HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE 6TH HEAD ON PHOTO FESTIVAL
Head On Festival 2015 Review
The sixth running of the highly successful Head On festival in Sydney featured a new format which, says Alison Stieven-Taylor, gave the event a more cohesive feeling. Here she selects her personal highlights from this year’s international and local exhibitors.
It is always a challenge to bring something new to a format that is established, but this year the sixth Head On Photo Festival managed to add flavour to an already successful recipe with the introduction of the Festival Hub located in the majestic Sydney Town Hall in the heart of the city’s CBD. Geographically speaking, Head On has always felt too spread out and the Hub solved that issue immediately. Here nine major exhibitions were on show, spanning documentary, fine-art and photojournalism. The Hub was also the venue for workshops, screenings and talks, many of which were held during the day as a way of engaging the city’s workers.
Festival Director Moshe Rosenzveig programmed The Hub to deliver “…a taste of the breadth of the festival. We are appealing to a very wide and diverse audience – photography professionals, those who are keen amateurs and those who are not immersed in the genre, who aren’t usually exposed to exhibitions. We are trying to inspire people to get involved with photography and having a central location like the Hub helps us do that”.
The Hub also hosted the opening night event where hundreds gathered to discover the winners of this year’s Head On Awards – the coveted Head On Portrait prize along with four other categories. Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, officially opened the festival, and it was great to see the City of Sydney get behind the event. This year Head On comprised 50 featured exhibitions plus an associated program, and the diversity of work on show was remarkable.
One of the greatest benefits of the Hub was that it became the place where photographers could connect with each other which is one of the most important and valued functions of a photography festival.
“We realised there was no focus point for photographers like there was in the good old days when you’d go to the lab to drop your film and get to catch up with your colleagues there,” explains Moshe. “As photographers, we don’t have that opportunity anymore. That is one of the great things about the festival that people can get together, but it was not enough to meet up at an opening of an exhibition, or single events. That’s where the idea of the Hub comes in.”
International Artists
Away from Sydney’s CBD, there were featured exhibitions in the inner city, including Chicago photographer Sandro Miller’s brilliant Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich: Homage to Photographic Masters. Another imported show that took my eye was Los Angeles Times photographer Michael Robinson Chavez’ The Driest Seasons: California’s Dust Bowl. I found German photographer Daniel Schumann’s Palliative Care series profoundly moving, and Chinese photographer Shunzan Fan’s Between Heaven and Earth delightfully idiosyncratic.
Sandro Miller
Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich
Over the past 40 years, Chicago photographer Sandro Miller has carved a stellar career. His credits include being Michael Jordan’s personal photographer; shooting for international brands like Coca Cola, Reebok, Nike, Samsung, BMW, Pepsi and American Express and; being regularly named in the Top 100 Advertising Photographers in the world. He’s also
an award-winning director with two short films to his name, both starring his good friend, John Malkovich. And to top it off, he’s a ridiculously nice guy.
Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich: Homage to Photographic Masters, celebrates the work of photographers including Irving Penn, Dorothea Lange, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annie Leibovitz and Richard Avedon with John Malkovich appearing as Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, Che Guevara, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol and other celebrated cultural identities.
In creating this series, Sandro spent 18 months painstakingly researching each image and learning the different styles of lighting for each era. He says one of the biggest misconceptions is that he just photographed
Malkovich’s face and dropped it into the existing photograph.
“People think it’s all done with the computer. I’m old school, I’ve been doing this for 40 years. I use a computer like a darkroom. For the most part it’s all in-camera and we’re very, very, very proud that’s how we did it.”
Sandro knows Malkovich playing Marilyn Monroe will draw laughs. “But I also want you to take a look at the photograph and go, oh my God, he nailed it”. And he did.
Michael Robinson Chavez The Driest Seasons: California’s Dust Bowl
For the past four years, California has been in the grip of a fierce drought and many communities in the Central Valley – the state’s food bowl – are on the brink. It is a story that is all too familiar in Australia and these striking black and white photographs resonate strongly.
Photojournalist Michael Robinson Chavez is on staff at the Los Angeles Times newspaper. This story began as an assignment and evolved into a series for which journalist Diana Marcum won a Pulitzer Prize this year, and Michael the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Journalism.
Rather than chasing the political or environmental stories, Michael says, “We really wanted to focus on the migrant workers, the farm owners and the communities without water to show the effects of the drought and its direct impact”.
Michael adds he saw the series in black and white because of its historical import.
Festivals like Head On expose Australian audiences to an incredible array of photography and the hope is that the more they see, the more they will understand the value of photography as an art form.
“This is a huge story and it harkens back to the days of the Farm Security Administration when Dorothea Lange, Steinbeck and all these people were sent across the west United States to document the dust bowl of the thirties. It was really important to me to keep it in that historical documentary vein.”
Daniel Schumann
Palliative Care
This body of work is incredibly moving, and touches on a subject seldom spoken about; death. We all know that death is the final outcome, but it’s not a topic of general conversation. Modern medicine wants us to live longer and often the result is to die hooked up to machines in a hospital.
German photographer Daniel Schumann’s Palliative Care series was shot over a 12-month period in a hospice. He chose to follow a certain number of people during the year and his portraits show the obvious – the physical demise – but they convey much more. They let us see the individual. Daniel comments, “My work seeks to make death visible, with all the pain and suffering that fatal illnesses entail, but also with the certainty that a final farewell in dignity is possible. I want to show death as something common and tangibly ubiquitous in the real world”.
Shunzan Fan
Between Heaven and Earth
If you had a dream life what would it be? This is the premise behind these elaborately constructed photographs where reality and fantasy collide. In these staged and highly manipulated images, Chinese photographer Shunzan Fan combines symbols from the real world with those of the ideal – a young impoverished girl imagines she is a princess; a schoolboy sees himself as Superman; a farming couple dream of living in a palace; a bicycle repairman wishes to be a pilot. Each image begins with a portrait shot against a hand painted backdrop and then is built in Photoshop. While it appears the people pictured are sharing their personal stories, they are in fact actors, but that doesn’t take away from the beauty of the images or the cultural contrasts depicted.
The Australians
There were also some great local artists on show. The stand-outs for me were Matthew Smith’s A Parallel Universe, Emmanuel Angelicas’ Silent Agreements Marrickville 45 and Patrick Boland’s My Inner Monologue is Analogue.
Originally from the UK, Matthew Smith moved to Australia to indulge his love of over and underwater photography. He’s often up before dawn and on the water ready to shoot as the sun rises. With a background in mechanical design, Matthew has created his own lighting system allowing him to use flash underwater to bring out the stunning electric colours of the Blue Bottles and other marine creatures.
In these images Matthew actually shares his perspective as he submerges into the water, capturing a world suspended between.
“The most wondrous part of any dive is the moment that the water engulfs my mask as my head slips below the surface. It’s the suspense of the unknown of what lies beneath, the transitional part of moving from one element to the next that feels so magical.”
From the time he was given a plastic Diana camera at the age of seven years, Emmanuel Angelicas has taken photographs. That was in 1970. Since then he’s used his home suburb of Marrickville – in Sydney’s inner-west – as his canvas. For 45 years he’s documented his family, neighbours and strangers – capturing images of Marrickville, its humanity and its dark secrets without censorship.
One of the greatest benefits of the Hub was that it became the place where photographers could connect with each other which is one of the most important and valued functions of a photography festival.