Professional Photography has been Milton’s working life.
After failing year 11 twice at Brighton High School, he started work as an apprentice letter press printer in 1968. His father Dick Wordley a well known Australian Journalist was living in Sydney at the time and had no knowledge of Milton leaving school.
When he did find out he was as they say “less than pleased with the decision”.
Dick thought it was a stupid decision and believed letter press printers had no future. He told Milton at the time ”If it doesn’t work out News Ltd have a policy of employing family”. Rupert Murdoch had once worked with Dick.
Milton lasted about three months at the printer.
The boss came in one day and said “Are you going to resign before your three months is up and that way it won’t go on your reference or am I going to fire you ?”
Milton took his Dad’s advice and went to the Adelaide News as a copy boy, started studying photography at the South Australian Institute of Technology on North Terrace, bottom of the class in theory and top in practice.
He remembers working in the picture gram room and being the first person in Adelaide to see the moon landing images when he took them of the picture gram machine.
His first published photograph was of a hang man on the News Ltd North Terrace building site which ran on Friday March 29th 1969. He was offered a cadetship at the local Messenger Newspapers where he worked for a year or so before moving to Sydney at the ripe old age of 19.
From there he worked as a photojournalist on many Newspapers, including The Sunday Australian, the London Evening Standard & Daily Express, where on August 4th 1975, he captured the first streaker at Lords with his hand in exactly the right spot. On returning to Austalia in 1976 he freelanced for the Australian Womens Weekly, the Bulletin and the National Daily ‘The Australian’.
In 1981 he was one of the 100 of the world’s leading photojournalists to be invited to shoot for the book ‘A Day in the Life of Australia’. His image of the bowler at the Kangaroo Island, Pardana Bowling club became one of the most published images of the book.
Milton has been committed to the Photographic Industry for many years. He was the inaugural National President of the Australian Society of Advertising, Commercial and Magazine Photographers (ACMP) in 1990 and been involved on many other national committees, including the AIPP Mentoring program, the old AJA National Freelance committee and the Australian Professional Photography awards. He was the Chairman of the ‘Fuji ACMP Photographers Collection’.
Milton established Southlight Photo Agency in the early 1980’s as a cooperative for freelance photographers.
Over the years many highly regarded photographers based themselves at Southlight’s purpose built Studio in the heart of Adelaide.
But as the Dylan song goes, ‘The times they are a changin’ , and like everything else, photographers and the photographic industry must move with the times.
Early in 2005 Milton closed down the large studio and continued to work like many others nowadays from home.
In 2012 he worked on a major project ‘A year in the life of Grange’ and in 2013 self published a book of the same name that went on to win International awards .
He retired himself from professional photography in 2017.
Being a lover of wine, he has often observed the people who make wine as interesting as the wine they create, he started a wine blog ‘People of Wine’.
He’s still involved, occasionally teaching at the CCP and mentoring young photographers.
He now lives at Aldinga Beach in the McLaren Vale wine region of South Australia.
