Mortality
Self
Nature
History
Follow the journey from birth to death (and beyond) as PHOTO 2022 traverses the full breadth and depth of human life. Start with Jenny Lewis’ epic documentation of a community from ages 0 to 100 (p50). Then, our formative years are celebrated in Naomi Hobson’s Adolescent Wonderland (p38) and Luo Yang’s portraits of Chinese youth exploring fragility, love and self-expression (p86). Matthieu Gafsou (p17) tracks the transhumanist movement across Europe, following human bodies as they merge with technology, augmenting the flesh and reaching towards immortality; and Otis Burian Hodge reflects on the places, objects and repetitive habits that make up a life (p94). The story continues to unfold with Ponch Hawkes’ studies of Victorian women’s bodies over the age of 50, capturing the rarelydocumented splendour of age in all its diversity (p90). Lives draw to a close in Ioanna Sakellaraki’s explorations of Greek mourning traditions (p30). And Vasantha Yogananthan travels to the afterlife (p29), via the Dussehra festival in India, to document a millennia-old tale told through contemporary bodies.
The body is our container for experiencing the world. But how does our identity define us? And how do we define it? Technology helps us ask these questions. Gillian Wearing uses digital tools to imagine multiple versions of herself (p12). Meanwhile, Ying Ang & Ling Ang create 3D scans, considering our ever-evolving digital selves and the impact of social media on our bodies and minds (p15). In The Portrait (p21), ten artists explore the possibilities of the form, with wildly disparate results. Elsewhere, Mark Smith delves into the space between beauty and ugliness in his images of bodies, challenging notions of disability (p63), and queer artists are front and centre in a series of exhibitions including at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (p54–57), Prahran Square (p79) and Parliament Gardens (p24). Cultural identities are addressed on several fronts: Scotty So (p23) challenges the notion of aesthetic appropriation of Asian cultures, Thandiwe Muriu (p19) uses colourful portraiture to immerse her subjects in Kenyan tradition, and Bidjara man Christian Thompson evokes his culture’s supposedly extinct language—bringing it to vivid life (p43).
As inhabitants of Earth, our natural surroundings are a perpetual wellspring of inspiration. The elements recur throughout this year’s line-up: Hoda Afshar explores the power and myth of the wind in the Strait of Hormuz, off the coast of Iran (p74) and, in a series of surreal images, Honey Long & Prue Stent place the human body within earth and water (p35). Elsewhere, a series of larger-than-life lightboxes on Southbank Promenade (p38) present work by artists including Dean Cross and The Huxleys looking at our relationship with water, and Massimo Vitali shows us leisure, nature and artificiality on the shores of Italian beaches (p37). The space between us and nature is ever-shifting. Danie Mellor (p33) brings Indigenous thinking to landscape photography of environmental destruction, whilst Hannah Brontë presents a powerful suite of new photographs amongst a planting of native flora (p18). Across in Ecuador, Misha Vallejo Prut documents a First Nations community fighting to save the Amazon rainforest for the sake of humankind (p78).
How do actions of the past influence who we are today? James Henry’s photographs and interviews with Kulin Nation Elders (p30) situate the current day within a human history stretching back 60,000 years. Atong Atem looks to the past with Banksia (p92), exploring the forgotten history of Australia’s first African migrants. Elsewhere, Atem also curates the exhibition Be Here Now (p77), in which she invites artists working in photography, film and new media to look to the past to consider the kind of future they hope for. James J. Robinson (p76) deconstructs nostalgia and our yearning for ‘golden days’, filtering it through his own queer, Filipino identity, and the legacy of the Australian frontier narrative is transplanted into the present day in Warwick Thornton’s Meth Kelly (p16). Empire is a recurring theme: Phuong Ngo deals with the colonial legacy of French occupied Vietnam (p87), and in A Bell Rings Across the Valley (p88), five South Asian artists consider the shadow of empire.
Image left: Annie Wang, No.1 The day before I was due to give birth, 2001, from the series The Mother as a Creator, 2001-ongoing. Courtesy the artist. Image right: Samuel Hodge, from the series The Wit of the Staircase (detail), 2022. Courtesy the artist.
Image left: Hoda Afshar, from the series Speak the wind (detail), 2015–20. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Image right: Phuong Ngo, I am the state, 2022, from the series Lost and Found, 2019-ongoing. Courtesy the artist.
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