Archived FotoFreo 2006 webpage. See also the FotoFreo 2008 website.

FotoFreo 2006 Conference

Conference Programme Outline
Conference Abstracts
Festival Programme for Conference Weekend
Cost & Delegate Registration Form

After the success of FotoFreo 2004 it was decided to expand the forum and discussion activities of the festival into a conference.  The FotoFreo 2006 Conference will be held at the Drill Hall, in Mouat Street, on the campus of the University of Notre Dame Australia. It will be a one day event with 5 international and 3 national speakers and Alasdair Foster, Director of the Australian Centre for Photography, as Convenor.

   
 

The benefits of the FotoFreo 2006 Conference to participants will be:

• to address key issues of interest to photography practitioners, professionals and other interested parties.
• the conference will take place within the context of the FotoFreo Festival and, as such, will provide the conference attendees the opportunity to participate in a wide range of other related activities.
• to provide an excellent opportunity for networking with internationally acclaimed photographers, critics and photography professionals.

In planning the FotoFreo 2006 Conference it has been the intention to:

• raise the level of debate in WA about photography for both photographers and art professionals.
• be educational and informative.

The FotoFreo 2006 Conference organisers believe the audience for the event should include:

• Art based photographers,
• Professional photographers,
• Students of photography,
• Teachers of photography, photomedia, cultural and art history/theory,
• Curators
• Art students generally,
• Amateur photographers,
• Art lovers,
• Collectors of photography.

COST OF REGISTRATION is $200 + GST = $220
Registration will entitle the delegate to a conference bag, FotoFreo 2006 Catalogue, buffet lunch with wine, morning and afternoon tea, and windup drinks.

REMEMBER Friends of FotoFreo are entitled to a 10% discount on the registration fee.

For bookings please use either the Standard Entry booking form  or  Friends of FotoFreo Discount booking form.

To book accommodation in Fremantle CLICK HERE

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME OUTLINE

CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS

In order of presentation

SESSION 1

Mark Haworth-Booth
Photography: The Reality Effect

Noted curator and author Mark Haworth-Booth will look at how illusionistic photography can be - especially in the works of photographers he has studied closely - such as Camille Silvy in the 19^th century and Bill Brandt in the 20^th century. He will then ask if there has been a decline in the reality of photographs - or in our expectations - over the past 30 years and if so, did this result from theory, practice, digital photography or the embrace of photography by the art world? Finally, in the light of all this, he will with the support of a PowerPoint presentation look at the implications of the coverage of the Iraq War.

François Hébel
Excitement, Profusion, Diffusion and Confusion

For Arles, photography has never been so exciting. The territories of photography are wide open, XIX century, XX century, vernacular, digital, press (not to mistake the news with the reportage, the document or the wider land of conceptual documentary), fashion (and fashionable), academia (the reign of the zone system has long been taken over by the school of Dusseldorf, the British documentary..), etc... This profusion has not always been recognised as possibly interesting, and not so long ago, except for some American icons, photography stopped being art if not in black and white printed 11 x 14 or 14 x 20 inches.
Some artists of the eighties have themselves freed creation: Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall with their fictions, Duane Michals and Sophie Calle with their series, Nan Goldin with the projection of the Ballad of Sexual dependency, Martin Parr with his documentary of proximity, Andreas Gursky, etc… More recently the techniques give the artists more freedom with the digital tools being seen as more options for creation as much as diffusion to the public. Thanks to its exceptional elasticity, photography can be projected, printed small or large, viewed in the open air and syndicated on the net. Its diffusion is in and out of cultural institutions, in squares, shops, magazines, website, and now telephones.
The increasing world of collectors, the growing interest of Museums and book publishers, the incredible amount of ‘month of photography’ and other festivals are very good news for photographers and the public, even if this excitement sometimes turns to confusion.
The great challenge for Arles today is to be a seminar, for both public and the professional, investigating new creative aesthetics as much as public representations. What seems a handicap, being remote from a natural audience, like ‘months of photography’ have in big cities, is in fact its chance. The public is retained day and night. For 36 years Arles has been recognised as a different place for stimulating photographers and curators, that was before FotoFreo happened …

SESSION 2

Stephen Muecke
Contingency Theory

Contingency is that which touches: it is the risk of the event which calls for a singular response. This lecture will describe a new method for cultural practice, as I tell a story about travelling in Madagascar with photographer Max Pam. This method stresses the transformative potential of lines of connection as they weave through space, language and history, linguistically and historically. The traveller moves in a complex system where connections unfold and disperse, then more suddenly knot and bind in rituals which propitiate these ghosts of the ancestors (famadihana), or deploy a ‘dancing mania’ (ramanenjana) against colonialism. In reflecting on Max Pam's work, I focus on the contingencies of the occasions on which he is moved to take shots, as well as on the narrative of the work which results.

Graham Howe
E. O. Hoppé: What it is to be Australian

In 1930, E. O. Hoppé, who has been described as "the most famous photographer in the world in the 1920s," created the first photographic portrait of the entire Australian continent. Spending almost an entire year traversing and documenting the countries geographic expanse while also examining its social landscape, Hoppé’s brilliant photo-modernist portrait of a nation shows what it is to be Australian.
His photographs seem insightful today because Hoppé identified Australians of diverse backgrounds and cultures interacting as a single society, in the process of forming its distinct identity and becoming a multi-cultural nation.
This important national treasure of social, topographic and artistic documentation was only recently discovered in the files of London’s oldest picture library that acquired most of Hoppé’s archives when he retired in 1950. Entombed for almost half a century, Hoppé’s important work, of which the Australia body is a part, was unreachable by photo-historians, until recently.
Australian photo-curator, Graham Howe, will explore the Hoppé archive to show the depth and richness of the artist who fellow photographer Cecil Beaton simply called, "The Master."

SESSION 3

Shahidul Alam
Publishing from the streets: Citizen Journalism.

Control of the media by state and multinational entities has led to partisan reporting by the mainstream. In the absence of media plurality, citizens have taken it upon themselves to report events as they see it from the ground. Activist networks and citizen groups, and even media savvy individuals, now utilise the power of the Net (with the advent of the ‘blog’) and the versatility of digital technology, to challenge the media giants. Will this lead to better journalism? Will it force the mega media entities into greater accountability? Will it restore the credibility of the media? The debate is ongoing, but without a doubt, a new journalist and a new photojournalist has emerged, who does not have an accreditation pass, who is not backed by a big budget, but is unfettered by the weight of editorial control. The whispers of cyberspace are being amplified, and there are many who will listen.

Gael Newton
Richard Woldendorp

Richard Woldendorp originally wanted to be a painter but WWII interrupted his education and life and led to his immigration to Australia in 1951 where he settled in Perth. An engagement with his personal photography in the mid 1950s prompted an unexpected career in photography. Woldendorp came to understand and bond to, the vastness of the Australian landscape; his first photobook The Hidden Face of Australia was published in 1968.
Woldendorp began to make many photographs from the air in the 1970s often eliminating the horizon line to emphasise the powerful linear and planar forms of the landscape. His distinctive colour aerial work of the 1980s neatly balanced between abstraction and illustration, was widely disseminated though his own photobooks and stamped the image of the nation in a booming and confident era.
Yet barely a word of critical history and appreciation of him as an artist exists. Gael Newton, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia will discuss Woldendorp’s development as an artist over more than 50 years of work and the curiously low status of landscape photography in the history of photography as an art in Australia.

SESSION 4

Sandy Edwards
Is all indigenous photography by definition political?

In 1988 the Bicentennial was the rationale for a nationwide project documenting indigenous communities which became the After 200 Years Project (organised by AIATSIS). I participated in this project as one of the mainly white photographers, photographing in Brewarrina, NSW. There was a small group of indigenous photographers involved. Since that time there have emerged in the artworld a significant number of prominent indigenous photographers employing a wide range of strategies in their work. It is notable that a documentary approach is rarely chosen.
This lecture will look at the work of photographers including Tracey Moffatt, Ricky Maynard, Michael Riley, Brenda L Croft, Destiny Deakin, Brooke Andrew and a group of teenagers documenting their own community in Brewarrina. It will examine the different strategies and modes of photographic practise found, and ask the question - is all indigenous photographic art by definition political in intent?

Susan Bright
The Contemporary Portrait

Over the last ten years there has been a remarkable increase in artists turning to human figure (and more specifically the human face) and reworking traditional concepts behind photographic portraiture. Traditionally the studio and the street have been the longest and most established environments in which portraits have been made. In these locations there are recognised codes of conduct that result in portraits that we know how to read and understand. These codes and rituals are formed by a triangle of relationships between the sitter, photographer and spectator. On closer inspection the rituals between the three parties involved often become a complex interplay of power, positioning and performance. Susan Bright will look at a range of contemporary approaches to portraiture by showing a selection of still and moving images and open up questions about the relationships between them in terms of intention, production, encounter and interpretation.

FESTIVAL PROGRAMME FOR CONFERENCE WEEKEND

FOTOFREO 2006 CONFERENCE REGISTRATION FORM

Cost of registration is $200 + GST = $220
Registration will entitle the delegate to a conference bag, FotoFreo 2006 Catalogue, buffet lunch with wine, morning and afternoon tea, and windup drinks.
Also, FotoFreo has negotiated a special accommodation rate for FotoFreo attendees from overseas and interstate at the Fremantle Esplanade Hotel.

REMEMBER Friends of FotoFreo are entitled to a 10% discount on the registration fee.

Standard Entry booking form   OR   Friends of FotoFreo Discount booking form

To book accommodation in Fremantle CLICK HERE

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