It’s a strange thing that the photographers assembled to show in these four separate exhibitions – Peter Annand, Georgia Metaxas, Francesca Rosa and Ria Tierney – deliver an overarching curatorial rationale for their placement through the subject-matter of their photographs. Their conjunction was an accident, but it is not an unfortunate accident. In fact, it’s lucky for us, perhaps even serendipitous, that through happenchance they unite under one roof, because while they are ostensibly examining contrary subject matter, the thread that holds them together lies in the ‘accidents’ in their work and how we understand them.

For instance, in Georgia Metaxas, lower your ears, we venture into the world of the homeless and destitute in Fitzroy, Melbourne; where each person is having his or her hair cut. Each person exists on the margins of mainstream society, probably caused by accident rather than choice, but each embraces a route of normalcy defined by grooming. Yet, like Francis Galton’s systematic photographs made in the 1880s or Tournachon’s images of electrotherapy from the 1860s, the people in these images are not completely reclaimed and remain Other, as much as any of us would when photographed during a process of transformation.

By comparison with Metaxas’s black and white images, Peter Annand’s photographs in City evoke a spectrum of colour, and so it might seem pleasant to let the colour wash over us and smother the job of making sense of the social landscapes that he depicts. But what sense can we make of the disparate conglomeration of objects and surfaces assembled from the modern built environment and the taxonomy of colour that he employs? Perhaps formally Annand does make some sense of the order and chaos that surrounds us, which is further leavened by the ‘designed’ colour of the subject-matter; if so, then it’s an uneasy sense of a city’s social cohesion that begs us to reexamine its virtues.

Like Annand, Ria Tierney’s 2 Percent notionally explores colour, yet again this is a somewhat superficial reading that needs to be thought through more carefully, for the red colour of each person’s hair suggests a more profound issue of genes carrying a line of hair only found (as she reminds us in the title) in 2% of the world’s population. Her subjects were approached randomly, and they agreed to be photographed; this is perhaps a somewhat arbitrary practice, but how random is a gene, and what constitutes diversity, if some predictions hold true that red hair is gradually diminishing?

Clearly the systems that abound in this exhibition reflect what exists elsewhere, and when the weather system goes ‘wrong’, as it did in 2006, it may lead to disasters like Cyclone Larry. But Francesca Rosa, in Interior Disaster, is not just recording the resulting mayhem of severe weather, but more specifically (as she points out) she is recording the scene of a ‘crime’ with the studious intent of a forensic photographer. These documents inform the reader of what existed in front of the camera eleven months after the tragic events in northern Queensland; the fetid residue and aftermath of a storm, undoubtedly measured by insurance companies and It is a human trait to want to understand the unknowable and control the events that befall us, yet the precariousness of our control over our lives and environment is evident in the work in each of these exhibitions, which remind us that these ‘accidental’ issues are worth attending to.

Dr Stephen Hobson