UNCOVER September 4, 2010
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Australian photographers, PCP, exhibition , add a commentIn otheir quest to support all artists working with the medium of photography, Perth Centre for Photography has teamed up with Team Digital to introduce, UNCOVER. A juried projection showcase that aims to UNCOVER new photography. This initiative is set to encourage and nuture the growth of photomedia artists whilst bringing them together in an easily accessible exhibition space. In addition to this, one artist will be selected out of the finalists by the judges and be provided with the opportunity to exhibit at PCP for the second half of the 2011 exhibition program. The invited artist will also be provided with assistance towards the realisation if required, and the presentation of their exhibition.
This opportunity is open to all photographers, people who work with photography as a medium using any photographic themes and processes.
Closing date for entries: 8am Friday, 17th September 2010
Cost to enter: $25
Entry form is also available at www.pcp.org.au.
Adam Pretty / The Big Picture August 26, 2010
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Australian photographers, Journalism, Publishing , add a commentOn Saturday, Singapore welcomed young athletes from around the world in a ceremony opening the inaugural Youth Olympic Games. This first ever Summer Youth Olympics, an event designed to be celebrated in the same tradition of the Olympic Games – involved competitors between 14 and 18 years of age. This year, 3,500 athletes from more than 200 countries competed in 184 events in 26 sports. The amazing Australian photographer Adam Pretty was there and the Boston Globe’s Big Picture ran a story on the event.
- Photo Copyright Adam Pretty Getty Images
Boat People Protest August 26, 2010
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Australian photographers, Documentary , add a comment“The Boat People art gang are making a video work and we are inviting you to be involved.
Our borders remain the hot election issue, and we are becoming fools again, baying at strangers, terrified and stupid”.
Deborah Kelly, Aug 2010.
The day before the inconclusive Australian federal election, the boat-people.org and pvi collective held a protest which involved individuals in a muffled protest against the political agenda of border protection. Protestors wrapped their heads in the Australian national flag in Forest Place in Perth, Friday 20th August 2010 in a media protest.
- Muffled Protest Perth Photo Darren Smith
Nikon Walkley Awards August 19, 2010
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Australian photographers, Awards, Journalism, Walkley Awards , add a comment2010 Press Photographer of the Year
The Nikon-Walkley Photographic Awards are the most prestigious awards for press photographers and photojournalists in Australia. Nikon proudly sponsors the awards in eight categories including press photographer of the year, spot news, general news, daily life, sport, photographic essay, portrait photography and community/regional photography.
To enter visit http://mynikonlife.com.au/nikonwalkley
Note: There are less than two weeks to go to enter the Walkley Awards
- Natalie Grono photo Nikon Walkley Photographic Awards
500 Photographers August 5, 2010
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Art, Australian photographers, New Media , add a commentWell worth a look at. For creatives, for people interested in photography and for professionals. Interestingly, the list so far numbers 89 photographers and number 87 is Jane Burton, a fine art photographer from Melbourne I met a couple of trips ago.
Jane Burton, 1966, is an Australian photographer. She has been in various exhibitions (group and solo) and her work is held in numerous private and public collections. Her photographs are dark, mysterious and often poetic. She often combines images of landscapes together with portraits. The following images come from the series Velvet Portrait Suite, Ivy and Wormwood.
Her website: www.janeburton.com.au
“500 photographers is a weblog that posts 5 active photographers a week for 100 weeks. The photographers can be from any discipline within the photographic range, but they have to be worth looking at and have a certain level of quality. When we get to number 500, we will have a deep database of great photographers.”
Peter Wisse
It is certainly interesting looking down the list. Philip Toledano, who has been written about in this blog, gets an early mention. It is worth savouring this list in a slow and deliberate manner.
500 photographers is done by Pieter Wisse, a photographer himself based in Rotterdam, NL and owner of Four Eyes Photography & Art
http://www.500photographers.com/
- Photography copyright Jane Burton
8 Days Exhibition opens at Perth Centre of Photography August 2, 2010
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Australian photographers, China, exhibition , add a comment
- Graham Miller, Kevin Ballantine, Juha Tolonen, Mike Gray and friends at PCP launch of 8 Days, photos taken during the Pingyao International Photography Festival
IRIS Awards July 22, 2010
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Australian photographers, Awards, Portraiture , add a comment
8 Days Exhibition at Perth Centre of Photography July 22, 2010
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Australian photographers , add a commentKevin Ballantine, Mike Gray, Graham Miller, and Yuha Tolonen are exhibiting at the Perth Centre of Photography 6pm on the 29th of July 2010
Big City Press July 16, 2010
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Australian photographers, German Photographers, Hijacked, Publications, Publishing , add a comment Robert Cook
Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Photography and Design
Art Gallery of Western Australia (2010)
Opening Speech at launch of Hijacked 2 Australia Germany ART GALLERY OF WEST AUSTRALIA
- Laura Beilby and Mark McPherson
The Hijacked project was initiated by Mark McPherson in 2005 as a photocopied ‘zine. It took what was cool about where ‘zine culture ended up going via the American post-punk and skate scenes, by riffing off the way those publications worked against hierarchical culture to create liberating peer-based zones of exchange. So because the ‘zine format functioned for McPherson as a guerrilla platform, to announce the work of peers and to shape a society of creative equals, it expressed the general evolution away from the zine genre’s fan-roots as DIY printed love songs to movie stars and pop icons made by spotty bedroom romantics. This is a way of saying that Hijacked, in its various forms, has always been about framing, not fandom per se. While there is undeniably love in it, it is, therefore, not devotional, and, now, in its current state of hardcover monumentality, it might be seen to stand on the opposing pole to the intricate first person longing of the world’s other great uber zine, Stop Breathing. In my mind, in ‘zine culture in general, that is where Hijacked now stands. There is Stop Breathing – almost obsessively over-thought singly authored analyses of the world of mostly American indie music – and there is Hijacked – sprawling, restless, decentred, local and international, shooting from the hip, yet obsessive in its own delirious way. Both began life in lo-fi formats and expanded to be all they could be, while staying true to their defining visions.
Hijacked’s vigorously loose ambit was facilitated in the title. In an overt way it allowed other artists to take over, to hijack it and take it to their own destination. Thus, early issues were also produced by outstanding Perth creatives such as Thomas Jeppe, Conor O’Brien, Marcus Canning and Hannah Mathews. In a covert way, the idea of hijacking also, I believe, granted a kind of permission to lift practices from the context of their production and give them a new meaning through this violence. It is more forceful than cultural jamming, it is latently heavy, and this weight is supported by the horizontal field, the sense that Hijacked works, figuratively at least, in the manner of Fugazi and, later, The Evens -(where possible) no stage, no difference between audience and creator.
I dwell on this because I think the original ethos pulses through its relaunch as the hardcover book. The first outing, published in 2008 to great success, saw McPherson and co-editor Max Pam bring Australian artists together with American. The tone was post party, hung-over soulful, humans and spaces merging in a graphic liquid bath. It was like two New Worlds, two products of the colonial oceanic slough faced each other and asked, what the hell brought us here? And what the hell are we gonna do with these cars, in these hotel rooms, with these inked skins? Hijacked 1, answered these questions visually in wildly entertaining ways.
This volume sees McPherson joining fellow editors Ute Noll and Markus Schaden to create a dialogue between German and Australian photographers. And in it, the feel is ‘post hurricane’. The cobwebs are gone and the old and the new world stutter and speak with and at other, their gestures, their communications opening out the implicit politics that structure post war Germany and contemporary colonial Australia. As such, issues of freedom, of movement, of desire, of the world as ‘troubled playground’, shape the work. And so there is a celebration of youthful vigour and a tremulousness thanks to the awareness that the adolescent and recently adolescent mindset are in no way separate from the dangerous voyage of history, and the architectural and human structures that we live through. What this book shows is that we are always hemming ourselves in, always challenging those boundaries. It is in this way that the political and the aesthetic are carefully unified in the project. And it’s a coolly complicated thing, obvious and not so, and it’s something the fine essays circle in ways both dense and airy. These essays sit discreetly between the two hemispheres’ art works, functioning as a dividing wall of interpretation that might be seen as being both respected and broken down by the photos themselves. Easts and Wests, Norths and Souths, push together, imagistically, against the words that would contain them in the middle. It’s a smart layout, but then everything is smart about this project.
And as such, I want to pay a small tribute to Mark McPherson. Though he has collaborated, and drawn on many, many people’s energies, Hijacked is basically a testament to his force and his energy. He has a lot personally at stake in this. It is not a career, but a drive that has caused him to make this. He has a brave and a wonderful vision and I am kind of in awe of it. In his essay in this book, Alasdair Foster quotes Henry Miller, saying that ‘chaos is the score upon which reality is written’. I think that sums up so much, not just about this book, but about Mark’s energetic approach to making culture, to being in a way our most important young photo curators and editors in this country. He is reaching out, refusing to be pinned by the local, and is making a new kind of global community of artists.
Beyond the book, is the tour of the exhibition. It is currently on show at the Australian Centre for Photography, where I am told it looks amazing. It is moving around not just eh country but the world, and will make an appearance in Perth at the John Curtin Gallery July-September 2011, something of a significant homecoming for the material, and I am positive it will look incredible in the crisp spaces of the exquisite gallery.
Before that, you have the book. It is available from our shop right now and I need to say that all sales from the book shop go toward assisting the gallery fund a range of activities, exhibitions especially. I would like to congratulate Mark, Ute and Markus on their achievements, all the incredible photographers several of whom are here tonight, and also the brilliant Fabio Ongarato and his team for the impeccable graphic design. Inspiring people all. Thanks for coming and have a great evening.
- Photographers Suzie Fox and Jackson Eaton with Hijacked 2
- Robert Cook Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Photography and Design
Art Gallery of Western Australia
Art Gallery of Western Australia
Claire Martin wins Inge Morath Award July 5, 2010
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Australian photographers, Documentary, Edith Cowan University, Foto Freo, Photojournalism , add a commentPhotographing marginalised communities has paid off for Perth’s Claire Martin. Her striking photos from the series ‘Slab City’ in the Colorado Desert, California and from ‘The Downtown East Side’ in Vancouver Canada have combined to win her The Inge Morath Award for a female photographer under 30 from the prestigious Magnum Photo Cooperative. Coming on top of last years win in the Sony World Photography Up and Coming Portrait Photographer of the Year Awards and also being chosen as an ‘emerging talent’ by Reportage for Getty Images it is obvious that Claire Martin is striking chords with her photographs and touching us all. Her photos of ‘Slab City’ in the Moore’s Building for Foto Freo were powerful and quite unforgettable.
Claire Martin has recently joined Oculi and is available for assignments.
- Photograph of Tony copyright by Claire Martin
