Friday Round Up - 5 June, 2015

This week on Friday Round Up - farewell to Mary Ellen Mark, new exhibitions for Melbourne, Konrad Winkler launches new book and #dysturb in Pro Photo magazine.

Photos of the week:
Australian Adam Ferguson - Nepal Earthquake


(C) Adam Ferguson for TIME

(C) Adam Ferguson for TIME

Farewell to Mary Ellen Mark

Mary Ellen Mark at an exhibition of her work at the Leica Gallery Los Angeles
(C) Todd Williamson/AP 2013

I was fortunate to interview Mary Ellen Mark in 2014 and was greatly saddened to hear of her passing last week. You can read my interview with her on L'Oeil de la Photographie. One of the highlights of my journalistic career. 

Here's an excerpt: Like other notable photographers Mark studied painting and art history before photography came into her life. “When I went to university I wanted to be either an architect or painter, a fine artist; I found being a painter very isolating. As for being an architect, that’s very academic, very difficult and I am not a good engineer,” she laughs.

At graduate school Mark took a major in photojournalism; it was a light bulb moment. “Photography became an immediate love for me. I had always read books about photography and was always fascinated with great photography. But it hadn’t occurred to me that it was something I could do myself until I got to graduate school and picked up a camera in my very early twenties”....

(C) Mary Ellen Mark

(C) Mary Ellen Mark

Exhibitions: Melbourne
Julie Millowick - Before: Photographs from the 1970s

(C) Julie Millowick Love is the Drug on the Jukebox, Kookaburra Cafe, Frankston

A Day in the Life of Australia, 1981

Melbourne photographer Julie Millowick was a student at Prahran Arts College in its heyday. In this exhibition she showcases images captured during the 1970’s, using a Nikon F film camera and one lens - a 50 mm standard.

"With that camera hanging over my shoulder, I walked around St Kilda, where I lived, and Fitzroy, where I did pro bono work for the Brotherhood of St Laurence. And.....I talked to people. Sometimes I made a photograph of them, sometimes I didn’t. 

There seems to be a quietness, for want of a better word, about the photographs that reflects the long ago decade of the 1970’s. A time that was definitely pre-digital. A time that was definitely prior to the daily saturation in our lives of the photographic image."

(C) Julie Millowick Alone on the Lawn, Anzac Day, 1975, The Shrine, Melbourne


(C) Julie Millowick Photographer Athol Shmith photographed with his ever-present 

LunaSix Light Meter around his neck. A Llegendary Fashion and Advertising 

Photographer, Athol had a studio at the Paris End of Collins Street for decades.

He retired from commercial photograhy in the1970's to take up Head of Photography

Department at Prahran College of Advanced Education. Julie Millowick was one of his students.

(C) Julie Millowick Limurru, Fitzroy, 1975

Millowick is now a teacher of the online photojournalism course at Latrobe University and is sharing the gallery space with one of her graduates, Christine Sayer who is exhibiting her work, Deconstructing Dementia. 

(C) Christine Sayer You have Visitors, 2014

Until 14 June
69 Smith Street Gallery

Collingwood  

Group Show - Melbourne Is… 

(C) Mike Reed

Three year old collective Image Chasers, comprises a group of “passionate” Victorian photographers. In the exhibition Melbourne Is… they present their unique views of Melbourne taking the audience beyond the “tourist brochure view of Melbourne to capture a side of the city that perhaps we do not always see”. 

(C) Chris May

(C) Helga Leunig

(C) Roger Arnall

"Melbourne Is…not the place you might think it is. Many stereotype descriptives have been written about Melbourne. ‘The world’s most liveable city’…’Four seasons in one day’…’The garden state’… But underneath all these flowery statements, lies an urban subtext – A city of counter cultures and contradictions. Graceful buildings from our colonial past stand defiant against brave new futuristic visions.

"Melbourne is light and dark and all shades in between. It’s home to a migrant’s tale or a cabinetmaker’s workshop. A stage for lovers’ trysts, lost souls, found treasures and sleeping rough.

Melbourne. A city that is so many things to so many people. A place that is as diverse as its 4 million plus inhabitants."

Until 4 July
Quadrant Gallery
72 Barkers Road
Hawthorn

Book Launch:

Konrad Winkler - Moments of My Life

Specialist photography book publisher M.33 will launch Konrad Winkler’s new book Moments of My Life on Sunday June 14 in St. Kilda. The book contains a number of classic photographs from Winkler’s 45 year career. Interspersed throughout the book are Winkler’s writings making Moments of My Life more an artist’s diary giving insight into the image beyond mere description of time and place. I’m looking forward to reviewing this one. 

4.30pm Sunday June 14
Linden New Art
26 Acland Street
St Kilda
To be launched by Wendy Garden, Curator at the Morning Peninsula Regional Gallery.

New Pro Photo - #dysturb

My feature on #dysturb is in the latest issue of Pro Photo magazine out now. 

Friday Round Up - 8 May, 2015

This week Friday Round Up features the last of this year's Head On Photo Festival coverage with the opening of Timeframes, an exhibition by two German photographers - Daniel Schumann and Thomas Kellner, and group show, 4, featuring Australian photographers Paul Blackmore, Murray Fredericks, Gary Heery and New Zealander Derek Henderson. Plus in Melbourne Silk Road Stories opens and Peta Clancy shows her series Puncture.

Photos of the Week: 

Australian photojournalist Daniel Berehulak, who recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage on the Ebola crisis, is in Nepal covering the tragic aftermath of the earthquake that has devastated this nation. Berehulak continues to produce outstanding work that is insightful, intelligent and compassionate. Images (C) Daniel Berehulak for the New York Times. 

Head On Photo Festival:

Last weekend I attended the opening of the Head On Photo Festival in Sydney and interviewed a host of fantastic photographers for stories that will be published internationally in various magazines. In the coming weeks I'll also post some interviews here. This week's post is the last on the actual festival and I want to highlight two shows that opened this week which are definitely worth seeing. If you missed my other picks, see my posts from 30 April and 1 May for a rundown on the International and Australian exhibitions.

Thomas Kellner & Daniel Schumann
Timeframes 

(C) Thomas Kellner


(C) Daniel Schumann

These two German photographers share their visions on the concept of time. Kellner’s work is based in deconstruction and reconstruction, where he takes multiple images of a single building and recreates the perspective presenting an image of a building, usually a well known landmark, that appears to move before our eyes. 

(C) Thomas Kellner

(C) Thomas Kellner

Schumann uses the passage of time to tell the story of those living out their final days in a hospice. The work, ‘Purple Brown Grey White Black – Living While Dying Today,’ gives a deeply personal insight into the final days of these individuals with dignity and compassion. 

(C) Daniel Schumann


(C) Daniel Schumann

(C) Daniel Schumann

Until 31 May
Conny Dietzschold Gallery
99 Crown Street
Darlinghurst
Head On Photo Festival

4
Group Show 

(C) Paul Blackmore

Photographers Paul Blackmore, Murray Fredericks, Gary Heery and Derek Henderson join in this group exhibition, which features work ranging from landscape and portraiture, to documentary and fine art. Some of photographs in this show have never been exhibited before, others are familiar, but all are representative of the great photography being created in this country. 

(C) Paul Blackmore

Blackmore, who works in both the fine art and documentary genres, presents new work shot last summer on Sydney’s beaches (above). Fredericks, known for his epic, surreal landscapes includes two photographs from his Greenland series. Heery, who has worked in the music industry for decades, includes his portrait of a young Madonna, and Henderson presents a selection of B&W and colour landscapes. It's a beautifully executed exhibition.

(C) Murray Fredericks

(C) Murray Fredericks

(C) Gary Heery

(C) Derek Henderson

(C) Derek Henderson

presented by Cohen Handler
114 Brougham Street
Potts Point
Head On Photo Festival 

Exhibitions: Melbourne

Guy Vinciguerra – Silk Road Stories 

Shot over a decade, Western Australian photographer Guy Vinciguerra presents a selection of his works from the series Silk Road Stories shot in Pakistan. 

All images (C) Guy Vinciguerra

Until 30 May
Colour Factory
409/429 Gore Street
Fitzroy

Peta Clancy - Puncture

All images (C) Peta Clancy

As part of the group show "Paper," Melbourne photographic artist Peta Clancy showcases her series Puncture, comprising four large-scale, intimate self-portraits. Clancy’s artistic practice explores themes of ‘transience, temporality, mutability and the corporeal and subjective limits of the human body’. In this series Clancy uses a fine needle to carefully apply thousands of tiny pinpricks through the surface of photographic paper. These markings rupture the surface of her self-portraits to form beautiful embroidered patterns that are visible on the surface of the paper.

Until 12 July
Linden New Art
26 Acland St

St Kilda 

Friday Round Up - 10 April, 2015

This week on Friday Round Up new exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney, plus the 2015 Getty Grants for Editorial Photography round is now open.

Photos of the Week:

Lynsey Addario -  India's Insurgency

National Geographic

Coal worker Ajay Marijan carries a load from an open-pit mine to a waiting 

truck in Bokapahari, Jharkhand state (C) Lynsey Addario

At an ad hoc restaurant, men prepare breakfast for workers clocking in for the 

morning shift at the coal-based Jindal Tamnar thermal power plant, in the 

Raigarh district, Chhattisgarh (C) Lynsey Addario

Exhibitions:

Melbourne

Polaroid Resurrection
by FilmNeverDie

(C) Luigi Sposa Berbera

This group show at Melbourne’s Photonet is part of the global ExPolaroid Exhibition Festival being held in 40 cites around the world. ExPolaroid began in France and is held annually in April. This year there are 57 events. Melbourne’s FilmNeverDie is run by a group of film enthusiasts who sell a range of photographic film types and hosts forums for those who are keen to know more about the medium. Polaroid Resurrection is the first exhibition by FilmNeverDie. 

(C) Amanda Mason

(C) Francis Danesi

(C) Gary Wong

(C) Pei Wen

(C) Rachael Baez

Photonet Gallery
15a Railway Place
Fairfield
Until 22 April

Rob Love - Timeless

Melbourne based Rob Love uses extended shutter speeds to capture these painterly images of water. Made in camera without the aid of computer manipulation, Love’s images are both abstract and documentary in their capacity to at once demonstrate the power of nature and its ethereal beauty. Love produces single prints rather than limited editions and his work is held in collections in Australia and the USA.

(C) All images Rob Love

Colour Factory
409-429 Gore Street
Fitzroy

Until 2 May
Artist Talk; Saturday 18 April, 2pm

Sydney:

Jane Brown - Black Ships 

(C) Jane Brown, Reception Centre, Kyoto, 2015, Silver gelatin FB print 

hand print,17 x 21cm courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney 

Australian photographic artist Jane Brown’s latest series, Black Ships, is named after the term used by the Japanese in reference to Western water crafts approaching Japan’s shores and dates back to the 16th Century when Portugese fleets painted the hulls of their ships with pitch. Black Ships became symbolic of the opening of borders.

Black Ships is Brown's first exhibition at Stills Gallery and draws on this symbolism through the use of various visual tropes – “pathways and bridges to reflect the idea of a journey, bandaging and wrapping symbolic of past wounds, walls and fences figurative of boundaries and cultural isolation, nature and decay referencing the Japanese concept of mono no aware (mortality and a pathos for the transience of things)”.

“Ultimately, Black Ships is a travelogue that looks to the strange machinations of history, and at the same time, a reflection on contemporary Japan...More broadly it is an articulation of curiosity, seeking out points of difference from home – the peculiar, the beautiful and the unfamiliar.” 

(C) Jane Brown, Wisteria, Miyajima, 2015. Silver gelatin FB print 

hand printed, 17 x 21cm courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney 

(C) Jane Brown, Silver Pavilion, Kyoto, 2015. Silver gelatin FB print 

hand printed, 17 x 21cm courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney 

(C) Jane Brown, Hiroshima, 2015, silver gelatin FB print

hand print, 17 x 21cm courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Stills Gallery
36 Gosbell Street
Paddington
Until 2 May


Grants:
Getty Grants for Editorial Photography

(C) William Daniels

In 2015 there are five Getty Grants for Editorial Photography on offer valued at $10,000 each. The Grants are designed to celebrate and support independent photojournalism. Applications are open until 13 May and winners will be announced in September, 2015.

Judges for this year are photojournalist Lynsey Addario, Jon Jones Director of Photography Sunday Times Magazine, Matthias Krug, International Director of Photography Der Spiegel, Romain Lacroix, Director of Photography Paris Match and Jean Francois Leroy, Director General Visa pour l’Image. 

 (C) Jordi Busqué 

(C) Giulio di Sturco

Last year’s winners were Giulio di Sturco for his body of work titled Ganges: Death of a River; Juan Arredondo for Born in Conflict; Jordi Busqué for his award-winning portfolio, The Mennonites of Bolivia; Krisanne Johnson, for South Africa's Post-Apartheid Youth and; French photojournalist, William Daniels for his CAR in Chaos body of work. 

(C) Juan Arredondo

(C)Krisanne Johnson

In Brief:

Defending Gallipoli: A Turkish Standpoint

Until 3 May
Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Road
Wheelers Hill