I’m off on a photo road trip into the great Aussie countryside tomorrow. It will be a week long trip starting at Edenhope, fairly close to the Victoria / South Australian border. The plan is to then travel through Casterton, Coleraine, Heywood, Willaura, Mortlake and Hamilton. This trip is part of a project put together by my friend and fellow photographer Andrew Chapman (amongst others). The idea is to collect a large body of work documenting photographically the current drought and the associated issues of water across Australia. This project has tentatively been named Beyond Reasonable Drought and has a lot of very good professional photographers woking on it.
This drought has now been running for over 9 years and has led to severe water restrictions in most of the continent, particularly in the South and Southeast. In the cities such as Melbourne where I live, we have minor inconveniences such as no watering of lawns, minimal watering of gardens and no hand washing of cars. In the bush however, where livelyhoods depend on rain and water for agricultural production that feeds us all, times are very tough. Issues such as depression and other social hardships are having a major impact on poeple as the drought worsens.
I’ve hooked up with Drought Bus, a slightly dodgy sounding (but actually quite cool) bus that is travelling all over the country (I think there are 3 buses really) providing government assistance and social support to those doing it tough. I’m going to tag along and see who I meet and what stories might come out of it. I’ll be trying to record a fair bit of audio as well which I’ll mix in with the photos in slideshow format. It’s the documentary style of people photography that I really love so I’m looking forward to it a lot!!
I’ll try and post some updates from the road (is anybody out there….) including pictures and certainly when it’s all over I’ll be pushing the stories out and trying to get some coverage in the mainstream media here in Australia and potentially overseas as well. Of course, this will also form a large part of the body of work I submit for the collective MAP (Many Australian Photographers) drought project.
In a strange twist of fate, it’s actually been raining quite heavily across Australia in the last few days and it seems set to continue during the week, so the breaking drought story may come into play as well?? Either way, I’m on the road, taking photos and living a life I love - I’ll have fun and will enjoy every minute of it.
Have been playing around with putting together some of my documentary work into self contained slideshows. Inspired by the big Projections night at fed Square, I went back to my series from 2006 and put together Reflections of the Rainbow. Quite happy with it but will redo the text at some stage. It was nice going back to this work again - I still think i prefer it to this years series. I’m also going to work on a few other Rainbow Serpent pieces, featuring the quick-flick style with lots of images.
Magnum photographer Martin Parr speaks about the way digital has changed the photography landscape, about the rise of flickr and lots of other thought provoking ideas. His talk is part of the “We are all Photographers Now” show put on by The Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Projections 07 is screening this week in Sydney and Melbourne.
I’ve put together a slideshow showing some of the work by all 100 odd entries.
Each entry was required to put together a body of work consisting of 10-20 images. 15 Finalists, over 1700 images, cut down to 607 shown in 4 minutes exactly. Enjoy
Interesting article on the future of photojournalism on Dirck Halstead’s digitaljournalist website. In summary it says that stills photography is dying, being replaced by high quality stills taken directly from HD video footage and also by more feature rich content available using video and audio. As a relative newcomer to the photojournalism game this article makes a lot of sense. I’ve only ever shot digital as a professional so I’ve no real attachment to the old analog film and print world. Despite my age I’m a product of the internet and see it quickly taking over the traditional hardcopy newspaper in terms of immediacy and visual possibilities.
I’ve done a couple of stills/audio slideshows to explore them as vehicles for good storytelling and have been pleased with my early results. This one focuses on the Melbourne Victory FC supporters. In only the second year of existence, the Australian league has taken off dramatically with Melbourne Victory picking up audiences of up to 50,000 people. This slideshow aims to convey the emotions and chants of these new crowds. It’s a bit rough, with the audio taken off the back of my 1DmkII - good enough for proof of concept though.
In many ways these slideshows seem to provide a better forum for stills photography, with the ability to use a series of images to tell the story,a method used in the early days of photojournalism with Time-Life photo essays which has been squeezed down to a single image in todays publications crammed full of advertising. The addition of audio adds a new perosnal dimension to the story that I am really excited about. Dirk’s article pushes the video angle which is the next extension of that idea. No matter what, I see this as the future for storytelling and photojournalism and intend to expand my skills in this area over the next few months. You only have to look at the organisations moving their photographers into this space to see that its time is here. A great place to look at this new style is at mediastorm.
This is the very first post to this blog which will contain posts and links to the many and varied things I come across both on and off the web as a working photojournalist. Please enjoy and let me know how I’m going. To start, here’s a link to my website. As at April 18th 2007 it’s still the old site (last updated when I was first starting out in this about 2 years ago), but we’re working on a new one with much more recent and relevant work. Cheers Joseph
