Melbourne born artist Laura Delany explores alternative perspectives on social history with her research-led practice. Previously based in Naples, Italy from 2014-2018, she creates community-specific projects using found materials and archival records. Delany has worked across a range of sites in Australia and Europe, including public spaces, heritage listed locations and galleries.

 

 

Delany created ‘The Rise and Fall’ in response to the 99 Spring Street façade. The billboard-sized work uses repurposed photography from vintage rock-climbing journals and explores the statement: ‘Their trajectory is upward, but will they rise, or fall’—a meditation on the search for new equilibrium in a planet facing crisis.

 

 

‘My experience in the festival exceeded my highest expectations and was one of my most successful and enjoyable projects to work on to date. I have not felt so supported to push an idea to its full potential (and beyond)’ — Laura Delaney.

Argentinian photojournalist Gustavo Germano documents experiences of loss throughout decades of fascism in Latin America. His photographic productions investigate social and citizen memory, via victims’ experiences of exiles, abductions, recoveries, traumas and reckonings. From early 1960 to late 1980, dictatorships across South America resulted in the murder, torture and disappearance of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

 

 

Germano’s series ‘Absences’ – featured in PHOTO 2021 – depicts family photos alongside ‘after’ shots— calling attention to a loved one’s presence and subsequent absence. The work was presented on a series of large billboards adjacent to the SUBSTATION.

Australian settler artist, Kate Golding, challenges the settler colonial reverence for Cook’s legacy with ‘Near this spot’. Located at Cooks’ Cottage and the Captain Cook statue in Euro-Yroke (St Kilda), during PHOTO2021, Golding re-evaluates the presence of this divisive figure throughout history, in a country that continues to celebrate him, while ignoring the unceded sovereignty of the First Nations people.

 

‘For me being part of PHOTO 2021 has been an incredible opportunity to present work in a public way, said Kate. Also, on a personal level, having my work validated after [maternity leave] and years of being home.’

South African-born, Melbourne-based artist Eliza Hutchison’s was commissioned as ‘Photographer in Residence’ at the Parliament of Victoria for PHOTO 2021. With unrestricted access throughout the Parliament Chambers over twelve-months period Hutchison created an experimental, yet photojournalistic series titled ‘Just wanted you to know’ to examine complex narratives within the Australian political system.

 

The work draws on broader personal and cultural narratives using abstraction and photographic sequencing, and responds to the everyday activities within Parliament, including debates about safe injecting rooms, WorkCare, climate change, and mobile phone use in Victorian schools.

Sara Oscar uses restaged photography and images from historical archives, to play with the idea of photos as documents of ‘truth’.

 

Her commissioned series ‘Most Wanted’ draws on the familiar tropes of mugshot photography but removes its subjects from their criminological context. The images point to the fluid dispersion of images in the post-truth internet era: are these Tinder profile photographs, fashion headshots, or records of the FBI’s most wanted?

 

 

Ann Shelton’s ‘an invitation to dance’ explores the life of performer Lola Montez, who toured Australia during the gold rush era of the 1850s—notably, she was the first woman photographed while smoking.

 

Shelton describes Montez as ‘a radical and mercurial figure who exceeded the prescribed parameters of femininity and ignored conventions designed to control women’s bodies’. Drawing upon her subject’s own use of photography as a means to promote one’s self-image, ‘an invitation to dance’ comprises an new series of images, exhibited
alongside an Instagram feed  (@elizagilbertandlolamontez) containing archival material relating to Montez.

Taungurung-Filipino artist Alan Stewart asks viewers to question the ‘truths’ held about this land (so-called Australia) and its First Peoples. Using large-scale photographs, taken at various locations throughout the Kulin Nations (which are now referred to as ‘Victoria’), Stewart documents his familial and community journey as a First Nations person, via stories from his childhood in both Manila and Melbourne.

 

His work is predominantly focused within landscape and street photography.

 

Apply now for the PHOTO 2022 Open Call.