Thursday, February 19, 2015

Melbourne Photobook Festival - totally wonderful

It was a great pleasure to be in Melbourne this last weekend and take part in their inaugural Photobook Festival. Here was a chance to catch-up with friends and meet new people. Not to mention get to look at a heap of new photobooks. On a zero to ten scale I'd give the festival a ten! It was remarkable what kingpins Heidi Romano and Daniel Boetker-Smith achieved with an immense amount of hard work and probably a limited budget.

I was blown away with Katrin Koenning's show, Indefinitely at the James Makin Gallery. Hauntingly mysterious and evocative, the work is in Katrin's words: about love and a seemingly infinite space that is, in fact, filled to the rim with all kinds of things.

Katrin Koenning from the series Indefinitely

Emma Phillips very kindly gave me a copy of her self-published bookwork SALT. This beautifully produced book is full of hard light and spare but loaded images, minimalist and alien.

Emma Phillips - SALT

Emma Phillips - SALT

It was good to catch up with Dan Rule from Perimeter Books, Angel Luis Gonzalez of Photo Ireland and a very jet lagged Ron Jude.
I also enjoyed meeting and talking with Hoda Afshar whose work I'm looking forward to have a good look at.

Under the banner of REMOTE Photobooks, New Yorker, now Aucklander Anita Totha was working her photobook table promoting New Zealand bookworks. But still time for a delicious Polish cake at St Kilda.

Anita Totha - REMOTE but accessible

Last but not least, in-between all the photobook action I was able to squeeze off nearly 400 frames and a 28 page bookwork is at the printer as I write.

Harvey Benge - Melbourne

Stacy Mehrfar - shoots HB shooting

An an image from Stacy Mehrfar's work below. You can see more on her website HERE.

Stacy Mehrfar - American Palimpsests

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