Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up – 21 December 2018

This is the final Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up for 2018 – this week it’s all about women photographers. In New York the exhibition Women Street Photographers features 75 photographers including eight Australians; in Ballarat Lumina Collective, an all women group, launches Echoes exhibition; and Women Photograph reports a stellar year of activities designed to elevate women photographers and close the gender gap.

Exhibition: New York

Women Street Photographers

This show curated by Gulnara Samoilova features 75 photographers including eight Aussies – Ilana Rose, Catherine Matthys, Julia Coddington, Kirsty Greenland, Rebecca Wiltshire, Jessie Dinan, Libby Holmsen and Jane Zhang. 

(C) Ilana Rose

Exhibition images were selected by Samoilova and renowned documentary photographer Donna Ferrato. Submissions came in from around the globe. The common theme is “being shot candidly in public.” This international selection includes some of the most notable women photographers working in this space today.  

(C) Catherine Matthys

(C) Jane Zhang

(C) Jessie Dinan

(C) Julia Coddington

(C) Kirsty Greenland

(C) Libby Holmsen

(C) Rebecca Wiltshire

On show at El Barrio’s art space, a former abandoned public school in East Harlem until 2 January, 2019. 

215 E. 99th Street, New York

Exhibition: Ballarat

Echoes – Lumina Collective

“In an assemblage of partially destroyed images, obscure gestures and repetitive acts, The Umbra explores the embodied experience of the bereaved self in the world”           The Umbra (C) Jessie Boylan

Lumina Collective was founded in 2017 and comprises eight Australian women photographers: Aletheia Casey, Anna Maria Antoinette D’Addario, Chloe Bartram, Donna Bailey, Jessie Boylan, Lyndal Irons, Morganna Magee and Sarah Rhodes. 

“The Encyclopaedia of Sex Practice: Ages Sixteen to Twenty Four (And Some After), is a polemical exploration into the sexual and bodily narrative prescribed from adolescence to early adulthood. A lived experience that has had passivity, submission and obedience inculcated into the undercurrents of my being.” (C) Chloe Bartram

“Migration causes fracture; a disconnection with identity and place. Memory changes to myth as each retelling allows mistruths and secrets to reshape history. Ego Eimai explores the myths of my family and of a heritage I have little connection with, as well as the intergenerational effects of living in the diaspora.”                                 (C) Morganna Magee

Their new exhibition, Echoes, explores “the ways in which photographic image-making in Australia is inherently linked to questions of identity and place and to generational stories of translocation.” Themes covered include “family history, trauma and loss, migration, notions of home as well as the formulation of social and cultural Australian identities.” The work is the result of long-term studies that are informed by each artist’s unique practice. 

“A Surrounded Beauty is a camera-led psychological investigation into islandness. What roles do geography, ancestry and cultural memory have in shaping identity? How do isolation and self-containment intertwine and influence? Challenging traditional documentary portraiture, A Surrounded Beauty explores the fictionalised spaces of the subconscious, imagination and memory.” (C) Sarah Rhodes

“Goldfields Gothic, reflective of my long form photographic practice, feeds my curiosity and takes my experience of living here a step sideways as I seek and observe, via my fascination with Victorian era inquest reports, the stories of women and children long gone. I use my camera and my love of history as tools of comprehension.” (C) Donna Bailey

“Pildil sketches my impressions of the country deserted by my great grandmother, the changes from what she knew and the contrast to the country she settled in. And layers my voice to the correspondence. Beginning as a hunt for something familiar and ending with the discovery of myself, in the picture.” (C) Lyndal Irons

Farewell Angelina. “My sister was thirty-five when her life was taken…This work began as a response to her loss. It was an act of resistance and of survival, an attempt to speak in the face of silence, and with time, it has developed into an autobiographical handmade bookwork that contains within its pages, a photographic elegy for my sister.” (C) Anna Maria Antoinette D’Addario

Which Way is North “This work, which began after I had my son three years ago, explores the of loss of self which I experienced after childbirth and attempts to make sense of my new role in life and find my place again in a world in which felt unfamiliar and fearful.” (C) Aletheia Casey

Art Gallery of Ballarat 40 Lydiard Street Ballarat

Until 10 March, 2019

Update:

Women Photograph

 

Women Photograph at Photoville 2018

Women Photograph is an amazing organisation that works to “elevate the voices of women and non-binary visual storytellers.” Founded by the powerhouse that is Daniella Zalcman, Women Photograph is run by a handful of women who must think sleep is over-rated (as many of us do!) as they all have day gigs too – Zalcman, Mallory Benedict, Sara Ickow, and Eslah Attar. What they’ve achieved in such a short time is incredible and shows the strength in collective action. 

Highlights from 2018 (you can see the full report here)

• The database now features 850 photographers in 105 countries 
• New to the website is a dedicated “Women Photographers of Color”
• In 2018 $60,000 in grants was distributed
• Workshops were held including the second annual Women Photograph at Photoville New York
• Women Photograph funded 40 photographers who could not afford to travel outside their country enabling them to participate in workshops, training and festivals, furthering opportunities for education and networking
• The second annual mentorship program was launched with 22 early career photographers partnered with an experienced photographer and photo editor over a year 
• Continued monitoring of selected publications and their engagement of women photographers – look out for the WP report card in 2019

 

Check out Women Photograph Year in Pictures curated by Mallory Benedict. There’s some serious talent out there!