John Street featured on ABC arts online

John Street's current exhibition Slow photography at MGA is featured in this ABC arts online feature about the artist.

ABC arts online states:
In more than 50 years as a photographer, John Street has gone from shooting some of the 1960s' most iconic models to composing unique still-life images.
Street, who was born in England, began taking photographs after serving in the Royal Navy, using an Ilford Sporti camera he was given. After studying Rembrandt's use of lighting, he went on to photograph models such as Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton during the 1960s.
Street then moved to Australia in 1972, where he shot major advertising campaigns. He found an old wooden camera and customed it to develop a long exposure process. He fixes a 51 x 61 centimetre sheet of photographic paper to the camera and exposes it for up to 45 minutes to capture images of items such as foliage arranged on a glass plate.
During the extended exposures, various light sources are used to illuminate the subject from different angles and to modulate the spectrum of colour being captured by the camera.
His exhibition John Street: Slow Photography is on until 11 December, 2011.

Thanks to Mark Street and ABC TV Arts producer Klaus Toft.
http://www.mga.org.au/exhibition/view/exhibition/97

BEAUTIFUL LIES

Queensland Centre for Photography has announced the launch of its most recent publication, BEAUTIFUL LIES: Notes Towards a History of Australia by photomedia artist Peter Milne.

Edited by Maurice Ortega with Helen Frajman as photo editor and essays by Prof Michael Stone-Richards, Detroit, USA, Dr Courtney Pedersen, Brisbane, Australia and Prof Darren Tofts, Melbourne, this major project brings together 10 years of Milne's satirical photomedia projects.

The book will be launched by former Bad Seed Mick Harvey @ Loop Bar, 23 Meyers Place, Melbourne, 5.30 for 6pm on Tuesday 22nd November. You will need to RSVP by 14th November for this one to Michelle St. Anne michelle.stanne@au.pimco.com

Published by Queensland Centre for Photography and T&G Publishing, Brisbane, 2011
120 pages
305 x 256mm
hard-cover with slipcase: $66 AUD (inc GST)
ISBN: 978-0-9775790-7-5

Peter Milne is represented in the Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash collection.

Hijacked III artists just announced

Mark McPherson and fellow Hijacked III curators have just announced the artists involved for Hijacked 3 - AUS/UK.

The Australian artists involved are – Tony Albert, Warwick Baker, Bindi Cole, Christopher Day, Tarryn Gill & Pilar Mata Dupont, Toni Greaves, Petrina Hicks, Alin Huma, Katrin Koenning, David Manley, Jesse Marlow, Tracey Moffat, Justin Spiers, Michelle Tran, Christian Thompson, and Michael Ziebarth.

Work from these photographers will be shown alongside work from these British photographers – Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Natasha Caruana, Maciej Dakowicz, Melinda Gibson, Leonie Hampton, Seba Kurtis, Trish Morrissey, Laura Pannack, Sarah Pickering, Zhao Renhui, Simon Roberts, Helen Sears, Luke Stephenson, Wassink & Lundgren, and Tereza Zelenkova.

The exhibition will be launched at PICA during The Perth International Arts festival from 17 February 2012.

Congratulations to all photographers. Of course we are especially happy for the Australian mob. Two 2011 Bowness Photography Prize finalists are among them: Warwick Baker and David Manley.

In camera and in public

CCP's latest exhibition charts scary territory: the disruption of the "contract" that exists between the camera/photographer and their subject. This is a juicy subject for our time, as we become increasingly anxious about where we can take pictures and of whom -- or even when and where we are able to use devices like phones that have the potential to make photographs.

So the exhibition asks the question: what does it mean to take someone's picture without them knowing? Across a series of at times extraordinary pictures, we are given the chance to think about what it means to allow our photograph to be taken, and what it might mean to have our picture taken unawares. The effect of this, in the evidence of the pictures, is complex and varied.

In Bill Henson's magnificent photographs of people in crowds Untitled 1980/82, the effect is melancholic poetry -- the magical rich blacks and silvery greys of the prints are cut through with the loneliness, boredome and distraction of the subjects. In Cherine Fahd's pictures of habituees of her local park (the homeless, the addled, the stoned...), taken from the safety of her sixth-floor apartment, the effect is something much more ambivalent. Each of the pictures in the series The sleepers 2005/08 sits on the edges of photographic propriety, which is an uncomfortable and challenging place to be situated by a photographer. Among the most striking of the pictures in the show are a series of surveillance photographs taken by ASIO officers between 1949/80: because they were taken covertly by intelligence operatives, the photographs -- often showing benign subjects such as a man entering a doorway or a group of men chatting in a street -- somehow become suspicious. (If you search hard in the photographs of street marches, you'll spot one of Melbourne's best-known photographers, but we can't reveal her name...)

The money shot in the exhibition, though, are the images from Kohei Yochiyuki's infamous series The park 1971/79 which document public sex acts in Tokyo parks and the endeavours of voyeurs to look and touch. In these pictures, the photographer, the voyeurs, the performers -- themselves often unaware of the voyeurs circulating around them -- and us as viewers are all drawn into a murky web of who has the right to look at whom and under what terms. Its confronting and weirdly titillating at the same time.

Vale Robert Whitaker

It is with sadness that we note the recent passing of great Australian celebrity photographer Robert Whitaker. Although born in England, Whitaker spent his teenage years and early twenties in Melbourne, where he became friends of the iconic Mora family.

In 1963 Whitaker took this striking double portrait of Mirka and Georges Mora -- an image that in turn inspired Nat Thomas and Concetina Inserra's 2008 Bowness Photography Prize-winning picture "Portrait of mother and daughter". Whitaker went on to become court photographer to Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, and was in many ways responsible for the cool image of the Stones, the Beatles and many of the 1960s' other cultural icons.

Victorian Indigenous Art Awards

Entries are also due soon for the Victorian Indigenous Art Awards. The deadline for entries is 28 October 2011. As well as the $25 00 Deadly Award, there are three $5 000 awards and a $2 500 People's Choice Award. The exhibition at fortyfivedownstairs generated terrific media interest last year.

The shortlist for this valuable prize always includes a good range of photographic practice. In fact, the last two winners presented photographic material: Bindi Cole won the Deadly in 2010 for one of her wonderful sistagirl portraits, while Ben McKeown won last year for a large Polaroid of a man holding two boomerangs. The exhibition of finalists for the 2012 Victorian Indigenous Art Awards will be held at fortyfivedownstairs between 10-30 March 2012.

NewNorth Photography Prize

You've got just under a week to get your entries in for NewNorth's annual photography prize. With $5 000 in prizes and a chance to exhibit and sell your work at NewNorth's Fairfield gallery, there's plenty of reasons for submitting your entry form to Michael and Suzanne at NewNorth by 4.00PM next Tuesday 11 October. The winner will be announced between 2.00-4.00PM Sunday 23 October. Ironically, last year's winner was Andrew Chapman, the subject of our last post!

Andrew Chapman's Shearer project

One of our favourite documentary photographers Andrew Chapman was featured on this week's Landline program (ABC) with his ongoing work on Australian shearers and shearing sheds. This now decade long project has seen Andrew travel across Australian documenting the arduous work of the country's shearers and also the sheds in which they do their work. As Andrew hints in the Landline feature, shearing sheds are surely among the most significant examples of vernacular Australian architecture and surely in need of photographic documentation.

Andrew's project is now quite vast in scale and increasingly highly regarded: the NGA in Canberra recently acquired photographs and a second book drawing on the series is about to come out. But this aside, the most striking aspect of the Landline story is its dramatic account of Andrew's battle with a life-threatening condition and recent liver transplant. It makes for a compelling portrait of an Australian photographer dedicated to and sustained by their practice. MGA exhibited 40 of Andrew's photographs of shearers in 2004.

Our billboard currently features a work by Claudia Terstappen, from her recent series Roadside memorials. Claudia has written a beautiful statement about the origins and intention of this series:

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Susan Sontag

My recent photographic series Roadside memorials focused on grief and loss, which was addressed through personal shrines created for loved ones that had been killed on the road. It was whilst working on this series that I also came across many other victims, dead animals that festooned many of our roads.

Over the last few decades the number of our roads has grown and with it the traffic. Consequently many animals’ habitats have been reduced to small corridors of natural forest or bush and their daily routines have become more dangerous. Also, roadsides are attractive to animals due to water in ditches, freshly slashed vegetation or food thrown from cars. In addition dead animals act as a food source and attract others. All of these factors have lead to an increase in the number of fatal accidents for animals as well as for humans.

About three years ago I began to collect images of roadkill, photographing the animals as they were, squashed on the road; sometimes flattened, sometimes reshaped in their moment of death. In their stillness I could look at them unhurried, observing closely their size, pattern and beauty (or what was left of it). It’s not often you have the opportunity to examine closely a wild animal because they either move fast or are too far away to be looked at properly. Their appearance was often surprising, making me question their identity and behavior.

In my images I sought to create a death mask – as used for identification during the 18th and 19th centuries – to permanently record the characteristics and distortions of the animals, like a true portrait. I therefore isolated the animal from the road, thus removing anything that could distract our attention. I also enlarged the image so that the animal’s presence becomes overpowering and can’t be overlooked.

It saddened me to imagine their suffering and loss. Several times I witnessed that one of a pair had been killed and its mate was still lurking, puzzled by the accident, returning to the dead body, touching it but not understanding what had happened: an almost heartbreaking observation.

People create roadside memorials in order to express their grief and perhaps also communicate their sorrow to a wider public than they could with a conventional grave. Handwritten notes and personal belongings that symbolise the deceased are carefully positioned on site. The majority of these memorials also show a photograph of the deceased. The photograph plays a crucial role: It makes the deceased a noninterchangable character and brings them back to life by showing us their face.

My roadkill portraits function in a similar way. They are witnesses to the animals’ existence and death and make them part of our life. Absence is reversed to presence.

Facing ongoing changes in our environment and a growing population with further demands on shrinking habitats, one wonders how long we will be surrounded by these animals – will they soon be history? Some people would argue that the presence of roadkill is a positive indication of the existence of animals. Their very presence means that there are animals around and an environment healthy enough to support them. What if there was no roadkill? What would that say about our environment?

My photographs are a place for safekeeping, they keep the visual mementos available and alive as much as they confront us with loss. Memory is coagulated and preserved in the images that refer to the animal itself, representative of nature and its fragility. Photography not only becomes a stabiliser of our memory but also recreates memory. It freezes time and helps us to both observe with precision and look back. It builds an interesting link between the past and the present, the living and the dead, us and our environment.

Claudia Terstappen 2010

An exhibition opening soon at RMIT's First Site Gallery features the work of students of RMIT’s traditional and historic photography program who have or are in the process of establishing “fine art” careers. RMIT’s BA Photography program continues to train many of our leading young commercial, fashion and scientific photographers. But as This is Not Fine Art will show, graduates also use the strong the strong technical training provided by the program as the basis for a fine art practice.

Among the eight exhibiting artists is Warwick Baker, whose Rocklea, QLD from the series After the flood (2011) is currently on display at MGA as part of the 2011 Bowness Photography Prize.

THIS IS NOT FINE ART: contemporary practice from the BA Photography

Warwick Baker, Phillipa Grenda, Ken Hughes-Parry, Kobie Nel, Damien Rudd, Hannah Spence, Lia Steele, Thomas Dallas Watson; curated by Daniel Stephen Miller

Opening night drinks: Tuesday 4 October 2011, 5:30–7:30pm

Exhibition continues 5-15 October
Artist talks: Thursday 13 October, 1pm
First Site Gallery, 344 Swanston St, Melbourne

Real photographer or phoney?

You may have seen copies of this poster around town. I've been thinking about it for days, and photographed it this morning with my iphone, driving down Toorak Road. The poster is a direct provocation to those of us who now use our smart phones, with their five-megapixel cameras, to record our daily lives. "Get a real camera!", it screams. Moreover, with its challenge to our virility (those limp two minute noodles...) and integrity (are you "real" or "phoney"?), it suggests a picture of the hard-nosed photographer that many of us assumed had passed away. I know it's an ad (for Olympus) and chock-full of irony, but it got me thinking: is the challenge posed by the smart phone to the veracity and identity of the photographer real, or simply a cute line thought up by clever marketers?

Annemieke Mein at Ararat Regional Art Gallery

The popular Annemieke Mein will be showing her extraordinary textile works at Ararat Regional Art Gallery from 19 May - 3 July 2011. Recognised for her meticulous representation of the natural world through textiles the exhibition will also include samplers and drawings that provide an insight into Annemieke’s creative process.

Image: Annemieke Mein, 'Pink Emperor Gum Moth' (detail), 1982, silk, wool, satin, emu feathers, rabbit fur, dacron filling, sewing threaads, covered wire, 13 x 60 x 50 cm. Purchased with the assistance of an Australia Council Crafts Board Grant, 1982. Collection: Ararat Regional Art Gallery

Andrew Chapman Benefit and Print Swap

Our friends at Gallery New North are hosting an exhibition to raise funds for the Austin Hospital's Liver Transplant Unit and photographer Andrew Chapman. Andrew recently received a liver transplant at the Austin -- a unit that has now saved the lives of at least two of our best photographers, since Paul Cox received a life-saving liver transplant there last year.

The exhibition opens Sunday 29 May at 2pm and there is also a print swap on Sunday 19 June.

Head On Photo Festival & Head On Seminar

Sydney's Head On has quickly become one of Australia's biggest photographic festivals. Held annually, Head On covers the diversity of photographic practice in Australia, and last year featured over 80 events held at almost 70 venues. At the heart of the festival is the Head On Portrait Prize , one of the nation's major photographic portrait prizes.

This year's festival will feature the inaugural Head On Seminar , which will take place on 14-15 May 2011. Scholarships are available for Indigenous photographers to attend this industry seminar program and take part in workshops. Recipients will receive funds towards the costs of flights, accomodation, transport and seminar fees.

Download the application form here.

Applications close 5pm, 1 April 2011.

National Photographic Portrait Prize

Last year's Bowness Photography Prize winner Lee Grant is among the 55 finalists for this year's National Photographic Portrait Prize. This year's judging panel, National Portrait Gallery curators Sarah Engledow and Christopher Chapman, Director of Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation Domenico de Clario, and National Portrait Gallery Director Louise Doyle, whittled down the 1,200 photographs submitted to just 55 - some really brave choices among them. The winner of the $25,000 prize will be announced at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra at 6pm, 24 February 2011. Good luck Lee, and each of the other finalists on being selected for this important prize.

DIANA MADNESS

MGA's favourite camera supplier LOMO is about to begin two months of Diana Madness in Australia and New Zealand.

Hosted once every few years, the Lomography World Congress is responsible for uniting Lomographers from all over the world that share one common interest-an immense love for analogue photography.

No Vacancy Gallery is hosting the Melbourne leg of the tour with an exhibition, a great range of workshops and events. Check out their site: http://no-vacancy.com.au/wp/?p=18

Don't forget, MGA's shop stocks a range of LOMO cameras and accessories.



No Vacancy Gallery
34 – 40 Jane Bell Lane, QV, Melbourne.
Exhibition Running: 24th February – 12th March 2011
Trading Hours:
Monday: Gallery Closed
Tuesday – Friday: 11:00am – 5:00pm
Saturday: 11:00am – 5:00pm
Sunday: 12:00am – 5:00pm

Tracy Moffatt: Narratives at AGSA

MGA’s touring collection show, Tracy Moffatt: Narratives, is about to open at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

For this instalment of the exhibition, AGSA’s Associate Curator of Prints Drawings and Photographs, Maria Zagala, has augmented the show with four additional series of works and an installation of the video montages that Moffatt has produced with Gary Hillberg.

The exhibition is being presented as part of the BigPond Adelaide Film Festival, and screenings of Moffatt’s films will also take place during the course of the show. Until 20 March 2011

Jodi Beiber wins World Press Photo of the Year 2011

Eminent South African photojournalist Jodi Beiber has won the 54th World Press Photo Contest for her portrait of Bibi Aisha -- a woman from Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan, whose nose and ears were cut off by her husband with the support of the Taliban, who had accused her of abandoning her husband. The photograph appeared on the front cover of Time magazine in August 2010, and even before this significant award came to embody the violence suffered by Afghan women under Taliban rule. Beiber's picture was selected by the World Press jury from over 108,000 entries.

Hijacked III

You may have seen Hijacked II: Australia and Germany at MGA recently. The exhibition is about to open at Queensland College of Art Gallery, Griffiths University, before heading to the Samstag in Adelaide. The show is accompanied by a spectacular publication.

Mark McPherson, the man behind the Hijacked project, is now looking for entries for its third installment. Photographers from Australia and Britain are encouraged to submit entries. Mark and his selection panel are looking for material that suggests the "future of photography", in both conceptual and technical terms. As with Hijacked I and II, a book and exhibition will follow.

Afterglow: performance art & photography

MGA’s major exhibition, Afterglow: performance art & photography, is now on display until 3 April. This exhibition examines the relationship between photography and performance art, highlighting the different ways performance artists have used photography to document their temporal activities and extend the audience for their performances beyond the event itself.

While Afterglow focuses on Australian artists, similar themes are explored internationally in the Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibition, Staging action: performance in photography since 1960, which is on display in New York until 9 May: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1100

For more information on Afterglow, the artists included and the exciting program of events scheduled to coincide with the exhibition, visit MGA’s website: http://www.mga.org.au/exhibition/view/exhibition/81