FotoFreo 2008 Core Exhibitions

 

The core exhibitions listed below are arranged according to the venue in which they are being shown and the order that the exhibitions will be officially opened.

Art Gallery of WA	Roger Ballen – Already open
Edith Cowan University	Allan Radich – March 31, 6:30 - 8pm
Murdoch University Art Gallery	Agnès Dherbeys
John Curtin Gallery	Brook Andrew – Thursday, April 3, 6pm - 8pm
Fremantle City Library	Mindaugas Kavaliauskas – Friday 4, 2pm
New Editions Bookshop	Landlines
Fremantle Arts Centre	Marian Drew, Christophe Bourguedieu, Chen Nong and Hayden Fowler – Friday, April 4, 6:30pm - 9pm
Perth Centre of Photography	Denis Darzacq – Saturday, April 5, 1pm - 3pm
Artsource Exhibition Space	Hijacked - Saturday, April 5, 4pm - 6pm
Fremantle Prison	Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Christopher Koller, Robert Frith and Connie Petrillo – Saturday, April 5, 6pm - 8pm
Kidogo Art Gallery	Megan Lewis – Saturday, April 5, 8pm - 10pm
Western Australian Museum – Maritime	Edward Burtynsky & Paolo Pellegrin – Sunday, April 6, 6:30pm - 8pm
Film & Telivision Institute (FTI)	Wang Gang – Monday, April 7, 6pm – 8pm
KULCHA	Dow Wasiksiri – Tuesday, April 8, 6pm – 8pm
Johnston Gallery	Polixeni Papapetrou – Wednesday, April 9, 6pm - 8pm
Central TAFE Art Gallery	Focus: Photography & War 1945-2006 – Thursday, April 10, 6pm - 8pm
Moores Building Gallery of Contemporary Art	Jodi Bieber, Stephen Dupont, Gilbert Bel-Bachir, Contact/s: The Art of Photojournalism and the Walkley Awards – Friday, April 11, 6:30pm - 9pm
Turner Galleries	Darren Siwes – Friday, April 11, 6pm - 9pm
Cullity Gallery	Shi Guorui and Zhu Hao – Sunday, April 13, 6:30pm - 8pm

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ART GALLERY OF WA

Roger Ballen

Brutal, Tender, Human, Animal: Roger Ballen Photography
Until May 4, 10am – 5pm daily

According to Robert Cook*, “The oeuvre of Roger Ballen is one of the most singular in contemporary art today. Working within South Africa over the last thirty years he has created a body of work of searing intensity. It is challenging, edgy, shocking, tender, ambiguous, brutal and sometimes funny. His photographs strike at the heart of what it means to be a human animal, driven by libido, desire, passion, daftness, spiritual and physical hunger and a whole range of other half-understood forces.
“Bringing together 79 black and white photographs produced between 1983 and 2006 as well as the DVD Memento Mori, this exhibition ‘Brutal, Tender, Human, Animal – Roger Ballen Photography’ presents the depth and breadth of these striking qualities in Ballen’s practice. Within this span – it tracks the most significant shift in Ballen’s work to date – the move from a “straight” photo-documentary style to a profoundly compelling psychological subjectivism that fits somewhere between surrealism, the drawings of Cy Twombly, the films of David Lynch, the poetry of Paul Celan and the plays of Samuel Beckett.”
* Robert Cook is the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of WA.

Roger Ballen is probably best known for his photographs of people on the fringes of South African society. These images are examined in publications such as Platteland, Images from Rural South Africa and Outland his most recent book, Shadow Chamber, published by Phaidon. He is described as making images that are ambiguous and often disturbing, but that are also shot through with flashes of dark humour. The photographs in Shadow Chamber blur the boundaries between the documentary photography and art forms such as painting, theatre and sculpture, challenging the ways in which we perceive the 'reality' of photography.
Roger Ballen’s photographs are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He has won numerous awards, including the prize for Best Photographic Book of the Year at the PhotoEspana festival in Madrid (for Outland) and was named Photographer of the Year at the inaugural Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles in France in 2002.
In Australia, Roger Ballen is represented by the Stills Gallery in Sydney.

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EDITH COWAN UNIVERSITY

Allan Radich 1959-2008

I Like Roses
Building 3 Upstairs, 2 Bradford St, Mt Lawley, April 1 – May 4
Open 9am – 5pm Mon-Fri
Official opening 31 Mar 6:30pm

In the corridors of academia, and the narrow margins of exhibition notes, photography is often cast in a fluorescent cerebral light. Theories and theorists are commonly employed to give weight to a medium which, by its very nature, is all surface. Allan Radich was well aware of these rules of engagement – he, after all, completed an Honours degree in Photomedia at Edith Cowan University – yet he willingly flouted these traditions. Photography allowed Allan to pursue the things that he liked with a technology that he loved. Allan may have affirmed Lemmy Kilmister’s assertion that ‘the chase is better than the catch’. Still, this collection of images from Morocco, Iran, Korea and Japan indicate that the catch can be equally enticing.

I Like Roses is presented in memory of Allan.

Allan Radich maintained a passion and talent for photography through years of surfing, surveying and farming. His vocations not only provided him with the means to pursue his passion around the world, but they also complemented his photography. He was acutely aware of the people and things which temporarily inhabit this earth. His life and photography were both private and popular, and his work has been published in photography journals in Europe. This is the first exhibition of his work since his passing in February 2008.

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MURDOCH UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY

Agnès Dherbeys

Timor Leste: The Shattered Dreams Of Independence
Murdoch University Art Gallery
Level 4, North Wing Library Building, South Street Campus
Exhibition from April 2 – April 27
Open daily 10am – 5pm

World press award winning photographer Agnes Dherbeys, documents the continuing troubles in East Timor, who despite winning their independence in May 2002 in a bloody struggle, continue to have trouble building a coherent national identity. The murderous violence within the army in 2006 has suddenly divided the country between Easterners and Westerners and the gravity of the situation forced an International Armed Force (mandated by the UN, under Australian command) to come back in to the country. Dherbeys captures the exploding and volatile atmosphere of the 2007 presidential elections, symptomatic of the bitterness within the little country. In spite of all, the Timorese voted massively for a Peace Nobel Prize: José Ramos Horta.

Agnès Dherbeys is a Bangkok based, 30 year old French photographer and founder of EVE photographers. She has mainly worked in Nepal, East Timor, Cambodia, and Thailand, also in  Palestine and Israel. Her work has been published in Newsweek, Le Monde 2, Liberation, Publica, Marie Claire, IHT, among others. She was winner of the Foundation Lagardère grant 2005, for her project in East Timor. Timor Leste: The shattered dreams of the Independence was recently exhibited at Visa pour l’Image, and was a projection in Angkor Photo Festival. In 2007, she won second prize stories Spot News of the World Press Photo for her work on the Nepalese Popular Uprising against Absolute Monarchy. She is also one of the 12 participants of the Joop Swart Master Class 2007.

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JOHN CURTIN GALLERY

Brook Andrew

Brook Andrew: Eye to Eye
4 April -­ 30 May 2007

Brook Andrew: Eye to Eye is an exhibition that spans the artist’s practise over the past decade and features photography, neon lighting and installation. Andrew has created a powerful body of work that challenges dominant points of view regarding Indigenous people and issues of identity and history. That is, ­what aspects of traditional culture and language have been lost and what can be recovered.  
Reflecting equally on global mass media and traditional grass-roots aesthetics, the works in this exhibition speak of an unfolding or recovery of a lost history, a lost identity and a lost language.
Andrew's deceptively simple choreography of text and image, underlies a complexity and beauty at the heart of his work - in the poetics of space and public address, the spectacle of light and sight, in the echo of memory and the pressure of historical consciousness.
Brook Andrew: Eye to Eye is a Monash University Museum of Art Touring Exhibition

Brook Andrew is a multimedia conceptual artist at ease with whatever medium he is working with and suits his purpose, and he is as well known for his installation, neon, sound, print and performance work as he is for his digital media work and photography. Through his artwork he seeks to comment on a range of central issues including race, politics, celebrity, capitalism and beauty. He says that, "focusing on the intentions of the mass, electronic and published media (from a Wiradjuri position), I interrogate contemporary global culture, teasing out the popular to spew forth iconic takes on 'globalism'...I am attracted to Indian images of mass communication and popular culture like that of Bollywood and more non-western dominant forms of local religion and customs".

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FREMANTLE CITY LIBRARY

Mindaugas Kavaliauskas

A Portrait of Kražiai (2001)
Town Hall Centre, Fremantle, T- 9432 9766,
April 4 – May 4 Opening hours Mon 9:30am - 5:30pm, Tues - Fri 9:30am - 8:00pm, Sat 9:30am - 5:00pm
Official opening 2pm Friday 4th April

Inspired by the work of Walker Evans, and in particular a book by Paul Strand and Cesare Zavattini called Un Paese, Mindaugas Kavaliauskas‘ sensitive series of photographs depicts the transitory life of a small historic village in Lithuania.   
The village of Kražiai has a rich history that dates back over 750 years. An important landmark in Lithuania, Kražiai was the last pagan region in Europe, and in the 17th century was a college town famous for its theology scholars. Kražiai was also an important national symbol of resistance against foreign occupation, when at the end of the 19th Century the town stood up to anti-catholic Russian Tzarist forces resulting in a massacre that has since become a milestone in Lithuanian history. This event significantly contributed to the development of Lithuania‘s national identity and the restoration of statehood at the beginning of the 20th century. 
Once a favourite visiting place for generations of Lithuanian and European nobility, today Kražiai is a small town of 830 inhabitants which, like most rural Lithuanian communities, faces the harsh reality of transformation as it tries to cope with a changing economy and an aging population. Little remains of its glorious past. With the older population dying out and the village struggling to contain the young men and women who leave to work abroad, those that remain find themselves in a kind of social nowhere. As a representative of the younger generation of Lithuanian photography, Mindaugas Kavaliauskas breaks tradition by avoiding the cliches of social photography- exaggerated emphasis on religious rites or on the poverty and degradation- keeping the focus on the daily life.
A Portrait of Kražiai was started in 2001 and continues to document the changes and paradoxes of a village in decline. 

Mindaugas Kavaliauskas is a photographer, curator and festival director and one of the central figures in the development of photography in Lithuania. He studied photography and arts at Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania), Ecole Nationale de la Photographie (Arles), Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts (Paris) and at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). The founder and director of Kaunas Photo, the only international festival of photography in the Baltic States, he is also a member and board member of the Lithuanian Photo Artists Union.

The images in this exhibition were printed by our sponsor, Fitzgerald Photo Imaging

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NEW EDITIONS BOOKSHOP

Landlines

Kevin Ballantine, Duncan Barnes, Norm Leslie, Max Pam, Brad Rimmer
New Editions Bookshop
High Street, Fremantle, 4 April – 4 May, Open 10am – 10pm every day

Landlines is an ensemble work by photographers Duncan Barnes, Norm Leslie, Brad Rimmer Kevin Ballantine and Max Pam. As a group and as individuals they are saying something unique about the poetics of Western Australian landscape photography and how it can shape an understanding of passing through this huge terrain. A process many millions of Australians do often in a lifetime living in this country.

Their finely calibrated reporting on a series of long and seemingly open-ended road trips was financed on shoestring economics and plenty of goodwill. This necessary parsimony kept the photographers at all times connected to the landscape. Sleeping out, eating dinner on the dry creek bed, moving on the next morning. Constantly sampling the million square kilometres that constitutes one third of the Australian land mass.

Brad Rimmer was born in 1962 in Wyalkatchem, Western Australia. A Perth based photographer, Rimmer looks at social landscapes specifically in China and the Western Australian Wheat belt. These two bodies of work have been exhibited Australia, China and the UK. Both projects are being developed into monographs.

Kevin Ballantine was born (1950) in Victoria Park, Western Australia. Kevin lectures in Photomedia and for the last decade his research has focused on picturing things sacred resulting in exhibitions of Western Australia's Great Sandy Desert, Perth Metropolitan beaches and Easter Processions in Sicily.

Duncan Barnes has worked as a commercial and editorial photographer since the mid 1990’s and now lectures in Photomedia at Edith Cowan University.  His personal body of photographic work has focused heavily on the music/dance scene in Australia and more recently has exhibited work looking at the human impact on natural environments

Max Pam left Australia at 20, after accepting a job as a photographer assisting an astrophysicist.  Together, the pair drove a Volkswagen from Calcutta to London. This adventure proved inspirational and travel has remained a crucial and continuous link to his creative and personal development. His work has been published in numerous highly regarded books, including Going East: (1992), Human Eye (1992) Max Pam (1999), Ethiopia (1999) and Indian Ocean Journals (2000). Going East won Europe's major photo book award the Grand Prix du Livre Photographique in 1992.

Norm Leslie was born in Scotland in 1951, lived in Fremantle for 50 years and taught photography at Edith Cowan University for 28 years. He is currently Coordinator of the Photomedia programme and Director of Creative Industries and Contemporary Arts.

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FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE

Chen Nong

San Xia
Fremantle Arts Centre
April 5 – May 11, 10am – 5pm

The Yangtze River is the longest river in China, and the cradle of Chinese civilisation. Among its most significant sites is the Three Gorges region, where the river has cleaved its way through the mountains to form the Qutang, Wu, and Xiling Gorges. An area of tremendous natural beauty, the region is also rich in historical and archaeological significance, where some of the earliest human activity in China has been discovered. 
Today, the Three Gorges is being transformed into the world’s largest dam, the biggest construction project since the Great Wall and the Grand Canal. Cities and villages that have existed for over a thousand years have now been consumed by water, and millions of residents have been displaced from their homes and relocated.
In his San Xia project, Chen creates a sumptuous allegory which explores the interplay between the ancient and the contemporary. His work contemplates the Three Gorges Dam, a potent symbol of modern Chinese industrial development, and the social, cultural and environmental impact such projects bring about. Using former residents, at that time employed as workers to tear down their 2500 year old city, Chen recreates the “Terracotta Warriors” in handmade uniforms created by the artist himself and photographs them amongst the rubble and detritus of their destroyed homes. The Terracotta Army of the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, originally created as a symbol of the endurance of the imperial system, become in Chen’s series representative of the futile quest for the immortality of tradition in the face of China’s unstoppable progress. As the German photographer and curator Thomas Kellner says, Chen’s army reveals itself to be an “army of morality”.
Chen Nong’s beautiful and painstakingly produced black and white prints are created using an old style bellows camera, which are then hand-coloured by brush reflecting his fascination with traditional photographic techniques and values.

Chen Nong was born in 1966 in Fujian Province, China. He has worked extensively with ceramics and is a self trained photographer and painter. His photographic career was established in 2005 after his participation in the Rome Photography Festival. Chen Nong’s photographic work is distinguished by the hand colouring he uses on his prints.

 

Christophe Bourguedieu

The Passengers
Fremantle Arts Centre
April 5 – May 11, 10am – 5pm

Shown for the first time in Australia, The Passengers is the latest body of work from the French photographer Christophe Bourguedieu, who produced this series from several trips to Perth between 2004 and 2006.
The Perth we see in The Passengers appears at first sight so familiar. Eucalypts, bitumen roads, asbestos fences, jarrah floorboards, a Blue Heeler dog. And yet something about these pictures remains just beyond reach. It is this quality of the enigmatic, always present in Christophe Bourguedieu’s photographs, which makes the work so compelling.
Bourguedieu’s world is a finely nuanced universe. Outside ordinary suburban streets and laneways are empty, while inside hesitant young men and women in timeless Australian interiors wait for a possible encounter. Despite the loneliness evoked in these images, the characters are poised and calm. They are modern heroes trying to cope in an imperfect world. Objects become portents to their undecided fate. A white vinyl sofa with faded red velvet cushions sits absurdly alone in a room. Paint flakes off the scratched exterior of a partially opened door. The quality of the light and the sensuality of the colours maintain a carefully considered atmosphere. We have entered what Max Pam has called Bourguedieuland.

Christophe Bourguedieu studied law and criminal sciences before developing an interest in photography. He has taught at ECAL (Lausanne, Switzerland) and currently teaches photography at the Ecole nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs (Paris). He exhibits regularly in France and Europe, most recently at Galerie Box in Brussels and Musée d'Art Contemporain in Lyon. He has published several monographs with Point du Jour Editeur including Le Cartographe (2000), Tavastia (2002) and Eden (2004). His latest book Les Passagers (2007), which accompanies this exhibition, is the result an affinity he developed with Perth, Western Australia as a result of attending FotoFreo 2004.

 

Marian Drew

Every Living Thing
Fremantle Arts Centre
April 5 – May 11, 10am – 5pm

Marian Drew’s art practice in photography and video explores current relationships to time, domesticity, history and landscape. Her work acknowledges the pictorial relationships of landscape and history to cultural identity, as explored in her photographic translation of the European Still Life genre in the context of Australian roadkill.

After completing her Degree in 1984, Marian Drew was awarded a German Government Scholarship to study experimental photography in Germany. Since that time her work has been recognized thorough grants, awards and residencies in Australia, Europe and the US. She is Convener of Photography at the Queensland College of Art, Brisbane and is represented by commercial galleries in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and New York. In Australia her work is represented in State and National Gallery collections. Her first major monograph was published in 2006 by the Queensland Center for Photography and held her first solo show in New York titled Every Living Thing in late 2007.

Marian is represented by Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne, Hill Smith Gallery, Adelaide and Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney.

 

Hayden Fowler

Call of the Wild
Fremantle Arts Centre
April 5 – May 11, 10am – 5pm

The Call of the Wild series of photographs is the documentation of a weeklong performance that took place during the Auckland Festival in 2007. Fowler worked collaboratively with a tattoo artist within a sci-fi, futuristic set, to have a pair of extinct birds (the New Zealand Huia) tattooed onto his torso.
The Huia holds important significance to New Zealand Maori, with tail feathers traditionally worn as a sign of status. However, the gifting of feathers to the visiting Duke of York in 1901 resulted in a London fashion-trend, which lead to the birds’ final demise and extinction by 1907.
Fowler’s performance captivated public attention. It was a modern voyeuristic experience, enabling spectators to watch the full and complex tattoo procedure unfold. While contemplating the permanence of the artwork Fowler was having transferred to his skin, people were simultaneously witnessing the resurrection of the Huia, an enduring symbol of Maori authority.
Fowler’s practice is concerned with the increasingly estranged relationship between nature and culture. In Call of the Wild, the projection of tattooing tradition and animism into such a-natural, futuristic surrounds, acts to juxtapose the phenomena of resurgent ‘tribal’ practice against the increasingly sanitised contemporary human experience.

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PERTH CENTRE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY

Denis Darzacq

Hyper et Casqués
Perth Centre for Photography
91 Brisbane Street, Perth
April 5 - May 4, 10am - 4pm Wednesday to Sunday
Official Opening April 5, 1pm - 3pm

"The subtle and elegant treatment of color, the precise framing, the pertinence of the choice of locations insure there is coherence as a whole, creating a beautiful tension between activism and aesthetics" - Christian Caujolle, Director of Gallery VU on  La Chute.

“The place of the individual in society has been a driving theme in my photographic work of the last few years. I explore this through a staged approach but also through documentary images. 
“In my two latest series exhibited at the FotoFreo festival, Hyper and Casqués, my questioning is articulated on a visual opposition. The opposition between body and decor as it is shown in Hyper, or between body and ornament in Casqués. All my photographs are the result of a shared collaboration with the models and the images are not digitally manipulated in any way.
“For Hyper I asked young dancers and sportsmen to jump for the camera, inspiring themselves from the aggresive setting of the hypermarket as well as the body language found in mannierist paintings, unreal and exaggerated, futile. A form of resistance against an increasingly rampant consumer society.
“Casqués was shot in a small provincial French town. Living on the fringes of our globalised modern world, the youth of this town have nevertheless developed the urge to be part of the bigger picture. They have invented a very unique helmet culture, oscillating between protection and ornament, sheltering their shyness behind an aggressive and bright design. A culture in equilibrium between their reality and their desires.” 
Denis Darzacq
15th February 2008.
Translated from the French by Laura Beilby

This exhibition was printed by Fitzgerald Photo Imaging, a proud sponsor of FotoFreo 2008: The City of Fremantle Festival of Photography

French photographer Denis Darzacq was born and raised in Paris, a city in which he still lives and works today. He graduated from the ENSAD (French National School for Decorative Arts) in 1986 and started his photographic career following the French rock scene.
In 1994 he began a series exploring the nocturnal life of Parisians titled Only Heaven, which he exhibited at various photo festivals. In 1999 the French Ministry of Culture commissioned him a body of work on French youth. The interaction between man and urban space and, more precisely, the suburbs have been a driving force in his recent work.
Darzacq won the 2007 World Press Photo prize in the category ‘Arts & Entertainment’ for his series La chute.
He has published a number of books including La Chute (2007), Bobigny centre ville (2006, co-author Marie Desplechin), Le ciel étoilé au-dessus de ma tête (2004), Ensembles 1997/2000 (2001).
Exhibited extensively throughout France and internationally, his work is also held in both public and private collections including the Pompidou Center, the FNAC (French National Contemporary Art Fund), the Nicéphore Niépce Museum and the Agnès b collection.
He is represented by Galerie VU’ in Paris and by Gallery de Sotto in Los Angeles.

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ARTSOURCE EXHIBITION SPACE

HIJACKED

Artsource Exhibition Space Level 1, 8 Phillimore St, Fremantle
Open 10am - 4pm Monday - Friday and 12am - 4 pm Saturday and Sunday
Official Opening 5th April, 4pm - 6pm followed by book launch and party at Little Creatures Loft 9pm – 1am

An exhibition showcasing a selection of work from the Hijacked book project, curated by photographer and editor Mark McPherson.

American Photographers - Timothy Archibald · Angela Boatwright · Alana Celii · Nick Chatfield-Taylor ·Brian Cross · Todd Fisher · Jonathan Gitelson · Dean Karr · Lisa Kereszi · Jason Lazarus · Suzy Poling · Robin Schwartz · Tod Seelie · Sarah Small · Amy Stein · Jennifer Juniper Stratford · Bill Sullivan · Shen Wei ·
Grant Willing · Ed Zipco  
Australian Photographers - Greta Anderson · Duncan Barnes · Karron Bridges · Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy · Michael Gray · David Griggs · Caitlin Harrison · Nathalie Latham · Mark McPherson · James Mellon · Graham Miller · Martin Mischkulnig · Fiona Morris · Tony Nathan · Jack Pam · Emily Portmann · Brad Rimmer · Janelle Ryan · Flavia Schuster · Juha Tolonen · Joshua Webb · Toni Wilkinson · Gareth Willis  

Hijacked brings together, for the first time, an uncompromising movement of international cultural exchange. Presenting the most diverse and provocative new photography from Australia and America, the book erases traditional boundaries between artists, professionals and emerging talent in order to point towards the future of contemporary photography.
Shunning repetitive and predictable structures, Hijacked's aesthetic is directed by the mindset and energy of young and emerging practitioners. Embracing the prevailing wanderlust, their work exhibits a fascination with international subcultures, fragmented trends, alternate life styles and urban landscapes. Explorations of suburban pleasures are placed on par with high artistic experimentation.
While assembling the visions of its contributors, Hijacked delves into the practical and conceptual issues of the world of contemporary photography. Interviews provide a social comment on the socio-scape of Australia and America, and highlights talking points from discussions with artists on communication, social awareness, capitalism and the impact of commerce on identity and artistic practice.
Relentless in its ambition, much like the photographers, writers and contemporaries it publishes, Hijacked, the photography book, is a survey and hybrid of real time photography and life in real time.

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FREMANTLE PRISON

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin

Fig.
Fremantle Prison
April 5 – May 4, 10am – 5pm daily

Fig. features over eighty still lives, portraits and landscapes by photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, drawing together newly commissioned work made around the south coast of England and internationally, and traces links between photography, imperialism and the colonial impulse to acquire, map and collect. The exhibitions diverse imagery harks back to an era of Victorian collecting, which resulted in strange accumulations of objects being deposited in local museums throughout the UK. As Broomberg and Chanarin have observed: ‘the history of photography is intimately bound up with the idea of colonial power. Documentary photographers today have a worrying amount in common with the collector/adventurers of past eras. As unreliable witnesses, we have gathered together ‘evidence’ of our experiences and present our findings here; a muddle of fact and fantasy.’

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin have been collaborating for over a decade. They have produced five books which in different ways examine the language of documentary photography; TRUST (2000) accompanied their first solo-show at The Hasselbad Center; GHETTO (2003) a collection of their work as editors and principal photographers of Colors magazine, was exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum; MR. MKHIZE'S PORTRAIT (2004) documented South Africa ten years after apartheid and accompanied a solo show at The Photographer’s Gallery; CHICAGO (2006), an exploration of contemporary Israel was published by SteidMACK in conjunction with a solo-show at The Stedelijk Museum; and FIG (2007), also by Steidl, to accompany solo exhibitions at the John Hansard Gallery and Impressions Gallery, UK. Broomberg and Chanarin regularly teach workshops and give master classes in photography, as well as lecturing on the MA in Documentary Photography at LCC. They are the recipients of numerous awards, including the Vic Odden Award from the Royal Photographic Society.

 

Connie Petrillo

Vanished Innocence
Fremantle Prison
April 5 – May 4, 10am – 5pm

The exhibition ‘Vanished Innocence’ will place viewers in a complex relationship to a selected group of Connie Petrillo’s works so as to enable them to step outside the bewildering assumption – that artwork based on photography has only one uniform meaning for all observers. As we shall see perhaps, she has been affected by the politics of her times.
Petrillo attempts to meld innocence and experience in her images. Reality and representation become one. Though her work mainly focuses on her immediate environment, art emerges from her family life (her own children and her observation of the world around her) and her images always tell a story full of contradictions and dichotomies: sexuality/innocence, innocence/knowledge, mortality/immortality, beauty/sadness, art/motherhood. These produce a continuous tension in her work. The familiar often becomes unfamiliar as she adds a disturbing element to the final image. This strangeness is what makes us question them and we are no longer sure if what we are seeing is real or not.
Though photography has long been understood to reveal the truth, with Petrillo’s work we often don’t know whether to believe what is in front of us or not. Her stories leave us wondering if in fact what we see actually took place or if she is just telling us some alluring tale?
For many viewers who have followed Connie’s career in both photography and painting this exhibition will bring focus to her current art practice.

Concetta Petrillo is a multiple award winning artist working in Perth. Connie is best known for her large-scale narrative paintings and photographs that make decisive statements on local and national events and on contemporary social issues. Petrillo closely observes these events and issues as both an artist and a woman. Her narratives are as personal as they are universal for they have been experienced first hand or are imbued with a deep emotional understanding of her carefully chosen themes.
Her exquisitely executed paintings and photographs draw upon the ‘old masters’ both in terms of their compositional elements and techniques as well as their visual vocabulary. This renaissance approach to volume, space and realism, employed by artists throughout the ages, provides an ‘authority’ to her often haunting yet always engaging contemporary images.
Exhibiting consistently since 1995, she also gained a Masters of Curatorial Studies in 2006 and a Postgraduate Degree in Fine Arts in 1998 both from the University of Western Australia). Connie describes herself as, “a mother and a photographer; an artist and a creator; a mother and a procreator.”

 

Christopher Köller

The Living Get The Chicken - The Dead Get The Hole
Fremantle Prison
April 5 – May 4, 10am – 5pm daily
                                   
This exhibition of Köller’s photographs has been selected from a number of bodies of work from 1980 to 2008. It conveys a consistent interest in photographing people using a varied range of approaches from the early studio portraits, through to photojournalistic work, staged works in which collaborators act out narratives and the most recent formal portraits in which the sitters conspire with Köller to present a negotiated representation of themselves to the world.
Christopher Köller explores issues that have both a personal and a strong social relevance using photography and increasingly, the medium of digital video. He has developed new approaches through an engagement with ideas from a very broad range of disciplines including architectural, social and media theory. His visually engaging works provoke a strong, immediate and even visceral experience at times, but that nevertheless offer up complex layers of meaning to extended and subsequent viewing.

Christopher Köller studied at Prahran College in Melbourne under Athol Shmith and John Cato, graduating in 1981 and completed a Masters degree in Fine Art at RMIT University in 2002. He has held solo exhibitions of his photographs, installations and video works in various Australian cities and in Japan, England, Spain and Mexico. His work has been included in group exhibitions in France, Italy and throughout Australia. The Australia Council’s Visual Arts Board has awarded Köller two grants and he has been accepted for four residencies; in Los Angeles in 1994, in Milan in 1997, in Tokyo in 2003 and in Barcelona in 2008. Köller’s work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the City of Monash, Griffith University, the Bibliotheque Nationale of France, the Sata Corporation Collection Tokyo and numerous private collections. He lectures in photography at the Victorian College of the Arts.

 

Robert Frith

New Works
Fremantle Prison
April 5 – May 4, 10am – 5pm daily

Robert Frith has used photomontage in his personal work for over twenty years. Working with found images, text and a patent blend of laconic humour, Frith examines the role of photography in establishing our sense of history and place.
Frith enjoys the hunt for interesting images, carefully collating photographs to look for the common threads which might link them together. Particularly attracted to the snapshot, due to its potential to communicate with authenticity and honesty, Frith often sifts through over a 1000 images to produce the work for his projects. In the case of the IASKA commission he solicited images mainly by word of mouth and a radio interview. Images were scanned from family albums, shoeboxes of photos, and office bottom-drawers.
The greater the variety of source of raw material the better. The Iluka commission provided Frith with a large archive full of interesting two-dimensional artefacts. The process of selecting the found images is not dissimilar to the process of working as a photographer. Decisions are still made about content and framing, but they are made through the filter of other people’s interests.
Frith is also attracted to the marks left by people’s interaction with images, for instance notes on the reverse, and the marks left by the process of photography, whether they are proof numbers or film batch codings. Combining these elements helps him achieve the degree of ambiguity that he strives for in his work. It has an important function in engaging the audience and in allowing personal and unintended interpretations. The works are primarily concerned with history, not in noting events, but in the ways in which photography influences the understanding of history. In this context politics, specifically the politics of rank, is very much a part of the work.
“Tragically I’m quite conflicted about photomontage; on the one hand I have a gut feeling that it lacks purity, that text and marks are the province of graphic designers, on the other I can’t deny that I’ve always been interested in combining images. The former feeling smacks of rankism (and even graphic designers have been gaining some credibility lately, Andy Warhol for instance) so I’m going with the latter.”

Robert Frith runs a commercial photographic studio near Perth. His solo exhibitions include 32 Pretentious Pictures at Darklight Gallery, Still Kllerberrin, International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia (IASKA), and shows at the Photography Gallery of WA. He is represented in a small number of collections including Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and the Australian National Gallery.

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KIDOGO ART GALLERY

Megan Lewis

Conversations With the Mob
April 5 - 4 May 2008 Official opening and book launch 8pm April 5. Perth Based Wadumbah Dance Group will perform on the opening night as a welcoming to the desert Mob

NB: Please Note that some the people in these images may have passed away  

Conversations with the Mob is a strong but sensitive body of work, which captures the beauty, humour, sadness and friendship of a traditional Aboriginal community grappling with the demands of Western culture - they are the Martu Aboriginal People, who Megan Lewis first met in the Western Desert in 2000.
The Mob, as they call themselves, granted Lewis permission to live with them full time in July 2002, where she stayed for several years. Numbering only about 850 people, they live in or near Western Australia’s Great Sandy Desert. It is an extremely remote and tough stretch of country, which is roughly the size of England or Tasmania. 
The Martu were some of the last Aboriginal people in Australia to come into contact with white people and rarely have they allowed their private world to be recorded. For Lewis it was a great privilege.
Life for many of the Martu Mob is tough, especially when they are not completely in the old world, nor are they completely in the white world, just some uncomfortable place in the middle. There is no handbook for them on how to survive the grief of losing 30,000 years of living as hunters and gatherers; and, by in large, they receive no real understanding from an alien white bureaucracy spewing out endless government funded studies and media reports. 
In a world so complex and full of contradictions these images and the accompanying book tell the story of extraordinary human beings who call themselves the Martu Mob.
In Lewis’ time with the Mob hardly a week passed by without a death. The grief was insurmountable…but still they manage to find humour.

Award-winning photographer Megan Lewis was born and raised in rural New Zealand. At the age of 21, she moved to Sydney and was employed by Reuters. During that time Megan’s work regularly appeared in various international publications including the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune and a front cover of Time Magazine.
In early 1998, Megan was lured by the Australian newspaper to their Perth bureau, where she continued to cover national and international stories including the Tampa crisis, Queen Elizabeth’s tour of Australia, riots in Indonesia and the first tremors of East Timor’s bid for independence. In July 2002, on a gut feeling and with an invite from the Martu people, Megan left the Australian to live full time in the Great Sandy Desert. The result of this five-year privilege is Conversations with the Mob, whose images won a 2005 Walkley Award and then were voted winner of the 2006 Photographers Choice Awards.

Megan is now based in Perth, working as a freelance photographer. During her career Megan has worked in many challenging locations and situations. She has photographed all manner of people – from the most exalted to the most destitute. She remains an optimist.

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WESTERN AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM - MARITIME

Edward Burtynsky

Australian Minescapes
Western Australian Maritime Museum (Victoria Quay)
April 5 - June 4

Australian Minescapes is a new body of work by internationally renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky and which was specifically commissioned by FotoFreo Inc, with the support of BHP Billiton Iron Ore and the FotoFreo Angels, for the FotoFreo 2008 festival. This series of images taken in the eastern goldfields of Western Australia and in the Pilbara continues Burtynsky’s examination of natural landscapes modified by mankind in the pursuit of the raw materials required for our modern society. However, Burtynsky's pursuit is that of finding beauty in the marks that mankind makes on the land.
While Edward is currently one of the world’s leading contemporary landscape photographers, the focus of his work is not the natural landscape but ‘man made landscapes’ – in his words, “manufactured landscapes”. His photographic work has examined quarries, mine sites, industrial landscapes, oilfields and industrial landscapes in the third world. Regardless of viewer’s opinions on the subject matter the photographs remain exquisitely beautiful. The images are also insightful and non judgemental. Describing his practice, Burtynsky elaborates, “Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.”

Edward Burtynsky is known as one of Canada's most respected photographers. His photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes are in the collections of several major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum in New York. His distinctions include the TED Prize, The Outreach award at the Rencontres d’Arles, The Flying Elephant Fellowship, Applied Arts Magazine book awards, and the Roloff Beny Book award. In 2007 he was awarded the title Officer of the Order of Canada and his honorary degrees include: Doctor of Laws, from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Doctor of Fine Arts in Photography, Ryerson University, Toronto and Doctor or Fine Arts from Monserrat College of Art, Beverly, Massachusetts.

FotoFreo Inc gratefully acknowledges the support for this project and exhibition by BHP Billiton Iron Ore and the FotoFreo Angels

Paolo Pellegrin

As I was Dying
Western Australian Maritime Museum (Victoria Quay)
April 5 - June 4

Pellegrin’s unique ability to capture humanity amidst the despair and suffering of war cumulates in this remarkable new exhibition, As I was Dying.
Pellegrin captures the horror of conflict and the anguish of those innocent victims of circumstance swept up in events beyond their control. His emotive images record the desperation of the displaced and the terror of those who witness the destruction of their homes and the death of their loved ones.
Featuring photographs from Lebanon, Haiti, Afghanistan and the funeral of Pope John Paul II, As I Was Dying is both an unflinching and memorable record of man’s inhumanity to man and an exploration of our response to death.
Pellegrin says: “When I do my work and I am exposed to the suffering of others - their loss or, at times their death - I feel I am serving as a witness; that is my role and responsibility to create a record for our collective memory. Part of this, I believe, has to do with notions of accountability. Perhaps it is only in their moment of suffering that these people will be noticed, and noticing erases our excuse of saying one day that we did not know. But I also feel that it is in this very delicate and fragile space that surrounds death, the space that I sometimes have both the privilege and the burden of entering, there exists the possibility of an encounter with the other in a way that goes beyond words and culture and differences. It is about being exposed for a moment in front of each other and in front of the act and mystery of dying. In that moment I feel I am looking at something that I can't completely see but that is looking at me. It is in this exchange that something simultaneously universal and deeply intimate can be found; in the death of the other there is a loss that belongs to everyone."

Renowned for his aptitude to immerse sympathetically into every situation, Paolo Pellegrin has created profound bodies of work including ‘As I Was Dying’ and ‘Double Blind’ which have won many awards.

A Magnum Photos Touring Exhibition. All images © Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos

The images from this exhibition were printed on the HP Z3100 Printer with Vivera inks

FotoFreo Inc gratefully acknowledges the generous support of this exhibition by Magnum Photos and Hewlett Packard

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FILM AND TELEVISION INSTITUTE

Wang Gang

Yi in the Wild
Film and Television Institute
92 Adelaide Street, Fremantle, April 5 – May 4, opening times 10am – 4pm Monday – Friday. Phone 9431 6700
Official opening will be on Monday 7th of April 6pm – 8pm and followed by the film, Manufactured Landscapes

Chinese photographer Wang Gang visited the remote Liangshan region of Sichuan province to capture a series of powerful and moving portraits of the Yi people, a forgotten ethnic minority that seems to have been passed over by the country’s accelerating economic development.
Taken over several visits to the region in 2006 and 2007, Wang Gang photographs with an unpretentious and natural approach, communicating something of the strong bond and empathy that he was able to establish with the Yi. His painterly images shot in soft natural light convey a love of freedom, an easy way with their natural environment, and a disregard for conformity that Wang Gang strongly identified with. But underneath the “charwa” or ponchos, Wang Gang also conveys a sense of vulnerability and looming tragedy. Wang Gang's work reflects his need to capture the soul of these Yi people in the wild in order to nourish his own self, completing a process of recognition - of self and other.

Wang Gang was born 1969 and studied French existentialism and history. He worked as an interpreter and started businesses in film and television, mining, internet games and publishing before pursuing photography seriously in 2006. His talent saw him awarded with a World Press Photo Award second prize in portraiture in 2007.

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KULCHA

Dow Wasiksiri

My Thai
Kulcha Club (above the Dome Restaurant on Sth Terrace, Fremantle)
5th April – 4th of May. The official opening will be Tuesday the 8th April at 6pm.

For two decades Thai photographer Dow Wasiksiri has explored through his camera’s lens the psychology of Thais in their habitat. Dow Wasiksiri says that he photographs the Thai way of life “with a quizzical eye” to show the Thailand he knows, lives and feels. In this series of photographs he explores the Thai way of life away from the visitor’s gaze to reveal the unselfconscious behavior of Thais in all their playful contradictions.
Dow says of this work, “I show the people and scenes I encounter just as they represent themselves in public, without judgment. You can see the impromptu, shared way that Thais tackle everything, from eating, exercise and worship, to markets, hair-dos and having their photograph taken. Being a Buddhist, I was raised to treat situations with detachment; not easy, but it breeds a useful discipline. I shoot something unexpected, then let it go.”
Dow says that, “Thailand supplies plenty of unexpected moments. The country’s particular rhythms and priorities can seem bizarre or chaotic to the observer. To compound the mystique, visitors are presented with contrived, idealized images of ‘Thainess’ by Thais ourselves. We prefer to show outer decorum for reasons of face. So countless published views of Thailand are staged and styled. The contrivance and the reality rarely match, leading to startling juxtapositions. Through these frames, I aim to reveal the unselfconscious behaviour of Thais, in all its playful contradiction.

“Celebrating popular culture is a hot-button issue in Thailand, where officialdom seeks to determine what ‘Thainess’ and Thai culture should be. My portfolio expresses through photography a zeitgeist emergent across many genres – music, media, art, writing, film, dance, design – that reappraises ‘Thainess’ and savours it, unabashed. This is how we are.”
“Taken as a whole, the (photographs) represent scenes in the transformation of a people. You become a witness to the onslaught of globalization as it collides with ancient ways. The themes you see in the popular culture of this rising Asian Tiger resonate with the hybrid development of Thailand’s neighbors. However hard that collision, the Thais meet it with the one exotic cliché that holds true: smiles.”

Dow Wasiksiri is a professional photographer who started his schooling in New Zealand then studied in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles City College from 1976-1978, from where he graduated with a degree of Associate in Arts. Later he went on to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Radio and Television Broadcasting from California State University in 1981. After returning to Thailand he stated his photographic career and in 1983 established his own photographic studio called Persona. His professional work involves a range of assignments from fashion through to documenting commercial business activity in the South East Asian region.

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JOHNSTON GALLERY

Polixeni Papapetrou

Games of Consequence
April 4 – April 27, Official opening Wednesday 9 April

In her new series, Games of Consequence 2008, Polixeni Papapetrou has returned to the landscape.
Papapetrou considers the landscape as a medium in which she can explore ideas about the contemporary social landscape of childhood.  The artist uses the landscape as a visual metaphor — viewed symbolically as a space without constraints and a place where children can test and define their individuality. The depth and complexity of the natural world, ranging from an Arcadian ideal to the darker haunts that children once frequented, provide a way of reflecting on the idyllic and shadowy aspects of growing up.
As the experience of childhood has changed dramatically in developed urban areas in the past generation, the question of what it means to be a child in our society today becomes more important.  The process of growing up in the modern world has changed. As recently as the artist’s own childhood, play was unregimented and steeped in the natural environment.  Even in the city where she grew up, she spent hours playing in vacant lots and abandoned houses and spaces outside the home that allowed Papapetrou to think in terms of unchartered territories and discovery. Papapetrou draws upon her own childhood memories as the inspiration for this work.
Papapetrou sees the type of free play and exposure to nature that she experienced growing up substantially diminished by the lure of the increasingly unnatural world of the screen, ironically supported by parental anxiety about children playing outside of the safe environment of the home. By exploring her childhood memories of play, Papapetrou is reflecting on the liberties that children had in these arcane spaces.
In images of children at play and in contemplation set in the landscape, Papapetrou portrays the landscape as a metaphorical shelter, an arcane place where children can make discoveries about themselves and where their imagination and rules can flourish. The land represents a space without constraints and a place where children attempt to define their individuality through their surroundings.

Born in Melbourne, in 1960, Polixeni Papapetrou still lives and works there. She has held over 20 solo exhibitions and is represented in many private and institutional collections including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, National Library of Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, BHP Corporation, Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersberg, Florida, USA and Artbank. Recently works by Papapetrou were included in ‘Tell Me a Story: Narrative Photography Now’, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, USA; ‘Aperture 55th anniversary exhibition’, Aperture gallery, Aperture Foundation, New York, USA; ‘Selected works’, Roger Williams Contemporary, Auckland, New Zealand; ‘Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’, Te Tuhi Gallery, Manukau City, New Zealand and at the Le Mois de la Photo, Montreal Biennale.

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CENTRAL TAFE ART GALLERY

Focus: Photography & War 1945-2006

11 April - 10 May 2008 Monday - Friday 10am - 4:45pm; Saturday 2pm - 4:45pm
The Central Tafe Art Gallery is located at 12 Aberdeen St, Perth

Alan Cuthbert · Allan Queale· Harold Dunkley · Phillip Hobson · Ian Robertson · Andrew Mattay · Denis Gibbons · John Fairley · Michael Coleridge · Tim Page · David Dare Parker · George Gittoes · Heide Smith · Stephen Dupont · Ben Bohane

Focus is an overview of the historical and aesthetic richness of the Australian War Memorial’s extensive collection of photographs, through the images and experiences of 15 photographers working in the period 1945 -2006. The exhibition covers a diverse range of images from Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam as well as Australia’s role in past and present peacekeeping operations. It includes the work of official photographers covering the war for the Australian defence force or the Australian War Memorial, photojournalists representing the media, and soldiers operating their own cameras in the field. Walkley Award winning photojournalist David Dare Parker is the Western Australian photographer selected.

This exhibition is supported by Australian Government's Commemorations Program and supported by Visions of Australia

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MOORES BUILDING GALLERY OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Jodi Bieber

Las Canas
Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery
April 5 – May 4, 10am – 4pm daily

“When you get to know us we are not as bad as they make us out to be. We are just people who lack affection; who, instead of offering love, are on the defensive and quickly react by showing our claws in response to the attitude of our society.
Accept us.  Support us.”
 Signed: Cesar, Valencia. Spain

In Spain, one of the main methods of transmission of HIV/AIDS is through the use of sharing needles when injecting drugs. A lack of social support, condemnation from society, an industry with no control or regulations has isolated drug users from the rest of society, as in so many other countries around the world.
In Spain the consumption of drugs is not prohibited unless it is consumed in a public domain, however the trafficking of drugs is a serious offense.
Jodi Bieber has photographed the people of Las Canas, a large area on the outskirts of Valencia. It is a fly infested municipal dump where approximately 100 people live in abandoned cars, makeshift shacks, tents or under the stars. Every day at least a 1,000 people pass through Las Canas to buy drugs and every morning at 9:30am a caravan faithfully makes its way into the area.
The caravan parks in its familiar position. As its doors open, you see the “Canas” community, worn out, slowly making it’s way to it’s only means of support, Fundacio Salut I Comunitat.
On a daily basis, without fail, the committed staff of Fundacio Salut I Comunitat work from their caravan supplying drug users with coffee con leche and biscuits, water, juice, clean syringes, needles, tin foil, pipes, elastic bands and condoms. There is also a portable shower, medical care and counseling. Clothes are also handed out when the need arises.
Pepe San Martin, co-ordinator of the project explains, “Many times when I see the people in Las Canas in this extreme situation, I think of the injustice this situation holds. In many cases, they are being victims of a society that marginalises them and drives them to this situation and keeps them there. As citizens of the world, they have a right to assistance”.
Bieber says of her exhibition images, “The photographs might seem confrontational to the viewer but Las Canas is a harsh world and there is nothing sentimental about this place.”

Jodi Bieber started her career after completing three short photographic courses at the The Market Theatre Photography Workshop in Johannesburg and after which she was selected to participate on a photographic training programme at the Star newspaper by the late Ken Oosterbroek in September 1993. She continued to work there as a photographer leading up to and during South Africa’s first democratic elections. In 1996 she was chosen to participate in the World Press Master class held in Holland and started working on assignments for publications like NY Times Magazine, Geo and Stern magazine. She now also works for non- profit organizations like MSF and Amnesty International on special projects for booklets and exhibitions.
Over a ten-year period (1994 – 2004) Jodi Bieber has worked on her own projects focusing on the country of her birth, South Africa – portraying youth living on the fringes of South African society. This work was finally published in the book, “Between Dogs and Wolves – Growing up with South Africa” which was released in five countries in 2006.

 

Stephen Dupont

Axe Me Biggie (Take My Picture)
Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery
April 5 – May 4, 10am – 4pm daily

In 1996, using a Polaroid Land Camera and an old chair and curtain backdrop borrowed from a local photographer, Stephen Dupont made a series of extraordinary portraits by a dusty roadside in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Jacques Menasche, an American journalist who accompanied Dupont on his journey describes the pictures. “One and all, the subjects of Stephen’s photographs seem to understand eternity and they have a certain look for it, each one, even among the blowing dust and the swelling crowds, finding this “center,” this patch of downtown Kabul magically transformed into a royal portrait studio, the rickety chair a throne on which the formal sitting takes place.”
“Axe Me Biggie”, explains Dupont, “is my crude Anglo phonetic rendering of the Dari for ‘Mister, take my picture!’, a plea I heard all over Kabul during my stay there in March 2006.  It seems to mean something in English, axe being just a more visceral and violent version of the camera verb to shoot returning all its original aura of surrender. And because I am a big guy, ‘Axe Me Biggie’ also seemed like a request addressed to me personally. I am Biggie. And on this day Biggie finally answers them all, en masse, saying, ‘Yes, alright. I will axe you, shoot you, and take your bloody picture. Have a seat!’”
Axe Me Biggie consists of 20 silver gelatin mural prints, hand printed by Chris Reid from Blanco Negro in Sydney, and a video installation and presentation of the making of Axe Me Biggie shown continuously throughout the exhibition.

Stephen Dupont is an international award winning Australian photojournalist and film maker and a member of Contact Press Images.
He works on long term projects around war, conflict and social issues.
His reportage has been featured in The New Yorker, Newsweek, French and German GEO, Liberation, The Sunday Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Time, and has earned him photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America in 2006, and first places in the World Press Photo and Pictures of the Year International. In 2006 he received Walkley Awards in TV Current Affairs, International Journalism and Photography, all for work from Afghanistan.
In 2007 he was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Prize for Humanistic Photography, the world’s most distinguished documentary photography award. This was for his work on Afghanistan.
Having exhibited his work in London, Paris, New York, Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, and at Perpignan’s Visa Pour L’Image Festival, in 1999 Dupont was a founding member of the first festival of photojournalism in Australia:  Reportage - A Celebration of Australian Photojournalism.
He is currently on assignment back in Afghanistan working on a feature length documentary film and his 15 year book project.
He is represented by Byron McMahon Gallery in Australia and Contact Press Images in New York.

 

Gilbert Bel-Bachir

LUCKY PICTURES: Images of Xingjiang
Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery
April 5 – May 4, 10am – 4pm daily

Taken in Xingjiang in remote Northwest China in 1996, the remarkable series LUCKY PICTURES was the result of a fortuitous accident.
After travelling through Pakistan for six weeks, Gilbert Bel-Bachir arrived in Kashghar. His plan - to travel to China through the Kunjerab Pass and into the high altitude Taklamakan desert, an extreme and isolated place inhabited by an ethnic minority called the Uyghurs. With his film stocks running low, Bel-Bachir reluctantly purchased the only film he could find. Forty rolls of cheap black and white stock called LUCKY. Taking the lesser travelled southern route, on some of the roughest roads he had ever encountered and on buses which constantly broke down, Bel-Bachir nonetheless was rewarded with rich experiences and opportunities on a journey that took six weeks.
After three months of travel, and back in Sydney, Bel-Bachir began processing the LUCKY film only to discover that the information on the backing paper of the 120 film had bled onto the emulsion, and the films were fogged. Mistaking 97 for 91 as the expiry date of the films, they had been five years out of date, but also probably temperature affected from the extreme climate in that region. Initially devastated by the results, Bel-Bachir put the prints away. With the passing of time, however, and convinced by his photographer friends to exhibit them, Bel-Bachir has grown to like the effects of the markings and the way that they ironically mirrored his Xingjiang trip- unique, rough, but with an unexpected beauty.

Born in Casablanca Morocco, Gilbert Bel-Bachir is a photographer and curator based in Sydney. He exhibits widely both in Australia and overseas and is part of numerous collections including The Art Gallery of Western Australia, State Library of NSW, Australian Maritime Museum and the Michel & Michelle Auer private collection Geneva, Switzerland.

 

Nikon-Walkley Photographic Awards

Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery
April 5 – May 4, 10am – 4pm daily

The Nikon-Walkley Photographic Awards are regarded as the most comprehensive and prestigious competition for press photographers in Australia. Every year more than 1,000 photographs vie for selection.
The skill of the photographer is to distil an often complex story into a single image. From tragedy to triumph, across the world and the spectrum of human emotion, these images from the Nikon-Walkley photographic finalists document the biggest stories of the year. Visually arresting, the composition and aesthetic skill on show here often belies the chaotic, precarious moments of their conception.

This exhibition showcases the best photographic moments in sport, daily life and reportage; more importantly they act as an historic visual record and reveal the creative talent behind our Australian photojournalists.

This exhibition is proudly sponsored by Nikon Australia Pty Ltd

 

Contact/s: The Art of Photojournalism

Kristen Ashburn · Alexandra Avakian · David Burnett · Stephen Dupont · Giorgia Fiorio · Frank Fournier · Lori Grinker · James Hill · Kenneth Jarecke · Yunghi Kim · Annie Leibovitz · Li Zhensheng · Don McCullin · Dilip Mehta · Alon Reininger ·

Curated by Robert Pledge

Contact/s: The Art of Photojournalism showcases the last four decades of photography through the medium that helped shape it: the contact sheet.
Marked by red, blue and yellow grease pencils, annotated with circles and arrows, these miniature "films" have represented a crucial link between events and publication since World War II. But their predominance, and the classic narrative-driven tradition they helped create, is quickly disappearing as the digital age drives photojournalism back to a single-image, "one picture says it all" approach.
Mining the historic archive of Contact Press Images, Contact/s revisits all the form’s power for storytelling and intimacy. Spanning thirty years and a dozens of countries, it puts the reader in the room … standing next to the Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran as he greets the largest crowd in history after his 1979 return to Iran, or at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. From apartheid in South Africa to firemen raising the US flag over Ground Zero in New York on September 11, 2001, Contact/s allows readers to peer behind the scenes of history.
Shot in both black and white and color, and featuring such legendary photographers as David Burnett, Annie Leibovitz, Li Zhensheng, and Don McCullin, the exhibition is a study in the process of photojournalism, and a history lesson in the second half of the twentieth century.

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TURNER GALLERIES

Darren Siwes

Mum, I want to be Brown
Turner Galleries, 470 William Street, Northbridge,
11 April - 10 May 2008
Open Tues – Sat, 11am - 5pm, Phone 9227 1077

Mum, I want to be Brown. This was the phrase verbalised by Darren Siwes' young son, and the trigger that instigated the artist's new series of photographic images shown at the Turner Galleries as part of FotoFreo 2008.
Fascinated by children from indigenous backgrounds who are fair skinned with a desire to be brown, Siwes has created a body of work which visualizes a world from their perspective. Set in a period when the Australian cultural milieu envisioned and enforced a mono-cultural society, these images simulate a nineteenth century aesthetic in which the lives of white middleclass families are being turned upside down. With their home interiors set outdoors and their white child longing to be brown, Siwes symbolically plays with notions of private inferiority versus public revelation, and challenges traditional notions of white history and black displacement.
Siwes' allegorical narratives are multilayered and rich, creating thought provoking juxtaposition. Past with present, innocence with preconception, conformity with resistance. And yet despite the social and political tensions created by the photographs, Mum, I want to be Brown maintains a balance of humorous relief.

Darren Siwes is of Aboriginal and Dutch descent, a mix of black and white that he refers to as Brown. His ongoing investigation into identity and belonging is imperative to his work. Siwes was awarded a Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship in 2002 and has held solo exhibitions in Australia and Spain, as well as participating in several international group exhibitions.  His photographs have been acquired by, the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of Queensland, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia, Artbank, Flinders University, Monash Gallery of Art and Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.

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CULLITY GALLERY

Shi Guorui

Uncanny Perceptions
Cullity Gallery
University of WA, Clifton St, Nedlands, April 12 – May 4
Monday to Friday, 9am – 5pm, phone 6488 2581

Chinese photographer Shi Guorui’s astonishing large scale photographs, usually 3 - 4 metres long by 1.2 metres high, are renowned for the tremendous detail and depth he is able to capture with a camera obscura.
Attracted to the monumental and the iconic, Guorui has completed over ten projects choosing his locations carefully for their symbolic cultural resonance. His subjects include The Great Wall of China, Mount Everest from base camp, San Francisco from Alcatraz prison, and the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles.
With Uncanny Perceptions, Shi Guouri has turned his focus to China’s iconic architecture, both ancient and contemporary. Photographs from the Beijing series capture the rapid rise of the city’s skyline and the architectural and historical incongruity of these immense steel towers that, in themselves, constitute tremendous feats of engineering and capital investment. Shi Guorui’s photographs illustrate the enormous scale of these new buildings, most notably with Beijing – New CCTV, and present them as empty shells, rather than symbols of China’s economic development. These are architectural projects that have reached completion, yet, through Shi Guorui’s photographic technique, buildings are rendered void of life. The work, Beijing – CBD, seemingly portrays Beijing’s Central Business District as something from a science fiction movie, where human life is rendered minute by large, cement highways around which stark steel-and-glass office buildings are clustered.
Guorui achieves his remarkable results by creating or transforming rooms into giant camera obscuras and projecting images onto enormous “paper negatives” using pinhole lenses. The light sensitive paper takes between two and eight hours to expose, a time calculated intuitively through experience by Guorui who sits inside the darkened rooms silently during the exposures.  "Besides just looking, I'm thinking, taking it all in.” he explains. “In Taoist and Buddhist thought, a monk will go to a mountain to be alone. This kind of isolation is improving for the inner self. So for me, to be in this dark place, this camera, for so long, is also a kind of cultivating of the inner self. As I face the wall, I'm aware that I'm living."

Shi Guorui began using the camera obscura exclusively after a 1998 highway crash that killed a friend and left him and another friend injured. He decided to slow down, to not worry and to take time. The methodical, slow procedural technique of the camera obscura becomes for Shi Guorui a form of meditation. Shi Guorui lives and works in Beijing. Now regarded as one of China’s most significant artists, his work is exhibited widely in international museums and has been collected by Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, De Young Museum San Francisco, Zhengzhou Museum China.

Zhu Hao

Silent Shanghai
Cullity Gallery
University of WA, Clifton St, Nedlands, April 12 – May 4
Monday to Friday, 9am – 5pm, phone 6488 2581

Zhu Hao’s colour photographs examine aspects of city landscapes that often go unnoticed. Through his use of colour and calculated positioning of the image he highlights the disorder in what is usually thought of as organised space (a modern city). As such he offers us a more organic and personal view of China’s super cities.
As a device, Zhu Hao shows these city landscapes devoid of people and in so doing foregrounds the subtle aspects of his scenes – those details that would otherwise go unnoticed. These apparently empty spaces also create a subtle tension, as we all understand that we are viewing what is undoubtedly some of the most densely populated spaces on the planet. The Chinese art critic, Gu Zheng, writing about the work of Zhu Hao, likens this detail to “silent chatter” in which, “the city’s cultural marks, like advertisements, paints and scratches, symbols and old buildings, reflect peoples desires and creativity.”

 

 

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