Photofile - Back Issues

Post-Feminism?

In 1975, the date of the United Nations International Women's Year, American arch feminist guru, Lucy Lippard visited Australia, and helped galvanise artists such as Bonita Ely, Elizabeth Gower and the Women's Art Movement, which had been founded the year before. Now, in the new millennium, with the plethora of female figures working as artists, curators, critics and dealers, it's hard to imagine women having to battle to be heard. But such were the times.

Thos cont...

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The Portrait Issue

And the winner is... A funny thing happened on the way to the deadline of this issue of Photofile; three writers; almost simultaneously, wanted to write about the plethora of photographic awards that seem to have swamped the genre of late. Both Anne Marsh and Maurice O'Riordan took The National Photographic Portraiture Prize as a springboard for highly incisive discussions on the stature of photography today; the blurring lines between high and low art, bet cont...

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Innocence UNCuT:

When colonial-era scientists sent a platypus to England it was considered a cleverly devised practical joke. What kind of mammal lived in the water and had a duck’s beak? In many ways Australia, both in its very nature and in its culture can be looked at the same way; a bizarre melting pot of desert and forest, of cultures from here and afar.

Australia, in this issue of Photofile, is portrayed in numerous ways. Brendon Lee’s ‘remaking’ of aspects of Aust cont...

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Post Punk

I must say that I have had an interesting few months since the last Photofile appeared. First off there was a long lunch with the infamous performance artist Stelarc, whose latest endeavour has seen a third ear grow on his left arm. It was a warm day in a moderately crowded restaurant and when Stelarc removed his jacket a gradual hush filled the room. It's not every day that you dine with a man with three ears.

That led to talking with Stelarc's partner, cont...

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Distortions

Domesticity can be a strange thing indeed. As filmmaker David Lynch illustrated so wonderfully in his film Blue Velvet, there are many oddities that lie beneath the surface. Three artists in this issue of Photofile certainly seem to back this up.

In Maree Alexander's world, everyday objects take on a mysteriously erotic frisson. A jug pushes a glass into a corner with clearly erogenous intent, fruit squeezers prepare to copulate - the everyday becomes a cont...

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