Artists
Anthony Amos
Anthony Amos was born in Chelsea, Victoria. In 1985 he moved to New York with his wife Lee Tulloch where he began taking portraits of people in the arts. He assisted top figurative photographers learning lighting, method and process. In 1986 he interned with fine art black and white printer Paul Skeehan. From 1988 to 1995 he worked across the continents in Sydney, New York, Melbourne and Paris as an editorial photographer for such publications as Martha Stewart Living, English House & Garden and Vogue Living.
In 1996 in New York he began making cut up portraits using elements from multiple C prints to make a composite print that was then hand retouched. This method then changed to cutting up multiple negatives from one sitting, to make a single print that he hand retouched. In 1997 he produced Phantoms – figurative images without figures made from padded and draped materials. In 1998 he produced a series of Screens out of found materials from neighbourhood streets and piers, making large painted etched, torn, dyed and montaged masters to be photographed creating a 4 x5 inch negative to then print with, which again received more hand retouching.
In 2001 he returned to live in Australia after being evacuated from his Manhattan home when the World Trade Centre was attacked.
In 2004 he held his first US solo exhibition Redemption at the Erickson Davis Gallery in Connecticut. In 2006 at the same gallery he showed Natural Instincts. In 2008, his first Australian exhibition Native was held at Depot II Sydney. In 2009, Impermanence, again at Depot II Sydney.
Coming up is Wax On – Contemporary Surf at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, Dec 09 to Jan 10, curated by Nell Schofield. His work can be found in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria and is in private collections in Australia, US, Spain and France.
Anthony Browell
Anthony Browell founded the Workshop of the Australian Centre for Photography. Before this he had established himself as one of Australia’s leading editorial and portrait photographers after immigrating from London in 1970. Other areas he specialized in include architectural and corporate photography.
From 2000 he concentrated more fully on his personal work, exhibiting The Waterfront at Stills Gallery in 2001 and then creating an ever increasing body of lenseless imagery with his own handbuilt pinhole cameras. This work has been exhibited at Michael Nagy Fine Art, Point Light Gallery and Parliament House.
In recent hears he has been a finalist in multiple prizes - the National Photographic Portrait Prize, the Moran Photographic Prize, the Olive Cotton Portrait Prize and Head On Photographic Portrait Prize. He was a winner of the latter in 2004.
His work is in the following collections – the National Portrait Gallery, the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Australian Institute of Architects.
It should also be acknowledged that Anthony has been a mentor and community organizer for a large number of photographers in Sydney over many years, in particular with his tug lunches.
Catherine Cloran
Born in Sydney, Catherine Cloran studied Fine Arts at the University of Western Sydney and in 2006 graduated from Monash University with a Master of Visual Arts. In 2003 she moved to Hong Kong after living in the Blue Mountains, NSW on the edge of the National Park for many years. This disjuncture drives her current art practice which utilizes digital photography to deal with themes of nature and urban culture. pan>
She has had three solo exhibitions, two in Hong Kong and now True Nature in Sydney. In 2004 she exhibited Vertigo at the Shanghai Street Artspace, Hong Kong and in 2006Displaced at Fotogalerie, The Fringe Club, Hong Kong.
She has participated in many group exhibitions and received several awards including the Cultural Diversity Art Prize, Western Sydney (1996) and the Blacktown City Art Prize (highly commended) in 2004.
Stephen Dupont
Award-winning photographer Stephen Dupont was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1967. Since beginning his photographic career in 1989, he has produced photo essays from dozens of countries, including some of the world’s most dangerous regions: Afghanistan, Angola, Burma, Burundi, Cambodia, Congo, East Timor, India, Iraq, Israel, Rwanda and Somalia.
Dupont’s reportage has been featured in The New Yorker, Newsweek, GQ, French and German GEO, Le Figaro, Liberation, The Sunday Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Stern, Time, The Australian Financial Review Magazine, and Vanity Fair, and has earned him photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America; a Bayeux War Correspondent’s Prize; and first places in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Australian Walkleys, and Leica/CCP Documentary Award. In 2007 he was the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography for his ongoing project on Afghanistan.
In 1999 Dupont was a co-founding member of the biennial festival of photojournalism in Australia: REPORTAGE—A Celebration of Australian Photojournalism, of which he was the 2008 guest curator. He has exhibited his work in London, Paris, New York, Sydney, Canberra, Tokyo, and Shanghai, and at Perpignan’s Visa pour l’Image and Holland’s Noorderlicht festivals. He is also the author of several books, including Steam: India’s Last Steam Trains, and Fight, a global retrospective on traditional wrestling.
Dupont’s handmade artist books are in the collections of the National Library of Australia, Berlin National Art Library, Stanford University, Boston Athenaeum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Joy of Giving Something, Inc. His photographs are represented in private collections and international institutions, including, in the United States, The New York Public Library and Contact Press Images. Editioned artist books and photographs are available from Booklyn Artists Alliance, New York City.
Dupont’s work can be seen at www.stephendupont.com, www.contactpressimages.com, www.booklyn.org, and www.tkcm.com.
Peter Elliston is an established Sydney art photographer. His work is held in collections of the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of NSW amongst many others. He has travelled the world photographing people, places and monuments. He works in the tradition of documentary photography using the camera to record places and cultural creations of significance. He has published his own books. His most significant achievement is Stones and Marks, a book documenting ruins and monuments of ancient civilizations including Australia.
For this latest exhibition Broken Monuments Elliston travelled to India after reading an article by William Dalrymple in Time Magazine about the lack of restoration and simple love and care given to religious and historical buildings in Indian cities, Delhi in particular. The result is an outstandingly honest and unromanticised document of life in present day Indian cities.
Peter Elliston is a physicist by trade however his lasting contribution will be a body of documentary photography which records and informs us about the disappearing world around us.
Luke Hardy has been exhibiting for over ten years. In that time he has had four solo exhibitions and has been nominated for many prestigious awards including Head On Photographic Portrait Prize and the Blake Prize.
Yuki Onna is his second solo show for 2009, the first being Votive at Depot II Gallery in February. Before Votive was snowforms at Depot Gallery. All of the solo exhibitions have demonstrated his long term love affair with Japan.
Hardy is a master of subtlety and intimacy in his carefully conceived and immaculately constructed photographs. He sees like a filmmaker and thinks like a novelist. He brings his personal work history, an association with the United Nations and world aid organisations into his photography. His concerns are universal, deeply felt and compassionate. He aims to touch our deepest feelings.
www.lukehardy.com
Mayu Kanamori
Mayu Kanamori is a Japanese born artist who migrated to Australia in 1981. Her works combine photography, performance art, videography, and story telling with an emphasis on the genre of documentary. She has collaborated with artists from diverse genres and disciplines. Her earlier works have dealt with themes relating to subcultures and minority groups within Japan and Australia, whilst her later works have explored Australian and Japanese cross cultural and migrational issues. Her most recent works further these concerns, attempting to make spiritual connections with people and landscapes of Australia and Japan.
Mayu’s major works include The Heart of the Journey an image and sound documentary performance, telling the true story of a Broome based indigenous woman’s search for her Japanese father; CHIKA: A Documentary Performance, a multi layered performance telling the true story of a Japanese tourist who was wrongly incarcerated in Melbourne for drug trafficking; and In Repose, a multi disciplinary work performed in collaboration with Japanese migrant artists, site specific to old Japanese cemeteries in Townsville, Broome and Thursday Island.
In performance works in 2008 Mayu produced Sydney and Adelaide seasons of CHIKA: A Documentary Performance, collaborated with Rakini Devi in her recent dance workDisturbing Elements and created two documentaries for Buzz Dance Theatre's Big Stretch Tour. The Heart of the Journey was produced in DVD format as part of the 2008 Sydney Biennale's On-Line Venue and she held the others exhibition in New Caledonia.
In her photographic work she held a solo photographic exhibition The Island of the Ancients in collaboration with the author Ben Hills at Customs House Library in Sydney. The book The Island of the Ancients was published by Murdoch Press.
Mayu’s works have received several awards - the NAIDOC Non Indigenous Reconciliation Award, a commendation by UN Media Peace Awards, she was selected as finalist for the Walkley Awards, Conrad Jupiter Art Prize, Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture, the Julie Milowick Photography Prize and the Harries National Digital Art Awards.
Pete Longworth
Pete Longworth has a Bachelor of Visual Communications from UWS. He also studied internationally in Vancouver and Sweden. He works as a photographer and teacher. In conjunction with John Curtin University in Perth, he travels annually to Asia to teach photography to international students. At the end of each trip he curates an exhibition of the students work in Perth.
In 2007 he established a company with a friend in the United Arab Emirates. This company provides creative services including websites, branding and photography.
As a photographer Pete has worked for many clients and has had his worked published widely. His areas of speciality are portraiture, property and travel.
He is currently concentrating on his art photography after the highly successful Life On Top Of Hyde Park exhibition at the Residence Hyde Park. This exhibition resulted from a very creative commercial brief and transformed seamlessly into a historically important exhibition about Sydney’s premier park, Hyde Park and its surrounds.
This has led directly to the exhibition Wonderland at Multiple Box in 2 Danks Street Waterloo (August – September 2009).
Pete has been a double finalist in Head On 2006 and a winner of the Greenpeace Photographic Prize.
www.petelongworth.com
Ben Ali Ong
At the ripe young age of 27 Ben Ali Ong is already a major presence in the world of photography. He has received many awards and prizes for his work. He has participated in numerous group shows and had nine solo exhibitions in five years. For such a young artist he shows incredible focus and vision. While his black and white images appear to explore darker themes, they become a mixture of the extraordinarily beautiful and the frightening.
His technique is a trademark of his style. He sandwiches negatives and uses inscription and scratching within the image itself. He shoots film and scratches, scans, retouches, layers and mixes the works, until the final result yields a beautiful and mysterious black and white world (words adapted from Cassie French, press release).
Ben Ali Ong was born in Singapore. His parents are Malaysian and Iranian. He has lived in many countries around the world and is now living in Sydney and working for Giclee Australia with Warren Macris.
His solo exhibitions are – One Travellor (China Heights 2005), Broken Beauty (China Heights and Blender Gallery, both 2007), Refluent Hours (Blender Gallery and QCP, Brisbane, both 2008), Black Sun (The Art of Dying) (China Heights Gallery and QCP, Brisbane, both 2009) and Ben Ali Ong – Photographs (Powerhouse Museum, Brisbane, 2009).
Ben has also exhibited widely in group exhibtions. He has been represented and acknowledged in many prizes and awards recently including the Olive Cotton Photographic Prize 2009, the Moran photographic Prize 2009, the Gosford Regional Gallery – Sharpe brothers Acquisitive Prize Winner 2009 and selected for Cross Projections, Kings Cross Art Fair 2007.
Ben Ali Ong is represented by United Galleries, Sydney. www.unitedgalleries.com.au
Zorica Purlija
Born in Montenegro (former Yugoslavia) in 1964 Zorica Purlija immigrated to Australia in 1973. She completed an Associated Diploma of Visual Arts at Nepean College of Advanced Education, majoring in Design and Photography in 1989. She became a mother in 1993 and now has three children. Since 1999 she has been pursuing her career as an artist.
Zorica specializes in portraiture. Her themes revolve around emotions, truth and the human predicament. She has often photographed her daughter Yumi, with great beauty and sensitivity. She also has created some delicate and sensual female nudes.
Her exhibitions and awards include: Olive Cotton Award 2009, 2007 and 2006; National Photographic Portrait Prize 2009 and 2007; Iris Award for Portraiture, Perth Centre for Photography 2009 and 2008; Sale or Lease 3 Photographers ARTHERE, 2008; Head On Photographic Portrait Prize 2008, 2007 and 2006; Group Show Tapestry Café, TAP Gallery, 2007; High Tea Fundraiser, First Draft Gallery, 2007.
She was awarded the 2007 Olive Cotton Award’s Director’s Choice Acquisition prize.
Zorica Purlija is represented by Sara Roney Gallery in Paddington. Ph: 02 9361 0061 www.sararoneygallery.com.au
Rob Scott-Mitchell
Rob Scott-Mitchell is best known for his National Photographic Portrait Prize winning study of the artist Lindy Lee, as she contemplated birth and death amid the blood-red waves of her extended family. Most of his art however, while also concerned with the metaphysical, has a far more whimsical quality. He is a master of the manipulated 3D image, transforming everyday banalities into magical luminous worlds. In the process he also inserts troubling questions on the nature of life and death, one of the consequences of his lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism.
Scott-Mitchell’s created worlds have until recently been devoid of human beings, populated instead by animals such as rats, dogs and owls. In his 2008 series, The Rat’s Tale and other stories, rats tend shrines and behave in a generally non-rat like manner. However their strange worshipful lives are not permitted to slip into the saccharine, as they are pursued by predatory owls - a reminder that life is simply a prelude to death. Scott-Mitchell seems to have a thing for owls, way and beyond appreciating their beautiful arching wings in flight. They appear as constant motifs in his work, inserted in the most surprising places.
Rob Scott-Mitchell was born in London and grew up in Sydney. He graduated from the Tasmanian School of Art and has a Master’s Degree in Digital Media Design (UWS). He has worked as a documentary film editor, writer and producer, digital designer, 3D animator and photographer. In addition to his art practice, he currently teaches Photoshop at the Australian Centre for Photography, and runs a small digital fine art printing business, Blackstone Images.
Peter Solness began his photographic career at the Sydney Morning Herald and the National Times in the 1980’s. Since then he has worked for many major magazines, newspaper and book publishers.
He has also exhibited his work regularly since 1994 and it is held in collections including the National Library Canberra, the State Library of NSW and the Museum of Sydney. He has been included in many photographic competitions and awards and the subject matters he has focused on are environmental and human rights issues.
Of many book projects his most ambitious one is Tree Stories (publ. by Australian Geographic in 1999) which was presented as an exhibition at Stills Gallery.
Illuminated Landscape is one part of a much larger project. In late October and continuing through January more images from this series will be presented at Customs House on Level 1. This exhibition is title Light Play and it will be seen on lightboxes. This work illustrates well his deep connection to the unique landscape of the Australian bush.
Greg Weight
Greg Weight is well known in Australia for his long career documenting Australian artists and their work. His book Australian Artist: Portraits by Greg Weight was published in 2004 with and accompanying exhibition at Australian Galleries in Paddington. Many of his portraits have become iconic representations, for example of Lloyd Rees, Brett Whiteley and Emily Kame Kngwarreye.
He was one of the defining artists involved in The Yellow House in Potts Point in the early 70’s. His association with fellow artists Martin Sharp, Peter Kingston, Jon Lewis and others has continued and in some ways defined his career.
He has had many solo exhibitions, most recently Desert Air with his partner, artist Carol Ruff at Australian Works on Paper Gallery (2007). He has won many awards notably Head On Photographic Portrait Prize 2006 and the inaugural Citigroup Portrait Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2003.
His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the Queensland Art Gallery, the Monash Gallery of Art and the Art Gallery of NSW.
He is currently working on a follow up to his Australian Artist book. Western Desert Artists will document the significant artists of the Papunya Tula artist movement which changed the image of indigenous art in Australia.
Greg’s output over many years is a testament to a fine art photographic tradition with high values in relation to both technique and content.
Roz 'Spiri' Laurie
Text to come