Introduction

The Queensland Centre for Photography (QCP) is a non-profit organization that facilitates connections between audience and art practitioners. Local audiences are invited to extend their interest in photography by learning about the medium, its practitioners and the surrounding theoretical debates. Through exhibitions, educational programs, publications and a collection, we aim to increase opportunities for art dialogue in a friendly all-inclusive environment. Importantly, local artists need local institutions to present their work and provide a voice for their work nationally and internationally. This Centre also provides professional support and advice for the Queensland photographic art community.

Many of the most successful Queensland artists move interstate to gain recognition and increase their professional opportunities. We aim to reverse this trend by drawing the focal point for the photographic arts into the state and consequently improving the cultural life for residents and visitors.

A major aim for the QCP is to increase audiences for the arts. Our program represents a wide range of interests within the photographic arts but preserve excellence and critical perspective. Other local institutions show photography, but audience interest in this versatile and expanding medium is such that in order to keep pace with new ideas and developments a specialist focus is needed. This marketing strategy will benefit audience participation, knowledge dissemination and investors interests.

The QCP is attracting the best practitioners in Queensland and is being advised by informed and influential members of the art industry in Brisbane.

Audiences are attracted to photography as the ideas and language of the medium have significant relevance to their lives. Nineteen million photographs are put through fast photo laboratories across Australia every week. Photography has become a way of thinking about the world. It is more than an art form - it is the common thread in our social and commercial lives. Improved understanding of its processes, its history as an art form and its contemporary practitioners is crucial to our ability to develop and maintain a critical perspective.

Sponsors to the organization are offered the opportunity to associate their own brand with a dynamic and progressive organization with a focus on large and diverse audiences. In identifying with the goals of this organization, sponsors will play a role in the formation of a significant cultural organization that aims for a condensation of local culture and through this focused identification, eventual international recognition.