Chloe Dewe Mathews’ Thames Log uses the river Thames as a place to explore ritual, history and connection. Drawing on interests that the photographer has explored in previous projects, Thames Log represents a continuation of her style, approach, research and sensibilities. While most of the time this plays well into her strengths, the images do […]
While Virginia Wilcox’s debut book Arboreal (Deadbeat Club, 2021) may appear to be about trees, it is much more about honesty and acceptance. Among the harsh sun, skeletal trees and hewn pathways of the parks, Arboreal feels, to me, as much about taking somewhere on its own terms as the plants that are the subject […]
In 2010, I had a meeting at the US consulate here in Melbourne. I was pursuing the possibility of studying abroad in the US and, when discussing options, the University of Michigan came up. I said ‘well I can’t picture Ann Arbour, but I know a bit about Detroit’. Looking at me with an award […]
Commissioned as part of Melbourne’s inaugural PHOTO2021 festival, Emma Phillips’ Send Me A Lullaby examines the city of Melbourne in a way that challenges the idea of a city with the reality of change. While we may be used to photographs of steel-and-glass icons, sunset skylines and clear blue skies, Phillips’ work steps five kilometres away […]
When Tom Goldner chose to produce a work examining ecological destruction through the subjects of fire and horses, he chose subjects that remain intrinsically connected to the history of humankind. While vastly different in nature, where they are similar is that Australia is having to reckon with each in profoundly new and difficult ways. Brumbies […]
Vincent Delbrouck’s photobook Dzogchen doesn’t take its cues from photography itself. He appears not to be interested in replicating the obsession that many photographers have with the surface, of the exposure or the composition, and instead approaches the image with a much more robust utilitarianism. The result is work that takes a very pragmatic and […]
Photography has an inevitable relationship to time. All images, consciously or not, end up being about time and reflecting the era they were made. The making of photographs, especially within the context of project-based practice, concerns time on another scale, often seeing a photographer engage in cyclical repetition, rework and rediscovery of a place, subject […]
One of the reasons Shinya Arimoto’s Tibet rings so true for me is that the work was begun from a point of self-critique. Towards the end of the book, Arimoto recounts that he was once a twenty-something, backpacking in India, travelling fast and shooting freely. When his undeveloped film was stolen, he fell into a […]
The Great Wall of China, like China itself, is a fragmented, broken up site held together by history, mythology and necessity. Xiaoxiao Xu’s new book, Watering my Horse by a Spring at the Foot of the Long Wall, reminds readers that although the wall is unquestionably present in memory, history and myth, what really exists […]