Why Great Portraits Require Risk
“Great portraits don’t come from playing it safe. I’m not there to take an ordinary photograph. I’m there to take something dangerous, risky and bold. You’ve got to walk the high wire – take risks, push past the ordinary – and that’s how you get a shot that still resonates 30 years later.”
That line is about photography, but it could just as easily be about leadership.
Because a portrait is never just one person’s work. It is always a collaboration – between photographer and subject, between trust and risk, between what is revealed and what is held back. And that same truth runs through every successful leader and organisation I’ve ever seen.
Creating conditions for others to succeed
In a portrait session, the best images come when the person in front of the lens feels free enough to be themselves. My role is to create the conditions for that to happen – space, trust, and a willingness to risk failure in pursuit of something extraordinary.
Leadership is no different. True leaders don’t impose control – they create the conditions for others to bring their best selves forward.
The quiet details matter most
In photography, it’s often not the grand gestures that make an image endure. It’s the quiet details: a gesture of the hand, a hesitation before someone speaks, the moment when someone’s guard drops.
Culture inside an organisation works the same way. It’s rarely the big set-piece speeches that define trust or collaboration – it’s the daily tone, the way people are treated in small moments, the way truth is allowed to show itself.
Trust as the foundation
A portrait is impossible without trust. People know if you’re just there to “take” something. But if they sense you’re present with them – that the process is shared – then something real emerges.
In leadership, authentic connection builds the same kind of trust. It’s what allows teams, institutions and even nations to move past performance and into substance.
Don Dunstan - Norwood, Adelaide. 1993. Collection of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia.
A living record of collaborative truth
The portraits I’ve made – of Don Dunstan, Julia Gillard, Sir Donald Bradman, Kylie Minogue and many others – endure not because of technique alone, but because of the collaboration they represent. Each image is a record of two people meeting at a moment in time, stepping into the unknown together, and revealing something true.
That is also what leadership at its best looks like. Not control, not safety, but the courage to risk, to collaborate, and to create something that still resonates decades later.
That’s the spirit behind The Sellick Archive – a living record of who we are, and the truths we can only reach when we walk the high wire together.
Robin Sellick’s portraits are held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, the State Library of South Australia and the National Library of Australia.