13th Dong Gang International Photo Festival: Episodes Australian Photography Now

Curated group exhibition entitled Episodes: Australian Photography Now, part of the Dong Gang International Photo Festival

No photography please

Rather than represent the world merely by photographic means, handmade moving-image artists seek to create new ways of seeing by staging a variety of interventions into the material makeup of celluloid. Handmade artists tattoo film’s skin not only with scratches and paint, but also with blood, dirt, paper, candy, sand, nail polish remover, and seawater. Seeking media not normally found in a filmmaker or artist’s studio, they mine their own bodies and backyards for things to make into moving images.

This program highlights rarely-seen works of artisanal film production from the Coop’s collection. Some of the works are wonderfully constructive, building up the visual surface of the film by combining found footage with painterly abstraction. Others are destructive, subjecting film to a variety of elemental and material stresses. Taken together, these films not only exhibit the diversity of handmade practices and concerns, they also provide a framework for rethinking how cinema can be made through its unmaking.

In other words, handmade cinema—in concept, material, and execution—is counter-cinema.

Stillness and movement: a bodily approach to photography

My paper will address both Duration and temporality of the ‘still’ imageand Sensorial and bodily experience of photography through a discussion of a recent body of work ‘Fly Rhythm’, a series of photographs and video works exhibited in a gallery context.By acknowledging the inter-relationship between the body and the camera my project seeks to challenge a perceived separation between performance and photography. Fly Rhythm was conceived through a performative somatic process. Through using a custom made camera I was able to negotiate time and space to create a visual drawing of movement and stillness together in photography. The resultant images are discussed as a notation of body movement – a record of bodily history enabled through a self imposed discipline of learning to read light.I initially constructed a human size camera to understand how photography works. Spending time inside observing the way light moves and affects the formation of sight is also a way of embodying the act of photography. I responded by making a bespoke camera that enabled light to be captured during extended periods while moving. My project is dependent upon a self-imposed discipline of intuiting light’s strength and erratic changes, a skill developed by making analogue prints while inside a camera obscura. Once I had developed an ability to read light’s changes and gain an understanding of camera mechanics I made durational recordings moving through the landscape on Bruny Island Tasmania and industrial sites in Melbourne, photographs exhibited as part of Fly Rhythm. I will discuss these prints in context with the idea that light is a conduit through which past and present fuse together in a bodily act of photographing and processing images.I will explore durational aspects of photography by discussing light’s relative motion while taking photographs without using the viewfinder or composing images in the traditional way. Rather, the camera at the end of my arm is directed through how I read light therefore a choreography notated in the prints – a kind of body signatureMy practice enables a new the way of seeing, in a spontaneous hand held process creating a sense of embodiment. By analyzing process my paper will consider how the body together with analogue and 21st century digital technology coalesce cross-disciplinary practice combining visual art, performance and photographic disciplines.I also explored limitations of digital light in contrast with ‘natural’ light by a making a gamut of dissolving colour determined by the software based on two pixels. Projected into the ambient light ‘Glide’ is an 11minute durational work installed at the Substation Contemporary Art Space in Melbourne Australia.

Chamber music in painting photography film

This exhibition expands upon the history, approaches of experimental film and image making. Through speculative and abstract approaches the artists appropriate images to deal with trauma, confusion and nostalgia. The artists in this exhibition use personal imagery to demonstrate abstract ideals and idiosyncratic perspectives. Work in the show will be made up of photographic prints, collage, 16mm film and video work. Through physical manipulations of the image surface, retrenching of forgotten archives and poetic layerings of time and place, this exhibition aims to examine the de-linear and personal ways artists can experiment with the image.Through incorporating work of long standing artists Dirk De Bruyn and Luigi Fusinato in contrast with the work of young artists Anna Higgins and Beth Caird, the exhibition will examine the relationship between experimental film from a pre-digital context and how it influences, echoes and evolves in a post-digital environment.

The body in photography: an improvised performance with light

Considering the way light is integral to photography I draw on its paradoxical nature at sub atomic levels that describe how, when observed it changes. Taking a biocentric approach ; ‘A radical new view of reality: Life creates time, space, and the cosmos itself The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.’ (Lanza, 2009), I aim to clarify how embodied photographic practice can be explored through improvisational and performative discourse.

Researching a whole-year EE program: some methodological issues

A P-12 school in regional Victoria has an environmental theme throughout its Year Four program with classes located in a purpose- built Environmental Centre in a separate location within the school’s grounds. The authors report here on a one-year case study of the grade four thematic integrated curriculum at the school. They reflect on and describe some of the methodological issues that arose during the interviews, direct observations, photography and video-recording. Some of the practical considerations associated with case-study methodology are discussed. The paper concludes with a summary of emerging substantive issues and a prospective view to further research.

Hope : metaphorically speaking

In a recent Gadamerian hermeneutic study, photographyand in-depth interviews were used as key methods to explicate the phenomenon of hope. Whilst using photography within qualitative research has become increasingly popular over the last decade, little has been written about how to introduce photographs as conversation enhancers or how photographs have the capacity to unleash both conceptual and linguistic metaphors.This article gives insights into the experience of using photographs to illuminate the phenomenon of hope and identifies metaphors that were revealed through the participants' photographs.

Hope seen through the eyes of 10 Australian young people

Aim. The aim of this paper is to report the findings of a phenomenological study that explored hope in 10 young people in Australia.

Background. Evidence suggests many Australian young people are in crisis. Examination of key reports that detail the incidence of suicide, early drug-taking behaviours, homelessness, self-harm behaviours, joblessness, depressive disorders, crime statistics and alcohol abuse suggest that many of today's young people have lost resilience as well as vital connections to their community.

Method. Two methods were employed to encourage the participants to reflect on their experiences of hope – what it is and what it meant to them. The first was to supply participants with a disposable colour film camera and ask them to take pictures that, in their view, showed hope. The second was participation in an in-depth interview that was prompted in part, by their photographs. Interview audiotapes were transcribed verbatim and analysis of the text used the Turner method. The data were collected in 2002.

Findings. Four horizons of hope were revealed: at-one-with; a driving force; having choices; and connecting and being connected. These horizons are discussed, showing how, or if, the literature treats these dimensions of hope. Perspectives are offered on how they might be considered by nurses who are charged with caring for today's young people.

Conclusion. Registered Nurses who work with young people must understand the phenomenon of hope from their unique perspective before they can offer appropriate hope-facilitating strategies.

Faking it for real

Jean Baudrillard suggests that the supremacy of the simulacra is a modern development, reality a construction of the U.S. His argument, given the U.S. penchant for breaking and remaking the world in its own image (it is, in the language of Baudrillard, both iconoclast and iconolater), is strong. However, writers, artists, and philosophers have been pondering the reign of illusion for millennia. Plato described the world as a place of simulations that left us wanting. For Shakespeare, the world was a stage of fools; the play was that of an idiot. Goya presented the world as a dream of reason that gave birth to the monsters he painted. Borges (like Shakespeare and also perhaps Goya and Plato) was obsessed with what he refers to in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" as the "atrocious or banal" idea that reality, as we know it (which is, of course, the only perspective of it that we can have), is fake. The three books under review here, Ian Miller's Faking It, Penny Cousineau-Levine's Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination, and Paul Matthew St Pierre's A Portrait of the Artist as Australian: L'Oeuvre bizarre de Barry Humphries, can be considered additions to the oeuvre fascinated and troubled by what Borges calls the "phantasmagorias" of our world

Through the frame & beyond the gaze

In Fiction in the Age of Photography[i], Nancy Armstrong examines the impact of photography on the way in which the nineteenth century novelists represented society. In particular she asks 'But what do we make of the fact that the novel's turn to pictorialism coincided with the sudden ubiquity of photographic images in the culture at large? Why did pictures begin to speak louder than words?

Anticipating the uptake and possible implication of digital imaging within the construction industry

Photography within the construction industry is merging into a new form of image capture and output that is a mix of conventional photography and digital imagery. As this transition takes place it is anticipated that the credibility of the image may also change within in the communication chain that links the various disciplines within the building industry. The following paper presents the development and results of a pilot survey of building professionals, which addresses the quality, content and authenticity of both conventional photography and digitally produced images used within the construction industry.