Centre for Contemporary Photography

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Dead Starlets Assoc. 

Yvonne Todd

Yvonne Todd is a New Zealand photographer who commonly manipulates the conventions of photographic techniques and genres. Her work exposes an intimacy that is often missed by the naked eye.

This is evident in the compositions in the Dead Starlets Assoc. Each portrait draws the viewer’s attention to the fine details. You begin the question the means of the simple details. For example, the yellowed teeth, the curled eyelashes, and the dark brows that are in contrast to the peroxided hair. A kind of sensible and prudish atmosphere is shown with young women as the subject. 

The particular narrative of a 1970′s style is carried throughout the book, which can evoke a sense of familiarity and nostalgia for particular viewers. 

In particular, the artist’s deliberate avoidance of adhering to the strict beauty standards of young women is notable. Because of this, each photograph evokes a slight unease and discomfort, which compels you to turn the page. 

You can find a copy of Dead Starlets Assoc. at the CCP Bookshop.

CCP Volunteer - Sonia Jude

Photographs from Yvonne Todd

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Provisional Arrangement by Martin Kollar 

Martin Kollar’s project, Provisional Arrangement, is rooted in the questioning of memory, ambiguity, and deconstruction. Born in Czechoslovakia within the communist era, Kollar’s book captures the landscape of temporal solutions post communist Czechoslovakia. Through Kollar’s silently humorous reflections and placement between each photograph and page, he creates quite a unique and disjointed narrative throughout the book. 

You can find a copy of Provisional Arrangements amongst many other compelling photographic publications at the CCP Book Shop.

Volunteer: Simon Aubor

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Hibi - Masahisa Fukase

Hibi was one of Masahisa Fukase’s final bodies of work. Fukase photographed street cracks and fissures between 1990 and 1992, and then hand painted a set of prints. The series was shown in February 1992, in his solo exhibition ‘Private Scenes ‘92′ in Tokyo. His working life came to an end four months later when he fell down the stairs at a pub in Tokyo, and suffered brain damage. He passed away in 2012.

Masahisa Fukase’s Hibi is as obsessive as his Solitude of Ravens, except cracks on the pavement were chased instead. His presence, can be strongly felt through the finger prints left with paint on some of the photographs. There is also an uncanny feeling of melancholia that is, at times, juxtaposed with the psychedelic and often erratic use of contrasting colours of paint. Whilst there isn’t enough information on what the body of work itself represents, one can only wonder if these photographs are an accurate representation of an obsessive, brilliant and often isolated mind.

Hibi is available at the CCP x Perimeter Bookshop.

Written by CCP Volunteer Cecilia Baker.

Images © MACK Books 2016 

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“This event - the film going extinct on me halfway through the work - embeds into the very substance of this series a sense that the time that we live in is falling into disrepair and decay even as we still actively occupy its present.” - Simryn Gill, 2004. Simryn Gill is a Sydney based artist who primarily works with photography and sculpture. Gill’s work investigates the relationship between nature, place and culture. Standing Still is a work that took place between 2000 and 2003 in South East Asia. The series comprises of 116 photographs taken in Malaysia after the Asian financial crisis of 1997. The buildings Gill has photographed are abandoned, decrepit structures long forgotten by people and are in the process of being reclaimed by nature. The highly saturated film takes away an eery reading of the work which otherwise may have been perceived. This saturation also takes from the possible nostalgic reading of the work and encourages the viewer to instead view the work as a snapshot of time. With these images comes the question of how place may hold or hinder time.  CCP volunteer Stephanie Symington Images: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/175.2004.a-lllll/

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Harley Weir Harley Weir is somewhat of an enigma.  Self taught, her subject matter know no boundaries with works spanning across social commentary (Boundaries, 2014), refugee camps in Calais (Homes, 2016), fashion editorial (Balenciaga SS17, 2017) and exploration of a surfaces relationship with camera and photographer (Paintings, 2017). With a focus on soft edges contrasting agains deep, rich colours, Harley’s work exposes an intimacy often missed by the naked eye.  As an artist constantly practicing, she has been quoted by her publishers and followers as an ‘elusive figure’; one who’s focus is on the project, its outcome, and message. Publicity and financial success are seemingly irrelevant to the young photographer, yet inevitable given her immediately identifiable aesthetic, unquestionable talent and ability to address a broad range of topics with ease. There is a sense of fluidity between projects and, as mentioned above, a great sense of intimacy. We are able to see through the eyes of Harley, who in turn invites us to consider the subject matter from our own ‘pure’, dream-like subconscious.  Written by Sarah Shepherd.  Photographs: Harley Weir, Loose Joints, i-D magazine

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David Moore (1927 – 2003) Australia’s most renowned and widely travelled photojournalist. His extraordinary archive covers both his homeland and the many countries and subjects he visited over a sixty-year career.

“Spain Portfolio” 

David Moore and Jenny Flintoff were married in London in October 1955 and honeymooned in France and Spain. Their destination in Spain was S’Agaro on the Costa Brava as guests of Senor don Jose Ensesa. Senor Ensesa, a fiercely nationalistic Catalonian, had commissioned David to produce a photographic essay on the unique enterprise he had created at S’Agaro. Jenny as a journalist provided a written account of the experience. The results were published in a stylish magazine owned by Ensesa given to promoting Catalonian culture.

Some of the pictures shown here illustrate how austerely beautiful was the built environment created by Ensesa. Villas, gardens, a winding promenade, an elegant stone parapet, a foaming rocky shoreline and one or two secluded and pretty beaches amounted to an exclusive enclave, an oasis of serenity standing in vivid contrast to the picturesque fishing villages which bordered it at either end.

Written by CCP volunteer Eirini Tzavara

Photos: http://davidmoorephotography.com.au/spain/

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Passengers - Dagmar Keller & Martin Wittwer

This magical book is the observational project Dagmar Keller and Martin Wittwer made at night at a bus station while travelling through Poland. The use of Chiaroscuro and different textures trigger memories from my childhood, even though these images don’t necessarily or directly relate to my own experiences. Drawing on familiar relationships and notions of caring, these images reflect my memories in a different light. I see them darker than they might have actually been.

Passengers is available at the CCP Bookstore.

Written by CCP volunteer Cecilia Baker

Photos: http://www.kellerwittwer.de/projects/passengers-neu/

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Kirsten Lyttle - Digital Mana

The Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival and the recent celebration of traditional African attire represented in Black Panther are both indicative of the importance of clothing and fabric in identity. Fabric is uniquely intimately woven into how we communicate our identity through our attire. This is especially true for Indigenous cultures, as seen in Kirsten Lyttle’s Digital Mana.

The artist, Kirsten Lyttle, self-identifies as a ‘Maussie/Mozzie’; a Maori living in Australia. This combination of identities is apparent in her work, where she applies customary Maori weaving techniques onto the feathers of Australian native birds. For her, Maori culture is not there to be examined; it must be engaged with and interwoven into current society, to be preserved. The perseverance of Maori people throughout history is testament to their ability to adapt when necessary. The Maori concept of ‘Mana’ -literal translation: to speak- represents the importance, status and spiritual power that a place or object projects(?). Lyttle shines a different light on the understanding of the culture and the concept by demonstrating its compatibility with technology, thus a ‘Digital Mana’; Mana, like Maori culture, is not antiquated, and should not be perceived as such.

‘My hands will tell you what I think'

Lyttle’s work encapsulates the significance of the action; the act of photographing, the act of weaving, the act of creating. Historically, the white man documenting/photographing the Indigenous tribe has done more harm than good. It has portrayed the people and communities as ’savage’ and ‘dying'; a false and harmful perception that prolongs still to this day. Extracting photography from its colonialist, ethnographic origins in an act of reclamation.

She dismantles the clinical stillness that often pervades an exhibited photograph by cutting it up and applying customary weaving techniques to the strands of the macro images, using 'the physical surface [of the photograph] as a site for making customary Maori woven artworks’. This is in addition to weaving the photographed cloak herself as well.

We as the viewer are then given a sense of intimacy to the piece, both through its subject matter and the materiality of the final work. The juxtaposition of the macro images of feathers and the image made from woven photographs of a customary cloak made from feathers emphasise the significance of the parts that make a greater whole.

Kirsten Lyttle’s exhibition was on display at the Centre for Contemporary Photography from Tuesday February 2 2018 to Sunday 11 March 2018.

Written by CCP volunteers Michelle Guo and Alice Francis

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What is it like to be a stone?

Pie[ r ]a is a collaborative work departs from a legendary story titled “The Turk’s Wife” in the town of  Castro, in South Italy. The legend talks about an incursion in Castro by the Turks where they stole a precious statue of Madonna from the cathedral. The Turkish commander gave this statue to his wife as a gift. In that period the wife was pregnant and no prayers could make her feel better and be able to give birth. The slave they had was a woman from Castro and she suggested to send the statue back to its country hoping for a miracle. They decided to sent it back on a ship and eventually the statue came back where it belonged. All the people of the town were full of joy to have  back their precious statue and finally iy was back to the cathedral where they could venerate it and respect it.

Through this legend, artists Cemre Yesil and Alice Caracciolo make a photographic expedition to the land of Castro. They want to question the relationship between stones and human soul. Their mystical and spiritual value and their way to custody our past, our history and what we are. The artists eventually understood the human being give life and emotional values to the stones and make them an important point of the collective history.

<With this work, Cemre Yeşil and Alice Caracciolo try to embrace the souls within the stones through photography by asking: What does it mean to move a stone? What does it take to remove a stone? How can one actually carry a stone? How come the stories change with the movement of a stone? Do stones take part in so-called ‘anima mundi’? Are stones inanimate objects? Do inanimate objects have consciousness? Are stones conscious to some extent? [..] Can photographs of stones reveal the consistency between spiritual and philosophical traditions that span cultures and centuries? How can a stone put us in touch with spiritual traditions? Can we feel and believe in a stone while trying to maintain an academic credibility?[..]Can we make our selves at home in a mindless cosmos filled with stones? What is it like to be a stone?>

•Cemre Yesil, Turkish photographer living in Istanbul, was nominated for the Paul Huf Award 2014 of Amsterdam Photography Museum FOAM, for ING Unseen Talent Award 2016 and for Lead Awards 2016.

•Alice Caracciolo, born in Pisa in 1986, took part in Curatorial Programme at the Royal Academy of Art with Bas Vroege in the Netherlands. Settles in Lecce where she founded in 2014  L.O.F.T: a place designed around the world of contemporary photography with the  photographer Francesca Fiorella.

Source: 

http://cemreyesil.com/piet-r-a

https://www.beraber.co/photography/pietra

http://cargocollective.com/alicecaracciolo/Piet-r-a

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Luca Campigotto Italian  photographer

Venice -the City By Night

Luca Campigotto is an Italian photographer. He was born in Venice, where he graduated in modern history. He is known for his images on night citiescapes and wild landscapes

Written By

CCP Volunteer Pia Gonzalez

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The first page of Ron Jude’s Vitreous China begins with the following text:

… the past is a fog, the present is chaos, the future doesn’t exist. Things seem to exist, things seem to change, to transform. Ancient sand is liquefied into polarized glass. Crushed glass is melted into shiny white enamel. Broken sinks and toilets gather dust in a junkyard. Metal is forged from rocks pulled from the earth. Rocks are pure history. Living matter becomes nonliving matter, accumulates and collapses into itself, compressed by its own mass.

The accompanying photographs, taken in Midwestern America, illustrate the theme at the very centre of Jude’s book – industry transforms our natural environment into a commodity, which in turn becomes nature once again, seemingly devoid of the natural beauty it first had.

Holes in brick walls are covered with wooden sheets. Wooden planks are placed against streams of water. Rubber hoses feed water through walls. It appears that we tend to corrupt nature in order to control it. 

The book’s text, by Mike Slack, highlights the wistful and familiar element of Jude’s work:

The dense high-pitched drone of crickets in humid Midwestern air. The low oceanic rumble of eighteen-wheelers on a highway overpass. A quiet metallic c-clank, c-clank, c-clank from a factory several miles away. The broadcast of a tornado warning on cheap car speakers and the simple rhythm of windshield wipers squeaking back and forth…

As a result, the photographs, conspicuously devoid of human presence, invite us to fill these peripheral environments with our own narratives. We see ourselves in this modern nature, transformed but ultimately tainted.

Jude's Vitreous China is available in the CCP bookstore.

Written by CCP volunteer Tom Hvala.

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WOLVES OF THE SEA

are the last of their kind. They are threatened with extinction. The photo documentary LUPIMARIS is dedicated to the history, the stories and the faces of the Greek fishermen and their traditional colourful wooden boats. Since 2010, Christian Stemper is photographically documenting the last remaining individual fishermen and their boats, on the Greek island of Paros. A total of 99 Boats and 31 fishermen. Half of the boats that have been photographed in 2010 do not exist anymore - destroyed, abandoned or sold to tourists. Because no one wants to become a fisherman anymore the traditional fishing craft is dying, and therefore a millennia-old tradition.

Written by CCP volunteer Eirini Tzavara

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Jacob Raupach’s Folding the Periphery is a collection of photographs and videos that capture various construction and industrial sites along 960km of rail corridor between Melbourne and Sydney.  

The series of liminal spaces, as something ‘in-between’, invites individuals to consider their interactions with industrial structures and their impact on the environment. The stillness of the photographs depict a new but contrived natural beauty, as the sites wait to be refined into accessible structures which we use each day. The inclusion of decayed fences and old silos, contrasted by sky and creeping vegetation, adds a darker element in which we are reminded that these structures have a limited utility.

Drawing on previous works and publications which have examined issues relating to regional areas, industry, labour and changing post-industrial landscapes, Raupach presents these ideas in both matter and method. As we walk through the space, we are forced to navigate our way around the gallery – in the same way we do in our day-to-day lives.

As a result, we are left feeling complicit in the contamination of the natural spaces around us, whether consciously or not.

Jacob’s exhibition is currently on display at the Centre for Contemporary Photography and closes on Sunday 11 March 2018.

Written by CCP volunteer Tom Hvala

(Photos from Jacob’s website - http://www.jacobraupach.com/)

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Nigel Shafran’s Dark Rooms contains a series of unassuming but familiar photographs which capture domestic elements of our own lives — items at a checkout counter; individuals on a slow moving escalator; an untidy pile of tax receipts. Engaging when looked at separately, the photographs become mundane when viewed collectively. As a result, Shafran’s work seems absurdist, evoking an odd sense of hopelessness. The deliberate absence of any meaningful or direct human interaction invites us to reflect on our own ‘mundane’. Describing the women pictured on the escalator, David Chandler notes:

The sense of the city in these photographs … is of a machine that induces and processes a distracted and ageing population of workers and consumers. And in this, perhaps, there is something fatalistic, a downward pull of inevitability.

Grim, but great. Shafran’s Dark Rooms is available at the CCP bookstore. Written by CCP volunteer Tom Hvala.

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Walking in Place 1: New Orleans, a pocket-sized paperback by LA-based photographer Mike Slack, is the first in a series that presents observational snippets of the photographer’s wandering through various towns, cities or geographical locales. 

Slack hones in on trivial or easily missed fragments that make up his exploration of New Orleans – unkempt flora, insignificant architectural details, meandering neighbourhood cats - and in doing so, documents his own objectivity as a wanderer while instilling a sense of vitality in these small details. 

His approach to photographic documentation recalls the ease of the flâneur. In an interview, Slack himself explains:

‘...the open-ended, “meditative” aspect of photography is what I’m getting at, the aimless wandering.’ (x)

Walking in Place 1: New Orleans employs an expressive use of light and colour that attest to the vivacity of its location and Slack’s pictorial eye. In its printed form, the images are somewhat detached in their isolation on the page, and are yet joyously intimate.

Walking in Place 1: New Orleans is available at the CCP x Perimeter store.

Written by CCP volunteer Ash Holmes.

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Ron Jude’s Lago collates 54 photographs of an empty Californian suburbia and its surrounding desert to explore our individual tendency to create and filter our own narrative.

The end result is a collection of images, devoid of any direct human interaction, which seem somewhat familiar: spiders in jars, school buses, deflated soccer balls and empty playing fields.

The book’s only text is as follows:

…I know it happened, and I have enough information about it to reconstruct the whole scene to my own satisfaction, but the person to whom it happened is somewhere so far off that I only know it’s me because I can see his face, and because I’m the one remembering. —John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

The absence of any formal explanation for Jude’s curation of images creates an opportunity for us to interpret Jude’s intention on our own terms. For some, the images may resemble an attempt to reconstruct our childhood and its playfulness: how do we position ourselves in relation to our childhood and those that were in it? 

For others, the photos may indicate an absentness of community and genuine human engagement in contemporary contexts – the suburbia of America is no longer what it used to be.

Either way, Lago offers a lot without really saying anything.

Jude’s Lago is available at the CCP bookstore. 

Written by CCP volunteer Tom Hvala.

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“I’m less concerned with facts and more the beauty or strangeness of that moment.” Through his haunting and mysterious images, Jack Davison heroes the art of spontaneity and allows for unplanned moments to inspire his craft. Residing in London, this self proclaimed documentary photographer originally studied English Literature, before focussing solely on image making as a career. Davison experiments with light, blur and shadows through his work- producing dynamic photographs both in colour, as well as black and white. Whilst some photographers work within the confinements of what they excel in, (Fashion, Documentary, Still Life), Davison comfortably and confidently shoots across a variety of genres- allowing his signature style and treatment transpire. Davison’s curiosity with people is truly articulated through his imagery, which inspires him to photograph the strangers that he encounters in everyday life. Whether it’s a lady on the tube, an old man walking the street or a shadowed alleyway- Davison discovers beauty whilst others may only understand mediocrity. This sharp and considered eye reflects Davison’s undeniable talent.

“As soon as I meet someone, I start to work out how I would portray them,” he says. “I can’t help it. I do it without thinking. And the way someone reacts in front of the lens, the pressure to get it right in the time you have with them – I never fail to find that exciting, I live for that.” http://www.jackdavison.co.uk/ JD - CCP Volunteer