Focus on photography: Wilkins, Clayfield, Sirianni

Curated by Liza McCosh, an exhibition of photographic artworks by John Wilkins, Peter Clayfield and Mick Sirriani, exhibited at SCOPE Galleries, Warrnambool.  The exhibition surveyed a range of processes and included portraiture, landscape, urbanscape and experimental photography on paper and aluminium.

Retake Melbourne : mobile application for re-photography and comparative imaging research

A project of interpretive and comparative re-photography, making use of the collection of Mark Strizic's images and the documents related to his career, held by the State Library, as a basis. Strizic died in 2012. It is now 50 years since his work began to illustrate the period of the 1960s when architecture of the Gold Rush era coexisted side-by-side with, and was being replaced by, curtain-glass high-rise office buildings. It is the position of the researchers that not sufficient attention has been given to Mark Strizic’s reaction to what he saw as a plague of ugliness pervading Australian city-scapes, developing a distinctive aesthetic that in turn made his work useful to commentators like Robin Boyd and David Saunders. Strizic operated from a unique perspective as a migrant with an architectural heritage from his father Zdenko, prominent architecture professor in Croatia, and visiting professor of architecture at Melbourne University in the 1960s. Precise re-photography alongside creative work will enable a comparison of Melbourne now with fifty years ago. The public will be able to participate in and contribute to the project via a crowd-funded custom-made app. Half a century has passed since Strizic made his photographs of Melbourne. In so many cases buildings have disappeared or altered, streetscapes have changed and the appearance of Melburnians have changed as have their habits of using the city. A selection of Strizic’s photographs of Melbourne locations can be rephotographed by the public using the methods devised by Mark Klett, assisted by the app software. This will provide a core of documentary imagery of benefit in framing and completing the rest of this project and to future research through comparisons over the time span. The app enables the location on a map of the site and orientation of photographs taken by Strizic. Photographs are downloaded onto users’ devices from the online SLV Strizic picture catalogue. They appear in the app as transparent templates so that users can line up their own re-photograph with accuracy. They will be able to upload their resultant images to a server and they will be available to the Library as an archive enabling direct comparison with the Strizic holdings. It is anticipated that involvement and participation of the public will elevate the profile of the project and publicise the SLV collections and encourage their increased usage and popularity.

Glamour photography makes suburban stars of us all

For the last two decades, studio photographers have been trying to create photos that replicate those produced for stars and for those destined for the cover of magazines. This article explores this phenomenon from the perspective of its suburban site for the production of the sensation of fame through glamour photography.

Anne Scott Wilson : Video & photography exhibition

Solo Exhibition, Framed Photograhs and Video installations as part of the 'Head On Photography Festival'

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.