Ballarat International Foto Biennale GradFoto 2024 – Highly Commended.
ICONOCLAST.
This practice-led research project uses reflexive and responsive modes of observation, borrowed from the documentary photography genre, to critique the way that dominant power structures use symbolism to enforce their imperatives. I have created a large volume of photographs while walking through urban Australia, aiming to capture the absurdity of the lived experience of everyday Australians as they navigate the labyrinthine illusions of reality perpetuated by the world powers. These images are then exhibited in carefully curated sequences with iconography of power – also captured during my walks – to reveal and critique power structures. In dialogue with Jean Baudrillard’s Hyper-Reality, the research interrogates the ongoing power struggle between these institutions for a dominant broadcast of reality and how that struggle shapes our everyday. Navigating the contemporary constructions of reality that emerge systematically from the media and other world powers, thinkers like Debord and Baudrillard suggest that the outdated notions of truth favoured by documentarians throughout the 20th century can no longer grasp truth in today’s power dynamics. Reality and imitation are indistinguishable. So, how does documentary photography confront reality when the line between reality and non-reality has blurred?
