Family Photography Pictures: Australian Photography

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Thursday, July 30, 2020

Photography art Gallery Friday Round Up - 6 June, 2014|Photography Art Definition

This week on Friday Round Up four new exhibitions for Melbourne; more news from the Auckland Festival of Photography; and an interview with Italian photo-artist Valentina Vannicola in the new Q&A section above. Plus Head On Photo Festival closes this weekend in Sydney and Australian high-end photography book publisher T&G Publishing launches Jean-Marc Caimi’s new book Daily Bread in Sweden and Japan.

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Exhibition: - Melbourne

Three Shows at Edmund Pearce

Christian Pearson – Industrial Graffiti

Photographer Christian Pearson, who is from Melbourne, says the works that comprise "Industrial Graffiti" aim to convey an “unconscious aesthetic created by labourers, technicians and engineers during the construction of our urban built environment”.

Defining the concept of ‘industrial graffiti’ Pearson says his images capture what appear as random markings on industrial sites, squiggles, letters, numbers, scrawled in different colours on metal, wood, plastic and over paint.

“The marking is an ephemeral part of a process that ultimately leads to the creation of a new, functional and aesthetic objective,” Pearson states. Like some graffiti, these markings appear defacements when in fact they are codes that guide those erecting our cities. This exhibition is an interesting visual study on a form of communication known to few.

Also on show at Edmund Pearce:

Tim Gresham – Reflect

Shannon McGrath - Fraction

Edmund Pearce

Level 2, Nicholas Building

37 Swanston Street,

Melbourne

Until 28 June

Exhibition: Melbourne

Tom Williams – Portside

Often the most powerful photographic stories are those you find in your own backyard. Tom Williams has spent years abroad capturing other cultures and building a career in documentary portraiture. On returning to Australia and the town of Wollongong, (near Sydney) Williams turned his focus on the local population and how the failing industrial economy was impacting residents.

In his exhibition “Portside” are images taken in Port Kembla and Wollongong, both places that have made their mark through the mining and shipping industries. Williams says he found Wollongong a shadow of its former self with those formerly engaged in industrial jobs now joining the ranks of the unemployed.

“The postcard coastline parallels one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Australia,” he says. “As a photographer I’m always asking: what do surfaces say about what’s hidden behind them? What attracts me to making portraits is the brief and intense interaction that results in an image that speaks of the subject, the picture-taker; and sometimes, the place. In the end you can only try to guess at the magnificent complexity and consciousness beneath the outer layer – this is something that keeps us looking at photographs.”

Colour Factory

409-429 Gore Street

Fitzroy

Book Launch:

Jean-Marc Caimi – Daily Bread

I’ll say it upfront. I am biased as I was the editor on this new book by Jean-Marc Caimi “Daily Bread”, and of course I love it. Publisher Gianni Frinzi of T&G Publishing has once again done a brilliant job bringing this book to life. It launched in Sweden last week at Caimi’s exhibition of the same name. You can buy Daily Bread by following the link here.

Daily Bread also launches at the exhibition’s opening in Tokyo at Reminders Photography Stronghold (RPS) on June 14. Caimi is the fourth recipient of the RPS Grant, which he was awarded for Daily Bread.

Launch: Saturday, June 14 at 4:00pm

2-38-5

Higashi-mukojima

Sumida, Tokyo 131-0032

Festival:

Head On Photo Festival

Head On Photo Festival ends this weekend. Check out the website to see what shows are still on

Showing Now for Head On

Valentina Vannicola's Dante's Inferno - until 8 June

Click on the Feature Articles tab above to read Alison Stieven-Taylor's interview with Valentina about this meticulous and thought-provoking work.

Festival:

Selected Exhibitions – Part Two:

Auckland Festival of Photography

Signature Exhibitions - Alison Stieven-Taylor’s Selection

Last week Photojournalism Now previewed some of the exhibitions on show in the first week of the Auckland Festival of Photography. This week Photojournalism Now takes a look at two exhibitions – one showing now and the other opening 12 June. Both present very different approaches to this year’s Signature Series’ theme -memory. There is also a photo-gallery with images from Rob Gilhooly’s “Suicide Forest” and Emil McAvoy’s “Reflections on Lily Pond”.

Showing Now

Auschwitz Revisited

Melbourne-based photographer Bronek Kozka’s “Auschwitz Revisited” is a contemporary portrait of a landscape that will be remembered in the annals of history as the site of one of the darkest moments of humankind. "Standing in the bitter cold looking to a foggy horizon and seeing what looked like columns, but they were chimneystacks for as far as I could see. One chimney, one hut...the magnitude of the horror dawned on me at this moment. I didn’t want to take any photographs at first...however at some point I decided to shoot. It was here that the most frightening and daunting revelation occurred to me. How close my family was to Auschwitz...how all could have ended here." This is how Kozka describes his experience visiting Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland where he found himself on a personal exploration into his Polish heritage. His black and white images weave his own story with the somberness of the landscape and its open wounds.

Auschwitz Revisited

Bronek Kozka

4-21 June

Elam George Fraser Gallery

University of Auckland

25a Princes Street

Auckland

Opens 12 June

Unruly Memoirs: Nature Fights Back

In “Unruly Memoirs: Nature Fights Back” Christchurch-based artist Jane Zusters examines the aftermath of that city’s recent devastating earthquakes in a series of “geopolitical montages”. In this collection of digital images Zusters combines images of external and internal spaces to pose unlikely realms where the ceiling of a library may be blue sky and clouds, or the wall to a bedroom open to the street. These images while somewhat surreal are also situated in reality, reminders of the impermanence of structures and their perceived safety especially when faced by the power of Mother Nature.

12-28 June

Sanderson Contemporary Art

122 Jervois Road

Herne Bay

Suicide Forest

Rob Gilhooly

4-17 June

Hum Salon

123 Grafton Road

Grafton

(Read last week's blog post for the story on this exhibition)

Emil McAvoy

Reflections on Lily Pond

11 June - 21 June

ELAM Projectspace Gallery, Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland, 20 Whitaker Place

Photoforum: History in The Taking; 40 years (6-28 June)

Gus Fisher Gallery

74 Shortland Street

For details visit Auckland Festival of Photography

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Photography art Gallery Friday Round Up - 13 June, 2014|Photography Art Definition

This week Friday Round Up features an historical theme. There are stories on two iconic American photographers who began their careers in the 1960s - Mary Ellen Mark and Danny Lyon, plus The Sievers Project (Melbourne), and a look at two massive photography archives that are now available online - the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and The Open Society Foundations. A visual feast.

Interview

Mary Ellen Mark

American photographer Mary Ellen Mark has been taking pictures for more than 50 years. In May the Stills Gallery in Sydney hosted her first solo exhibition in Australia featuring a number of images from the eighties and nineties including some shot for National Geographic in 1987 for a story on Australian Immigrants.

More recently she’s worked in Australia as a stills photographer on three of Baz Luhrmann’s films – ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘Moulin Rouge’ in Sydney, and ‘Australia’ in the remote town of Kununurra in Western Australia, 3,040 kilometres (1,889 miles) from Perth. I can tell by the way Mark pronounces” Kun-un-urra” that she is still savouring that quintessential Australian outback experience. Of her time with Baz and his multi-Oscar winning wife Catherine ‘CM’ Martin she says, “Great people, brilliant”.

Internationally Mark is equally renowned for her film stills as well her documentary photography and she’s managed to successfully live in both worlds without losing her visual signature. She is credited with shooting more than 50 films including ‘Tootsie,’ ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ ‘Apocalypse Now’ and Fellini’s ‘Satyricon’. Mark tells me these commissions, and her magazine work, have funded her personal projects, which lie at the heart of her photographic practice...(to read the full interview and see more photographs please click on the Feature Articles tab at the top of the blog).

Book:

Danny Lyon - The Seventh Dog

“The Seventh Dog” is the first retrospective monograph from American documentary photographer Danny Lyon. This book is as much a visual diary as it is a personal recollection, with images and anecdotes interwoven throughout in an intimate portrayal of what Lyon has seen over the last fifty years.

And it’s also a rollicking good read that is moved along by Lyon’s humour and his frankness. Unafraid of controversy, and throwing caution to the wind, Lyon plunged headlong into life using his camera to try and make sense of what was around him. Photography may be a lonely pursuit, as Robert Frank said, but the gems that live within the pages of The Seventh Dog could not have been taken without a single-minded focus...(to read full review and see more photographs please click on the Book Reviews tab at the top of the blog).

Exhibition: Melbourne

The Sievers Project - Group Show

Gerard Hearbst (C) Wolfgang Sievers

Considered one of the world's great industrial and architectural photographers, Wolfgang Sievers (1913-2007), a student of Bauhaus, fled Nazi Germany for Australia at the outbreak of WWII. In 1939 he opened his photographic studio in Melbourne and became one of Australia’s most renowned photographers with many of his images icons of the industrial age in this country.

Since his death in 2007, Naomi Cass the director of Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) has pondered how to combine contemporary practice with Sievers own work,the outcome of which is "The Sievers Project" in which six “early career” photo-media artists have responded to Sievers’ photographs in both direct and more esoteric styles.

The Sievers Project artists - Jane Brown, Cameron Clarke, Zoe Croggon, Therese Keogh, Phuong Ngo, and Meredith Turnbull – were given an open brief says Kyla McFarlane, Assistant Curator at CCP, who was also heavily involved in the Project. “The only remit was to respond to his work or his life or his philosophy…All responded quite respectfully, and have taken quite an interesting lateral and sometimes more direct responsive approaches”.

McFarlane says Clarke and Brown focused on some of Sievers more commercial images. Both visited various sites that Sievers had photographed including the Ford Factory and AMCOR’s Australian Paper Mills in Melbourne. Brown also visited “an old mining site in Broken Hill, which is a graveyard for machinery. There’s a certain poetic melancholy to these images. Jane prints her own work and uses interesting tones including gold. The prints are arranged in grids so you can see this mass of machinery and the abandoned nature of the place. We’ve hung Jane’s work opposite Sievers’ images and there is a real conversation between the pair”.

At a textiles plant in the Victorian country town of Wangaratta Clarke took a different approach with his response. With his idea being to capture the “theatrical drama of Sievers work, Cameron has taken portraits of the machines and the individuals,” offers McFarlane. “The workers in these photographs look so human and almost sweaty against these machines that are still in operation”.

Photo-media artist Zoe Croggon has taken Sievers’ photographs and used them underneath her collage works that are printed on aluminium. Suspended from the ceiling on wires, these two images overlap and juxtapose the athleticism of the human form against cold steel.

Phuong Ngo drew on his migrant heritage to tell a personal story about his mother and other Vietnamese women who worked as seamstresses in backyard workshops. Using the sewing machine as the lynchpin, his portraits explore the relationship between the machines and the women. McFarlane says this work is a personal homage to Ngo’s childhood. “Phuong said that when he was growing up the sewing machine’s sound was like a Vietnamese lullaby…so here he’s taken a nub of Sievers’ work and placed it within his own history”.

In addition to the more traditional photographic representations are works that feature fabric, sculpture, collage and photolithographs. Using photography and original sculpture, artist Therese Keogh chose a photograph Sievers took in Rome of The Forum on which to frame her response. McFarlane says Keogh’s approach is centred on what she’s defined as “anomalies in Sievers’ practice”. Another installation artist and designer Meredith Turnbull, has used Sievers’ portrait of designer Gerard Hearbst as inspiration. Hearbst was an immigrant like Sievers. In this portrait Hearbst is pictured waving a bolt of fabric like a flag. It is this image that Turnbull has collaged and printed onto fabric as her response to a master’s work.

The Sievers Project

Until 24 August

CCP

404 George Street

Fitzroy (Melbourne)

Open Archives:

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has opened its archive of around 30,000 photographs for free for non-commercial use. Images date back to the early years of photography with an eclectic collection of works that provide a brilliant walk through photography's history in the US in particular. This is a goldmine for anyone interested in the photograph's journey from Daguerre to now.

Open Society Foundations Archive

TheOpen Society Foundations has also opened its archive of documentary photographs to the public. Spanning 15 years, this collection features works by more than 170 photographers. There are both renowned and lesser known photographers in the Collection with the emphasis on the work - bodies of work that address human rights abuses and investigate the human condition in times of conflict.

This is a fantastic research archive with images from many including "Antonin Kratochvil’s documentation of the nascent years of Eastern Europe’s transition from Communism; Andrew Lichtenstein’s examination of the criminal justice system in the United States; Saiful Huq Omi’s representation of the Muslim ethnic minority Rohingya living in western Burma; and Andrea Diefenbach’s photographs of Moldovan parents who have migrated to Italy to find better-paying work, and the children they’ve left behind".

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Photography art Gallery Friday Round Up - 20 June, 2014|Photography Art Definition

This week on Friday Round Up last chance to see two fantastic exhibitions in Sydney, World Refugee Day in Melbourne and a new exhibition at Monash Gallery of Art explores the notion of 'the road'.

Exhibitions: State Library NSW

Ends 22 June

This weekend is your last chance to see two exhibitions currently showing at the State Library of NSW in Sydney - World Press Photo and Sydney Morning Herald Photos 1440.

I saw both of these exhibitions at the State Library, which is a brilliant setting for these large scale shows. Viewing the works with me were high-school students who had the opportunity to learn about the images and their makers, as well as a large cross-section of the general public. While I was there a steady stream of people moved through the exhibitions, and many left via the bookshop. Clearly there is a market and an audience for quality photography in this country and it was heartening to see such attendance.

Sydney Morning Herald Photos 1440

With 1440 minutes to the day this exhibition presents photographs taken by Sydney Morning Herald photographers in the course of their daily jobs. When this show went up all of the exhibiting photographers were in the employ of Fairfax Media, the Herald's publisher. With the recent decimation of the photography department at the Herald, these former staffers are now swimming in the overcrowded freelance pool while the Herald takes its images from agencies. More cost-cutting measures marking the continued demise of original, quality content made even more depressing by the exhibition's narrative that reinforced the important work that these photographers do in capturing unique views of Sydney and its people.

World Press Photo 2014

I really admire the way the World Press Photo (WPP) exhibitions are presented. With clear information panels that support the large scale images the WPP is all encompassing. Having viewed many of these winning images on screen it was fantastic to see them in reality and to gain an understanding of scope. John Stanmeyer's winning photograph (below) was even more impressive in print. While this photograph has attracted controversy, for me it speaks volumes about the world today, our reliance on technology and above all, our will to hope.

Until Sunday 22nd June

State Library of NSW

Sydney

Screening:

Beyond Borders

MAPgroup

(C)Silvi Glattauer

On Sunday at 12noon on the Big Screen at Federation Square the film 'Beyond Borders' will be aired as part of the activities to celebrate World Refugee Day. 'Beyond Borders' is a collaborative project with refugees and asylum seekers and members of the MAPgroup; MAP stands for Many Australian Photographers.

“Beyond Borders presents an alternative view around some of the issues relating to asylum seekers and refugees in Australia. The topic of asylum seekers and refugees dissects our community, yet few of us have met, befriended or shared stories with people in the unenviable position of having to seek asylum in another country. If we believe Australia is the sum of all her parts, we as citizens all benefit from knowing more about this topic and about the people in this position" - MAPgroup.

(C)Silvi Glattauer

MAPgroup members involved with the 'Beyond Borders' project include Silvi Glattauer, Julie Bowyer, Tobias Titz, Ponch Hawkes, Morganna Magee, Nicole Marie, Joseph Feil, Andrew Chapman, Naomi Herzog, Jenny Hodge, Jim McFarlane, Helga Leunig, Juanita Wilson, Julia Millowick and Joyce Evans.

World Refugee Day

Sunday 22nd June

Beyond Borders screens 12noon

Federation Square

Melbourne

Exhibition:

The Road - Group Show

The ‘road’ has long been the subject of artistic expression, a symbol of the physical and allegorical paths we follow. In this group exhibition featuring eight artists - Micky Allan, Virginia Coventry, Gerrit Fokkema, John Gollings, Tim Handfield, Ian North, Robert Rooney, Wes Stacey - the archives of the Monash Gallery of Art have been mined to uncover works taken in the 1970s and 1980s. These photographs examine the meaning of the road in modern Australian life through the exploration of the relationship of photography and the experience of road travel.

MGA Curator Stephen Zagala says, "The road has often provided Australian photographers with a means to an end, whether a landscape or a picturesque community in some distant part of the country. But as this important exhibition shows, during the 1970s, the road took on a whole new meaning for Australian photographers. It provided a space for innovation and experimentation, and also a photographic reconsideration of Australian life."

The exhibition features Wes Stacey's visual travelogue of the trips he made in the early seventies around Australia in a Kombi. "The Road" also includes John Gollings’s monumental, ten-metre long streetscapes of Surfers Paradise Boulevard from 1973, and Robert Rooney’s iconic Holden park, featuring Rooney's Holden parked in 20 different locations across Melbourne. "The Road" also features work by "two of Australia’s most important feminist photographers, Micky Allan and Virginia Coventry, who both challenged many of the gendered assumptions about the road, automotive travel and Australian life during the ‘70s and ‘80s".

Opens Saturday 21st June at 3pm

Until 31 August

Monash Gallery of Art

860 Ferntree Gully Rd, Wheelers Hill

(Melbourne)