PHOTO 2024

Among the most influential artists of today, Nan Goldin is renowned for her intimate capturing of life around her, and transforming the role of photography in contemporary art. Emerging from the artist’s own life and relationships, her photographs and moving-image works are both deeply personal and profoundly influential, addressing essential themes of identity, love, sexuality and mortality. Her subjects are her friends, lovers, family and intimate surroundings.

Presented across the façade of The Atrium, My Parents on their Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary continues Goldin’s career-long theme of the human need for companionship and, in this instance, looks to the experience of her parents later in life. For the artist, relationships are not only essential to emotional sustenance but the foundation of her artistic practice. As she wrote: “These pictures come out of relationships, not observation.”

Goldin takes photographs to connect, to keep the people she loves in her memory. She is committed to the idea that photography can faithfully record a time and place, and do so in a way that has real social purpose.

Curated by PHOTO Australia
Presented by Fed Square

Moroccan-Belgian photographer Mous Lamrabat shapes a parallel universe, filtering his own multicultural brand through humour, empathy, and irreverence. Lamrabat subverts North African stereotypes, expertly layering Western brands and pop culture with symbols from his Euro-Afro heritage and faith. The result? Pure joy. Colour, audacity, and clever mise en scène define his work, with a positive energy that is as irresistible as it is provocative.

Born in an Amazigh village in the north of Morocco, Mous Lamrabat grew up in Belgium, where he remembers feeling different, and this “otherness” has fuelled his photographic vision. A trip to Morocco hit him, like a flash of warm southern light, revealing his inner voice: “It was there, standing right in front of me”. He began to build his own supercharged universe, where nothing is off-limits and everyone is invited to the mix. The characters that emerge from his work go wherever they choose to go, be whoever they choose to be.

Lamrabat take us on an exotic journey, sharing his world, where imagination runs wild. With his cross-cultural mind and non-binary view of the world and our place in it, Lamrabat breaks down barriers and spreads his doctrine of inclusivity and diversity.

Curated by PHOTO Australia
Presented in partnership with the City of Melbourne
Supported by Fed Square

Since 2008, Jemima Wyman has collected hundreds of online images related to camouflage used in global protest.

The photo-collage works from Wyman’s Haze series weave various images of smoke together to form landscapes. They become an atlas of recent global dissent. Meanwhile, her Declassified series utilises the discarded photo pieces that fall to her studio floor to depict the negative space around where smoke appears during protest—revealing defiant protesters, police with shields on masse, hands holding flares, and the detritus left from conflict in the street.

The titles for these artworks are multi-page records detailing each constituent image and the associated protest, location, and date, gathering disparate historical moments into a partial yet sweeping account of global unrest.

Curated by PHOTO Australia
Commissioned by Photo Australia and the City of Melbourne
Supported by Fed Square
In association with Agency

From flaming jungles to taxi-ride chit-chat, six artists look to the future from very different standpoints.

Embracing a handful of approaches to the future, from hard-hitting documentary photography following a man-made water crisis, to the world on fire, and an on-the-run documentary about what the everyman thinks the metaverse really is, these are films to get you thinking and feeling.

Screening daily on the big screen at Fed Square and featuring some of the most interesting Australian and international artists working with moving image, this film program provides space to reflect on artists’ views of the future of the environment, culture and technology.

Moorina Bonini (Yorta Yorta/Wurundjeri/Wiradjuri), LaToya Ruby Frazier (US), Caroline Garcia (AU) and Noémie Goudal (FR).

Curated by PHOTO Australia
Supported by Fed Square

Artist Zoë Croggon uses archive imagery to respond to the architectural metamorphosis taking place as part of the Melbourne Arts Precinct Transformation Project.

Croggon has a background in dance, and the body has long been the focus of her work. She presents the trained body and modern architecture as fascinating counterparts, each unyielding, severe, and rigorously functional in form.

For this project, she has been invited to comb through the expansive collections of archive imagery at Arts Centre Melbourne to create an architectural and historical synthesis responding to this significant shift in Melbourne’s cultural fabric.

Presented by Fed Square

What is coming to pass on this enormous continent as the Earth changes? What does the future hold for communities facing the impact of the climate crisis?

Big Sky is a photographic survey of this nation’s heartland. The Australian bush is an ancient land of Aboriginal Countries renamed and reshaped by colonisation. In recent years the transition to large-scale mining, the mechanisation of farming, and a population shift to larger regional centres has reshaped the cultural and environmental landscape. It has also suffered from the gamut of extreme weather linked to climate change—bushfires, flooding and drought.

In this ambitious project, Adam Ferguson takes in the fading yet iconic events of rural life, shrinking small-towns, Aboriginal connection to Country, pastoralism, the impacts of globalisation and the adversity of climate change. In doing so, he asks whether the Australian identity of yore still rings true, particularly when seen in the context of the complex realities of contemporary life in the outback.

Curated by PHOTO Australia
Supported by Metro Tunnel Creative Program

A world-first global forum exploring the future of photography presented by PHOTO Australia, supported by Fed Square and Museum of Australian Photography.

Join a day of inspiring keynotes and in conversations with artists and thought leaders from around the world.

Speakers include Ryan McGinley (US), Boris Eldagsen (DE), Jo Duck (AU), filip custic (ES/HR), Janet Lawrence (AU), Daniel Jack Lyons (US) and many more.

View the full program here with more speakers still to be announced: https://photo.org.au/events/ideas-summit

Curated by PHOTO Australia
Supported by Fed Square