TALKING THROUGH YOUR ARTS – CROSS PROJECTIONS
Image: 'Physie', by Lyndal Irons
Clicking frames into the darkness makes everything appear. You see, photographs, traditional photographs on paper, deceivingly stable looking, change with every sighting. They change because we, and language, and objects, all accumulate time. No two sightings are the same. Even if you are bored as hell the third time, the experience of boredom itself will be different the sixth time around.
Over the past decade Sydney documentary photographers have invented numerous ways to produce works using computer technology. These photographs show many different expressive elements that can be plotted at once, in a short period of time, layered on top of one another in a cinematic screening.
It was ten years ago a group of Sydney photographers had the inclination to display photographic work in such ways, developed alongside the technology capable of accomplishing the task. Cross Projections pioneers have created an understanding of what we are seeing that has been followed by many others since. The drive for control was a founding impulse for these local photographers to maintain the directions of their work and to showcase their images to an audience.
Cross Projections is a creative, interdisciplinary exhibition or ‘screening’, where language and computers serve as mediators, contemporary interpretations of photo making. Stories are presented in alternative creative documentary forms that enhance the visual qualities of photographs.
Experiments by 17 photographers are works that represent an important and fascinating step in the production of experiencing how photography can be viewed. These experiments are presenting at the heritage protected Australian Architects building Tusculum House.
Co-producers Roslyn Sharp and Amanda James have featured works; Sharp offers a pertinent selection from her ongoing series with a title that scopes the many characters encountered in Kings Cross is Not a Place; It’s a State of Mind. James’s keen eye for detail in a poetic scaping of Aboriginal totems, language groups and family members tattooed on skin, is documented in Represent.
Emerging documenter Maya Newell, whose documentary Growing Up Gayby recently broadcast on ABC, recreates a sense of vision offering portrayals of women and their experiences of unplanned pregnancy in At Least I Don’t Shoot Blanks.
The diversity of subject matter places us on the inner CBD street curbs in photographer Marco Bok’s submission, Suits in the City, a footpath cantering of businessmen, with their tele-communication blinkers; and follows Greenpeace photographer Glen Lockitch’s dramatic coverage of the Antarctic Whale Warriors on activist ship Sea Sheppard in Whale Sanctuary.
Viewers are presented with stimulating and challenging textual scenarios; these are the successes of digital photography. (AS)
Nov 28, 9 & 30, 3 Manning St, Tusculum House, Potts Point, $15-20, crossprojections.com.au
BY ANGELA STRETCH
