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Photography

How do you visually portray a concept like human rights? Much of the scholarship around this question focuses on the idea that to understand what human rights might look like, we have to visualise life without them. Historically, photography has played a significant role in exposing violations of human rights to a mass audience ... 

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Published in March 2019, no. 409

Vivian Maier has received the kind of attention most photographers and artists can only dream of – multiple monographs, documentary films, commercial gallery representation, extraordinary public interest, and now a biography. However, all this activity and acclaim has occurred posthumously. In her lifetime ...

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Published in March 2018, no. 399

A modern cricket photographer using digital single-lens reflex cameras and high-speed motor drives can take 5,000 photos in a day’s play. With such a surfeit of images, the quality of seeing is diminished. For most of his career from the 1970s to the 2010s, English photographer Patrick Eagar would shoot four or five rolls of film ...

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Louis Klee reviews 'Blind Spot' by Teju Cole

Louis Klee
Friday, 27 October 2017

The text tells us this is Venice, or more precisely Giudecca, but what we see is an empty arcade, a distant tower, and the long shadow of the photographer. It is a scene with an understated surrealism, like a painting of de Chirico, but both photo and adjacent text are by Teju Cole. Giudecca, writes Cole, means ‘“Jewry,” though there’s no proof a Jewish comm ...

Published in November 2017, no. 396

'Among Trees' by Philip Jones

Philip Jones
Thursday, 28 September 2017

Even young trees bear the signature of deep time, if not eternity. For most of humanity’s existence, men and women have looked upwards through trees, wondering at the tracery of their branches piercing the firmament, the domed lid of the earthly world. Recorded mythology confirms that trees have occupied that special place in every ancient belief system; rooted in ...

Published in October 2017, no. 395

William Yang is one of Australia's best-known and most prolific photographers. In William Yang: Stories of love and death, Helena Grehan and Edward Scheer interrogate the political and aesthetic themes running through this artist's output.

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Published in May 2016, no. 381

One of the big attractions of this book is the portraits and self-portraits of the photographers who are its subject. Diane Arbus, in the early stages of pregnancy, looks whimsically at her reflection in a full-length mirror; Robert Mapplethorpe's face leaps out of the darkness, paired with his skull-topped walking stick; Margaret Bourke-White perches with her camer ...

Published in March 2016, no. 379

'Creating a Wetland' a photo essay by Jo Daniell

Jo Daniell
Tuesday, 29 September 2015

Gleneira - sepia

This photograph taken around 1890 shows what was done through over-clearing and grazing. Fifteen years ago, our property on the Mornington Peninsula featured two overused stock dams filled with opaque brown water. The muddy edges had no vege ...

Published in October 2015, no. 375

'Drought', a photographic essay by Alison Pouliot

Alison Pouliot
Saturday, 01 November 2014

As a freshwater ecologist, Alison Pouliot endeavours to understand the interplay of the processes that sculpt the Australian environment.

As an environmental photographer, she aspires to capture the intricacies and obscurities of these processes.

The insidious creeping nature of drought can sometimes lend itself more to images than words.

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Published in November 2014, no. 366

Notwithstanding occasional media focus on misbehaving students or senior members, the residential colleges and halls dotted around or about most Australian university campuses keep a low profile. Their influence has undoubtedly declined since the early twentieth century, when as many as one quarter of Melbourne’s enrolled undergraduate population, and a much higher proportion of full-time students, were attached to Trinity and Janet Clarke Hall, Ormond or Queen’s. But the collegiate ideal to which all these institutions aspire, more or less, still provides a vital alternative to the regrettably prevailing view of higher education as mere vocational training – especially now, when the future viability of universities themselves is called increasingly into question.

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