Andrew Quilty, an Australian photojournalist based in New York, said Dupont’s reputation “was a big factor in choosing to be part of Reportage. The quality of participants is incredible. I think Reportage is aiming to branch out to an audience beyond photographers and photojournalists and the locations that Stephen has selected for the exhibitions and talks will do that. Bringing photojournalism to the Museum of Contemporary Art is a real feat. In Australia photojournalism as art struggles in comparison to places like New York where there is a real respect for photojournalism, not just retrospectively, but in the present. Anything that promotes photojournalism like Reportage does, is important and this year the Festival is aiming sky-high”.
Quilty, who is a multi-award winner, is also a member of Oculi, a collective of Australian photographers, who have a group show this year with the theme of “Home”. With the group show Quilty said, “There are no photo essays as such, but we’ve all responded in our own ways to the theme home. There’s around eighty photographs in the exhibition and we are giving audience members the opportunity to select forty photographs which they can assemble as they wish in a personalised book that is being produced by Blurb. So we are putting the process of editing into the hands of the audience and I am really keen to see how that works”.
He also has work in the Reportage projections, black and white images of the Australian landscape ravaged by bushfires. “I wanted to explore that beauty in destruction which is something that is a pretty vexed issue in photojournalism particularly with people like Salgado and Nachtwey who are often accused of beautifying tragedy. I don’t subscribe to that line of thinking and with the bushfire landscapes I was looking at taking advantage of a situation where human suffering is somewhat removed. That was a personal decision too because at the time I shot that work I wasn’t really interested in engaging with people photographically. This was an opportunity to explore a subject, an important issue, that I had never really looked at before”.
Quilty chose to shoot in black and white, which he said was “entirely an aesthetic choice. I went with a preconceived idea to show that contrast of the trees and baked earth and smoky skies, to show the monochromatic landscape left after the fires”.
Oculi Collective: HOME
Cleland Bond Building, Reportage Festival Hub
Until 13 June 2013
Reportage Projections – check the website for locations
Alison Stieven-Taylor
