Not unlike many successful photographers working today, photography wasn’t Nick Melidonis’ first career. After a prosperous working life with a consulting firm he co-founded, in 1999 Melidonis decided to relinquish his role as director of the company and turn his attention to his true passion, photography. His company was about to be taken over by a major university’s school of management and Melidonis says he wasn’t keen to work for a bureaucracy again.
But Melidonis’ love for photography was not sudden by any stretch. The spark had been lit during his time at university. “I was inspired by the great photo essays in magazines such as Time-Life and National Geographic,” Melidonis says. “I discovered the work of Ansel Adams and then W. Eugene Smith and Sebastião Salgado. And after that, I was hooked on landscape and documentary photography.” Melidonis says that it was the simplicity, treatment and the way these photographers saw and documented the world which had the greatest impact on him.
This story was first published in the Australian Photography + Digital April 2013 issue.
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