every picture. In his foreword to Slightly Dangerous, photographer Tim Page writes: "This is a life well travelled, of a baby boomer who surfs an existential path across six decades, waxing the best of nostalgia against the odds that are self mitigated by the excesses of those times. It is a heritage of the hippest, most gonzo ‘down-under’ attitudes, rendered by images we all wish we had snapped. As if Hunter S. Thompson and Richard Neville shuffled photo cards with Robert Frankian images throughout the deck".