Ingvar Kenne
Film, photography, portraiture, landscapes, motor vehicles, documentary, long-form narrative — everything in its right place.
See also — Cinéma-vérité, tangible, immediate, original, authentic, anomalous, natural light. Ike!
We want to see clearer and deeper. To see more. To see better. In a way that will take the images deep down to the centre of us. An artist like Ingvar Kenne expands our vision and transports us to what we need to see. There must be selection, some principle of discovery and arrangement. How can we impose but still clear the line of sight so that the subject might emerge unhindered and unforced? Let us consider Ingvar’s images as exemplary in this regard. His work allows us to rediscover, paraphrasing Camus, the two or three images in whose presence our hearts first opened.
Swedish-born and Australian-adopted, Ingvar sees with a perpetual outsider’s eye — sensitive, responsive, alert. Beholding his landscapes, one discovers, image by image, ways of perceiving that honour silence and true sight. It’s a continuing journey; these photos are markers of his and our way there. And then there are his portraits, whether it’s The Ball, a genuinely unkempt and revelatory piece of fearless and particularly Australian ethnography, or Citizen, his ongoing life’s work.
All of life is to be found in Citizen — the famous and the forgotten, the notable and the everyday. At every turn, in every image, we find Ingvar’s adaptability and openness — a spirit of generosity towards his subjects that finds a level no matter the assignment. An adaptable inclusivity, bereft of judgment or implied commentary. That same receptivity and lack of moralising define his debut feature film, The Land, a deeply empathetic and hushed piece about male friendship and the limits of forgiveness.
Across these places — populated or empty, but both profoundly evocative — and faces, we find, again and again, Ingvar’s effortless sense of composition and decision-making and his essential authenticity. Whether found in private efforts or work for partners as eclectic as Mastercard, Hyundai, or Uber Eats, there is the immediacy of the documentary combined with the careful selection principle of the storyteller. But all real, all newly seen.
Further reading;
a portrait of [country] in 2 or 3 Things.
The Ball, interview w/ American Suburb X.
Surreal photos from a two-year odyssey experiencing rural Australia's Bachelor & Spinster Balls
"Across these places and faces, we find, again and again, Ingvar’s effortless sense of composition and decision-making and his essential authenticity."
Saskia Wilson
Photography, film, portraiture, landscapes, food, still life.
See also — dappled, honeysoaked, burnished, transcendent, ethereal, glimmering. Saskia.
Sometimes, it’s all about how much sunlight you’ll permit — how wide the aperture, how generous the vision. What does the sun seek out? Where does it fall? And who is there, in the end, to capture its totality, its dappled and endlessly extending blessing. In Saskia Wilson’s visuals, the heliocentric possibility encompasses all. It’s a forever golden hour and a possibly golden life.
With the sun comes other gifts — warmth, ease, generosity. This isn’t simple magic hour iconography we find in Saskia’s imagery — the glowing vision unlocks other feelings that place her work in a world we want to enter and linger within. The softness and invitation of the human face. The texture of the land. The bloom of fruit, the promised coolness of afternoon drinks, repose and relaxation. All connects with all — image by image; the world grows kinder and more hopeful. And beneath that, beyond mere prettiness, is life as seen clearly — with clarity and authenticity.
What seems at first uniquely Australian extends outwards to capture something larger and more universal. In collaborations with partners as varied as Google, Nike, Swiss Airlines, and Chandon, Saskia shows us colours and places as we might have only dared dream them — munificent, magical. We are aloft, suspended, and somehow still here, at surfeit.
Further reading;
Documentaries, Light Like Syrup and Capturing Nostalgia in 2 or 3 Things.
Simon Harsent
Film, photography, TVC, portraiture, landscapes, conceptual advertising.
See also — considered, crafted, artistic, epic-canvas, black & white, poetic. Visionary.
By one definition, it's what the particular and endlessly rigorous art of photography pursues: the decisive moment — some element or snatched portion of time that, if found and isolated, might speak for the whole. The crucial gesture, the telling look. In the work of Simon Harsent, we find it again and again, so regularly that his output, as a whole, might speak for all of us about everything.
It's there in his work with Hugh Jackman and Usain Bolt, bodies in space, movement captured and isolated. How one step or turn of the torso might reveal the truth of a person's whole life, their reason to be. The power to convert that instantaneous concern into something resonant and grander is the Harsent signature — the punctum, the passageway. Seeing precisely, with his focus and eye, we see more than seemed at first possible. It's there most of all in Simon's extensive portraiture work, where, in the isolated look or gesture, a person's essence feels revealed — forthright, guarded, vulnerable, direct — in all forms, all of us.
Yet a contradictory notion is present too — beyond time, beyond the mere moment. Beholding Simon's icebergs, for example, we spiral past the subject's and our own current mortality and enter considerations in the broader frame — beyond time, mocking our contemporary concerns.
It's a testament to his artistry that these feelings are prominent in his commissioned work — in the last outpost sentiments and security in his work for NRMA or the direct eyelines and stoic resolve of his work with the Australian cricket team for Amazon's Test documentaries. The location we dream of returning to is a single resonant image as time moves over us. The sense of the self we are, staring down an opponent, staring down the battles and endurances of sport and time itself. It's what it all comes down to — that moment, that image.
Further reading;
Juliet Taylor
Film, photography, TVC, creative direction, portraiture, music video, conceptual fashion.
I know a place you can get away. It’s called a dance floor, & here’s what it’s for.
See also — playful, unconventional, impromptu, immediate, candid, natural light. Virtuoso.
How do you visualise an idea? How does an artist put flesh on abstract bones? Consider photography’s natural inclination towards elegance, style, even the ever-elusive notion of cool. It was found and made eternal by artists who knew where to look. When to push and probe, and when to back off and let the moment evolve. A precarious balancing act, where force creates mere strain, and apathy finds nothing at all.
What, then, is attitude? And how does Juliet Taylor find it so effortlessly, in so many images, across her body of work? Is it her continual search and discovery of that particular sequence of frames where the subject's essence and purest mood are most directly evinced? Then there is her proximity and intimacy with her subject, the kind of preternatural connection to a figure that yields looks from eyes unlocked, poses and shapes that only emerge with trust, with genuine engagement and response between camera and subject. In a Juliet Taylor image, we see directly, candidly, and yield.
It's more than an eye — it's the true artist's possession, a way of living and seeing that they convert into similarly liberating imagery. Across her work — with Apple, Lexus, Samsung, Telstra, and many others — Juliet's sense of liberation and vibrancy works in campaign after campaign. The high life, the open road, the clear vision — call it what you will, but she finds it and shares it first with her collaborators, then the world.
Further reading;
Sean Izzard
Photography, portraiture, docu-realism, landscapes, conceptual advertising.
See Also: Personal, intimate, (also) hyperreal (on request), authentic, in-the-moment. Disarming.
The thing seen truly might be the illusive dream of art. The highest purpose, once all else is cut away. A clear line of sight, matched eye for eye, subject to viewer. Something seen, and a challenge in the seeing too — an implied question directed to the beholder: Was their seeing allowed? Were they brave enough to look someone down as they stared the camera down? In Sean Izzard's portraits, a challenge is offered, again and again, from the bereaved to the brave, the individual wrapped in community and work to that same figure suddenly left to fight for themselves. There is a story here, all in implication: stoicism, resolve, persistence. Eye's unblighted view. Hands, figures.
Across these portraits of the triumphant and the communal, Sean shows us, again, the price of survival and survival's rewards. When he captures Palau, he shows us the bright light maintained in people and places after outside forces and natural decay have taken their toll. In his portraits of cancer survivors, he sees and delivers, with a precise and unsentimental eye, the damage done and the defiant shape of the human figure that endures. Even his private or abandoned images, such as his giving pools, pay testament to a stoicism separated from the human — the turn of the tides, the shape of public spaces temporarily abandoned. Narrative and humanism are palpable from project to project, image to image.
There are responsibilities and burdens here — from the private to the public, the assigned to the unassigned. Within shots, what can be captured and what must be excised. Through the intimacy and morality of these shots, the subject and trade are presented to us without falsity or hyperbole and are truly seen.
Further listening;
Yeoseop Yoon
Film, photography, TVC, emotive documentary, long and short-form narrative.
No matter how dark the storm gets overhead, they say someone's watching from the calm at the edge.
See also — heartfelt, fragile, tactile, emulsion, recherché, prescient, enlightening. Storyteller.
Yeoseop Yoon's work draws sharp and direct lines of emotion between creator and viewer — an expressway to the skull. His imagery is taut and deeply suggestive, from his early film work with the fraught and tender debut Beginners to his recent collaborations with the poet Walter Kadiki.
This sensibility extends to his photographic work, which isolates and draws in the figures under his gaze. Rather than comforting the viewer with platitudes and assurances, Yeoseop's work seeks to map the terrain of uncertainty and tension. It's a world of both the unrefined and the clearly seen — potent, passionate, pure.
In Yeoseop's world, the viewer feels a sense of vulnerability almost immediately, with a claustrophobic intensity. Emerging from the Australian Korean community, his work intertwines personal experience with a wider societal view, the most potent fusing of the individual and the community, the personal with the political. In both his artistic and commercial work, whether pursuing private notions or collaborating with Carriageworks, what emerges is a sensitivity to the figure's isolated, adrift, negotiating thorny and unyielding space. That his landscapes and urban interiors so often bloom and glow with a simultaneous beauty and menace only contributes to the conflicted and irresolvable nature of the vision pursued within.
Yeoseop speaks of a desire to see what is hidden rather than what is already shown. Across his work, the previously smuggled or suppressed rises to show itself through the struggle of artistic labour. The gesture, the pregnant pause, the human face agonised or relieved — they are enough.
Further reading: The Unseen and Exploring Fragility in 2 or 3 Things.
Krystle Wright
Film, photography, action and adventure sports, reportage, documentary, brand endorsement.
Pick up here and chase the ride. The river empties to the tide. Fall into the ocean.
See also: ascendant, plunging, vertical, breathless, hidden, visceral, romantic. Trailblazer.
We live in humbled times without a sense of the sublime. When confronted with the imagery of Krystle Wright, we see an untouched world, a reinvigorated romantic landscape in the purest, most old-fashioned sense of the word. There remain vistas to see, places on earth seemingly conjured from the hand of the invisible creator. These are images that bristle with possibility and wonder. The rolling menace of the sky as it contorts to shapes beyond comprehension. The sheer face of a cliff, somehow scaled. The bike rider isolated on a terrain as alien as a distant planet, not our own. Krystle makes These surreal fancies and otherworldly notions present and perpetually available to us.
Krystle's approach to image-making is unique and singular — pure documentary-style reportage combined with the heightened intensity of the cinematic moment. Her rigour and courage take her to places most of us would dare not visit, and her persistent eye lingers there long enough to find the images no one else would find. Across her work for partners such as National Geographic, Patagonia and Amazon, we feel both a terror and an awe, a sense of scale that reminds us how small and dwarfed by our surroundings we are, but moved in such a way that this reckoning humanises, not humbles. We are at nature's command, overwhelmed, and in some endemic-raptured state.
There are lands and skies still to see and see anew. Throughout her body of work, Krystle shows us how little we thought we knew and reminds us how much there is still to see.
Further reading;
Interview in Suitcase Magazine.
Watch: Heart Explosions, Photographer Season 1 ep.5 on Apple TV.
Danny Eastwood
Film, photography, still life, food, motor vehicles, animals, small/large inanimate objects.
See also: vivid, idiosyncratic, detailed, distinctive, considered, sheeny. Ducks.
Light strikes an object, permitting its mechanical reproduction. Before he sat waiting with camera in hand to capture the conjoining of permanence and fleeting illumination, Danny studied architecture and industrial design. There, he learned to see structures as they were, as they might be in hypothesis. His perception of the lines and shapes that bind the physical world persisted and strengthened when he found the art form he would eventually call his own. The bones of the natural world as first imagined and then built remain in each image Danny conceptualises — a testament to both the actual and the still vividly possible and as yet uncaptured.
In these images, something is always becoming something else — the photograph is proof of conversion, of the limitless possibility an object has, always passing from what it was it was to what it might be. It shows us how much blooms and grows restless within the seemingly settled vocabulary of the still life. Danny's work with partners such as McDonalds and Absolut bears out these surreal visions of the fantastic excavated from the real. His bright poppy advertising work is the same — the hidden symbols in the every day, the deeper patterns within the grammar of the image. Semiotics can dance with sensationalism.
On the other hand, there are his personal visions—fragile and foreboding. His Discards and sicles are the tender and morphing real world held down momentarily. Like his more ebullient advertising work, there is something tender and slightly peculiar, surreal but approachable. By its nature, all photography nails down the temporary, making the fleeting into something negotiable and comprehensible. But Danny makes those conversions human without robbing the world of its curiousness and the viewers of their curiosity. Fleeting, fantastical, forever.
Julian Wolkenstein
Augmented & virtual reality, artificial intelligence models, motion concepts, film, photography, creative direction, digital installations, alchemy.
I've got the world on a wire in my little mirror on the wall. In the pocket of my raincoat.
See also: immersive, inventive, simulacrum, mega, ironic, saturated. Digital Immortality.
Julian Wolkenstein's work is bold and vivid and defies straightforward summary. A playful and irreverent creative personality, his work across photography, film, and AR/VR tests the boundaries of the known and the unknown — the accepted and the acceptable. Work here is an elastic notion, forever stretched and stretching, and will likely take tomorrow a form that has yet to be understood, let alone named.
In every shape Julian's work takes, the abiding spirit is maximalist. It is the art of too much, of overload, and as such, it is exemplary in its modernism. No corner is left unexplored, no dialectic is left unflipped. High-concept video work is built for the most gorgeously audience-hostile gallery possible, work that is just as likely to adorn the wall of an international sporting stadium. In campaigns for Allianz, the BBC, British Airways, and Sony, commerce and art take the two-step effortlessly.
In Wolkenstein's world, the author died long ago, and much of his work sits on the knife's edge of two opposing notions — truth and fiction, chaos and order. How is an object perceived visually and materially? And what new technologies will artists use to delineate and define these challenges? What will AI change in us when harnessed the right way? The shapes of the future are still being discovered and unlocked. Julian Wolkenstein just might be the key.
Further reading;
Woody Gooch
Film, shorts, photography, portraiture, fashion, docu-realism, landscapes, seascapes, underwater photography.
I hear the sound of a gentle word on the wind that lifts her perfume through the air.
See also: luminescent, beguiling, epic, ethereal, intimate, natural light. Sun-kissed.
Woody Gooch is a self-taught artist who has never lost the energy and restlessness of the autodidact. The fizzing wonder of the recently discovered and the still miraculous is palpable in every one of his images. The world is still up for play. His work shows you how, as one frame follows the next.
The land and the water, the sea and the sky — barely understood and feared. Yet, in Woody's imagery, we move past shock and awe into something more fortified and persistent. Fear dissipates, and a more resolute, ageless knowledge emerges. These become, for artist and viewer alike, nourishing spaces, visions that first strengthen and embolden our sight. We respond to the moment's immediacy as it is captured, moving past hasty and reactive thought into something eternal and ethereal. Whether it's a crashing wave or the graceful human form in movement, these are gestures measurable in decades, not minutes.
Even more striking is Woody's casual visual grammar and how deftly he moves from assignment to assignment, from private consideration and questing to commercial imperatives in projects with his creative collaborators. Over the years, in work with partners as diverse as Audi, Corona and Dior, we see the natural extension of a visual language entirely Woody's own. Whether it's the curling wave or the beer on the sand, the icon, the subject moves towards, all as one, understanding past rhetoric or our own second thoughts. Communicated, delivered.
Further reading;
Jodee Knowles
Illustration, painting, digital art, murals, street art, fashion design, creative direction.
I'm going to prove the impossible exists
While I crawl into the unknown
I'm going hunting for mysteries
Cover me
See also: fractured, inverted, restless, playful, borrowed, bewitching. Blue.
Some work is a rapture — inspired, inspiring. Light falls down then lifts you up, the work full of ascent and ascent's accordant possibilities. And sometimes, it's a dive — a descent. In the work of Jodee Knowles, we plunge down — her images are emotive and immersive, gutting and overwhelming. From the tender vulnerability of her gothic female portraits to the vivid genre imagery of her fashion work with the Father Superior label, engaging with Jodee's work is a headlong, immediate experience.
Starting her career in Perth, Jodee's portraiture, design, and fashion have taken her around the world, but wherever she is, the self and the self's exquisite drive and darkness are persistent notions. In her own words, her work is based on the emotional state of mind that makes or breaks a happy existence. It's all an exorcism, the work driven not by petty accuracy or perfect brush strokes but the search for the feeling or idea itself, shaped into the most pressing form possible. It's creation first, transference next. The work slips the net of inspiration and becomes something more significant — resonant, mythical, inexplicable.
Above all else, there's conversion — the private language of struggle and solitude into something comprehensible, however fleeting the bitter wisdom. Her work is full of echoes and references — touchstones and warning shots. Nostalgia is warm to the touch but menacing, too — old horror movies and Saturday morning cartoons. Monsters persist in the memory, and Jodee's work touches upon some slumbering terror that lurks within residual, unshakeable iconography. Personal and pop. Addiction and satisfaction. Light and dark. Rise and fall.
Further reading;
