holtkamp

I had never considered using black and white photography until I was granted access to use the darkrooms at the Australian National University in Canberra. In that year I went from knowing relatively nothing about the whole process to being really passionate about spending time in the dark with chemicals. The images in this series are either shot on large format 4x5 camera or with my trusty medium format.

Fences and being fenced in is a recurring theme in this series. On a larger scale fences and borders are a problematic subject in Australia, the ongoing mistreatment of refugees held in detention camps is an illustration of this. Fierce border protection is in place for national safety and to exclude and filter out what is perceived as scary and alien. On a micro scale Australians mirror this in their backyards. Steel (Colorbond) panels which transform backyards into ghetto like enclosures are very popular. I too made the mistake of jumping on the the backyard security wagon and have been nursing an intense hate for my backyard fence ever since. Through this experience I started seeing the beauty in other more organic fences which seem to respond more to the elements. This series contains seeds of an ongoing investigation in this subject.

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Jiro Murofushi

Whitney Lewis-Smith

Minoru Takeyama