Museum of Australian Photography exhibition
An opinion piece about photography exhibitions, the visual arts, and things.
As the title of the exhibition indicates, this is a photography prize exhibition. Maybe a third of the works are not photographs but are contemporary artworks that either use photographic processes or at least have links to photography.
Despite that, please see this exhibition because there is a bunch of photography worth taking in – worth standing in front of and engaging with.
In among the photographs on exhibition, there were at least two that I would like to have taken home.
The problem is context. The photographs on exhibition are hard to appreciate because of the distraction of the non-photographic contemporary art pieces. I did not take much to the simple graphic ones and the neo-late expressionists works.
My advice is to make your way around the photographs before going back around to work out how you feel about the contemporary art works.
Overall, the mood of the exhibition and the accompanying words was sombre and serious. The general tone was along the lines of so many other contemporary art exhibitions that overtly emphasise how guilty we should be.
There was little enjoyment or the celebration of life or the beauty of our planet. You did not leave with a smile on your face or with that feeling of how much you had enjoyed the exhibition.
The next question is whether I agreed with the judges on who they selected for the major prize and the honourable mentions. I do not. But as this is a selection of 45 from about 750 works submitted, it would not be possible to nominate my winners. I would need to see the full set of submissions rather than working from someone else’s short list.
If you are in Melbourne, please get out to Wheeler’s Hill with your friends and have a look for yourselves. There are so few photography exhibitions to be seen at the moment. If nothing else, you will end up having a debate with your friends.
FYI, I found a review by Marcus Bunyan of the 2015 prize exhibition. I hope he is ask to review this year’s Bowness. He may disagree with some of my opinions.
Here’s my photographs of the exhibition:
The exhibition is on till 10th November 2024. Here’s link for the exhibition
and a link here to the listing of the works listed by year back to 2013.
More observations:
Being a person who spends time looking online at contemporary and historic photography exhibitions both within Australia and internationally, it is very obvious that in 2024 the interest in historic and contemporary photography oversees is alive and well – far more so than in Australia.
The issues around the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize exhibition are not easy to write about in one post. There’s much to be said and debated about how contemporary photography is being defined in Australia by particular institutions. I am considering a piece on those issues for another day.