Fine Monochrome Print Group: Folios
Photography is about images and the ideas embedded in them not process, right? Well yes, but that’s easy to say till you have a finely crafted palladium or silver gelatin in your hot greedy hands; my palms grow sweaty at the very thought. Despite the convenience, flexibility and ease of distribution of ‘electric’ photographs, making them appropriate for most applications of the medium today, they in no way rival the aura of analogue processes. The monochrome print group are a diverse collective of individuals who come together to celebrate the processes that are venerable ancestors of the one that dominates the medium in Australia today.

Vivian McLatchie: The Bridge Builder - A Tribute to My Father
There is something miraculous about a piece of paper transformed into a portal we can use to project ourselves back in time to more effectively empathise with lives lived in different historical contexts. All the more poignant when it’s about your Dad; it’s a common thing to want to. Vivian journeyed back to the South Island of New Zealand to visit the remote sites that her late father took parties of workers including his brothers who were still in there teens, to build bridges. She’s layered vintage photographs from that time over the landscape as it exists today in a tender gesture of homage.

Carla Feltham: The Revelator
This body of work is in the post WWII American documentary tradition in which the social landscape of a culture is mapped on a road trip made by a photographer as a sort of quest for the truth underlying a society’s shiny surfaces. Carla Feltham has travelled through the United States in 2009 balancing intention with chance to capture a human vision of the country in which the lives of its people are reflected in the commonplace roadside scenes that surround them. This work is a nod to Eggleston and Christenberry, pioneers of colour photography in the South as well as a new breed including Alec Soth, Richard Renaldi, Jeff Brouws and Michael Meads.

Annisa Belonogoff: Made In Australia Despite our claims that Australia is a classless society founded on egalitarian ideals, our record is one of a monoculture. Until recent decades, our nation was an Anglo bastion in which one language and one skin colour was acknowledged and anything outside of mother England’s mould was dismissed, devalued or ignored. Fortunately this situation is improving, new colours, flavours and textures contributed to our cultural melting pot by waves of immigration. These charming animations represent Annisa’s reconciliation of her bicultural heritage, growing up in Central Queensland with a Russian father and an Australian mother.

Carolyn Stubbin: Prayer – an Act of Peace (part 1) and Hands Off – Out Now (part 2)
The transition of Australia from Anglophile monoculture to a vibrant, culturally diverse nation has been a difficult journey. On one hand we profess to welcome newcomers to our land but look at our treatment of refugees, remember the shameful Cronulla riots of 2005 or think of the current lamentable Indian student situation in Melbourne. Carolyn Stubbin recognises that harmony between culturally diverse groups requires empathy, openness to new ways of thinking, willingness to accommodate difference, in short, effort and compromise. In “Prayer” she photographs her Muslim subjects posed informally at home with their prayer mats and in “Hands off” she documents the activities of Salem El-Merebi a politically outspoken Muslim feminist in an attempt to deflate ill informed notions that all Muslims are fanatics and latent terrorists.

Tom Evangelidis: Façade
Architecture is subject to the forces of history. When grand constructions are finally complete they reflect the values and aspirations of the men who commissioned them but the relentless progress of time uncovers a more human dimension. Peeling paint and crumbling plaster evoke eloquent voices from the past, chronicling the shifting fortunes of empires, of both the great and unremarkable lives of which they were comprised. Tom Evangelidis has travelled to Prague, Bucharest, Hanoi, St Petersburg, Sofia, Istanbul and Havana, sifting human traces from the stone and mortar with masterful technique and a gentle observant eye.

Ray Cook
Artist and Bon Vivant