Thanks so much. I wanted to do something that was a bit different and engaged the viewer in the space. I’m very grateful to the Hillvale team for encouraging me to keep pushing the exhibition design. We called the floating prints the fourth wall, which when you think about the concept of ‘breaking’ the fourth wall, is akin to what you described the experience as. I’m so happy with how it turned out.

During my third year of study, I started a body of work I called Krov, exploring my Russian/Ukrainian/Jewish identity and how it fits within an ‘Australian’ landscape. When I was researching for Krov by looking through family archives, I discovered migration had left a lot of open wounds that my family didn’t talk about openly. To this day I don’t know the extent of their experience, but the photographs that drew me in and that I picked out had a sense of familiarity, a bit of humour and posed more questions than they provided answers. After going through thousands of archival photographs, I made a tight selection that alluded to our deeper story. I chose the images for the way they held onto my family’s memories, where they might otherwise have been suppressed or forgotten. So many stories began to unfold once I started showing my family the photographs and asking them to tell me more about the moments behind them.

After finishing my degree in photography at RMIT in 2019, I started thinking about what I wanted to do next. I had ambitions to make a big project, but I wasn’t quite sure on what. At the time, I was reading Rebecca Solnit’s ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ and felt inspired to just go, explore and see. A bit of intentional intuition, I guess. I also decided to do my honours in photography at RMIT in 2020. Feeling hopeful and inspired, COVID arrived, and I was stuck to a 5k radius, back at home with Mum and Dad. As the world started to feel uncertain, my work mirrored it.

Using an expanded documentary mode, I began making images with elements of intervention, to communicate our strange reality. I was restricted to making photographs around my home and neighbourhood. I felt like a kid again, making my own fun in my childhood home, taking photographs of bugs, plants and my dog. The main difference was I was writing my dissertation, and I had to keep thinking about social media, capitalism, mainstream media and political rhetoric.

While those origins are important, most of that work didn’t make it to Big Bug. Somewhere along the way, I found my visual language and voice, which shifted the direction of the work and my own perspective of what I’m making. Compared to those days which were so tinged with melancholy, Big Bug is familiar, uncanny and loving. I have felt most myself in the creation of these photographs.

It was my first time exhibiting a large body of work in a gallery and Elias [Redstone], Brendan [McCleary] and Jenn [Ma] were incredibly patient and supportive. As a fledgling photographer, it was a safe space to go through the process of exhibiting a body of work, from pricing, to framing, to printing for the first time. Plus, it was really helpful to get the financial support to contribute to printing and framing of the work. It would have been limiting not having this financial boost and I simply don’t think I would have been able to exhibit without it.

Morganna Magee saw my work at PHOTO 2022 and suggested Matt Dunne [from Tall Poppy Press] reach out to me. It was perfect timing as I was starting to feel confident that I had something to say with the new work. Getting that email was a moment I’ll never forget. This opportunity meant we made something I can hold in my hands and see through other people’s eyes.

In January 2023, I went over to Matt’s place, and we started to talk about the ins and outs of publishing a book and from there, we began piecing together what the book would look like. I brought over a few books that I enjoyed, like Robbie Lawrence’s A Voice Above the Linn and Matt shared some to start giving me an idea of the directions we could take. We looked at every element that makes up a book and started to form the idea of ours.

I learnt a lot on my feet, being a first-time publisher with no idea about printing costs and the butterfly effect small changes can have on the bottom line. As a seasoned pro, Matt was gracious in his guidance.

Eventually, hundreds of xeroxed prints graduated from the table to the walls to InDesign, as we sequenced the story we wanted to tell. The images don’t follow a linear narrative, but it was still important to me how they all worked together. Sequencing is an art form I admire and look for in photobooks, so this part was key.

What Tall Poppy Press does to elevate emerging Australian photographers is special and I’m a more hopeful artist as a result of being someone they chose to work with.

I never take for granted how lovely it is to hold my photos in my hands and feel something in my fingers, like we do when we hold a photo album. Since going through my parent’s archives in the Krov days, photo albums have acted as a trigger for the tone in my work.

They take me back to a moment in time, where without a photograph, I probably would forget it. I think I have a terrible memory, but I also think that’s just the way our minds work – we forge on and forget everything unless we make ourselves remember. In Big Bug, I wanted to capture how it feels to go through photo albums and the hazy feeling of memories.

My girlfriend and I call our dog—and sometimes each other—Big Bug and it has become the name of choice for anything with “Big Bug” energy. It is a term of endearment but it’s also just fun to say, which leans into the playful elements in the work and that, I think, contrast between something, and of course, nothing really fits the theme of the book. I also spent a lot of time photographing animals, bugs and nature and so it just seemed to fit. Big Bugs are everywhere!

It makes me really happy when I hear the photographs make people feel a sense of warmth and safety, because that’s what photography does for me. It’s a privilege to make people feel those things.

To go a step further, I hope I can help the viewer make space for the memories that aren’t immediately available and stop for a moment to search for them. We might walk the same street every day, but there is always something new to see or something familiar to return to. There is always something special to see in the everyday.

Just a few of the photographers and photobooks that inspire me…

Katrin Koenning, Bharat Sikka (The Sapper), Lieko Shiga, Robbie Lawerence (A Voice Above the Linn), Jack Davison, Trent Parke, Morganna Magee, Agnieszka Sosnowska (For), Sohrab Hura (The Coast), Larry Sultan (Pictures from Home (Mack’s 1st Edition)).

No. This work will grow as I live, I hope. I am working on a separate, very different, body of work though. Looking forward to sharing more.