Friday Round Up - 12 July

This week Friday Round Up features news on the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, new exhibitions from Robert Ashton and Youngho Kang, Stephanie Sinclair's Too Young To Wed and more including an interesting article from a frontline journalist in Syria. Importantly there is a message also from Issa Touma in Aleppo, Syria where the blockade on food and medical supplies has plunged residents into a new living hell. If you can help please act now.

Festival:
Ballarat International Foto Biennale (BIFB)
Photography, wine and fine food. Is there a better way to spend a winter’s Sunday afternoon in Melbourne? This Sunday 14th July, Eleven 40 Gallery in Malvern (a short drive from Melbourne's CBD) is hosting a fundraising event for the fifth instalment of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale (BIFB). All 125 photographs in the RED DOT “lucky dip” are on show at the Gallery. Festival Director Jeff Moorfoot will be on hand, along with a number of local photographers who are involved in the Festival. Entry is by RED DOT or ticket only.

There are still some RED DOTs available for this worthy fundraising event. The RED DOT allows you to go into the lucky draw for one of the 125 photographs in this promotion. If you'd like to help the Festival raise much needed funds, please visit the link here.

BIFB Sneak Peak:
Youngho Kang – 99 VARIATIONS 






This photographic artist literally bleeds for his work! Today I interviewed South Korean photographer Youngho Kang about his exhibition "99 Variations", which is included in the core programme of this year’s Ballarat International Foto Biennale. My interview will run in the coming weeks, but I wanted to share a taste with you, as this work is extraordinary and demonstrates Kang’s unique visual signature. Inspired by ancient Chinese philosophy, Kang has created mythological characters that are of his “other” selves. In each photograph the camera is evident, an extension of his person, a “third eye” that observes and reflects. Shot on large format digital in front of a mirror, each image took hours to compose. The photograph where Kang is encased in a tangled web (above) took ten hours to complete. His interpreter Won said, “See that blood? It’s real”. This exhibition is a truly unique take on the self-portrait.

Youngho Kang will also hold a workshop during BIFB. Details to come. All images (C) Youngho Kang.

Exhibition:
Robert Ashton – Interior Exterior
Australian photographer Robert Ashton’s exhibition "Interior Exterior" opens at Edmund Pearce Gallery in Melbourne on 24 July. Comprising a series of interior and exterior landscapes presented as triptychs, Ashton captures the natural beauty of the western coastline of Victoria.

Ashton said the interior images “are a metaphor for the intricate tangles within all of us”. These complex, somewhat chaotic images are juxtaposed with “the peace and serenity” of the sweeping seascapes. All images (C) Robert Ashton

24 July – 17 August 

Edmund Pearce Gallery
Level 2, Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street (corner Flinders Lane)
Melbourne 

More details are available here  

Exhibition:
Stephanie Sinclair - Too Young to Wed
If you are in Washington DC this month, VII Photo’s Stephanie Sinclair’s exhibition "Too Young To Wed" is showing for three days. I wrote about this exhibition last year on the inaugural International Day of the Girl Child 11 October 2012. In more than 50 countries millions of girls as young as six years old are still forced into marriage with adult men. These girls face a life of abuse and torment. Uneducated, marginalized and persecuted by the families into which they are married, child brides lose their chance to be children free to play and explore, they lose the opportunity to better themselves and are denied basic human rights. Sinclair has produced a powerful body of work that allows these innocent young girls to have a voice.

Russell Senate Office Building
Washington DC
23-25 July
Too Young To Wed will tour throughout 2013 and 2014. Visit the website here for updates.

Aleppo – A Cry for Help
Food and medicine supplies have been cut off and the citizens of Aleppo now find themselves trapped in a humanitarian crisis on which the governments of the world have turned their backs. Issa Touma, who many know from his work as a photography festival director, now calls for help. If you know anyone in your circle of contacts that may be able to help, please ask the question. Let not only our hearts go out to the people of Aleppo….


A Message From Issa Touma (above)

“To all my Western Friend who enjoy Aleppo Nights
last 2 years I saw how you act on your page’s ( Face books ) , Today we need urgently your half energy you give it to changed the System in Syria , maybe can convince the Oppositions to enter foods and milks and Medicines to more then 1,5 Millions Civilians have nothing at all to eat , do not say you can not do any thing , I know you each one personally , and I know you are in Contact with them , and most of you have good contact with the media also …
Now Aleppians who welcome you in there home for years , when you was working and leaving in Syria , many of them Die and travel out , and rest of them will Die Hungry … if you stile part from Humanity so ?? show that now , and if you do not like what I say you are very welcome to removed your self from my friends , I do not care any more .
I will followed your reactions , we need it for History of Humanity .
PS : I do not mean diplomats in this post , because they was have limited movement in the society , I mean people who had full freedom to move and work and stay in Syria for years ,Also I do not mean Tourist who come for short time”

Worth reading:

Woman’s Work by Francesca Borri


Photo: Alessio Romenzi

Francesca Borri gives a frank account of her experiences as a freelance journalist on the frontline in Syria. Published in the Columbia Journalism Review. Here is an extract.

“People have this romantic image of the freelancer as a journalist who’s exchanged the certainty of a regular salary for the freedom to cover the stories she is most fascinated by. But we aren’t free at all; it’s just the opposite. The truth is that the only job opportunity I have today is staying in Syria, where nobody else wants to stay. And it’s not even Aleppo, to be precise; it’s the frontline. Because the editors back in Italy only ask us for the blood, the bang-bang. I write about the Islamists and their network of social services, the roots of their power—a piece that is definitely more complex to build than a frontline piece. I strive to explain, not just to move, to touch, and I am answered with: “What’s this? Six thousand words and nobody died?”….” to readmore please click here

Wherever you are in the world this weekend stay safe.

Friday Round Up - 5 July

This week on Friday Round Up the first solo exhibition by Australian photomedia artist, Niobe Syme, opens in Sydney, another masterful photo essay by GMB Akash that again proves the power of photojournalism as a voice for those marginalised and a fundraising event for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale.

Photo Essay: 

GMB Akash – Yasan Galuh

Photographer GMB Akash has produced another incredibly strong body of work this time highlighting the terrible conditions in which those with mental illness are treated in Indonesia. At the Yasan Galuh Rehabilitation Centre for the Mentally Ill patients are denied the most basic of human rights. Chained and caged, forced to eat and sleep in the most unsanitary conditions, these men and women are subjected to unimaginable hardship. Akash says there are only 500 psychiatrists in Indonesia, a country with a population of more than 240 million, and as a consequence those with mental illnesses are marginalised. Uneducated and fearful of the demons that plague their offspring, families “hand over” the mentally disabled to Yasan Galuh’s “carers” who Akash says see themselves as healers. The images speak loudly for those who are silenced and are a sobering reminder that beneath the glittering lights of our modern cities there are many still living in the dark. 

To read more and view the full photo essay please visit GMB Akash’s blog. This is a courageous work from a very insightful photographer. All images (C) GMB Akash

Exhibition:
Niobe Syme - Leaving Jodhpur
Interview Alison Stieven-Taylor 

The cultural melting pot that is India has provided a creative wellspring for photographers for decades. Much of what we see today is what could be considered ‘modern’ India, but the exhibition “Leaving Jodhpur,” by Australian photomedia artist Niobe Syme captures a slower pace, evoking for me a sense of the India of colonial times.

The images in this exhibition were shot during a long train journey one summer across the state of Rajasthan from Jodhpur to Delhi, a trip in which Niobe had time to contemplate, and observe, away from the madding crowds. As the train made its way across Rajasthan Niobe says she was “struck by an underlying sensation of the parallels with Australia in terms of the warmer tones, the dusty feeling. That was a huge surprise to me, and took me back to Western Australia where I am from and images of Hill End and those sorts of mining towns. I wasn’t thinking of colonialism, but yes there is that sense of nostalgia and I think that part of what's happening is that Rajasthan is predominantly rural and time is different there, certainly compared with a big city such as Mumbai”.

She continues. “Actually when I look at the series, it is like a long held breath. The whole series Leaving Jodhpur, and not arriving anywhere, reflects the existential feeling of angst about being a foreigner in this vast place and not having any reference from the world I was from, other than my sense for humanity and ability to channel that through the lens”.

The natural filters the train windows provided - smudges, scratches, haze, dirt, dust and erratic obstructions, intrigued Niobe. “I was curious because everything wasn’t too available to me as a voyeur. The camera and eye sees so easily, but there is so much you can’t know in India. My intention was to try to communicate both the beauty of this place as I was seeing it at the time and to also establish an authorship in an honest way”. 

From this journey Niobe says three strands emerged – landscape, people and buildings. “I didn’t take a whole lot of images, I think it wasn’t more than about 70 (there are 20 in this exhibition). Over time I am tending to take fewer images, which is interesting as with the digital format you can go to town, but becoming attuned to what it is you are feeling and developing a better sense of that kind of feedback, means pressing the trigger is more conscious”.

Niobe has made several trips to India in recent years and she and her family are working with the Sucheta Kriplani Shiksha Niketan (SKSN) School for physically challenged and disadvantaged children in Manaklao. “It is a very beautiful thing to spend time with these people, and the school is doing fantastic work in developing community attitudes about disability,” she says. Niobe contributes through visual and writing projects and says there is a team of Australians involved.

Also a poet, Niobe has written a poem entitled Leaving Jodhpur, which she plans to read at the opening of her exhibition. “I struggle to remember which came first,” she laughs. “The poem and the photographs are in a dialogue which is quite exciting creatively as one levers the other and it challenges me to investigate the subject matter from a slightly different angle. But they inform and inspire each other and overall where I am going with my work is to look at the dialogue between the two”.

Leaving Jodhpur
Arthere
126 Regent Street, Redfern
6-21 July
Opening 2pm Saturday 6 July

For more details on the exhibition and opening hours visit Arthere website

To view more of Niobe's work click here for the website

All images (C) Niobe Syme

Fundraising Event:
Ballarat International Foto Biennale

On Sunday 14th July, Eleven 40 Gallery in Malvern (a short drive from Melbourne's CBD) will host a fundraising event for the fifth installment of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale (BIFB). To find out how you can secure one of the 125 photographs up for grabs in this BIFB RED DOT promotion, and help the Festival raise much needed funds, please visit the link here. 

Until next Friday, take care wherever you are.

Friday Round Up - 28 June

This week Friday Round Up features an interview with Australian photographer Max Pam about his book "Atlas Monographs" and the exhibition 'mOther Armenia'. Also please check out the images on Tim Page Unpublished where legendary photojournalist Tim Page shares unseen photographs from his extensive archive. Have a great weekend.


(c) Nazik Armenakyan from mOther Armenia

Interview:
Max Pam's Unique Journey

Alison Stieven-Taylor

As a young boy Max Pam dreamed of traveling to exotic places. At school he’d open the atlas, pick a destination, and let his imagination take him wandering through Thailand, Tibet, or China, countries that were ostensibly light years from the narrow-minded cultural confines of his 1950’s upbringing in Australia.

When he was in his late teens he turned his dreams into reality. He traveled the hippie trail to Katmandu and hitchhiked from London to India, a seemingly impossible feat, but Pam managed to do it and live to tell the tale. And along the way he amassed an extraordinary collection of photographs, journals and memories.

In his award-winning book Atlas Monographs Pam shares his journeys through Zanzibar, China, South India, Yemen, Madagascar, Karakoram and the South China Sea. The weighty tome features photographs from his nascent years in the early 1970’s to images taken as recently as 2006.

The vast majority of pictures in Atlas Monographs have not been published before with Pam “plundering” his archives and reacquainting himself with images he hasn’t seen for decades.

Pam is now in his sixties, but as he warms to recounting the tale of putting together Atlas Monographs I get the distinct impression that the young man who left behind the shores of his birth for adventure and sex in a fusion of Asian cultures is still very much alive under the surface of time.

I ask him how he arrived at the collection of images that are in Atlas Monographs and he laughs. “This is draft number forty…it was very exciting for me to go through my negatives and select the images and to re-read my journals and then to recast and recast until I had what I wanted.” Pam is extremely pleased with the outcome which compresses decades of photographs and multiple journals into one book. 

Atlas Monographs takes the reader through a series of journeys across the Asian continent and beyond. Pam has toured many times over the years to this part of the world and his fascination with Asia, he says, is “built into my DNA. From an early age I had that sensibility I was going to be very attracted to Asia. When I stepped off the plane at the age of twenty and plunged into the Singapore of then it was obvious that this was what had been missing in my life. I found it very exciting, powerful and that feeling endured for a very long time”.







In his introduction to Atlas Monographs he writes about his time in Asia during this period. “My main function as a person was to be there, to travel, to comprehend and join in the osmosis with the many and unique cultures I passed through. I had no formal notion of myself as a photographer. There were no assignments. The printed media and I had no relationship. As for my pictures I considered them to be part of a big work, a series of photographs that would take a lifetime to execute and collate. To understand the power and enormity of the Asian cultures I was involved with needed years of commitment to field work, to my visual anthropology.” Atlas Monographs most certainly pays homage to that ethic.

The book not only contains photographs spanning four decades, but also excerpts from the journals Pam kept on his travels. These books are filled with sketches, paintings, postcards and mementos. Some are hand written, others tapped out on an old ribbon typewriter. They not only served to document his experiences, but also helped Pam to retain his sanity and to fill the void of long days and nights spent on his own.


Of his journals Pam says, “With each successive journey I’d take a different tack on how I created my journal. They are reflective of my mindset at the time, and the reality that from one journey to the next I was a different person.”

As much as he is a photographer, Pam is also a storyteller. As I read, each journal entry transports me to another place in time encasing me in that moment. I can almost feel the relentless humidity of a Bangkok afternoon and smell the Tom Yum that wafts up the stairwell to the bedrooms of a run down Thai hotel. I squirm at the thought of sleeping in cockroach-infested rooms skimming quickly across Pam’s description of these ancient bugs crawling into all sorts of human orifices, my hair standing on end. And I rejoice at the sense of freedom he so clearly conveys.

I ask him what it was like to be able to do whatever he wanted, to go wherever he chose with no agenda. He laughs in reply. “To wake up in the morning, walk down to the docks, find out what ship is going to which island and get on it, to be a straw being blown in the wind, is a beautiful and free feeling.”

Of course to believe that all of his travels were wondrous and great fun would be to ignore the truth of traveling on your own. On one hand it can be fantastic and liberating and at the same time incredibly lonely and hard.

He recounts moments when he despaired. “The worst times were when I was sick. One really powerful experience was having malaria in Sumatra. I was pinned to the bed, paralyzed and so helpless. When you are in that condition you have to have the locals on your side and that was a great thing for me. People who didn’t know me could see my predicament and helped. I’ve had lots of tough, tough trips traveling by myself, subject to the vagaries of depersonalization and powerful loneliness and paranoia. But then in the next week you can have the most spectacular experience and go somewhere so physically beautiful and spiritual that it cuts through what has transpired before and your journey into darkness is over like that”. 

Adventure is etched deep in Pam’s spirit and much of his work is autobiographical, his journal entries extremely intimate and at times sexually graphic. His writing conveys honesty, innocence and a wide-eyed enthusiasm for everything that life throws at him. There is no doubt Pam lives in the moment.

In Atlas Monographs you can see how he is drawn to the comic, the bizarre, the violent, the sexual, and the beautiful sides of human nature. A reflection of self steeped in a belief that “scratch the surface and human beings are all the same”.

He tells me his photographs “amplify the idea of an emotional connection to people. Quite a few of the photos (in this book) are from meetings with people that lasted ten minutes, others I spent weeks or a month with”.

As our interview winds to a close he tells me, “Photography is like a get out of jail free card in terms of not becoming part of the predictable set of circumstances that people adhere to in Western Culture – get a degree, get a job, become a functionary of the state. It is the really exciting card in the deck. You can be anything you want as a photographer”.

Atlas Monographs is published by T&G Publishing. Check here for more information.

Text (C) Alison Stieven-Taylor

All photos (C) Max Pam

Exhibition:

mOther Armenia

In what is a landmark event for photography in Armenia, ten women photographers will co-exhibit to present their vision of life in Armenia from a decidedly female viewpoint. The photographs in the exhibition ‘mOther Armenia’ give voice to those marginalised within Armenian society raising questions around social injustice and the treatment of minorities as well as providing an insight into the life of women in modern-day Armenia.

(C) Anahit Hayrapetyan


(C) Nelli Shishmanyan


(C) Nelli Shishmanyan


(C) Piruza Khalapyan


(C) Sara Anjargolian


(C) Sara Anjargolian


(C) Anush Babajanyan


(C) Anush Babajanyan


(C) Hasmik Hayrapetyan


(C) Inna Mkhitaryan



(C) Knar Babayan


(C) Nazik Armenakyan


(C) Mery Aghakhanyan

Curated by FotoEvidence’s Svetlana Bachevanova, mOther Armenia is organized by 4 Plus Documentary Photography Center and supported by Open Society Foundations.

Svetlana said, “I had the privilege to curate this exhibit and was allowed to enter their world of mothers, professionals and social activists. Women in Armenia still battle to establish a career. Women are still expected to be fulltime mothers and housekeepers. But these ten documentarians broke the rules and found a way to pursue careers and create powerful bodies of work”.

The photographers involved in the exhibition are Mery Aghakhanyan, Sara Anjargolian, Nazik Armenakyan, Anush Babajanyan, Knar Babayan, Anahit Hayrapetyan, Hasmik Hayrapetyan, Piruza Khalapyan, Inna Mkhitaryan and Nelli Shishmanyan.

Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art in Yerevan
3 July – 17 August

Friday Round Up - 21 June

This week Friday Round Up features storm chasing photographer Nick Moir, new work from Claire Martin and a new gallery opens in Melbourne. Also please check out the images on Tim Page Unpublished where legendary photojournalist Tim Page shares more photographs from Cuba. Have a great weekend.

Due to technical issues with blogger, Friday Round Up will feature on the Home page of this blog for the moment.

Interview:
Nick Moir - Confessions of a Storm Chaser

Few show the kind of fascination and enthusiasm for major climatic shifts that Sydney photographer Nick Moir does. This self-confessed storm chaser has been documenting the power of Mother Nature for the past 14 years watching with intent the development of super-cell storms and other weather-driven events like bushfires and locust plagues. His interest in all things meteorological stems back to his childhood - storms, cyclones, tornadoes, fires, he likes them all.

His desire to find storms that few witness has taken Moir across the world. He’s photographed Tornado Alley in the US, a strip of land that is fated as the point on the planet where the most tornadoes are likely to hit. And he’s travelled into the Australian outback to central New South Wales, where storms are dramatic in contrast; red earth; angry, dark sky; endless horizon.

On his ‘storm days’ he experiments with his camera, “trying to make mistakes,” he states. I encourage him to expand on that thought. “I like photographing storms or weather events in a bizarre way, such as using a really slow shutter speed during the day. Out there (outback) you tend to get amazing light and strange imagery. My aim is not so much to capture pretty pictures, but to reflect the atmosphere at that moment”.

He says 99 per cent of what he does is the “unsexy stuff”; the forecasting and driving. He’s tapped into numerous underground storm-watching sites. “When a storm breaks and you are the only one out there with your camera, that’s when the whole thing comes together,” as was the case in southwest Queensland in 2007.

“I was on a storm chase out near Cunnamulla. It was a big risk, as it was only a maybe it was going to happen. Sydney to Cunamulla is about a 12-hour drive flat out, so it’s a two-day return trip to get an hour’s worth of photos. I knew there would be weather, I just didn’t expect a storm of the quality I got”.

Leaving Sydney before daybreak Moir drove straight through stopping only for fuel. “I arrived just as this fantastic storm, a super cell thunderstorm, a very US style storm, erupted ahead”. He smiles at the memory.

At the time that area of Queensland was in the middle of one of the harshest droughts. The landscape was littered with the skeletons of kangaroos, emus and sheep. “I got a shot of the scattered remains of a kangaroo with a fantastic, photogenic storm in the background. It was super dry on the ground and the contrast of this with the storm was visually interesting. For me I guess it is about finding contrast”. 

From a photography perspective Moir seems to be in a niche of his own with very little competition, in Australia anyway. “There are lots of storm chasers and there are lots of photographers, but there are very few who do both things well. A lot of the people who photograph storms do so in a standard way with lightening behind their city’s icon, for example. But the pictures I am focused on, are the ones that haven’t been taken. I want to show how massive nature can be”.

Bushfires are another area of interest for Moir, but are a significantly more dangerous subject than thunderstorms. He recounts the time he was photographing bushfires around the country’s capital Canberra and was caught in the fire’s path. 

“You try and always avoid putting yourself in a position where you can’t pull yourself out or you don’t have a refuge, but there have been a couple of times when I’ve put myself in situations where I got lucky (read: escaped death). Near Canberra I came in behind a fire, which normally would be a smart thing to do as you are in burned out territory and only have to watch out for trees falling and other debris rather than actual fire. But on this day I unexpectedly found myself in an unburned area of grasslands. Fortunately I knew where I was, but the smoke got so thick I had to open the car door to watch the white lines go past. Suddenly a big glow came up on the right and I just went oh shit. I could feel the real pings of panic then”.

In his four-wheel drive he headed towards a field he remembered was on his left - luckily he’d been on this road previously. “I drove through a fence, and kept going. Eventually the smoke cleared and I was all right. But when you don’t know where you are in a fire, you are in deep shit. Even being in front of a fire, if you can see where it is you can place yourself so it can pass you. But if you don’t know your location and are stuck in smoke, you lose that sense of direction. A lot of people died in Victoria (Black Saturday) because they got lost”.

Moir has strong views about the way the Victorian bushfire was reported. He doesn’t believe there is an accurate photographic record of the catastrophic event, but concedes perhaps there can’t be. Conditions were deadly as the nation learned on that day in February 2009.

“Bushfires is a personal one for me because there are some amazing pictures to be captured. I still have not seen a single image of just how ferocious a bushfire can be. I rate some of my best pictures two out of ten, when I think about what you could get if you were lucky, and did it well.” He says in a situation like Black Saturday “you need to draw on all the knowledge and skills you have to actually keep it together on the day and stay calm. You really have to know what you are doing and know when to pull the pin and get out”. He likens photographing bushfires to combat environments; “you are never certain where the danger will come from”.

He ruminates about what it must have been like on Black Saturday and says it is clear why there are not more photographs depicting the ferocity of the firewall as there would have been massive, towering fire tornadoes 100 metres wide with 400 kph winds. “In that scenario you haven’t got a hope of surviving”.

(C) All photos Nick Moir. To view more of Nick's work visit his website here.

New Work: 

Claire Martin  

Australian photographer Claire Martin, who won the Inge Morath Award in 2010 for her photo essays depicting those who live on the margins of society – Downtown East Side Vancouver and Slab City California – has created a new work on the same theme in Nimbin, Australia forming a triptych collection.

“These three photo essays came together through looking at the culture of stigma and disadvantage in modern society,” says Martin who studied social work before turning her talents to documentary photography.

Nimbin, which is in the picturesque Summerland coastal area of New South Wales, Australia, is a village community that is founded on the counterculture that grew out of the sixties. Inhabitants here live in an environment where “drugs are not demonized, but seen as mind expanding, and not participating in the capitalist economy is viewed as positive. A lot of gay, lesbian and transsexual people who escaped the bigotry of the larger cities have made Nimbin their home since the seventies,” said Martin. “Stigma here is seen to be positive,” although Nimbin is not without its own societal problems either.

(C) All photos Claire Martin

To see more of Claire Martin’s work visit the Oculi website.

New Gallery:
Strange Neighbour - Fitzroy

Strange Neighbour Gallery opens tonight in Melbourne’s Fitzroy with its inaugural exhibition Creep Show, featuring works by Polixeni Papapetrou, Pip Ryan, Heather B. Swann and Tony Woods. Strange Neighbour is a new venture by former Colour Factory Gallery curator Linsey Gosper. Creep Show “explores the strange and yet strangely familiar. The works engage in part reality, part fantasy, where recognizable childhood motifs are combined with surreal horror aesthetics. The characters in Creep Show are at once playful and dreamlike, however, just like our childhood memories there is an eerie, dark undertone of the uncanny”.


(C) Heather B Swann



(C) Pip Ryan



(C) Polixeni Papapetrou



(C) Troy Woods

Opens today and runs until 13th July

395–397 Gore St
Fitzroy

Visit the website here.