FotoFreo 2008 Informal Lectures and Presentations
This series of informal lectures, presentations and interviews will take place at Kulcha Club, 7 South Terrace (above the Dome Café), 1 pm to 4:30 pm, during the afternoons of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, April 7th-11th.
Entry will be $5 payable at the door
Speakers will include the following, arranged in alphabetical order:
Brook Andrews (artist) – An interview with the artist
Roger Ballen (photographer) – The Shadow Chamber
Edward Burtynsky (artist) – An interview with the artist
Lisa Coleman (researcher and photographer) – The Legacy of Norman Hall, picture editor
Denis Darzacq (photographer) – Body Language in Public Space
Rod Giblett (researcher) – Australian Landscapes and Wilderness Photography
Philip Goldswain – Silver and Gold: The photographs of John Joseph ‘Jack’ Dwyer (1869-1928)
Mindaugas Kavaliauskas (photographer & festival director) - Lithuanian School of Photography and the Shift of Generations and Centuries
Jonathan Marshall (researcher) –
Poli Papapetrou (photographer) - Childhood as subject matter in photography.
Richard Renie (historian) – The History of Colour Photography.
Bill Taylor (educator) – Composing catastrophe ‘After the Flood’: Robert Polidori’s photographs of New Orleans
Juha Tolonen (researcher and photographer) – Wasteland Reverie
Les Walkling (photographer, educator) – Editing Light, Imagining Colour
Susan van Wyk (curator of photography) – Rennie Ellis: Glad All
MONDAY 7th April
Roger Ballen (photographer) – The Shadow Chamber
Denis Darzacq (photographer) – Body Language in Public Space
Edward Burtynsky (photographer) – An interview with the artist
TUESDAY 8th April
Susan van Wyk (curator of photography) – Rennie Ellis: Glad All Over
Bill Taylor (Educator) - Composing catastrophe ‘After the Flood’: Robert Polidori’s photographs of New Orleans
Poli Papapetrou (photographer) - Childhood as subject matter in photography.
WEDNESDAY 9th April (Revised)
J Mindaugas Kavaliauskas (photographer & festival director) – Lithuanian School of Photography and the Shift of Generations and Centuries
Brook Andrews (artist) – An interview with the artist
Richard Renie (historian) - The History of Colour Photography.
THURSDAY 10th April (Revised)
Rod Giblett (researcher) – Australian Landscapes and Wilderness Photography
Philip Goldswain – Joseph Dwyer
FRIDAY 11th April (Revised)
Jonathan Marshall (researcher) – Title to be advised
Juha Tolonen (researcher and photographer) – Wasteland Reverie
SPEAKERS, LECTURE OUTLINE & BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
This presentation will take the form of an interview and followed by questions from the floor.
Brook Andrew is a conceptual artist who works across media with installation, digital media, photography, sound, performance, film and neon. Through his artwork, Andrew comments on global and regional perspectives on race, politics, celebrity, capitalism and beauty. In his own words, "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". Andrew exhibits internationally and his work is held in major galleries and collections. In 2004 he won the 21st Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Straight Islander Art Award in the Works on Paper category for his work tensio from the kalar midday series.
Roger will talk about and discuss the work featured in his recent book, Shadow Chamber.
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.
This presentation will take the form of an interview together with projections and followed by question from the floor.
Edward Burtynsky is currently one of the world’s leading contemporary landscape photographers. However, 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 the subject matter, and regardless of the opinions of viewers of his work about the subject matter, the images are exquisitely beautiful. The images are also insightful and non judgemental. He says about his work, “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.”
His work has been collected by more than 40 institutional galleries and is in more than 50 corporate collections.
Lisa Coleman
The Legacy of Norman Hall, picture editor
Norman Hall was an Australian picture editor whose career took him from editing a small town family country newspaper, the Narrogin Observer, to becoming one of the most significant figures in the European photographic community from the early 1950’s until his death in 1978.
Hall was known to be one of few photographic intellectuals with an extraordinary knowledge of the history of photography that few others at that time commanded. His “eye” for picture layout, and an instinct for recognizing potential in young emerging photographers, set him apart from other picture editors. Sadler says: “His role, influence and significance in the history of photography in the mid-20th Century in both the UK and abroad were seminal.”
Lisa Coleman is a Lecturer in the Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales. She teaches design, communication and since 2000 her expertise as documentary photographer, curator, researcher/writer and planner has combined to see the development of several innovative faculty and general education electives: Photography, Society and Environment engages the notion of exploring society with the camera as research tool. Lisa worked at STILLS Gallery for eight years. With assistance of a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship, and forthcoming Visual Arts grant and AGNSW residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, she is continuing work on the Norman Hall book/ exhibition.
Denis Darzacq
Body Language in Public Space
The place of the citizen in democratic society has been an underlying theme in the work of Denis Darzacq for many years.
In this lecture, Darzacq discusses the development of his work and the processes which nourish his photography, expanding on both his documentary and staged approaches whilst always remaining firmly grounded in reality and shared experiences.
Darzacq won a World Press Award in 2007 for his series La Chute, which depicts isolated young individuals seemingly falling from the sky and about to hit the pavement against a backdrop of banal suburban architecture. These astounding and simultaneously disturbing images were imagined by Darzacq after the riots that shook France in 2005, and became his response to generation of French alienated youths- ignored by society, their energy untapped and unused.
See Denis Darzacq's' exhibition at the Perth Centre for Photography.
Rod Giblett
Australian Landscapes and Wilderness Photography
Australian landscape and wilderness photography has played an important role in the formation of Australian national identity and in wilderness conservation. These two uses of photography are diametrically opposed as the former celebrates the conversion of the Australian bush into farmland whereas the latter promotes the conservation of the Australian bush as it was. Yet despite these opposing political ends, Australian landscape and wilderness photography employs a similar aesthetic drawn from the traditions of American landscape and wilderness photography and of European landscape painting. The aesthetic modes of the sublime and the picturesque are used across all three with no regard for their nationalistic politics. This paper critiques the politics of pictures focussing on two prominent examples in the work of Frank Hurley and Peter Dombrovskis. It concludes by arguing for a photography for environmental sustainability.
Rod Giblett is Senior Lecturer in the School of Communications and Arts, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia. He has previously published books on wetlands. Recently he published a critical, cultural history of communications technology. He has completed writing a book about the body. He is a local conservationist of the internationally important wetland near where he lives in Forrestdale. He has written and published a book of oral and natural history of the area. The paper for Foto Freo is a chapter in a book entitled Quaking Zone.
Philip Goldswain
Silver and Gold: The photographs of John Joseph ‘Jack’ Dwyer (1869-1928)
The early arrival of photographers in Western Australian Goldfields towns like Kalgoorlie, contemporaneous with their settlement, signaled the importance of the camera in visualizing this isolated society - these towns were never described by line but always by light. Jack Dwyer was one such photographer. He was several children born to a Tipperary miner who established his family in Victoria following one of the gold rushes of late 19th century Australia. Having taken up amateur photography at the age of 21, the younger Dwyer followed his own fortune to the remote Goldfields of Western Australia in 1892. Dwyer established his own studio in Kalgoorlie in 1901 where his services were soon in high demand. By the time he sold his studio in 1917 Dwyer had amassed a collection of some almost 11,000 glass plate negatives. Dwyer’s broad oeuvre captured the remarkably rapid urbanization and industrialization of the Western Australian desert and the people that populated it.
Philip Goldswain is a lecturer in Architecture in the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts at The University of Western Australia. He teaches design, Australian architectural history and an elective which focuses on the relationship between photography and the constructed environment. He is the recipient of a research grant which will investigate and exhibit the work of photographer JJ Dwyer. He is a contributing editor to the journal Architecture Australia and former editor of The Architect (WA).
Mindaugas Kavaliauskas
Lithuanian School of Photography and the Shift of Generations and Centuries
The Lithuanian School of Photography emerged in the mid-sixties and became an influential trend in the Eastern European photography. It mixed the reportage method with a focus on the individual, particularly concentrating on native traditions, anecdotes, daily routines, and literary and religious heritage. The common man and woman became the privileged subject, over issues dealing with the socio-economic reality. Nevertheless the reportage method and the attention it delivered to the documentation of native people and their habits and farming traditions was valuable for the contradiction it provided to the official Soviet doctrine. A number of influential photographic icons were created, who became recognized for depicting the core values of humanity. The absence of colour in photography was accompanied by the absence of popular culture in life. It was a way of thinking which was based on a “Family of Man” mentality. Humankind and its place on the land dominated the Lithuanian school of photography.
After 1990 with the restitution of the Lithuanian independence, photographic themes began to swing around to experimentation. With the turn of the millennium, and the variety of new technologies that became available, Lithuanian photography was given a new breath of life. Artists once again, started exploring the local mentality, but this time through portraits of people from varying professions, lifestyles and social landscapes. They began discovering the world and adding their own interpretations of mood, irony, and the absurd. Colour replaced black and white as a more meaningful way of tapping into popular culture and the social environment, and the psychological impact of photographs began to reveal previously unknown aspects of ourselves- loneliness, fragility, and superficiality. New photography also became a visionary mirror of the rapid economic changes and transformations, which continue to be the subject of future aesthetic discoveries and write the new pages of contemporary history.
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.
Poli Papapetrou (photographer)
Childhood as subject matter in photography.
In recent years, my work has involved making images that tell stories about childhood. In dealing with this subject matter, I am conscious that the work on the one hand, takes the viewer into the realms of fantasy and story telling, but on the other hand, it challenges our expectations regarding the portrayal of childhood in photography. This presentation will talk about the tensions surrounding childhood and its representation in contemporary society.
In our society the image of the child becomes increasingly loaded as images of children proliferate in the media and are used in advertising, illustrating features in magazines and on the Internet. In advertising, children are often used as symbols of innocence, fragility and vulnerability. Children are used to portray qualities that have been lost to us such as innocence, the capacity for wonder, marvel, enjoyment and to feel awestruck. We feel comforted looking at pictures of children that reinforce the nineteenth-century romantic ideal of childhood innocence and experience the corollary, anxiety, when looking at pictures of children that challenge this image.
Born in Melbourne, in 1960, Polixeni Papapetrou lives and works in Melbourne, Victoria. 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.
Before devoting her career to photography Poli was a lawyer and in 2006 was awarded a PhD from Monash University.
Richard Renie (historian)
The History of Colour Photography
This presentation will discuss hand tinted Daguerreotype and Ambrotype images, and early processes that used ‘colour addition’, such as Paget Colour, Dufay Colour and Autochrome. Richard will also talk about the replacement of ‘colour addition’ by ‘colour subtraction’ processes, such as Kodachrome.
The lecture would be illustrated with examples of each process, projected on a screen, as well as microscopic images of each process showing the colour filters used.
Richard Renie is a science communicator whose passion is light and sound. In particular he is interested in the history of the various light and sound technologies, and the science on which each technology is based.
After many years as a science teacher, Richard has now established the Fremantle Light and Sound Discovery Centre in the Fremantle History Museum where he presents an ever changing display of light and sound technologies. In the centre he offers a range of education programs for schools, as well as programs for various community groups, such as school holiday programs for kids of all ages. In 2006 the Fremantle Light and Sound Discovery won the Premier's Prize for Excellence in Science Communication.
Bill Taylor
The evidence of flows: Robert Polidori’s witness to Hurricane Katrina in ‘After the Flood’
The flow of water is commonly known by the traces it leaves. Signs of the passing of waves, the course of rivulets and rising damp are everyday manifestations of flowing water, though important things can depend on finding them. Robert Polidori’s photographs of the traces of flood water and the impact of inundation on New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina constitute an important visual record in this regard. The images comprising After the Flood, the title of an exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2006) and accompanying book, record the extent of the disaster. The images also transform the built environment of the Crescent City, its streetscapes and interiors into material evidence for the attribution of neglect and blame. This presentation will establish a context for viewing After the Flood by describing the multiple and complex interactions of so many organic and inorganic ‘events’ which are communicated by the images and which were initiated when the levees broke and water began to leave its mark upon the city.
Professor William Taylor teaches at UWA. He has written on a range of subjects including the history and theory of the built environment and architecture and landscape project reviews. Recent work includes a major monograph The Vital Landscape, Nature and the Built Environment in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Ashgate, 2004) and an edited collection The Geography of Law, Landscape and Regulation (Hart, Oxford, 2006). He is currently engaged in a major interdisciplinary project looking at new possibilities for the study of architecture, philosophy and ethics.
Juha Tolonen
Wasteland Reverie
In Juha Tolonen’s own words, “In recent decades there has emerged a residue of photographers keen on picturing landscapes delivered from the backend of the modern world. Photographic equipment and styles normally reserved for the creation of unspoilt natural scenes seem equally at home in dysfunctional and abandoned spaces. These images are not just critiques of modern waste and excess, they can also be as alluring as their wilderness counterparts, if not more so. Wastelands appeal to our senses on many levels. I am attracted to them because they are always arbitrary and incomplete, when the shutter releases the photographer is recording a unique moment - unlike much wilderness photography, there are no allusions to timelessness. The images in this presentation are drawn from diverse sources, including abandoned military bases and hotel complexes, nuclear accident sites, crumbling playgrounds and steel mills. This residue of the modern world is often maligned, perhaps because its represents failed enterprise, but we need not consider these spaces as end points but rather as spaces of transition, entry points into a realm outside the usual networks of urban spectacle.”
Western Australian based photographer and lecturer at Edith Cowan University Dr Juha Tolonen will introduce some of the themes of his work in this presentation. Tolonen has exhibited widely both in W.A. and the eastern states. His work has included urban wastelands as well as an extensive project on the Chernobyl disaster site, which has been open to photographers for some years now.
Les Walkling
Editing Light, Imagining Colour - Foto Freo 2008
Since the birth of photography a succession of artistic and mathematical colour appearance models and standards have been devised and implemented. An understanding of the basic function of the human visual system is necessary for the appreciation, formulation, implementation, and application of these colour appearance models. But how does industry leading digital photo-editing software like Adobes Photoshop facilitate our interaction with and control of light and colour? To what extent does its approach correlate with the human visual system? Do Photoshops tools manipulate colour in accordance with our psychological and physiological attributes? This lecture explores such questions, examines their antecedence and argues for a radical reconsideration of the techniques, tool sets and practices currently employed in the editing of digital photographic images.
Les Walkling is a Melbourne based artist and educator. His art work is represented in many public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and The National Gallery of Victoria. Previously the head of Media Arts at RMIT University, he is now the Postgraduate Research Fellow and an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant recipient in the RMIT School of Art. Les also conducts regular digital imaging courses through the Centre for Contemporary Photography and the Australian Institute of Professional Photography. He is a regular contributor to journals such as Artlink and Photofile, works as a digital imaging and colour management consultant, and regularly presents at digital imaging industry conferences, seminars and festivals.
Susan van Wyk
Rennie Ellis: Glad All Over
Rennie Ellis’ vision of the world was celebratory. He was something of a modern photographic ‘flaneur’ and all the time he was ‘idling’, he was taking photographs of the people around him. He seemed to be everywhere, at every party, every ‘event’. Ellis was best known for his photographs of social events, such as, music festivals, fashion parades and nightclubs, but his oeuvre also encompassed the grittier side of life and darker aspects of the city. Over a lifetime he created a catalogue of the richness and diversity of contemporary life. This paper will consider the wealth of photographs Ellis created and the breadth of his practice in the 1970s and 80s. (112)
Susan van Wyk has been a curator in the Department of Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria since 1989. She has curated numerous exhibitions of Australian and international photography and is the author of The Paris End: Photography Fashion and Glamour, and co-author of Second Sight: Australian Photography in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, she has also written numerous exhibition catalogues, and contributed to a number of Australian and international journals and publications. She is curator of the forthcoming Rennie Ellis retrospective and author of the monograph on the artist that will accompany the exhibition. (99)
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