Author: Isobel Crombie

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13:

In our age of uncertainties, globalization, virtual reality and digitalization have inspired (or compelled) photographers to devise new ways of seeing, and distinctions between artist and photographer, fact and fiction begin to fade. Australian photographers continue to carve out a special niche for themselves on the world lens, developing new traditions and evolving forms of expression. Many of the young photographers represented here cast their eyes, like modern anthropologists, towards what is ordinary and even overlooked in our urban landscape as potent signs and symbols of who and what we now are. Photographs by 37 photographers, including Trent Parke, Penelope Davis, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Tara Shield and Kenneth Pleban, range over a series of themes: the 'uncanny', which includes camera-less images; new portraiture, which takes a time-honored subject into fresh creative areas; an examination of physically (but not psychically) vacant spaces; documentary work that considers reality in provocative ways; and photographs that explore the complex nature of modern social groupings. It makes clear that photography continues to be a medium capable of reflecting both the unlimited nature of the physical world and of the imagination.