PHOTO Editions

Drinking From The Eye is the first photobook by Australian artists Honey Long and Prue Stent, and the third in the PHOTO Editions series, co-published by Photo Australia and Perimeter Editions.

Commissioned by Photo Australia for PHOTO 2024 International Festival of Photography, Melbourne, Drinking From The Eye takes the form of an abstracted visual diary, presenting a combination of constructed photographs and detail shots that emphasise the artists’ attention to form, texture and material.

Honey Long and Prue Stent have worked together for the past ten years, developing a practice that traverses photography, moving image, performance, installation and sculpture. Their art is grounded in experimentation between bodies, materials and environments, and creates a space for the animate versus inanimate – the human and other – to interweave. “We see the body as a microcosm and are constantly exploring environments to find moments, processes or formations that reflect a feeling or speak to the body in some way,” the artists explain. “We try to find points of connection where the outside world and our inner worlds overlap.”

The body is ever-present throughout Drinking From The Eye, whether literally through a performative interaction, or appearing figuratively in the leaking eye of a rock pool, the plush lips of a sea creature or the tingling tentacles of a sea anemone. ‘From the micro worlds we explore – gardens, rock pools, ponds etc. – hybrid creatures and uncanny moments emerge which speak to desire, fantasy and the urge to see ourselves reflected in the natural world,’ say Long and Stent.

Often referencing historical representations of the female subject, Long and Stent distort and fragment their bodies, creating creaturely hybrids in a constant state of becoming and flux. Dreamlike, fluid, saccharine, gritty and fleshy, they challenge and captivate audiences with powerful imagery that is both subversive and surreal.

Surat is the first photobook by South Sudanese/Australian artist Atong Atem (Addis Ababa, 1994) and the second in the PHOTO Editions series.

Commissioned by Photo Australia for PHOTO 2022 International Festival of Photography, Surat (which translates from Sudanese Arabic as ‘snapshots’) is a homage to family photos and the characters within them. Working on the series throughout 2021, Atem revisited her family photo albums, which span decades and continents, restaging and reimagining the scenes and players they depict. The resulting book is a series of performances as self portraits, documenting the act of photographing and being photographed, framing and being framed. It is a performative depiction of photography, utilising the repetition of dressing, sitting, posing, changing, testing, adjusting and capturing that is so often implicit in the medium.

But beyond this, Surat is a celebration of the visual language of family photographs and photography as an extension of our oral traditions. ‘We sing songs to tell history and we dress up and sit for photographs to mythologise our histories,’ says Atem. This body of work honours the Dinka tradition of record-keeping and archiving as an intimate cultural practice.

For Atem, the book is also about movement, both geographic and historic. As she explains, ‘It’s about South Sudan, so-called Australia and everywhere else in between that I’ve rested my head to dream about my people—or rather, the depictions of people I don’t know but am connected to through photographs.’

Featuring an essay by Atem’s father, former South Sudanese Deputy Minister of Information and journalist Atem Yaak Atem, Surat was launched at the PHOTO 2022 Photobook Weekend (21-22 May 2022).

Awards

• Bronze in the Designers Institute of New Zealand Best Design Awards 2022, Editorial and Books category
• Finalist in the AGDA Design Awards 2022, Publications/Books – Entire Book Category

Send me a lullaby is a love letter to a city undergoing immense change, created during a period of both urban transformation and global upheaval. Emma Phillips (Sorrento, 1989) was commissioned by Photo Australia to make a photographic portrait of Melbourne in the lead up to PHOTO 2021 International Festival of Photography. The resulting project is a reflection on connection, navigation and time, and the constantly evolving relationship between people and place.

Phillips’ photographs contemplate urban, domestic and psychological space. Weaving into this series are portraits of people Phillips has come across in Melbourne, capturing a living, breathing city as it responds to the fallout of bushfires and a pandemic. These disparate photographs taken across different seasons construct a dialogue between some of the city’s component parts—homes, shops, parks, streets—with archaeological objects from beneath the city, offering myriad stories to uncover and tell.

 

Award

• Finalist in the Designers Institute of New Zealand Best Design Awards 2021, Editorial and Books category