This week on Friday Round Up exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney, FotoEvidence Book Award, Crying Meri launches in Papua New Guinea, Angkor Photo Festival Celebrates Ten Years and the first Asia Pacific Photobook competition is open.
Exhibition: Sydney
Group Show – CLICK!
Andre Kertész, Hungarian (1894 –1985)
Title: untitled (child with dog), 1969
CLICK! An Exhibition of Australian and International Photography is the last show for the year at the relatively new Badger & Fox Gallery in Sydney’s Surry Hills. The Gallery is the brainchild of two passionate collectors, ex-Londoners Peter Maddison and Peter Wright, who claim that “previously the only place you could have seen a photographic exhibition like this would have been at the National Gallery, AGNSW, or the National Gallery of Victoria. It’s a cracker of a show”.
And they're right. The show features works from Australians such as Max Dupain, Bill Henson and David Moore, as well as European photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Andre Kertész. The Americans get a look in too, with works by Garry Winogrand, Irving Penn and also Danny Lyon to name a few. It’s an impressive line up and all works are for sale. CLICK! draws on a total pool of 180 works, with a roster of 40 photographs on display at any one time.
“We both love art and have been collectors for many years, we now want to share our collection,” says Wright. “Initially Badger & Fox Gallery was just going to be a web gallery where clients could look at the works available, make a choice then we could hang the piece for them to see it in reality. During the construction of the site we decided that a real gallery with regular exhibitions could be fun to do.”
He continues. “In our discussions over the years we often talked about the Australian gallery market being very different to the European market where there are galleries that exhibit a mixture of work - the little galleries on Bond Street in London for instance - not just galleries with a stable of artists with rotating shows. Badger & Fox Gallery is our take on this concept, an eclectic mix spanning many genres”.
Collecting photography is still somewhat of a novel pursuit in this country. Perhaps Badger & Fox will help to swing the pendulum by educating collectors as to the artistic worth and collectability of photography. And that can only be good for the genre.
Aaron Siskind, American (1903-1991) - Title: Kentucky 7, 1951
Bill Henson, Australian (1955-) Untitled
Photographer unknown, Japanese – Title: X4 Yokohama Park, Japan, 1870
Until 21 December
Badger & Fox Gallery
201 Albion Street
Surry Hills
Exhibition: Melbourne
Pia Johnson – In a Dim Light
Pia Johnson's latest show - In a Dim Light - at Melbourne's Edmund Pearce Gallery, centres on the experience of being in a foreign place, of feeling lost, displaced, and fragmented.
This series builds on Johnson's earlier works and deals with similar themes of cultural difference, diaspora and identity, explorations that stem from her own cultural heritage of Chinese Malaysian and Italian Australia descent.
(C) All images Pia Johnson
Closes this Saturday 22 November
Edmund Pearce
Level 2 Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Melbourne
Call for Entries:
FotoEvidence Book Award 2015
Entries are now open for the fifth annual FotoEvidence Book Award.
This year's FotoEvidence Book Award Jury features a stellar line up - founder of Cosmos Agency Annie Boulat, Polka Magazine's editor-in-chief Dimitri Beck, Mother Jones' photo editor Mark Murmann, Telegraph Magazine's photography director Cheryl Newman and FotoEvidence managing editor and co-founder David Stuart.
I’ve reviewed three out of the four winning books - Majid Saeedi’s Life in War (2014), Robin Hammond’s Condemned (2013) and Alex Masi’s Bhopal Second Disaster (2012). FotoEvidence’s commitment to bringing these stories to a broader audience, and the passion and commitment of the photojournalists to pursue stories that often are overlooked by mainstream media, continue to fuel my passion to work in this space.
Deadline: 15 January 2015
Click here for entry details - FotoEvidence
Winner 2014 FotoEvidence Book Award - Majid Saeedi
Update:
Photojournalism Can Affect Change
Vlad Sokhin – Crying Meri
On Monday 24 November Vlad Sokhin’s book, Crying Meri, which is published by FotoEvidence, will be launched in Papua New Guinea (PNG) at Parliament House with the Prime Minister, Peter O’Neil, in attendance.
Crying Meri draws focus on the women of PNG, known as “meri” in the local dialect, who are beset by domestic violence and sexual assault at rates that are inconceivable; more than two thirds of women suffer horrific abuse at the hands of their men and many are left disfigured after being attacked with knives and axes. Fifty percent of women in PNG have been sexually assaulted, although this figures climbs alarmingly in the more remote provinces where in some areas 100 percent of women surveyed have been violated. Sorcery-related violence still exists and rape is endemic, a right of passage for the Raskol gangs that prowl the streets of the capital, Port Moresby.
The release of this book in PNG is significant. Sokhin’s work has influenced change and raised awareness, something all photojournalists hope their images will achieve. His photographs have been carried through the street in protests against domestic violence, and the Government has taken notice. In 2013 the PNG Government abolished the Sorcery Act that protected those accused of sorcery-related violence, including murder, and also instituted the first Bill to criminalise domestic violence. These are steps in the right direction, and while there is a long way to go before these reforms resonate at a deep cultural level, Sokhin has helped to bring the issue above ground.
“I hope my photographs did something to help,” Sokhin says to the notion his images contributed to broader change. “But what is more important for me is to see an individual helped and I know of a few women whose lives changed because someone saw my photographs and assisted them. That’s an achievement and I’m very proud to see that happen.”
Crying Meri
Available through FotoEvidence
Festival:
Angkor Celebrating Ten Years
(C) Marie Sordat
(C) Marie Sordat
On 29 November, the tenth edition of the Angkor Photo Festival & Workshops opens in Siem Reap, Cambodia. This is the longest running photography festival in Southeast Asia and its original ethos, to provide a platform and educational resource for both emerging and established photographers, continues with another comprehensive programme.
In 2014 there are 11 core festival exhibitions featuring works from photographers from Cambodia, Laos, China, Hong Kong, Jordan, Iceland, Spain, France and Australia. And the projections programme, which features the greatest number of photographers, throws the geographic net even wider, with works from virtually every continent.
(C) Viviane Dalles
(C) Alessandro Grassani
(C) Alessandro Grassani
(C) Alexander Mihalkovich
(C) Alexander Mihalkovich
(C) Boryana Katsarova
(C) Boryana Katsarova
But it is the educational strength of Angkor that sets it apart as Programme Director Françoise Callier explains. "As more festivals emerge in the region, our emphasis on education has become an increasingly critical part of what we do. Our annual tuition-free workshops provide Asia's emerging talent with premier professional training, addressing the region's lack of affordable and accessible options for emerging photographers to take their craft to the next level”.
These workshops run for a week and the tutors for 2014 are Antoine D'Agata, Ian Teh, Kosuke Okahara, Patrick de Noirmont, Sohrab Hura and Suthep Kritsanavarin. It's quite a line up and the 30 participants from 14 countries in Asia are in for an intense, and thrilling, week.
The panel discussions should also prove lively with topics including the evolving role of photo festivals, and Asia Perspectives: Startups, social media and photography.
(C) Eduardo Garcia
(C) Fan Ho
(C) Fan Ho
(C) Floriane de Lassee
(C) Floriane de Lassee
(C) Zalmai
(C) Stephen Shames
(C) Patrick Brown
To find out more about this year's Angkor Photo Festival visit the website here.
29 November - 6 December
Siem Reap
Photobook Prize - Call for Entries:
The Asia Pacific Photobook Archive, in conjunction with Perimeter Editions and Grenadier Press, has launched the inaugural Asia Pacific Photobook Prize. See website for details. Entries Close 1st December.
