image: Justene Williams

image: Lyndal Walker

Gorman House

Them

Sam Bosen, John Carty
Derek O'Connor, Lyndal Walker
Justine Williams
Stephen Zagala

30 June - 12 August, 2006

Opens 6pm Fri 30 June, 2006

If the everyday use of snapshots on noticeboards and fridges is anything to go by, we all intuitively understand that a photograph is, fundamentally, a form of connection. We embrace photography as a way of maintaining links with people and places, events and things. It would be a mistake to explain this connectivity as though it were a straight line running between two fixed points. The image opens up a relational interval, which can’t be reduced to representational coordinates because we return time and again to fill this interval with imagination, memories and desires. Viewed in this way, the photographic image is a space for creating connections and repositioning ourselves in a world that remains alive with emerging relations.

This exhibition explores the ways in which the conjunctive power of photography can be used to negotiate new connections between incommensurable fields of experience, between self and other, between us and them.

The five bodies of work that make up this exhibition are remarkably different from each other. Derek O’Connor, a Canberra-based
artist, has contributed photographs that he took of Aboriginal friends during his early twenties. Justene Williams, a Sydney-based artist, has documented the use of English text on Tokyo street wear. Sam Bosen, who lives on a small volcanic island in the South Pacific, has provided a photographic diary of his trip to America. Lyndal Walker, a Melbourne-based artist, has taken portraits of young urbane men from the inner city scene in her hometown. And John Carty, an anthropologist working in the Great Sandy Desert, has recorded his daily life in an Aboriginal community.

These five photographers have different cultural backgrounds, different conceptual interests, and different levels of training in art. Their images converge, however, around the problem of how to situate oneself in foreign environments, in relation to people who see the world from profoundly different points of view.

Stephen Zagala