NETHERLANDS: Knighted by the Dutch Government, Erwin Olaf has earned a world-wide reputation for his immaculately choreographed tableaux that subtly suggest the ultimate uncertainty of being.
Reality is always extraordinary
Mary Ellen Mark
IRAN / UK: Interlacing archival imagery to suggest the complex interplay of culture and context across time.
AUSTRALIA: With a subtle insistence, Marian Drew’s still-life and light-painting images question how we might inhabit and share the natural world in a sustainable and equitable way.
SPAIN: Images that borrow the narrative or visual architecture of other stories, other pictures, animating each with the personal in ways that evoke new meaning.
BANGLADESH: A photographer with a strong social conscience and a deep concern for the welfare of the marginalised members of her society.
ITALY/USA: From the imposing to the delicate, images assembled from thousands of nudes weaving across a panoramic field of view.
GUATEMALA: Luis González Palma grew up during thirty years of civil war, but while his images evoke sadness, they neither sentimentalise nor do they counsel despair. Rather they affirm the transcendent nature of the human spirit.
CANADA: Experimental photographic techniques that poignantly evoke the subtle grandeur and ultimate fragility of the Arctic region.
A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.
Oscar Wilde
BELGIUM/FRANCE: Visual poetry, nature photography and digital design come together in Catherine Nelson’s transcendent landscapes to evoke the complexity of ecological equilibrium.
AUSTRALIA: Japanese myth and sensual metaphor reflecting upon the ebb and flow of loves now unrequited.
ARGENTINA: Memories of the Dirty War starkly visualised by one of the survivors of the regime’s Clandestine Centres of Detention and Torture.
AUSTRALIA: In a career spanning six decades, this celebrated aerial photographer has captured the magnificence of the Great Southern Continent.
FINLAND: One of the country’s most celebrated photographers discusses his deep connection with the northern landscape and the Sámi people who live there.
POLAND / AUSTRALIA: Blending the chemistries of photography and vegetative decay to create hauntingly beautiful images exploring themes around memory, time, habitat, health, and inner contemplation.
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.
Walter Benjamin
CANADA: Casting a critical but amiable eye over the medium in acts of ‘becoming photography’.
SWEDEN: A simple pinhole camera used to create images that evoke the primordial and the post-apocalyptic; a tension between humankind and the rest of nature.
CHINA: breaking with Chinese art traditions that eschew the nude, performative images that express the importance of trust, empathy, and personal authenticity.
LATVIA: Personal evocations of the impact of social and ideological change while living through the turbulent post-war and post-Soviet eras.
PERU: Lyrical images that find a melancholy beauty in dilapidation and enfold maternal wisdom in pictorial fables.
USA: Disrupting the sedimentation of artifice through a bold juxtaposition of the vegetative with the simulation, the object with its image.
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange
GERMANY: What are the implications of an AI generated image winning the world’s largest photography competition? For photography, for society, and for the arts?
CONGO: Eccentric, impromptu performances set in the warlord-controlled villages of the Democratic Republic of Congo that challenge the established conventions of humanitarian representation.
AUSTRALIA: subtly disquieting images that evoke the artist’s youthful memories, unravelling the myth of childhood innocence.
RUSSIA: An artistic partnership with experimentation at the heart of a creative process that blends the sensual and the conceptual.
SPAIN: an artist who is also a scientist, harnessing scientific technologies to visualise the invisible.
VIETNAM: Focusing on people at the margins of society, these relaxed domestic moments explore, without sensationalism, the intimate companionship that is a foundation of our shared human experience.
AUSTRALIA: Images of conflict that avoid the explosive spectacle of war, to explore the lives of individuals caught up in events beyond their control.
The only true voyage of discovery… would be not to visit strange lands but to behold the universe through the eyes of another…
Marcel Proust
JAPAN: The photo-booth, the class portrait, the high-street studio, the job-applicant’s mugshot… hundreds of photographs and beneath them a single artist–model.
UNITED KINGDOM: Whimsical, poignant, fantastical, dark… these family photos restage the complex nature of parenting and the domestic dynamic, from ageing and the shift in mutual dependence, to ultimate departure.
SOUTH AFRICA: a remarkable synthesis of structure, texture, and authenticity exploring the triangular relationship between history, memory, and community storytelling.
CHINA: Youthful Asian women and men engage in the conscious but unselfconscious presentation of self within a milieu of open intimacy.
INDIA: Exploring radically different ways to think about museums, books, and photography, Dayanita Singh emphasises curiosity over cognition.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Land art seeking a fresh perspective on Nature freed from notions of territory and property.
Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Arundhati Roy
INTERNATIONAL: Eleven artists reflect on what they learned during the pandemic, picking just one thing they would reimagine for the better in the future.
POLAND: Atmospheric images of a social, political, and economic landscape that has changed radically over the past sixty years.
UKRAINE: Visualising the journey towards self-realisation that dances between empathic attunement and the artist’s own interior sensibility.
ESTONIA / AFRICA: Images of love and loss delicately exploring the essential mystery of human interconnection.
AFRICA / AMERICAS: poignant imagery on a grand scale evoking the existential threat of human exploitation to both animals and people.
AUSTRALIA: Distinctive ways of being and knowing, experienced through a queer perspective on expanded photography.
BANGLADESH: A humanitarian photographer who not only documents injustice and inequity in the world, but also explores his own imperfection with poignant honesty.
VIDEO: marking 150 interviews published on Talking Pictures.
KOREA: Park Jongwoo – the first person to photograph the interior of the so-called ‘Demilitarised Zone’ that divides Korea – speaks about what he found in this, the world’s most contested strip of land.
UNITED KINGDOM: an insider’s sensitive depiction of a group of south London fighters who find self-discipline, confidence, and connectedness through martial arts.
MEXICO: Harnessing artificial intelligence to create photo-based images that may well come closer to the true nature human visual perception than will ever be possible with a camera.
PERU: A bird’s-eye view of Lima’s Pacific coast and inland desert revealing the delicately balanced, intimately entangled ecology below.
USA: Exploring the interplay of context and desire, and the evolving ways in which desire might be reconciled with an initially hostile environment.
RUSSIA / SPAIN: Alisa Sibirskaya creates photographic tableaux echoing themes from the Dutch Baroque and Siberian folktales that capture the luminous glow of a bygone age.
Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.
Mae West
CANADA: Personal and historical trauma inspire a creative practice unafraid of the twilight world of the unconscious that lies beneath the veneer of rational civilisation.
USA: Spanning two decades, a mother and daughter explore the deep connection between people and their animal companions.
SAUDI ARABIA: Fascinated by harmony and dissonance, and the cycles of return, Saleh AlDaghari’s picture-making sits on the cusp between surrealism and allegory.
USA: Pulitzer-prize-winner Renée C Byer reveals how photography and journalism used together can catalyse action in the face of escalating inequality at home and abroad.
CANADA: a satirical retelling of familiar stories as Disney princesses, deities, and US presidents tumble into the real world like Alice in reverse.
ARGENTINA: delicate, hybrid works that speak to the fragility of life and the vulnerability we share with the planet we call home.
I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.
Imogen Cunningham
FINLAND / USA: After five decades re-imagining his body as something malleable and re-interpretable, Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s images remain as vital as those of his youth, and as refreshingly original.
CANADA: Delicate still-life images that capture a sense of tranquillity while celebrating the small and fleeting things in life.
THAILAND: Scathing satirical tableaux critiquing the country’s turbulent socio-political scene, created by one of Southeast Asia’s leading artists.
TAIWAN / USA: Haunting images inspired by the migrant’s ongoing negotiation of memory, perception, and identity.
USA: One woman’s experience of the stifling control of a patriarchal religious fundamentalism and the processes of artmaking that helped her escape.
AUSTRALIA: Luminous yet elusive images that navigate the gulf between the world of the senses and the interior realm of the self.
The one who plants trees, knowing that they will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.
Rabindranath Tagore
CHINA / USA: Delicately ambiguous self-portraits exploring the tension between freedom and boundaries, self-reflection and self-discovery.
AUSTRALIA / ICELAND: Haunting images of natural, urban, and industrial landscapes that rekindle a mythical past or spark ethical speculation about the future.
MEXICO: Named one of the top twenty talents worldwide by FOAM magazine, Diego Moreno’s monsters have much to show us about familial love and about domestic abuse.
USA: A mother’s delicate reflections on masculinity within the everyday intimacy of family life as boys become men and men become middle-aged.
ARGENTINA: La sensibilidad de la pintura y las técnicas de la fotografía se conjugan para crear un realismo mágico irónico pero extrañamente familiar.
ARGENTINA: The sensibilities of painting and the techniques of photography blend to create an ironic but strangely familiar magic realism.
BRAZIL: Turning a compassionate eye on rural and remote medicine to capture the kindness, dedication, and empathy of healthcare workers as they transcend the most challenging circumstances.
Seeing is not as simple as looking.
Joseph Kosuth
AUSTRALIA: Fables that are at once personal and universal, familial and public, recounting childhood perspicacity and adult frailty far the here and now.
RUSSIA / USA: One man’s quest for a more nuanced way of being, teasing apart notions of morality from those of dogma, of identity from those of normality.
CANADA: With well over 100,000 images and millions of possible interconnections, Luminous-Lint offers a near-infinite range of ways to pursue the study of photographic history.
USA: Patty Carroll’s ‘Anonymous Women’ parody and personify the frenetic consumerism and suffocating domesticity of ‘idealised’ notions of femininity promoted in the post-war era.
UNITED KINGDOM: Going beyond the clichés and prejudices about homelessness by facilitating each participant to create their own self-portrait.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Satirical imagery that critiques the impact of colonialism in Korea and its enduring legacy of historical trauma.
The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.
Albert Einstein
ISRAEL: An exploration of the equivocal transition from child to adult in portraits of adolescents in Ukraine, Russia and Spain.
LEBANON / AUSTRALIA: Dreamlike psychodramas that envision the émigré’s feelings of separation, longing and isolation.
USA: Past and present converse in an archive of American life shot from a refreshingly tangential perspective.
UNITED KINGDOM: Conjuring the familial past and a satirical future through the evocative power of photographic masks.
AUSTRALIA: Challenging misconceptions around disability and making evident the violent abuse that can sometimes be its cause.
CANADA / USA: Temporary sculptures created by balancing stones with nothing more than gravity to hold them together.
Without deviations from the norm, progress is not possible.
Frank Zappa
GERMANY: The uncanny and the documentary synergise as temporal and dimensional shifts reveal a prescient vision in the context of current events.
USA: With an emphasis on the dignity of all living things, these lo-fi collage works seek to emphasise harmony and our shared human nature, free from judgement.
CHINA: Documentary images highlighting communities that, while they may seem outside of the mainstream in China, are in fact simply some of its constituents.
FINLAND: Landscapes, ice, and flea-market clothing and fabrics come together in an unusual aesthetic and conceptual marriage – part myth, part speculation.
BOSNIA / AUSTRALIA: Darkly beautiful images that use alternative photographic processes to convey the ultimate ambiguity of life as experience.
MEXICO: The fluidity of domestic intimacy explored through the lens of childhood imagination and transformational community ritual.
If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for a hundred years, educate children.
Confucius
AUSTRALIA: From the arid heat of central Australia to the windswept ice sheet of Greenland, powerful and austere images that push the very notion of landscape to its extreme.
INTERNATIONAL: Nine photographic artists from across five continents reflect on what motivates them to create photographs.
AUSTRALIA: Figures from history and legend elegantly reconceived with the technology and sensibility of the present.