NETHERLANDS: Portraits that speak to the entanglement of individual, interpersonal and collective identity, the mutability of the body, and the fluidity of being.
Sexuality
UNITED KINGDOM: A collaboration between identical twins drawing on the traditions of European folklore, Gothic Romance and Hollywood cinema, blending British whimsy with a darker psychological ambiguity that lends depth and complexity.
AUSTRALIA: Rather than illustrating an idea, Christophe Canato’s images propose a paradox that animates questions around gender, sexuality and the transition from child to adult.
IRAN / AUSTRALIA: Poetically perceptive imagery that engages the layers of displacement, difference and marginality that define what it means to be ‘other’.
UNITED KINGDOM: Voted one of the top three physique photographers in Europe in the fifties and sixties, Frank Morton published under the professional name of Hoffman of Edinburgh. This article takes a double historical perspective combining his interview made in 1986 and my own present-day reflection on his life and work, three and a half decades after his death.
AUSTRALIA: An unconventional approach to portraiture that subverts clichés and stereotypes to emphasise the value of real human relationships over fantasy or caricature.
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.
GERMANY: Images that speak with quiet compassion of the impermanence that marks us out as human, and the dignity to be afforded to all, regardless of situation, apparent difference, or stage of life.
AUSTRALIA: An anthropomorphic metamorphosis in which bees not only evolve to humanoid form but behave with all the perverse complexity of humankind.
UNITED KINGDOM: Quintessentially British in their rigorous formality, these allegorical tableaux grow from the personal experience of an intergenerational life partnership condemned to the margins of ‘otherness’.
UNITED KINGDOM: An artist, activist, and co-creator of a potent form of psychological therapy centred on photography.
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.
AUSTRALIA: Japanese myth and sensual metaphor reflecting upon the ebb and flow of loves now unrequited.
VIETNAM: Focusing on people at the margins of society, these relaxed domestic moments explore, without sensationalism, the intimate companionship that is a foundation of our shared human experience.
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.
USA: Exploring the interplay of context and desire, and the evolving ways in which desire might be reconciled with an initially hostile environment.
AUSTRALIA: Luminous yet elusive images that navigate the gulf between the world of the senses and the interior realm of the self.
CHINA / USA: Delicately ambiguous self-portraits exploring the tension between freedom and boundaries, self-reflection and self-discovery.
MEXICO: Named one of the top twenty talents worldwide by FOAM magazine, Diego Moreno’s monsters have much to show us about familial love and about domestic abuse.
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.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: For the Korean artist Atta Kim, the process of making art has been an ongoing philosophical journey of discovery.
AUSTRALIA: A contemporary story-teller who combines photography and words to synthesis rich and complex narratives of family, community and sexuality.
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.
PORTUGAL: The long-running annual festival of photography in Braga takes a lively approach to integrating imagery and architecture, concept and conviviality that has sustained the engaging freshness that is the hallmark of the event.
NEW ZEALAND: Located on the rim of the Pacific, this is a festival of and by the people: stimulating creativity, encouraging participation, and celebrating the many and diverse expressions of human imagination.