Alec Soth and Me....

Today's lede photo comes courtesy of Alex Wisser the very, very smart exhibition assistant of the Headon Photo Festival exhibition 'No Direction Home' that was held at Dank Street Depot in Waterloo Sydney. It features me, Alec Soth and his dog...or a random dog, I am not sure which. Overall I think Alex's, rather  than Alec's is a better photograph, but that's perhaps biased because not only am I in it, I think Alex Wisser, who curates INDEX Gallery at St Peters in Sydney  is not only smart, but also a very, very nice human being.The difference in how we judge images is sometimes as superficial as that.I am currently editing a few emerging photographers work for one of my collaborative internet publishing projects Photojournale and I am often hard pressed to express to people what it is that makes a truly great image tick. 'No Direction Home' was an important inclusion into the Headon Photo Festival not only because Alec Soth is famous, but because it defined a point of view that while was quite ambient when you looked at the pictures, was quite strong when you walked away from the work and thought about what exactly it was creating for you to think about.Of course the reason I have used Alec Soth's name in the title of this blog is quite self serving because I want the readership that 'that' kind of SEO attention could bring me (Alec if you ever read this, I do apologise) but I also think it was an interesting thing at the exhibition itself that when I was asking people to photograph me with the screen showing Alec's work, someone mistook me as saying 'Alec Soth and Me' for 'Alec Soth is Here' and became quite excited at the prospect.Unfortunately while I understand that Alec Soth and the labradoodle were pressing theoretical envelopes and exciting people with his absence, it was actually the artist and curator of the show Stacy Arezou Mehrfar's work that stopped me in my tracks. It resonated at a very base level with me and I recognised the aesthetic as something that any immigrant to a strange land develops. I think that this was a very important thing to see, while Stacy lives in Australia now, her photographs of the American landscape were as unsettling to me as many of the photographs that were taken of Aboriginal people by the first white settlers...Then there is the most unsettling work I have seen for sometime by Canberra photographer Hilary Wardaugh showing right now at INDEX Gallery under the Headon banner. Hilary is doing an artist talk on June 4th and having spoken to her at length at the opening, I can assure you it will be well worth dropping into the gallery to experience. Her exhibition 'Die Like A Dog' chronicles the evening a group of friends gathered to attend a very special party to farewell the host who passed away that night.  Accompanied over that final horizon with the love of his friends I have to say I stood in front of one of the images and openly wept...something I am not inclined to do at exhibitions...But the poignancy of the moment is overwhelmingly summed up with the photographic studies of his dog...I will leave it there for you to judge but I believe its a must see show...Headon Photo Festival draws to an end over the next week or so but I am pretty impressed by much of what I have seen... I look forward to it growing in strength and depth next year and maybe we can get the real Alec Soth out here to attend...