Peter Leiss

Peter Leiss (born 1951) is an Australian photographer, filmmaker, actor, and producer whose work spans documentary, staged sequences, and stills photography for feature films. His photography practice has participated in the evolution in Australia from documentary and craft toward a more conceptual and intermedial art form, while he contributed also to avant-garde theatre.

Early life and training Peter Leiss was born in London in 1951 to Czech parents, sales clerk Alena Luise, and Eugene, a businessman, and was the brother of Eugen. He spent his early childhood in Tokyo, before migrating to Australia in his youth. During his student years, he produced photographic essays and short films. Graham Howe, Mimmo Cozzolino and Phil Quirk. The Enneagram Series (circa 1978), a series of staged, diagrammatic portraits exploring psychological types.

Filmmaker and film actor Leiss acted Lyautey's adjudant in Isabelle Eberhardt (1991), the army sergeant in The Garth Method (2004), as Dr Peter Wilmott in a 1997 episode of the TV series State Coroner, and a prison officer on another TV episode Good Guys, Bad Guys 1997), in Black Box (1998), then as himself in Unfolding Florence: The Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst (2006).

In 2005 Leiss, with Esben Storm, directed and filmed the docudrama The bridge at midnight trembles, conceived by Leiss, which starred Richard Moir as himself in a struggle with Parkinson's Disease.

Theatre Leiss's "subtle and sardonic manner" as "a self-amused teacher on the down-side of life" opposite Ann Shulman in Educating Rita at the MIllbrook Playhouse Cabaret was hailed by critic Jim Runkle in 1985. Leiss played a painter in Franco Marinai's 1988 experimental film Mock Gravity, which used hand-drawing on film stock for sequences representing flashbacks and the actors' thoughts, and it was shown at 26th annual Ann Arbor Film Festival, and chosen for the 1988 Melbourne International Film Festival.

Leiss on return to Australia in 1995 was a co-founder of WAX Studios Inc. in Richmond and over 1996–2000 designed the sets for Cowboy Mouth (1997), and acted in productions including a September 1997 Harold Pinter double bill, The Dumb Waiter and The Lover of which reviewer Helen Thomson wrote: Peter Leiss as Ben and Robert Corner as Gus give fine performances, creating the complex rhythms, the unexplained gaps, the shocking ordinariness necessary to build up the play’s suspense and give its conclusion the maximum shock impact.

On 25 August 1999 Antarctica Starts Here written by Leiss opened at Wax Studios.

Exhibitions, reception and legacy From the 1970s onward, Leiss’s work has been shown in both solo and group exhibitions in Australia, where he exhibited several times at The Photographers' Gallery and Workshop, Brummels Gallery, the Performing Arts Museum and elsewhere, and in the United States (1989).

In recent years, his work has been included in the major exhibition The Basement: Photography from Prahran College (1968–1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, curated to reassess the pioneering and continuing contributions of Prahran’s photography alumni.

Critical reception of his photography has varied: admirers note his formal precision and poetic framing, while detractors sometimes question whether the body of work accumulates into a sufficiently distinct signature. Beatrice Faust, in an early review noted Leiss’s ongoing involvement in documenting the Prahran community. Through interviews and archival efforts he has contributed to the history of Australian photography.

Collections

National Gallery of Australia Joyce Evans Archive, National Library of Australia Josef Lebovic gallery, Sydney.