FotoFreo 2010 Core Exhibitions

Cullity Gallery
An Everyday Transience: The Urban Imaginary of Goldfields Photographer John Joseph Dwyer

Fremantle Arts Centre
Magda Stanová, In the Shadow of Photography
Another Story: Chinese Contemporary Photography Curated by Zhang Guotian
Joy Cooke, A Vision of Africa

Fremantle Clubs David Dare Parker, The Clubs

Film & Television Institute (FTI) Film Stills

Fremantle Prison Eugene Richards, The Blue Room
Brad Rimmer, SILENCE: the west australian wheatbelt

Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery
Growing Pains Timor Leste 10 Years On
Viviane Dalles, A Journey of Exile
Jean Chung, Tears in the Congo
Claire Martin, Slab City

Perth Centre for Photography Amy Stein, Stranded
Sohrab Hura, Life is Elsewhere

Perth Cultural Centre Oculi Retrospective

Rottnest Salt Store & Museum Peter Eve & Monica Napper, Yiloga! Tiwi Footy

Gallery Central WAR, ºSouth Photographers

Turner Galleries Annet van der Voort,Vanitas
Simon Obarzanek

Western Australian Museum – Perth
World Press Photo
The Nikon-Walkley Press Photography Awards 2009

Western Australian Museum – Maritime Narelle Autio The Summer of Us
Pat Brassington
Carrie Levy

CULLITY GALLERY

Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts
The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley
Open 9am-5pm Monday – Friday
March 21 – April 18

©John Dwyer
Cremone Gardens Theatre Billboard
John Joseph Dwyer, Undated
Courtesy Western Australian MuseumGM001318

An Everyday Transcience: The Urban Imaginary of Goldfields Photographer John Joseph Dwyer
Curated by Philip Goldswain and William Taylor

John Joseph Dwyer photographed the Western Australian Goldfields from 1896 to 1917. Witnessing a period of rapid change and growth, he documented the rise and fall of towns during the gold rush. His revealing images of townscapes, industrial landscapes, machinery and people give an historic and honest perspective, not only of the Goldfields but also the experience of transience. Through his camera lens Dwyer poignantly captures the material, social and psychological reality of fast changing communities. The exhibition of photographs, many of which have been made public for the first time, is accompanied by the publication of a collection of writings offering contemporary insights into the nature of these important historical images. Alongside the rescanned and reprinted images from the Western Australian Museum’s collection the exhibition will feature original Dwyer prints loaned from the Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth.

FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE

1 Finnerty Street, Fremantle
Open Daily 10am-5pm
March 20 – April 25

Another Story: Chinese Contemporary Photography
curated by Zhang Guotian, Chief Artistic Director Pingyao International Photography Festival

This expansive inter-generational exhibition records the wide-ranging changes to the built environment which are underway in China today. Showcasing Ma Laing’s ‘wonderlands’, Ji Zhou’s futuristic representations of traditional Chinese architecture, and Qinwen’s account of the destruction of the old, stories traditional and contemporary intermingle. Another Story further extends the ongoing dialogue between FotoFreo and Pingyao International Photography Festival, one of China’s eminent photography events.

Zhang Guotian has been the Chief Artistic Director of Pingyao International Photography Festival (PIP) since 2008, following five years as its Secretary General. Born in Taiyuan, Shanxi, People’s Republic of China in 1962, Guotian started working in photography in 1986 and began shooting historic Pingyao in 1994. His book Pingyao was published in 2001, the same year he first participated in PIP. Guotian is a member of China Photographers’ Association. He has exhibited at the China Fine Art Museum, collaborated on a number of publications, and created the PICS magazine and continues as its Chief Artistic Director. In 1995 he also directed a MTV for the Shanxi folk song Xiang Qinqin, meaning “my love”, and won the copper medal at the 1995 China MTV Competition.

Magda Stanová

In the Shadow of Photography

The project In the Shadow of Photography is eminently photographical in a twofold sense: it talks about a presence which is also an absence, in the sense that it reflects on the medium of photography with very few actual photographs; and it considers its own self-reference in a natural, innate way, without forcing any awkward situations. This reflection is carried out from an essential yet (or possible necessarily) invisible position. It considers the way in which the appearance, democratisation and extension of photography has changed our social behaviour.

This set of thirty objects includes drawings, photographs taken from printed media, a book, a camera, a back-projected animation onto the edges of a frame identical to that used for the other works... Everything is explained and yet remains open, in a kind of subtle suspense, much like the title of the installation itself. We live and behave under the influential, omnipresent shadow of photography and yet increasing it doesn’t serve as much to describe us as to make us players in a life completed by the fiction created by its scenes.

Joy Horwood Cooke

A Vision of Africa

A Vision of Africa is a unique opportunity to re-examine the brash and confident portraits of Joy Horwood-Cooke. First shown in a tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1957, these images critique our popular perceptions of history, seen now through the “enlightened lens” of post-colonialism and the popular opinion that political attitudes have shifted empathetically concerning race, gender and (more specifically concerning photography) cultural voyeurism.

Most remarkably in A Vision of Africa, we have the opportunity to view the individual journey of a white female photographer travelling through Southern Africa in the 1950s. This indeed is a unique eye on the cultural climate of the time and Horwood-Cooke’s images come to us as a social critique sympathetic to domestic issues and day-to day living. Of course there is colonial pomp and ceremony, ravishing landscapes and tribal dance but this is intermeshed with mining photos, children playing and women hairdressing and gathering firewood. We may think today of these in the light of the plethora of travel images that we are bombarded with – most which attempt to excite the exotic in us, but Horwood-Cooke’s work predates all this, sitting rather in a history of social documentation that invokes Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Horwood-Cooke’s photography sort to honestly interpret the quirks and nuances that surrounded the rich cultural fabric of Southern Africa at the time; “I travelled from Kenya to Capetown taking photographs to depict typical African scenes and landscapes and now I want to show the real Africa to the people of New Zealand and Australia’ (from the Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 1956).

Post apartheid and the political and social upheavals in Zimbabwe, Joy Horwood-Cooke’s images stand testament to a different era but one with no less investment in the power of images as our own. As such we should read them not only through the political and socio-emotional landscape of our time, but understand how the political intentions and orchestrations of the past actuate these very readings. Joy Horwood-Cooke’s work has emerged as a significant addition to the geo-political history of social documentation in the Southern hemisphere and her marriage to a Tammin farmer makes her incredible story part of our own history of Australian photography.

FREMANTLE CLUBS

15 Bannister Street, Fremantle
Open daily 10am-4pm
March 20 – April 18

Floor talk & book launch 11am Saturday March 20

David Dare Parker

The Clubs

Commissioned by FotoFreo, this project will look at six of Fremantle’s social clubs, which have played such a vital role in the community’s history but are now facing declining and ageing membership. Award-winning photojournalist David Dare Parker will produce the exhibition and combine with writer Ron Davidson to produce a limited edition book, which will be launched during FotoFreo 2010.

...

I am sitting at one end of the freshly painted bar at the Fremantle Workers Social and Leisure Club. It is lunchtime. The bar is busy over all of its 30 metres; as is the café and TAB which in another age was the club library and reading room. I ask my neighbour his name and whether he’d like a drink. His name is Arty and he declines the drink with grace. He hasn’t had a drink since 1970. Why then does he keep coming to the heartland of Fremantle drinking? He tells me he is 86 and comes to the club whenever he feels like a chat. He chats of taking over his father’s union ticket in 1957 and coming on to the wharf: lumping was a family business then unless you happened to be a footballer. He chats of 400 lumpers’ bikes stacked outside the ferry terminal and not one was stolen; and how wharfies came over to the club for their schooners at lunch or smoko and of the some solid drinking ‘until stumps (11 pm)’ which destroyed Arty’s liver. Also how Paddy Troy, the Fremantle workers’ saint, was black-balled from the club and who did the deed. ‘There was no Commies in the Workers’ Club’ says Arty without explaining why. There were also no women and workers could wear their work hats up to the bar.

Now there are women everywhere. The club is flourishing again. However, when ships’ cargoes started to be carried in containers rather than on men’s shoulders, thousands of wharfies and woolies left town. Other clubs closed or became sad places…

FREMANTLE PRISON

The Terrace, Fremantle
March 20 – May 16

Eugene Richards

The Blue Room

The Blue Room Eugene Richard’s first colour project, a moving, highly personal project that brings together the themes that encompass all of Richards’ work – what he describes as the ‘transient nature of things’. The photographs are portraits of the abandoned and forgotten houses of western America in areas such as the plains of Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico and the Dakotas. In the early twentieth century, railroads lured settlers west with the promises of homesteads and towns rose across the plains. But in the wake of the Depression and the dust storms of the 1930s the towns faltered then failed. Richards enigmatic photographs of these forgotten homes are a meditation on memory and loss – family photographs stuck on a wall, a wedding dress hanging in a bedroom, snow falling on a bed by an open window, a wild horse standing at an open kitchen window. Richards’ contemplative, beautiful photographs inspire us to imagine the lives of the former occupants, and make a quiet statement on the inevitability of the circle of life and death, and the vulnerability of man in the face of shifting economic opportunities and the climate.

Text from The Blue Room Phaidon 2008

Brad Rimmer

SILENCE: the west australian wheatbelt

Memory and cultural idiosyncrasies inform the photographic works by Brad Rimmer. The recollection of growing up in rural Australia, the quietness of the landscape and the silence of the unspoken word. The series Silence alludes to the shifts in rural expansion and its demise, the changes in the social structures where the advent of the car, transport, better road infrastructures opened the way for new experiences. Where the once insular town has slowly lost its youth, its lifeblood and now exists as a residue of memory. Through contemplative and introspective images Brad Rimmer searches for the familiar; the recognisable elements which shape the region and it’s people. These images question the ‘familiar’ beauty of our environments and gently scrutinize Australia’s perception of itself, affirming that our cultural identity is based on empathy and understanding of our environment and the indelible binary link we have with it.
© Paola Anselmi Curator & Writer, Perth

MOORES BUILDING CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY

46 Henry Street, Fremantle
Open daily 10am-5pm
March 20 – April 19

Growing Pains - Timor Leste, The First 10 Years

Conor Ashleigh, Philip Blenkinsop, Zesopol Carlito Caminha, Glenn Campbell, Agnes Dherbeys, Chris Parkinson, Martine Perret, Dean Sewell, Matthew Sleeth, Bernardino Soares, Brendan Esposito

In 1999, after 25 years of Indonesian rule, the people of East Timor went to the polls to vote in a referendum offering Independence or self-autonomy. The resistance and protracted guerrilla war that ensued Indonesia’s invasion in 1976 had resulted in an estimated 100 000 people dead and the East Timorese overwhelmingly voted for full independence. In response, military backed Militia, loyal to Indonesia, went on a rampage, destroying 70% of the country’s infrastructure and forcing an estimated 300 000 people across the border into Indonesian West Timor.

Order was returned after the intervention of the Australian led InterFET force and Timor started its path to independence under the guidance of the United Nations. The 20th of May 2002 saw the birth of the 21st century’s newest Nation, Timor Leste, but the challenges relating to the establishment of a new government, society and economy simultaneously have been immense. Timor Leste is one of the world’s poorest nations, ranking below both the Congo and Sudan in its indicators of human development. The adult literacy rate is only 58% and one in ten children dies before it reaches five years of age. 42% of the population is under 15 years of age and life expectancy is 56 years.

Dreams of an idyllic independent Timor have been further complicated by poverty, the lack of economic opportunities coupled with unresolved social and political tensions for government and law and order institutions which are divided, weak and fragile. These all came to a head during the crisis of April – May 2006 after violence broke out following the sacking of 591 soldiers who had left their barracks to protest against discrimination based on regional affiliation. Since then the situation has, with a few hiccups, stabilised somewhat although many of the underlying problems are still to be fully addressed. Timor Leste remains heavily dependent on international aid and UN support as it slowly learns to take control of it’s own destiny.

Viviane Dalles

A Journey of Exile

Viviane Dalles was born in France in 1978. Passionate about the history of art, she studied applied art at the University Paul Valéry in Montpellier. In 1999 she entered the National School of Photography in Arles. After graduating, she worked in Paris at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation where she archived the famous photographer’s prints. Following that, at the Magnum agency. At the beginning of 2005, following the tsunami, she quit her job at the archives of the Magnum agency and bought herself a ticket to the Tamil Nadu region in India. Here she witnessed the victims’ lives as the media coverage faded out. She spent more than two months in temporary shelters alongside families affected by the disaster and saw the difficulties they faced in returning to a normal life. This first reportage changed her life and she decided to become an independent photojournalist. Since then Viviane works mainly in Asia – India, Cambodia, Thailand, Nepal and Bangladesh. Her photographs have been published in the international press such as Le Monde, Le Figaro, Marie Claire, The Guardian and Newswee. Viviane’s hard work and engagement were awarded in 2008 with the Vocational Prize from the Bleustein Blanchet Foundation.

Claire Martin

Slab City

Slab City has been created by a small but committed squatter’s community. It lies in the Colorado Desert in South Eastern California and takes its name from the concrete slabs that remain from an abandoned World War II base. It is a truly horrific and romantic landscape that commands residents to possess the same balance of beauty and beast. Unbearable temperature highs in the summer weed out the many who inhabit the free space in the winter, leaving only the most resilient, or the most unfortunate to become permanent residents. It is also these people who maintain the ad-hoc infrastructure that makes it such a desirable community to visit in the cooler winter months. The people who stay year after year could be described as poverty stricken, living in possibly the worst conditions in the USA, and some residents would tell you this is the truth. Others fiercely defend their lifestyle as a deliberate choice to reject the mainstream society. For these people Slab City provides a freedom they'd never experienced before. There are others who were forced here through circumstance; society wont tolerate them due to their pasts as felons, addicts or vagrants, but who whole heartedly embrace the opportunity to live in a community that wont judge them. Slab City is a place for the broken and desperate and for the fierce defenders of freedom from tyranny. But more than anything else, it is what this small group of people call home.

Jean Chung

Tears in the Congo

Women in the DR Congo suffer from Sexual and Gender-based Violence (SGBV) by different militia groups and civilians. According to UNFPA, 13,247 cases a year, and an average of 1,100 cases are reported each month in the country. One of the reasons for the highest sexual violence in the world is the notion of impunity on perpetrators, who, in the case of rebels, escape back to the jungle after committing the crime. However, there is an increasing number of women speaking out, trying to arrest the perpetrators. There are both military and civil courts in Goma that deal with rape cases, and without the DNA or age tests, the tribunals struggle to prosecute the accused perpetrators. Some of the accused rapists are inside the Central Prison, either already being sentenced or waiting to be. Some argue that they are the victims of women who try to harm them or make profits without any evidence. Despite all odds, the victims live a hard life while receiving surgeries and treatment, and struggle once they go back to their village.

PERTH CENTRE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY

91 Brisbane Street, Perth
Open 12-5pm, Thursday & Friday, 12-4pm, Saturday & Sunday

Amy Stein

Stranded

Beginning with the United States government's failed response to the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, the American people suffered through a series of devastating corruptions of their traditional structures of support. Stranded is a meditation on the despondence of the American psyche as this collapse of certainty left the country stuck in an unfamiliar space between distress and relief. In this series the car serves as both figurate symbol of American destiny and a literal representation of the personal breakdowns on the road to that promise. The images live in the road photography tradition of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, but where they sought to capture the American experience through "the journey," Amy Stein’s photographs seek to tell the story of this time through the journey interrupted. For this series Stein drove across America for weeks at a time photographing stranded motorists. Finding subjects was a matter of chance and every encounter tense because of the unusual circumstances of the interaction and the inherent danger of the roadside environment.

Sohrab Hura

Life is Elsewhere

Everything turns problematic, questionable, subject of analysis and doubt: Progress and Revolution. Youth. Motherhood. Even Man. And also Poetry...

Life is Elsewhere (Milan Kundera)

It was in the summer of 1999 when my mother was diagnosed with an acute case of Paranoid Schizophrenia. I was 17 then. The doctors, in retrospect, had said that she had already started developing the symptoms many years prior to that. Symptoms that nobody had noticed. But it was the break up with my father that caused her condition to suddenly come alive and then deteriorate. Over the years, the walls of our home started to peel off, people had stopped coming to our home because my mother was too scared to let anybody in and all that remained were the traces of a life that no longer existed. Our initial years were spent hiding from the world. Hers out of paranoia and mine out of embarrassment and anger at who she had become. But after all these years I’ve realized that my mother had never stopped loving me.

Today as I look back, I realize who I am, what I feel, see and think, is connected to my relationship with my mother in a way stronger than I know. And in this work, I hope I am able to connect the relationship that I’ve had with my mother with the rest of my life.

My Life is Elsewhere is a journal of my life, my family, my love, my friends, my travels, my sheer need to experience all that is about to disappear and so in a way I’m attempting to connect my own life with the world that I see with a hope to find my reality in it. Life is Elsewhere is a book of contradictions and of doubts and understandings and of laughter and forgetting in which I am trying to constantly question myself by simply documenting the broken fragments of my life which might seem completely disconnected to one another on their own. But I hope that in time I am able to piece together this wonderful jig saw puzzle called life. And this journey will perhaps lead to reconciliation with my own life.

PERTH CULTURAL CENTRE

© Tamara Dean

Oculi Retrospective

Donna Bailey, James Brickwood, Tamara Dean, Jesse Marlow, Nick Moir, Jeremy Piper, Andrew Quilty, Dean Sewell, Steven Siewert, Tamara Voninski

THE SALT STORE GALLERY

Digby Drive, Thomson Bay Settlement, Rottnest Island
Open daily 10.30am-3.45pm
March 20 - April 18

Floor talk 2.30pm Wednesday March 24

Peter Eve & Monica Napper

Yiloga! Tiwi Footy

Yiloga! Is an exploration of the importance of football in the life of remote Aboriginal community. The exhibition by Peter Eve and Monica Napper captures the way in which footy has become an integral part of Tiwi culture and highlights not just the Tiwi community’s passion for the game of AFL (Australian Rules) football but also its
positive influence on community life.

In conjunction with Artback NT: Arts Development & Touring.

GALLERY CENTRAL

12 Aberdeen Street, Perth
Open 10am-4.45pm, Monday – Friday & 12-4.45pm, Saturday
March 20 - April 1

WAR

°SOUTH Sean Flynn, Tim Page, Stephen Dupont, David Dare Parker, Jack Picone, Michael Coyne, Ashley Gilbertson

°SOUTH is a photographic collective of Australia’s most creative and award-winning documentary photographers who have covered conflicts from Vietnam to present day Afghanistan. These photographers live a very unique lifestyle and often perform at great risk to themselves to tell the story. The dedication of ‘°SOUTH’ is to record ‘evidence’ in a fair, truthful and informative way, following on the great Australian tradition of Frank Hurley, Hubert Wilkins, George Silk, Max Dupain and Damien Parer. Wars are complex situations that defy easy answers. With the courage of a soldier and the eye of a witness these photographers have created images of power and compassion that can influence public opinion, have historical significance and even reawaken a sense of responsibility in Humanity to deal with them.

TURNER GALLERIES

470 William Street, Northbridge
Open Tuesday to Saturday 11am-5pm
March 18 – April 10

Annet van der Voort

Vanitas

During the past two years the Dutch photographer Annet van der Voort called her atelier a floral laboratory. Here she observed the transformation of flowers, especially tulips, which she kept in order to use them in their various states of decay for her art. Her technique for producing these images is modern and completely without camera. In a complex process, she scanned the wilting splendor of the flowers and in doing so created a special visual space that corresponds to her understanding of vanitas, the philosophical idea of the transience of everything mundane. Her images are first and foremost constant attempts to home in on the issue of the meaning of birth and decline, of life and death - not only in her still-life series Vanitas and Tulipa, but also in most of her landscapes and portraiture.

Simon Obarzanek

Simon Obarzanek was born in Israel in 1968 and currently lives and works in Melbourne. Graduating with a Bachelor of Photography in 1989 from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, his first solo show Simon Obarzanek 96-02 was at Max Bernstein Gallery, Melbourne in 2002. Since then he has had a string of solo shows including Portraits, Max Bernstein Gallery, 2005; 80/137 Faces, 2006, Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2006; 80 faces, Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne, 2006 and 10pm-1am, Karen Woodbury Gallery Melbourne, 2007. Obarzanek has also exhibited in numerous group shows in Australia and overseas since 1999. Obarzanek's work is held in major public galleries including the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.

WESTERN AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM - PERTH

Perth Cultural Centre, James Street, Perth
Open daily 9.30am-5pm, excluding Wednesdays
March 20 – April 18

World Press Photo of the Year 2008
Anthony Suau, USA, for TIME

World Press Photo

World Press Photo conducts an annual, international competition to acknowledge the very best photojournalism in the world. Each year, an independent international jury, consisting of thirteen members, judges the entries in ten different categories, submitted by photojournalists, agencies, newspapers and magazines from all corners of the world. This year’s competition attracted 5,508 photographers from 124 countries. In total 96,268 images were entered in the contest.

The Nikon-Walkley Press Photography Awards 2009

The Nikon-Walkley Awards are the highest honour for Australian photojournalists. With categories for news, daily life, feature and sport photography, and special prizes for portrait and community/regional photography. The Walkley Awards recognise excellence in journalism - from the most senior levels of the Australian media and photography, to non-fiction authors, young journalists and student journalism.

WESTERN AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM - MARITIME

Victoria Quay, Fremantle
Open daily 9.30am-5pm, excluding Wednesdays
March 20 – April 19

Narelle Autio

The Summer of Us

Narelle Autio’s vibrant and award-winning images of Australian coastal life have won her impressive national and international acclaim. Since they were first exhibited at Stills Gallery in 2000, her vivid images have also captured the hearts and imaginations of viewers. One beauty of Autio’s work is its ability to speak to so many people about their own experience of being coastal dwellers. Another is the play of colour and light in the photographs, giving them a magic and painterly quality that transcends the usual depictions of the beach. Autio’s images give back to the coastline the complexity, drama and beauty that are eroded by postcards and clichés.

Pat Brassington

Pat Brassington (b 1942), artist, was born in Hobart and studied at the Tasmanian School of Art. One of Australia's foremost photo-based artists, she has been exhibited and collected extensively in Australia and overseas and featured in such prestigious events as Australian Perspecta 1989 and the Sydney Biennale 2004.
Brassington's work references surrealism, feminism and fetishism. Photographic motifs, collaged or digitally manipulated, create disconcertingly ambiguous imagined states which fascinate and disturb. Images evoke uneasy tensions between bizarre, sinister intimations of menace and weirdly beautiful, benign harmonies. Open to multiple interpretations, the titles deflect from the content to redirect and encourage more subjective meanings. Using sexuality to confront, discomfort and intrigue, she layers and collages the actual with the improbable to create a mesmeric and often humorous quality.
© Diane Foster

Carrie Levy

Born in 1979, Carrie Levy is a New York based photo editor, curator, professor of photography and photographer. She has worked in recent years as photo editor for Newsweek, The New Yorker, Random House, The New York Times Magazine and Vogue. Currently Director of Education at the Hudson Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, New York, Levy is also part-time faculty at Parsons The New School for Design. Levy’s photographic work is based on confinement, authority and control. Her series of images, Domestic Stages was exhibited at DCFA in 2005 and Impaired in 2007. Levy has been included in exhibitions at the Howard Yezerski Gallery, The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, P.S. 122, Trolley Gallery, EAST International and the North Carolina Museum of Art, where her work is included in the permanent collection. Levy was selected as one of the best emerging photographers of 2005 by Art Review magazine and has lectured at the Museum of the City of New York and at Photo London 2005. Trolley published 51 Months in 2005, Levy’s visual journal of her family during her father’s incarceration – a project she began at the age of 15. The book has been featured in Newsweek, French Vogue, The London Times Sunday Magazine, Look-Look and Foto Magazine.

FOTOFREO 2010 Incite PROGRAMME

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