....to the Fringe

Well Petals, France has long been departed and we’re back in the Victorian Burrow.

This blogs’ a bit like the French tour much was intended and about a 1/3 actually happened.

We’ve been busy post-processing stuff shot in France for exhibition at The Ballarat International Foto Biennale

which opened on the 20^th and will be running till Sept18th

My show, “Continuum” is on at “the Bean Barn” 

A neat little venue with good light and very good coffee.

This work is part of “The Fringe”….  and I am going to be commenting on the fringe shows and their venues over the next couple of weeks.

There’s not much point talking about the “Core” shows as the protagonists are pretty well known and get plenty of coverage.  Some unnecessary.

One exhibitor, Jan Saudek was stage-centre to a small controversy when (I believe) a woman in Ballarat rang festival director Jeff Moorfoot to complain about one of Saudek’s works that she had seen advertising the biennale in Art Almanac.

She was of the opinion that the mother of the child in the image was prostituting her child and wanted the work removed.

Jan Saudek

Apparently, she has been known to “play-the-public-conscience” before and receiving no joy from Jeff, rang both Child Services and then Tourism Victoria with her complaint. A bureaucrat from Tourism Victoria suggested that if the controversy reached the State Government funding might not be forthcoming for the 2013 biennale.

Picture was pulled!

Welcome to the “Nanny-State”

The nasty woman has sexualised the child but provided good publicity via many newspapers and television who ran the image… did she complain to them? Tourism Bureaucrat “covers-arse” and is gutless in the face of a storm in a teacup.

All in all a pathetic reflection of the reality of Australia.    

The process of putting an exhibition of photographs into non gallery spaces is  interesting and  I will make comment on the works and the venues and how they “work” together.

Please take note that even if my opinion is critical of works exhibited that underlying the criticism is a respect for the photographers willing to put their work in front of the public gaze (at much expense) in a real, not in a cyber sense, where so many “fibs, porky's and outright lies” can be told.

Cheers

Shane.