Stefan Gosatti at Rockefeller.
Camera IconStefan Gosatti at Rockefeller. Credit: Supplied/Andrew Ritchie

10 of photographer Stefan Gosatti’s best in PFF exhibition Clique

Tanya MacNaughtonEastern Reporter

NORTH Perth photographer Stefan Gosatti loves the hype and still gets a buzz from shooting a fashion runway show.

“And then there’s the desire to make nice images because you have pretty people dressed really nicely in front of your camera,” Gosatti said.

“That floats my boat, which is why I keep doing it. I don’t know if I’m the longest running runway photographer in the country but I’m pretty close to it. There are maybe a couple of guys on the east coast who have done it longer than me.”

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The first Perth Fashion Festival show Gosatti unofficially shot was the 2003 Fashion in the City in Murray Street Mall.

“It was on a very high platform and I rocked up in the middle of the day where all these girls were strutting around and I started shooting the show,” he said.

“I then approached some people from PFF and asked if they needed a photographer. They said ‘Sure’ and it was literally just that.

“The next day I came back and they had a little tag that said ‘Official Photographer’ with a piece of rope around it and stuck it around my neck. I started to shoot and wasn’t getting paid. The next year, 2004, was in an official capacity as a paid photographer and I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Ten of Gosatti’s best works are on display, alongside photos by Christian Blanchard and Simon Lekias, in PFF cultural program exhibition Clique: WA Fashion Through the Lens at Rockefeller, 448 Beaufort Street, Highgate, until September 21.

Gosatti, who also shoots for the West Coast Eagles, said it was hard to be limited to just 10 images and he went through a lot of hard drives of material, choosing one or two photos from PFF 2010 to 2016.

“It’s refreshed my memory of shows I’ve photographed and the ones that stand out are Jaime Lee’s shows and Empire Rose because they’re just so colourful and creative,” he said.

“I feel like I went for more colourful shots and I always like big fashion, big garments where the models do something with the fashion they’re wearing rather than what I call straight down the line stuff.

“Five or six years is quite a long time in fashion and I hope people see the history in that or some kind of evolution.”

Gosatti, who returns to photograph this year’s PFF, said his photography career got off to a slow start after an initial ambition as a teenager growing up in Dianella to photograph surfing.

“Then as life rolled on at 17 and 18, I met girls, I met my future wife, the realities of life kicked in and I couldn’t make any money as a photographer,” he said.

“My father told me that was enough and I went to work for him in the family woodworking furniture manufacturing business. The photography bug came back around 1996 when I started to pick up a camera again. It was still film back then; there was snippets of digital and my first digital camera was 1 mega pixel. I decided to retire from the family business in 2000 and pursue photography and here we are.”

Community Newspaper Group has two double passes to give away to PFF’s International Runway on September 15 at Crown Pyramid. Enter here by 10am, August 25.

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