INTERNATIONAL: We are social creatures, but it is a characteristic with many aspects. Talking Pictures asked twelve photographic artists from around the world to consider the nature of human connection. The images they selected are as nuanced as they are diverse.
Diversity
UNITED KINGDOM: A photographer drawn to older members of the community, those with a life lived – eventful, however ordinary. The Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers born to decades of deprivation and opportunity.
FRANCE: For Denis Darzacq, the body is an instrument of social critique with which to explore the constraints and barriers suffered by people marginalised by materialist society.
AUSTRALIA: Alasdair Foster, a curator, researcher, and writer who draws on an array of experiences from around the world, offers his perspective on photography – and where it’s going next. Interview by Alexander Strecker.
INDIA / UK: Challenging the prejudices ingrained in conventional constructions of beauty and the traditional role of women, Sujata Setia emphasises the potential for survival, redefinition, and regeneration.
USA: Meryl Meisler’s photographs capture New York City in the transformative decades of the late twentieth century, offering a rare glimpse into her extended Jewish family, the vibrant Brooklyn disco scene before gentrification, and the evolving LGBTQ+ community in the post-Stonewall era.
INTERNATIONAL: Twelve reflections on the nature of Beauty by acclaimed contemporary photographers from around the world, their images and ideas as richly diverse and insightful as their individual creative practices.
AUSTRALIA: A look back at the career of one of Australia’s best known photographic artists whose prolific practice has spanned five decades.
UNITED KINGDOM: A creative duo that explore the beautiful heterogeneity of human identity and personal relationships.
USA: Spanning six decades, Mariette Pathy Allen’s sensitive portraits have chronicled the transgender and non-binary community.
UNITED KINGDOM: Portraits exploring the transition from child to adult as it is expressed through modes of dress, social behaviour and body image.
INTERNATIONAL: Eleven artists and one archivist each select a photograph that speaks to them about the significance of family in its many ways of being and being understood.
ITALY/USA: From the imposing to the delicate, images assembled from thousands of nudes weaving across a panoramic field of view.
CHINA: Youthful Asian women and men engage in the conscious but unselfconscious presentation of self within a milieu of open intimacy.
AUSTRALIA: Distinctive ways of being and knowing, experienced through a queer perspective on expanded photography.
UNITED KINGDOM: an insider’s sensitive depiction of a group of south London fighters who find self-discipline, confidence, and connectedness through martial arts.
USA: Exploring the interplay of context and desire, and the evolving ways in which desire might be reconciled with an initially hostile environment.
USA: Past and present converse in an archive of American life shot from a refreshingly tangential perspective.
AUSTRALIA: Challenging misconceptions around disability and making evident the violent abuse that can sometimes be its cause.
CHINA: Documentary images highlighting communities that, while they may seem outside of the mainstream in China, are in fact simply some of its constituents.
MEXICO: The fluidity of domestic intimacy explored through the lens of childhood imagination and transformational community ritual.
AUSTRALIA: A contemporary story-teller who combines photography and words to synthesis rich and complex narratives of family, community and sexuality.
NETHERLANDS: Portraits that speak to the entanglement of individual, interpersonal and collective identity, the mutability of the body, and the fluidity of being.
AUSTRALIA: Raucous, irreverently grandiose images that bring to mind the diverse traditions of William Hogarth’s 18th-century satirical etchings, 19th-century history painting and 20th-century cinema.
LATIN AMERICA: Three Latino artists of Japanese heritage spend a month photographing in the Land of the Rising Sun. What will their images tell us about their identity?
LATINOAMÉRICA: Tres artistas latinoamericanos de origen japonés pasan un mes fotografiando la Tierra del Sol Naciente. ¿Qué nos dirán sus imágenes acerca de su identidad?
NEW ZEALAND: Ilan Wittenberg’s extensive catalogue of Auckland men captures the uniqueness and imperfection that lays bare the inhumanity of commercially idealised masculinity.