Photography / Concept to Publication. At PhotoAccess until December 21. Reviewed by CON BOEKEL.

This exhibition features the outcomes of the 2024 PhotoAccess Concept to Publication workshops .

Three of the 11 exhibitors, in particular, examine elements of the human condition.

I have never felt comfortable sharing my urban spaces with skateboarders, but Albert Soesastro’s series of skate boarding images provide a refreshing and positive reframing of the urban environment. We share the same Canberra spaces but see them almost completely differently. For Soesastro, fences, walls and other structures are not barriers. They are opportunities for creative movement.

While the photographic language used is familiar, Soesastro does an excellent job of portraying the muscular strength, the balance, the sense of risk and of danger and of the swirling movements of his subjects. The dominant camera angle – looking up – adds power to the series.

Australia’s birth rate, at around 1.57 live births per woman, is well below replacement level. Without compensating net migration Australians would eventually disappear. Such declines are a global phenomenon and demographers expect the global population to begin a long decline later this century.

The grand statistics cover billions of complex individual decisions and experiences. In The Messy Journey to Motherhood Kate Leddick gives us a personal insight into the complexities, challenges, chaos and beauty of mothering.

Leddick uses varied photographic and processing techniques to give expression to her emotions. There are superimposed exposures and the technical reworking of archived images. Some of the images are cropped. For example in one print we see only the bottom half a child. Leddick’s images are part unsettling and part satisfying resolutions. The global population is the sum of its parts. The prints, as pinned to the wall, present an apposite materiality.

My favourite was George Kriz’s Holding On, Letting Go. It is a visual tribute to his beloved wife Marjorie who died at the beginning of the year. I found this exhibition to be profoundly moving. Holding On, Letting Go is the epitome of love. The visual metaphors have wonderful integrity.

One of the patterns in the series of images is of evanescent foot prints along paths and tracks. Another is of solid, grounded rocks and of pavements which hold on. These may be flanked by the softness of windblown sand or of ephemeral vegetation – letting go. The final image, overexposed, integrates the whole. The accompanying music adds significantly to the experience.

The exhibitions here are a credit to the high quality of the workshop mentors, Alex Robinson and David Hempenstall.