Speculative Horizons has been in dialogue with the following image-makers and their work with photobook production to add further dialogue through longevity via publication. A selection of books will be on display at CAP in Kuwait and featured on the website. These books will be purchasable through links associated with each publisher.

Speculative Horizons has been in dialogue with the following image-makers and their work with photobook production to add further dialogue through longevity via publication. A selection of books will be on display at CAP in Kuwait and featured on the website. These books will be purchasable through links associated with each publisher.

Photobooks

Abigail Varney is a portrait and documentary photographer based in Melbourne/Naarm, Australia. Her work evolves from her curiosity and connection to Australia’s land and people; to explore untold stories that give light to the vivd lives unique to Australia. Her work is more recently moving back closer to home, working with family archives and stories that centre her community and family. She completed a bachelor or Arts at Deakin University and advance diploma at Photography Studies College. In 2014 her portrait series was featured at the National Portrait Gallery. Her long-term documentary project shot in Coober Pedy, Rough & Cut (2014–2018), has been exhibited in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and internationally. Rough & Cut will be her first publication with Trespasser, a Texas-based independent art book publisher. Her latest work The Build Up was featured in the 2019 Spring Exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne and was a finalist in the Australian Photography Awards stories selection. In 2020 she became a new member of the photography collective Oculi.

Rough & Cut documents Abigail Varney’s journeys into central Australia to a place called Coober Pedy. The town owes its existence to the discovery of opal seams in 1915, an iridescent gemstone that formed from water that once covered the desert landscape. This precious opal has been mined through a series of booms and busts, almost into oblivion. Beyond the mullock heaps and away from the sun’s searing heat lies underground dugouts inhabited by Coober Pedy’s remaining miners, still dreaming of one last opal-rich strike. Keeping the idiosyncrasies of the town’s personality alive and well, Varney’s encounters are an insight into the characters that call this place a forever home. Captured are the remnants of this magnetic, surreal landscape shaped by its extremities.

Iridescent foil stamped hard cover, Published by Trespasser Books (Texas), 68 pages, Edition of 750, 25.4 x 31.75cm

(Nur) Aishah Kenton is a photographer and curator based in Melbourne. Aishah
grew up in Kuala Lumpur and graduated from the School of Art and Design at
the Australian National University in Canberra with a Bachelor of Fine Arts
(Maj. Photography) in 2018.
Aishah’s current artistic practice examines contemporary and archival
analogue photography, with her practice based research resulting in
photographs that examine personal, social and cultural life experiences.
In 2018 Aishah was awarded an Emerging Artist Support Scheme Award for
her graduating exhibition To Whom it May Concern. This award was presented
by Goulburn Regional Gallery, where her following series Second Exit was
exhibited in 2019/20.

Aishah was a finalist in the 2017 Maggie Diaz Photography Prize for Women. In
2020 she was awarded a coveted spot in the 2020 Chico Portfolio Review in
Montana, USA, as well as being a finalist in the CLIP Landscape Award at
Perth Centre For Photography.
In 2021, Aishah co-founded Pacific Centre For Photographic Arts (PCPA), a
non-profit organisation primarily concerned with providing positive and
practical experiences in the Arts for people in regional, rural and remote areas
of Australia and the Pacific.

Aishah is a member of the respected Australian photographic collective Oculi.

Aishah Kenton’s new series Second Exit examines the richness of colour found across regional and remote areas of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland. This series explores the unique power of the photographic image, revealing an artist reaching for an elusive present while framing it within an ambiguous sense of the past.

Digitally printed, saddle stitched, Published by Kenton/Davey, Printed by Deephouse Print Studio (Sydney), 64 pages, Edition of 100

Raised in regional Victoria, the southernmost state on mainland Australia, Alana Holmberg is a visual artist known for her practice combining photography, motion, sound and text to make work that is both conceptual and documentary. Experimenting with performance, installation, and online platforms, she is interested in presenting her work in non-traditional ways to reach wide and diverse audiences. She comments on contemporary issues within Australian society, drawing on personal experiences, discoveries in her family archives, and observations of her socio-economic group.

Porch Diaries reflects on community as a remedy for isolation. Comprising more than two hundred colour photographs, the series features neighbours, strangers, workers and loved ones who passed by my home during the pandemic lockdown months in Melbourne in 2020, and then 2021. Initially intended as an act of record-keeping, the accumulation of these daily social interactions provided me with an unexpected discovery: an antidote to loneliness. In that sense, Porch Diaries became a reminder of the opportunities available for connection and belonging beyond screens and chosen social circles.

Folded softcover with tipped-in image embossed title and exposed binding, Self-Published, Printed by Bambra Press (Melbourne), 144 pages, Edition of 750, 23 x 30cm

Ethiopian-born, South Sudanese, Narrm/Melbourne-based artist and writer Atong Atem explores migrant narratives, postcolonial practices in the African diaspora, and concepts of identity that celebrate visual and photography as an extension of oral tradition.

Commissioned by Photo Australia for PHOTO 2022 International Festival of Photography, Surat (which translates from Sudanese Arabic as ‘snapshots’) is a homage to family photos and the characters within them. Working on the series throughout 2021, Atem revisited her family photo albums, which span decades and continents, restaging and reimagining the scenes and players they depict. The resulting book is a series of performances as self-portraits, documenting the act of photographing and being photographed, framing and being framed. It is a performative depiction of photography, utilising the repetition of dressing, sitting, posing, changing, testing, adjusting and capturing that is so often implicit in the medium.

Section-sewn hardcover, Published by Perimeter Editions x Photo Australia (Melbourne), 48 pages, 28 x 20.8 cm

Erin Lee is a documentary photographer and photobook artist originally from New Zealand currently based in Naarm / Melbourne. Erin recently graduated with a Master of Arts in Photography from Photography Studies College, Melbourne. She has published with agencies such as CNN, The Guardian, Vice, Financial Times, Broadly, The Advocate, etc. Erin’s photobooks have been shortlisted for the Lucie Foundation Photobook Prize, the Perimeter Photo 2020 International Photobook Prize, Kassel Dummy finalists and included in The PhotoBookMuseum, Cologne.

The Crimson Thread investigates the ubiquitous presence of Australia’s colonial history and examines the impact of colonisation and white privilege on contemporary Australian society. Using speculative documentary photography, the work encourages viewers to question official histories and to consider how strongly our past still exists in the present. 

Handmade by the Artist, Artist Edition Only, 21 x 26cm

Izabela is a Polish artist whose studio practice embraces photography as a way of interpreting and re-conceptualising the function that images have in the present. Negotiating the possibilities of how material forms come together, she draws largely on finding, fragmenting, translating and reconfiguring things that are both photographed and found. Conceptually anchored in the effects of globalisation and Pluta’s own personal experience as a migrant to Australia, her creative pursuit seeks to articulate a fluid mode of moving through and being in the world. She lives and works between the lands of the Awabakal and Worimi in Awabakal country (Newcastle, NSW) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal (Paddington, Sydney).

The German term nihilartikel is used to describe the little-known practice of inserting intentional errors, falsities or fictitious entries into reference texts – academic works, dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, directories – for the purpose of later identifying plagiaries, copies or other infringements to intellectual copyright. Taking this somewhat elusive practice as its subtext, Izabela Pluta’s major new book approaches photography and its central quandaries of authenticity and representation from a series of unsettled and dynamic vantages.

Perimeter Editions, coptic bind, softcover, 128 pages, 31.7 x 24cm.

Jordan Madge is a Melbourne (Narm)-based conceptual documentary photographer who explores both personal stories and larger community-based themes. He works primarily with the photobook format and the self-published book he made during his undergraduate studies at Photography Studies College, Melbourne, was highly acclaimed and was inspired by the disappearance of a girl in country Victoria. His most recent publication, Banana Spider Bite, was published by Bad News Books.


Banana Spider Bite documents a migration to a foreign country that was inspired by a romantic gesture. Made up of photographs of Madge’s partner, Whitney, and their new urban surroundings, Banana Spider Bite juxtaposes small moments of intimacy with an anonymous city environment. Night flowers and fruit are illuminated in the glow of the camera’s flash bulb, the urban landscape becomes otherworldly in the gleam of street lights, Banana Spider Bite is a dreamlike exploration on the twin complexities of love and understanding of place.

Embossed softcover with flaps, Published by Bad News Books, 74 pages, Edition of 50, 20 x 24cm

Kaitlyn Church is a Melbourne-based documentary photographer and her
practice primarily documents the ever-changing landscape of rural and regional Australia. She is interested in creating long-form new documentary photographic work where the photographer is not merely a silent observer but is an integral part of the project, either as protagonist or narrator.

The few memories of my Grandfather I have remaining have been distorted with time. Like the family photo archive, they are often blurry, fading and fragmented.

After my Grandmother passed away after a brief battle with dementia, the task of cleaning the home they shared was left to their remaining family. During the process of sorting through a lifetime’s worth of mementos, a series of diaries were discovered, gathering dust in the back of a cupboard. These diaries have given valuable insight into who Leonard was. These books include detailed descriptions of his day-to-day life, childhood memories, biographies of his parents and all 13 of his siblings, as well as his innermost thoughts about his then-impending death. These diaries have safeguarded memories that would have otherwise died along with my Grandfather.

On the surface, these diaries measure the passing of time, documenting current affairs and family activities, and mark out the monthly rainfall – textual systems of measurement that have enabled me to connect with him in his absence.

Hardcover, Self-Published, 88 pages, Edition of 5

Luke Le (formerly Luke van Aurich) is a Sydney-based artist and designer, working with no formal training. Born in Perth, his career has spanned photography, publishing, furniture design and product design. He has exhibited his photography in various contexts in Australia and internationally. He is a co-founder of the sustainable design label and retailer Column A.

Le’s photography questions where the meaning of a photograph lies? Where do the limits of its authorship, spectatorship and democracy cross paths? These are questions at the heart of untrained Sydney-based artist Luke Le’s photographic practice. In his first major artist book titled What are you looking for? Le reroutes notions of diarism and the impromptu to broach new aesthetic and philosophical terrains. A kind of open letter to a former life in Melbourne, the book forms both an intensely personal gesture and a wider provocation toward the subjectivities and assumptions that underpin photography itself. These raw, intuitive images – created from scans of degraded Risograph prints – are at once rooted in and free of place. Their dynamic gaze veers toward specificity, but never quite lands. Amidst the noise of their gritty, fine grain, Le’s images leave as many questions as answers.

Softcover with poster dust jacket and perfect bind, Published by Perimeter Editions (Melbourne), 170 pages, Special Edition of 25, 25.5 x 17cm

Matt Dunne is an artist and writer living and working in Melbourne, Australia. His work focuses on the complex relationship between people, nature and place. His work self-published three zines and his work is held in numerous private collections. He is the founder
of Tall Poppy Press, a publishing house enabling emerging Australian photographers and previously co-funded and ran This on That.

In 2017, in the remote South-East of Australia, a man called the police and reported that he had murdered more than 400 eagles over the last two years at the instruction of his boss. The news coverage of the criminal trial for this act was the starting point for artist Matt Dunne to explore the wider deliberate killing of the Wedge-Tailed Eagle. Dunne’s forthcoming book The Killing Sink is part true crime and part a public act of grieving for what has been lost.

Softcover with foil & silkscreen, Published by Void (Greece) & Tall Poppy Press (Melbourne), 88 pages, Edition of 750, 20.6 x 27cm

Matthew Sleeth is a visual artist and filmmaker who maintains a multi-disciplinary and collaborative practice with a focus on the aesthetic and conceptual concerns of new media. He explores the performative and photographic nature of visual culture through diverse processes of mechanical reproduction, creating objects and experiences that are often political, visually ambitious and formally experimental. Sleeth is also a keen publisher and he has published eight books: News & Weather (2022), Ten Series/106 Photographs (2007) published by New York’s Aperture Foundation and Opfikon (2004), Survey (2004), home+away (2003), Tour of Duty (2002), The Bank Book (2001) and The Roaring Days (1998).

For much of Melbourne’s second wave COVID lockdowns, I thought about the past. With a suspended present, there seemed only an imagined future and a distant past. Like many artists, I went back to past works, looking for the patterns…
NEWS & WEATHER was made while living in Tokyo during 2005/6. Each spread features an image from Japan paired with an article I was reading online that day from my hometown newspaper, alongside a record of the weather where the photograph was made. The project reminded me how you can be intensely immersed in another place while still thinking about home. Both these contradictory thoughts can exist together.
NEWS & WEATHER is also about the country Australia was becoming and how we ended up here. As the Howard government years drew to a close, there was a feeling that Australia was changing and becoming a different place, less generous and nastier.
The articles I read in The Age each day chronicled shifts: such as the relative indifference to the hanging of Van Tuong Nguyen in Singapore, the violent racism of the Cronulla riots and the wave of devastating bushfires that would signal the visible effects of climate change. The end of my time in Japan coincided with the Indonesian courts imposing death sentences for drug trafficking on Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.
Now, looking back at this work fifteen years later, I realise it was only the beginning…

Hardcover, Published by Third Floor Press (Melbourne), 17 x 23cm

Morganna Magee is a photographer based in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia) living and working on the land of the Wurundjeri, Bunurong and Boon Wurrung people, on the foothills of the Dandenong ranges. Her practice sits between storytelling and expanded documentary, creating work that pulls from an emotional response to the world whilst still being based in the documentary tradition. Her two decade-long practice as a photographer encompasses commercial, editorial, and fine art with her work being awarded and exhibited nationally and internationally, recognised by institutions such as The National Portrait gallery Australia and Miami Art week.

Created in the streets near where I live, on daily walks, the images depict a dark exploration of the landscape interspersed with motifs of my family and of animals both, dead and alive. Te resulting images come from an intuitive response to my surroundings, the images interplay with photography’s ability to make eternal what is feeting. Trough in camera and in scanner manipulations these images exist through intervention, sometimes by the artist, others by the unseen atmosphere that surrounds what is photographed.

Softcover, Published by Tall Poppy Press (Melbourne), 64 pages, Edition of 200, 21 x 26.5cm

Pearce Leal is a photographer based in Naarm, Australia. His practice-based research explores the interrelationships between humans and ecologies. He utilises traditional documentary practices, found imagery, and processes of making physical interventions on photographs to engage viewers with their own perceptions of fragile ecologies. He leads photography workshops in the natural world, teaching photography enthusiasts how to refine their craft in some of the world’s most diverse ecological locations. Pearce recently completed a Bachelor of Photography at Photography Studies College, Melbourne.

The Arctic, the Southern Andes and the South Pole are recognised as regions that are significantly changing due to the effects of the climate crisis on the landscape. With society becoming more conscious of the impact of climate collapse, large numbers of photo tourists now flock to these destinations to capture these rapidly and unnaturally changing landscapes. More than 74,000 tourists visited Antarctica alone in the 2019–2020 season, almost double the figures from a decade ago. A Field Guide to Seeing New Land observes what compels the enthusiast photographer to travel to places in traumatic change and how photo-tourists are instructed to take photographs of their temporary surroundings.

Softcover, Published by Tall Poppy Press (Melbourne), 64 pages, Edition of 200, 21 x 26.5cm

Rebecca Fagan’s art practice uses photography and writing to satisfy an insatiable curiosity about the complex past and the duplicitous present. Her research-based methodology uses found text and memoir in conversation with imagery. In this practice, the narrative is subjected to various degrees of concealment, acknowledging the divisive nature of contemporary themes and the sensitivities of society and the art world. Rebecca began her arts education with a first-class honours degree in Art History from La Trobe University in Melbourne with minor studies in archaeology and anthropology. Rebecca recently completed an MA – Photography through Photography Studies College, Melbourne.

This volume is a meditation on the darkness of human history using self-reflection and memoir of the artist; a non-indigenous Australian woman living on stolen Country. Here, Rebecca explores the physical landscape of her home in a central Victorian river valley, together with critical state archives, historical newspapers and early colonial letters. The inquiry culminates in a process-driven outcome of visual and textual story-telling that attempts to reveal and conceal the contested history of the landscape and in turn Australia, as a nation.

In this photobook, most images appear inside the folded page and some are further concealed using cropping as redaction. Along with the literary narrative, these visual devices are an attempt to address historical and contemporary trauma and the complex relationship that the landscape and Country has to all Australian people.

The Bleachfield is soon to be self-published and will become the first volume of the manifesto.

Softcover, Self-Published, Artist Edition

Sam Forsyth-Gray is a Melbourne-based artist whose work explores ideas of nostalgia, memory, and the tangibility of the photographic medium. Interested in the merging of fine art and documentary visual languages – often using archival images alongside his own work – the process is fluid and experimental. With a special interest in the application of found images within contemporary art practice, his work seeks to create new ways of both seeing and understanding these objects through his own photographic responses.

New Archivalia is a photographic project driven by practical and theoretical research which seeks to explore the unique connection between photography and the archive and the dynamics of the photograph’s role as either passive archived material or as an active and agential means of preserving, cataloguing, and documenting. The project seeks to investigate evolving contemporary notions of the archive, in its iterations both physical and digital and ultimately in its relation to power structures. New Archivalia takes the form of moving image, photographic prints, and a publication is the result of his studies during the Master of Arts – Photography undertaken at Photography Studies College, Melbourne.

Softcover Self-Published, Artist Edition on newsprint

Sarah Pannell is an Australian photographer whose work concerns culture, landscape, tradition and community. Pannell’s fascination with humans’ ever-evolving dance with their surrounding environments has led to an array of projects focussing on everyday life, preservation of traditions and communities around the world. She has produced a number of publications including Tabriz to Shiraz (2019) published by Perimeter Editions and Hillvale, self-published titles including Sehir (2014) and The Territories (2015).

I small-run photo booklet of images shot in the Northern Territory, Australia, on the traditional lands of the Arrernte, Luritja, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people 2021.

Saddle Stitched Booklet, Self-Published, Printed by Momento Pro (Sydney), 28 pages, Edition of 50, 14.8 x 21cm

Tom Goldner is an Australian artist, curator and teacher of photography residing on Wurundjeri country in Sherbrooke, Victoria. His career spans art, commercial projects, education, fundraising, gallery management and community engagement initiatives. Goldner’s creative practice is positioned within the expanded documentary genre of photography. His projects utilise a multifaceted, collaborative and experimental approach to storytelling which negotiates the intersections between social and environmental constructs. Together with business partner, Harriet Tarbuck, Goldner currently holds the position of co-creative director at Photo Collective – an organisation dedicated to finding meaning and sharing knowledge through photography. In 2021 Goldner completed an Master of Arts – Photography at Photography Studies College, Melbourne, where he currently lectures.

Do Brumbies Dream in Red? is a story of ecological collapse told through the 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season and the Snowy Mountain brumby, an Australian feral wild-roaming horse.
Brumbies are now increasingly seen as destructive force on the Australian environment. Their hooves destroy delicate ecosystems and their faeces contaminate critical water systems, yet they are also recognised by some as a part of Australia’s cultural identity. Fire’s role too has shifted. From a tool and a harbinger of safety to something beyond our our control and destructive. As human influence over the environment intensified, summers become hotter, droughts last for longer and species once seen as useful become invasive.
There are no images of fire included in this project as this work is not about the momentary drama of flames, but about cyclical lockstep and what is left in wake. The title itself is a proposition; Horses render the world in blues and greens, asking if they dream in red is an invitation to re-imagine the world as it appeared while suffused in the red glow of the bushfires.
The research is underpinned by the work of English professor Timothy Morton and his theories on ‘ecological awareness’ in Dark Ecology (2016), which examine the intersection of places, scales and nonhuman interrelations. Running parallel to these ideas are those of American professor Donna Haraway’s most recent book, Staying with the Trouble (2016). Her concept of the ‘Chthulucene’ strives to capture a future in which all things in the world are connected, coexist and, in many cases, ‘collaborate’, and through this, we learn to ‘live and die well together’.
The visual outcomes are intertwined and are driven by a series of colour film photographs and moving images made in creative collaboration with cinematographer Angus Scott and audio engineer Sean Kenihan. The series was exhibited in February 2021 and along with the exhibition, the project culminates in large-format photobook (edition of 1000). The black artboard cover features a tipped on graphic artist by Katherina Rodrigues and comes with a concertina text insert featuring a poem by Dr Judith Nangala Crispin.

Black artboard cover with tipped on image, exposed binding with concertina text insert, Self-published, 120 pages, Edition of 100, 33 x 26cm

Wendy Catling is an Australian visual artist working primarily in the medium of photography. Motivated by personal and family histories, the artist takes a reparative approach to revealing the complexities of human relationships. Her work focuses on shame, memory, power, and trauma. She employs alternative, vernacular and studio photography, video and installation practices. Catling completed her Master of Arts – Photography project titled Nightshade in 2020 at Photography Studies College, Melbourne, and since 2001 Catling has taught art and photography to secondary and adult students and is currently visual arts faculty coordinator at Wesley College, Melbourne.

Nightshade explores domestic abuse and intergenerational trauma. The project follows the relationship of my parents. During a tumultuous 20 years, they lived at more than 10 different addresses. At first, she was trying to escape my father’s stalking; then she was forced to marry when she became pregnant. Even at the worst times and living in decrepit small rental houses my mother would make a garden. Since my father’s early death in a car accident, she has lived a more stable and happy life, volunteering in natural bush reserves, to remove environmental weeds and promote the growth of native plants. She is now in her 90s and her own beautiful garden is kept scrupulously weed free. Throughout the book my mother’s battle against weeds is paralleled with her resistance to coercive control.

Exposed section sewn soft cover, Published by M.33 (Melbourne), 192 pages, Edition of 150, 28 x 21cm

Wouter Van de Voorde studied painting and printmaking at KASK in Ghent Belgium. In 2008 he moved to Australia where he currently resides with his family on Ngunnawal land in Canberra.

Death is not here combines disparate photographs created by artist Wouter Van de Voorde. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, he was about to become a father for the second time. He had been making still lifes with fossils, and in his spare time he had begun digging in the backyard with his son unearthing the grave of a family chicken. Photographs of subsequent excavations, rock sculptures, an eroded gorge and an ongoing preoccupation with ravens are combined to create a new narrative representing everyday encounters between life and death. The book is punctuated with disquieting and ambiguous photographs of hand dug holes. The original impetus to create a hole was a request from Van de Voorde’s son to play real-life Minecraft and so they began digging in the backyard. As the hole grew deeper and wider, Van de Voorde became fascinated with the void and began experimenting with drawing the outlines of the holes with flames. Upon unearthing the grave of a departed chicken, the bones visible, they harvested clay and used to fire small objects, such as a skull pictured in the book. The images of the backyard voids are interspersed with photographs of the artist’s son exploring an eroded gorge, which appears like a giant version of their backyard excavations—father and son sharing explorations of what lies beneath

Iridescent foil stamped hard cover, Published by Void (Greece), 160 pages, Edition of 750, 22 x 27.5cm

Yask Desai is a Melbourne-based Australian-Indian visual artist who works with photography, video, archives and text. His work explores themes of place and collective and individual identity and often combines historical and social research to explore the cultural connections between imagery. He continues to work on multiple projects and his current work Telia, formed the basis of his Master of Arts – Photography undertaken at Photography Studies College, Melbourne, where he now lectures. Desai is also a portrait photographer and has published books and won awards for his work.

Telia attempts to reanimate and re-examine the experiences of the men who migrated from undivided India and worked as hawkers or travelling salesman within rural Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Telia was the word used to refer to Australia by some of the migrant’s families who were left behind in India. The final work involves the production of a photobook consisting of archival artefacts (including documents and collected historical photographs) in combination with his own photography. In its gallery exhibit form the work also includes a series of video poems that help to place Desai, as an Anglo-Indian artist, within the overall narrative framework of the project.

Hardcover, Self-Published, Artist Edition of 5,

Currently based in Melbourne, Australia, Ying Ang is a photographer and author with an extensive exhibition history and client base, having lived and worked in Singapore, Sydney and New York City. She is on the teaching faculty at the ICP in New York City and is the Director of Reflexions 2.0 – a photographic masterclass based in Europe – and Director / Curator at Le Space Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.

Her first artist book, Gold Coast, won the New York Photo Festival and Encontros Da Imagem book prize for 2014 and acquired for the Rare Books Collection at the Victorian State Library and MoMA. Gold Coast was also listed by Lensculture, Voices of Photography, Asia Pacific Photobook Archive and Self Publish Be Happy in their top photobooks of 2014 and honoured with a nomination for the prestigious Prix Pictet award. Ying also fulfilled the role of Chief Curator for the Obscura Festival of Photography in Malaysia in 2016 and was the keynote speaker at the inaugural Photobook New Zealand.

Ying’s recent publication, The Quickening, was a winner of the Belfast Photo Festival 2021 and awarded with the silver award for the 2020 BIFA Documentary Photo Book Prize, bronze medal for the Documentary Book Prize at the 2021 Moscow International Foto Awards and Honorable Mention at the PX3 Paris Photo Awards and the Tokyo International Foto Awards. The Quickening was exhibited in a solo show during Rencontres d’Arles in France in 2019 at the Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation.

Ying was most recently featured in “FIRECRACKERS: Female Photographers Now”, a showcase of contemporary female documentary photographers published by Thames & Hudson, and “How We See: Photobooks By Women”, featuring one hundred 21st-century photobooks by women photographers published by 10×10 Photobooks.

Simultaneously touted as the crime capital as well as the tourist capital of Australia, the South Coast was a straggly and dangerous strip of coastline that was renamed to Gold Coast by real estate developers in an effort to seduce investors, retirees and holiday-makers. In a huge push to attract potential home owners through the 60’s and 70’s, a vast network of canals was constructed to provide for waterfront homes, complete with an unexpectedly large population of bull sharks that lurk in the shallow depths. This relationship between selling the idea of the perfect home and pervading danger is evident in the local news, that fluctuates between million dollar listings and tales of sleaze and murder. State Government corruption and unethical business practices through the 80’s and property scams in the 90’s cemented the Gold Coast as the perfect place for Australians of ill repute to come and reinvent themselves.

Chevron patterned hardcover with pale pink screen printed box, featuring diamond shape cut out. 9.6 x 11.2 inches in size, 132 pages with 72 colour images. Additional newspaper zine insert. Offset printing on matte coated paper in the Netherlands.

Photobooks

Abigail Varney is a portrait and documentary photographer based in Melbourne/Naarm, Australia. Her work evolves from her curiosity and connection to Australia’s land and people; to explore untold stories that give light to the vivd lives unique to Australia. Her work is more recently moving back closer to home, working with family archives and stories that centre her community and family. She completed a bachelor or Arts at Deakin University and advance diploma at Photography Studies College. In 2014 her portrait series was featured at the National Portrait Gallery. Her long-term documentary project shot in Coober Pedy, Rough & Cut (2014–2018), has been exhibited in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and internationally. Rough & Cut will be her first publication with Trespasser, a Texas-based independent art book publisher. Her latest work The Build Up was featured in the 2019 Spring Exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne and was a finalist in the Australian Photography Awards stories selection. In 2020 she became a new member of the photography collective Oculi.

Rough & Cut documents Abigail Varney’s journeys into central Australia to a place called Coober Pedy. The town owes its existence to the discovery of opal seams in 1915, an iridescent gemstone that formed from water that once covered the desert landscape. This precious opal has been mined through a series of booms and busts, almost into oblivion. Beyond the mullock heaps and away from the sun’s searing heat lies underground dugouts inhabited by Coober Pedy’s remaining miners, still dreaming of one last opal-rich strike. Keeping the idiosyncrasies of the town’s personality alive and well, Varney’s encounters are an insight into the characters that call this place a forever home. Captured are the remnants of this magnetic, surreal landscape shaped by its extremities.

Iridescent foil stamped hard cover, Published by Trespasser Books (Texas), 68 pages, Edition of 750, 25.4 x 31.75cm

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(Nur) Aishah Kenton is a photographer and curator based in Melbourne. Aishah
grew up in Kuala Lumpur and graduated from the School of Art and Design at
the Australian National University in Canberra with a Bachelor of Fine Arts
(Maj. Photography) in 2018.
Aishah’s current artistic practice examines contemporary and archival
analogue photography, with her practice based research resulting in
photographs that examine personal, social and cultural life experiences.
In 2018 Aishah was awarded an Emerging Artist Support Scheme Award for
her graduating exhibition To Whom it May Concern. This award was presented
by Goulburn Regional Gallery, where her following series Second Exit was
exhibited in 2019/20.

Aishah was a finalist in the 2017 Maggie Diaz Photography Prize for Women. In
2020 she was awarded a coveted spot in the 2020 Chico Portfolio Review in
Montana, USA, as well as being a finalist in the CLIP Landscape Award at
Perth Centre For Photography.
In 2021, Aishah co-founded Pacific Centre For Photographic Arts (PCPA), a
non-profit organisation primarily concerned with providing positive and
practical experiences in the Arts for people in regional, rural and remote areas
of Australia and the Pacific.

Aishah is a member of the respected Australian photographic collective Oculi.

Aishah Kenton’s new series Second Exit examines the richness of colour found across regional and remote areas of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland. This series explores the unique power of the photographic image, revealing an artist reaching for an elusive present while framing it within an ambiguous sense of the past.

Digitally printed, saddle stitched, Published by Kenton/Davey, Printed by Deephouse Print Studio (Sydney), 64 pages, Edition of 100

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Raised in regional Victoria, the southernmost state on mainland Australia, Alana Holmberg is a visual artist known for her practice combining photography, motion, sound and text to make work that is both conceptual and documentary. Experimenting with performance, installation, and online platforms, she is interested in presenting her work in non-traditional ways to reach wide and diverse audiences. She comments on contemporary issues within Australian society, drawing on personal experiences, discoveries in her family archives, and observations of her socio-economic group.

Porch Diaries reflects on community as a remedy for isolation. Comprising more than two hundred colour photographs, the series features neighbours, strangers, workers and loved ones who passed by my home during the pandemic lockdown months in Melbourne in 2020, and then 2021. Initially intended as an act of record-keeping, the accumulation of these daily social interactions provided me with an unexpected discovery: an antidote to loneliness. In that sense, Porch Diaries became a reminder of the opportunities available for connection and belonging beyond screens and chosen social circles.

Folded softcover with tipped-in image embossed title and exposed binding, Self-Published, Printed by Bambra Press (Melbourne), 144 pages, Edition of 750, 23 x 30cm

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Ethiopian-born, South Sudanese, Narrm/Melbourne-based artist and writer Atong Atem explores migrant narratives, postcolonial practices in the African diaspora, and concepts of identity that celebrate visual and photography as an extension of oral tradition.

Commissioned by Photo Australia for PHOTO 2022 International Festival of Photography, Surat (which translates from Sudanese Arabic as ‘snapshots’) is a homage to family photos and the characters within them. Working on the series throughout 2021, Atem revisited her family photo albums, which span decades and continents, restaging and reimagining the scenes and players they depict. The resulting book is a series of performances as self-portraits, documenting the act of photographing and being photographed, framing and being framed. It is a performative depiction of photography, utilising the repetition of dressing, sitting, posing, changing, testing, adjusting and capturing that is so often implicit in the medium.

Section-sewn hardcover, Published by Perimeter Editions x Photo Australia (Melbourne), 48 pages, 28 x 20.8 cm

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Erin Lee is a documentary photographer and photobook artist originally from New Zealand currently based in Naarm / Melbourne. Erin recently graduated with a Master of Arts in Photography from Photography Studies College, Melbourne. She has published with agencies such as CNN, The Guardian, Vice, Financial Times, Broadly, The Advocate, etc. Erin’s photobooks have been shortlisted for the Lucie Foundation Photobook Prize, the Perimeter Photo 2020 International Photobook Prize, Kassel Dummy finalists and included in The PhotoBookMuseum, Cologne.

The Crimson Thread investigates the ubiquitous presence of Australia’s colonial history and examines the impact of colonisation and white privilege on contemporary Australian society. Using speculative documentary photography, the work encourages viewers to question official histories and to consider how strongly our past still exists in the present. 

Handmade by the Artist, Artist Edition Only, 21 x 26cm

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Izabela is a Polish artist whose studio practice embraces photography as a way of interpreting and re-conceptualising the function that images have in the present. Negotiating the possibilities of how material forms come together, she draws largely on finding, fragmenting, translating and reconfiguring things that are both photographed and found. Conceptually anchored in the effects of globalisation and Pluta’s own personal experience as a migrant to Australia, her creative pursuit seeks to articulate a fluid mode of moving through and being in the world. She lives and works between the lands of the Awabakal and Worimi in Awabakal country (Newcastle, NSW) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal (Paddington, Sydney).

The German term nihilartikel is used to describe the little-known practice of inserting intentional errors, falsities or fictitious entries into reference texts – academic works, dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, directories – for the purpose of later identifying plagiaries, copies or other infringements to intellectual copyright. Taking this somewhat elusive practice as its subtext, Izabela Pluta’s major new book approaches photography and its central quandaries of authenticity and representation from a series of unsettled and dynamic vantages.

Perimeter Editions, coptic bind, softcover, 128 pages, 31.7 x 24cm.

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Jordan Madge is a Melbourne (Narm)-based conceptual documentary photographer who explores both personal stories and larger community-based themes. He works primarily with the photobook format and the self-published book he made during his undergraduate studies at Photography Studies College, Melbourne, was highly acclaimed and was inspired by the disappearance of a girl in country Victoria. His most recent publication, Banana Spider Bite, was published by Bad News Books.

Banana Spider Bite documents a migration to a foreign country that was inspired by a romantic gesture. Made up of photographs of Madge’s partner, Whitney, and their new urban surroundings, Banana Spider Bite juxtaposes small moments of intimacy with an anonymous city environment.  Night flowers and fruit are illuminated in the glow of the camera’s flash bulb, the urban landscape becomes otherworldly in the gleam of street lights, Banana Spider Bite is a dreamlike exploration on the twin complexities of love and understanding of place.

Embossed softcover with flaps, Published by Bad News Books, 74 pages, Edition of 50, 20 x 24cm

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Kaitlyn Church is a Melbourne-based documentary photographer and her practice primarily documents the ever-changing landscape of rural and regional Australia. She is interested in creating long-form new documentary photographic work where the photographer is not merely a silent observer but is an integral part of the project, either as protagonist or narrator.

The few memories of my Grandfather I have remaining have been distorted with time. Like the family photo archive, they are often blurry, fading and fragmented.
After my Grandmother passed away after a brief battle with dementia, the task of cleaning the home they shared was left to their remaining family. During the process of sorting through a lifetime’s worth of mementos, a series of diaries were discovered, gathering dust in the back of a cupboard. These diaries have given valuable insight into who Leonard was. These books include detailed descriptions of his day-to-day life, childhood memories, biographies of his parents and all 13 of his siblings, as well as his innermost thoughts about his then-impending death. These diaries have safeguarded memories that would have otherwise died along with my Grandfather.
On the surface, these diaries measure the passing of time, documenting current affairs and family activities, and mark out the monthly rainfall – textual systems of measurement that have enabled me to connect with him in his absence.

Hardcover, Self-Published, 88 pages, Edition of 5

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Luke Le (formerly Luke van Aurich) is a Sydney-based artist and designer, working with no formal training. Born in Perth, his career has spanned photography, publishing, furniture design and product design. He has exhibited his photography in various contexts in Australia and internationally. He is a co-founder of the sustainable design label and retailer Column A.

Le’s photography questions where the meaning of a photograph lies? Where do the limits of its authorship, spectatorship and democracy cross paths? These are questions at the heart of untrained Sydney-based artist Luke Le’s photographic practice. In his first major artist book titled What are you looking for? Le reroutes notions of diarism and the impromptu to broach new aesthetic and philosophical terrains. A kind of open letter to a former life in Melbourne, the book forms both an intensely personal gesture and a wider provocation toward the subjectivities and assumptions that underpin photography itself. These raw, intuitive images – created from scans of degraded Risograph prints – are at once rooted in and free of place. Their dynamic gaze veers toward specificity, but never quite lands. Amidst the noise of their gritty, fine grain, Le’s images leave as many questions as answers.

Softcover with poster dust jacket and perfect bind, Published by Perimeter Editions (Melbourne), 170 pages, Special Edition of 25, 25.5 x 17cm

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Matt Dunne is an artist and writer living and working in Melbourne, Australia. His work focuses on the complex relationship between people, nature and place. His work self-published three zines and his work is held in numerous private collections. He is the founder of Tall Poppy Press, a publishing house enabling emerging Australian photographers and previously co-funded and ran This on That.

In 2017, in the remote South-East of Australia, a man called the police and reported that he had murdered more than 400 eagles over the last two years at the instruction of his boss. The news coverage of the criminal trial for this act was the starting point for artist Matt Dunne to explore the wider deliberate killing of the Wedge-Tailed Eagle. Dunne’s forthcoming book The Killing Sink is part true crime and part a public act of grieving for what has been lost.

Softcover with foil & silkscreen, Published by Void (Greece) & Tall Poppy Press (Melbourne), 88 pages, Edition of 750, 20.6 x 27cm

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Matthew Sleeth is a visual artist and filmmaker who maintains a multi-disciplinary and collaborative practice with a focus on the aesthetic and conceptual concerns of new media. He explores the performative and photographic nature of visual culture through diverse processes of mechanical reproduction, creating objects and experiences that are often political, visually ambitious and formally experimental. Sleeth is also a keen publisher and he has published eight books: News & Weather (2022), Ten Series/106 Photographs (2007) published by New York’s Aperture Foundation and Opfikon (2004), Survey (2004), home+away (2003), Tour of Duty (2002), The Bank Book (2001) and The Roaring Days (1998).

For much of Melbourne’s second wave COVID lockdowns, I thought about the past. With a suspended present, there seemed only an imagined future and a distant past. Like many artists, I went back to past works, looking for the patterns…
NEWS & WEATHER was made while living in Tokyo during 2005/6. Each spread features an image from Japan paired with an article I was reading online that day from my hometown newspaper, alongside a record of the weather where the photograph was made. The project reminded me how you can be intensely immersed in another place while still thinking about home. Both these contradictory thoughts can exist together.
NEWS & WEATHER is also about the country Australia was becoming and how we ended up here. As the Howard government years drew to a close, there was a feeling that Australia was changing and becoming a different place, less generous and nastier.
The articles I read in The Age each day chronicled shifts: such as the relative indifference to the hanging of Van Tuong Nguyen in Singapore, the violent racism of the Cronulla riots and the wave of devastating bushfires that would signal the visible effects of climate change. The end of my time in Japan coincided with the Indonesian courts imposing death sentences for drug trafficking on Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.
Now, looking back at this work fifteen years later, I realise it was only the beginning…

Hardcover, Published by Third Floor Press (Melbourne), 17 x 23cm

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Morganna Magee is a photographer based in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia) living and working on the land of the Wurundjeri, Bunurong and Boon Wurrung people, on the foothills of the Dandenong ranges. Her practice sits between storytelling and expanded documentary, creating work that pulls from an emotional response to the world whilst still being based in the documentary tradition. Her two decade-long practice as a photographer encompasses commercial, editorial, and fine art with her work being awarded and exhibited nationally and internationally, recognised by institutions such as The National Portrait gallery Australia and Miami Art week.

Created in the streets near where I live, on daily walks, the images depict a dark exploration of the landscape interspersed with motifs of my family and of animals both, dead and alive. Te resulting images come from an intuitive response to my surroundings, the images interplay with photography’s ability to make eternal what is feeting. Trough in camera and in scanner manipulations these images exist through intervention, sometimes by the artist, others by the unseen atmosphere that surrounds what is photographed.

Softcover, Published by Tall Poppy Press (Melbourne), 64 pages, Edition of 200, 21 x 26.5cm

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Pearce Leal is a photographer based in Naarm, Australia. His practice-based research explores the interrelationships between humans and ecologies. He utilises traditional documentary practices, found imagery, and processes of making physical interventions on photographs to engage viewers with their own perceptions of fragile ecologies. He leads photography workshops in the natural world, teaching photography enthusiasts how to refine their craft in some of the world’s most diverse ecological locations. Pearce recently completed a Bachelor of Photography at Photography Studies College, Melbourne.

The Arctic, the Southern Andes and the South Pole are recognised as regions that are significantly changing due to the effects of the climate crisis on the landscape. With society becoming more conscious of the impact of climate collapse, large numbers of photo tourists now flock to these destinations to capture these rapidly and unnaturally changing landscapes. More than 74,000 tourists visited Antarctica alone in the 2019–2020 season, almost double the figures from a decade ago.

A Field Guide to Seeing New Land observes what compels the enthusiast photographer to travel to places in traumatic change and how photo-tourists are instructed to take photographs of their temporary surroundings.

Softcover, Published by ACB Press (Melbourne), 36 pages, Edition of 150, 27 x 19.5cm

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Rebecca Fagan’s art practice uses photography and writing to satisfy an insatiable curiosity about the complex past and the duplicitous present. Her research-based methodology uses found text and memoir in conversation with imagery. In this practice, the narrative is subjected to various degrees of concealment, acknowledging the divisive nature of contemporary themes and the sensitivities of society and the art world. Rebecca began her arts education with a first-class honours degree in Art History from La Trobe University in Melbourne with minor studies in archaeology and anthropology. Rebecca recently completed an MA – Photography through Photography Studies College, Melbourne.

This volume is a meditation on the darkness of human history using self-reflection and memoir of the artist; a non-indigenous Australian woman living on stolen Country. Here, Rebecca explores the physical landscape of her home in a central Victorian river valley, together with critical state archives, historical newspapers and early colonial letters. The inquiry culminates in a process-driven outcome of visual and textual story-telling that attempts to reveal and conceal the contested history of the landscape and in turn Australia, as a nation.

In this photobook, most images appear inside the folded page and some are further concealed using cropping as redaction. Along with the literary narrative, these visual devices are an attempt to address historical and contemporary trauma and the complex relationship that the landscape and Country has to all Australian people.

The Bleachfield is soon to be self-published and will become the first volume of the manifesto.

Soft cover, Self-Published, Artist Edition, 00 x 00cm

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Sam Forsyth-Gray is a Melbourne-based artist whose work explores ideas of nostalgia, memory, and the tangibility of the photographic medium. Interested in the merging of fine art and documentary visual languages – often using archival images alongside his own work – the process is fluid and experimental. With a special interest in the application of found images within contemporary art practice, his work seeks to create new ways of both seeing and understanding these objects through his own photographic responses.

New Archivalia is a photographic project driven by practical and theoretical research which seeks to explore the unique connection between photography and the archive and the dynamics of the photograph’s role as either passive archived material or as an active and agential means of preserving, cataloguing, and documenting. The project seeks to investigate evolving contemporary notions of the archive, in its iterations both physical and digital and ultimately in its relation to power structures. New Archivalia takes the form of moving image, photographic prints, and a publication is the result of his studies during the Master of Arts – Photography undertaken at Photography Studies College, Melbourne.

Softcover Self-Published, Artist Edition on newsprint

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Sarah Pannell is an Australian photographer whose work concerns culture, landscape, tradition and community. Pannell’s fascination with humans’ ever-evolving dance with their surrounding environments has led to an array of projects focussing on everyday life, preservation of traditions and communities around the world. She has produced a number of publications including Tabriz to Shiraz (2019) published by Perimeter Editions and Hillvale, self-published titles including Sehir (2014) and The Territories (2015).

I small-run photo booklet of images shot in the Northern Territory, Australia, on the traditional lands of the Arrernte, Luritja, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people 2021.

Saddle Stitched Booklet, Self-Published, Printed by Momento Pro (Sydney), 28 pages, Edition of 50, 14.8 x 21cm

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Tom Goldner is an Australian artist, curator and teacher of photography residing on Wurundjeri country in Sherbrooke, Victoria. His career spans art, commercial projects, education, fundraising, gallery management and community engagement initiatives. Goldner’s creative practice is positioned within the expanded documentary genre of photography. His projects utilise a multifaceted, collaborative and experimental approach to storytelling which negotiates the intersections between social and environmental constructs. Together with business partner, Harriet Tarbuck, Goldner currently holds the position of co-creative director at Photo Collective – an organisation dedicated to finding meaning and sharing knowledge through photography. In 2021 Goldner completed an Master of Arts – Photography at Photography Studies College, Melbourne, where he currently lectures.

I small-run photo booklet of images shot in the Northern Territory, Australia, on the traditional lands of the Arrernte, Luritja, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people 2021.

Black artboard cover with tipped on image, exposed binding with concertina text insert, Self-published, 120 pages, Edition of 100, 33 x 26cm

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Wendy Catling is an Australian visual artist working primarily in the medium of photography. Motivated by personal and family histories, the artist takes a reparative approach to revealing the complexities of human relationships. Her work focuses on shame, memory, power, and trauma. She employs alternative, vernacular and studio photography, video and installation practices. Catling completed her Master of Arts – Photography project titled Nightshade in 2020 at Photography Studies College, Melbourne, and since 2001 Catling has taught art and photography to secondary and adult students and is currently visual arts faculty coordinator at Wesley College, Melbourne.

Nightshade explores domestic abuse and intergenerational trauma. The project follows the relationship of my parents. During a tumultuous 20 years, they lived at more than 10 different addresses. At first, she was trying to escape my father’s stalking; then she was forced to marry when she became pregnant. Even at the worst times and living in decrepit small rental houses my mother would make a garden. Since my father’s early death in a car accident, she has lived a more stable and happy life, volunteering in natural bush reserves, to remove environmental weeds and promote the growth of native plants. She is now in her 90s and her own beautiful garden is kept scrupulously weed free. Throughout the book my mother’s battle against weeds is paralleled with her resistance to coercive control.

Exposed section sewn soft cover, Published by M.33 (Melbourne), 192 pages, Edition of 150, 28 x 21cm

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Wouter Van de Voorde studied painting and printmaking at KASK in Ghent Belgium. In 2008 he moved to Australia where he currently resides with his family on Ngunnawal land in Canberra.

Death is not here combines disparate photographs created by artist Wouter Van de Voorde. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, he was about to become a father for the second time. He had been making still lifes with fossils, and in his spare time he had begun digging in the backyard with his son unearthing the grave of a family chicken. Photographs of subsequent excavations, rock sculptures, an eroded gorge and an ongoing preoccupation with ravens are combined to create a new narrative representing everyday encounters between life and death. The book is punctuated with disquieting and ambiguous photographs of hand dug holes. The original impetus to create a hole was a request from Van de Voorde’s son to play real-life Minecraft and so they began digging in the backyard. As the hole grew deeper and wider, Van de Voorde became fascinated with the void and began experimenting with drawing the outlines of the holes with flames. Upon unearthing the grave of a departed chicken, the bones visible, they harvested clay and used to fire small objects, such as a skull pictured in the book. The images of the backyard voids are interspersed with photographs of the artist’s son exploring an eroded gorge, which appears like a giant version of their backyard excavations—father and son sharing explorations of what lies beneath

Iridescent foil stamped hard cover, Published by Void (Greece), 160 pages, Edition of 750, 22 x 27.5cm

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Yask Desai is a Melbourne-based Australian-Indian visual artist who works with photography, video, archives and text. His work explores themes of place and collective and individual identity and often combines historical and social research to explore the cultural connections between imagery. He continues to work on multiple projects and his current work Telia, formed the basis of his Master of Arts – Photography undertaken at Photography Studies College, Melbourne, where he now lectures. Desai is also a portrait photographer and has published books and won awards for his work.

Telia attempts to reanimate and re-examine the experiences of the men who migrated from undivided India and worked as hawkers or travelling salesman within rural Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Telia was the word used to refer to Australia by some of the migrant’s families who were left behind in India. The final work involves the production of a photobook consisting of archival artefacts (including documents and collected historical photographs) in combination with his own photography. In its gallery exhibit form the work also includes a series of video poems that help to place Desai, as an Anglo-Indian artist, within the overall narrative framework of the project.

Hardcover, Self-Published, Artist Edition of 5,

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Currently based in Melbourne, Australia, Ying Ang is a photographer and author with an extensive exhibition history and client base, having lived and worked in Singapore, Sydney and New York City. She is on the teaching faculty at the ICP in New York City and is the Director of Reflexions 2.0 – a photographic masterclass based in Europe – and Director / Curator at Le Space Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.

Her first artist book, Gold Coast, won the New York Photo Festival and Encontros Da Imagem book prize for 2014 and acquired for the Rare Books Collection at the Victorian State Library and MoMA. Gold Coast was also listed by Lensculture, Voices of Photography, Asia Pacific Photobook Archive and Self Publish Be Happy in their top photobooks of 2014 and honoured with a nomination for the prestigious Prix Pictet award. Ying also fulfilled the role of Chief Curator for the Obscura Festival of Photography in Malaysia in 2016 and was the keynote speaker at the inaugural Photobook New Zealand.

Ying’s recent publication, The Quickening, was a winner of the Belfast Photo Festival 2021 and awarded with the silver award for the 2020 BIFA Documentary Photo Book Prize, bronze medal for the Documentary Book Prize at the 2021 Moscow International Foto Awards and Honorable Mention at the PX3 Paris Photo Awards and the Tokyo International Foto Awards. The Quickening was exhibited in a solo show during Rencontres d’Arles in France in 2019 at the Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation.

Ying was most recently featured in “FIRECRACKERS: Female Photographers Now”, a showcase of contemporary female documentary photographers published by Thames & Hudson, and “How We See: Photobooks By Women”, featuring one hundred 21st-century photobooks by women photographers published by 10×10 Photobooks.

Simultaneously touted as the crime capital as well as the tourist capital of Australia, the South Coast was a straggly and dangerous strip of coastline that was renamed to Gold Coast by real estate developers in an effort to seduce investors, retirees and holiday-makers. In a huge push to attract potential home owners through the 60’s and 70’s, a vast network of canals was constructed to provide for waterfront homes, complete with an unexpectedly large population of bull sharks that lurk in the shallow depths. This relationship between selling the idea of the perfect home and pervading danger is evident in the local news, that fluctuates between million dollar listings and tales of sleaze and murder. State Government corruption and unethical business practices through the 80’s and property scams in the 90’s cemented the Gold Coast as the perfect place for Australians of ill repute to come and reinvent themselves.

Chevron patterned hardcover with pale pink screen printed box, featuring diamond shape cut out. 9.6 x 11.2 inches in size, 132 pages with 72 colour images. Additional newspaper zine insert. Offset printing on matte coated paper in the Netherlands.

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