GradFoto 2024 Gallery

Award Winner – Lê Nguyên Phương

Vở ô ly, 2024

The GradFoto 2024 prize of $1,000 is awarded to graduate Lê Nguyên Phương from RMIT University for his series Vở ô ly.

Alejandro Acín said, ‘Lê Nguyên Phương’s series masterfully intertwines politics, culture and personal narratives. The collaborative approach and text-image interplay create a powerful, cohesive aesthetic. His work transcends individual images, offering depth and resonance. A standout example of thoughtful storytelling through photography, blending meaning and artistry with impact and intention.’

In 1985, my father, then a professional volleyball player for the Vietnamese military, went to Siem Reap with his team as part of a training camp. This was his first time stepping foot on a foreign land. A year later, he was sent back to Siem Reap, not as an athlete, but as a soldier. In 2024, I travelled to Siem Reap with my father after having moved away for two years. This marked our first trip together. We visited sites of his battle, shared a motel room, played volleyball, and made photographs of each other. I could no longer place my father’s stories on the periphery. I needed to be nearby. Vở ô ly is part of a series exploring the interplay between war circumstances and my family, remembering and forgetting, a rupture in collective memory and the efforts one makes to fill the gap in-between.

Highly Commended – Harry Merriman

Untitled Australia, 2024

Alejandro Acín said, ‘This project takes an unconventional approach, challenging current photographic trends while maintaining a coherent and exciting visual narrative. By blending collage, digital painting and various mediums, it critically explores Australia’s colonial identity and its lasting impact on national self-perception. The work’s imaginative and thought-provoking execution elicits a deep emotional response, encouraging reflection on identity and reconciliation.’

Untitled Australia focuses on Australia’s colonial identity through the impact of Australian media: film, painting, printmaking and photography. Through these different artistic mediums, I focus on how each one has been used to construct a national identity. Birthed within the early years of colonial Australia, this national identity continues to mould and affect how contemporary Australians view themselves, both nationally and internationally.

Living in rural Australia, coupled with my long family history of working the landscape, has led me to question notions about how Australians perceive the history and legacy of colonialism. Within my work, I have used collage as a catalyst to bring together a variety of mediums onto a digital canvas to explore the various representations and symbols of ‘Australianess’. The resulting body of work becomes a melting pot of imagery and digital painting, aiming to critique and elicit an emotional response of selfhood in relation to nationhood. By doing this I want my work to reflect to audiences the processes of being sold an identity in the hope that we can move forwards towards a future of reconciliation.

Brent Leideritz

We shall not worship false idols, 2024

We shall not worship false idols is collection within the Divergent archetypes for old ideas collection. This aspect is split into two parts, the first being queer’d pop art inspired photographic portraits, and the second being AI generated promptography that is present to undermine the false and imaginative nature of religious propaganda art.

Utilising the act of queering, and déconstruction, on religious scripture and archetypes, this aspect explores the affirmative action that can be achieved by queering of harm causing ideologies. The inclusion of false religious promotographic resolutions act as a contrast point to the idolatry this aspect celebrates.

We shall not worship false idols is a creative space for agency, play, individual self-expression, gender performativity, community freedom and the erotic, collectively queering ways of being for continued challenge to the toxic symbolism, myth and narrative of judeo/christian religious ideologies, and a site for hopeful reclamation for our othered selves.

I have aimed to create portraits that are aspiring in nature, to present positive alternatives that speak of future potentialities for those who, like myself, have or continue to be trapped by ideas of religious and normative structures of domination that do not allow for expansion into their authentic self.

Dani Watson

Connection, 2024

Connection is an interdisciplinary photographic project examining the multifaceted relationship between individuals and the landscapes they inhabit. By employing diverse photographic methods and pioneering drone-based Aerial Luminary techniques, the project creates immersive visual experiences that engage audiences across varied geographic contexts.

Drawing inspiration from Michael Kenna’s profound relationship with the land and Ansel Adams’ perception of photography as a creative expression, Connection captures narratives that balance spontaneity and intentionality. The project addresses the challenges of documentation while fostering a dynamic interaction between the photographer and the subject.

Integrating traditional photography with interactive media and advanced technologies such as augmented reality, Connection pushes the boundaries of immersive visual storytelling. It conceptualises photography as a reciprocal dialogue among the photographer, the viewer, and the environment, exploring cultural, historical, and personal dimensions of human-landscape interaction.

Reflecting Fay Godwin’s philosophy of photography as a medium for storytelling and inspiration, the project aspires to evoke emotional resonance and intellectual curiosity. Connection demonstrates an advanced understanding of contemporary practices. Its innovative approach contributes to ongoing academic and public discourses within landscape photography, offering fresh insights into the intersection of art, technology and environmental engagement.

Kim Feng Cheong

Antara, 2024

Diasporic people exist in a shifting and unstable positionality between the social spaces of their motherland and current location. This is especially so for double-diaspora: when they live in a 3rd location, elements of their heritage are often invisible to others.

Antara assembles markers of Malaysian cultural-national identity, including heritage, locations, food, language, and sound. Through multi-sensory avenues, Kim Feng Cheong’s cultural-national identity is impossible to be unnoticed by the audience, who would otherwise likely assume the artist to only have direct Chinese heritage.

Antara also attempts to demonstrate and compare tendencies of western and non-western audiences’ interactions with non-western artists’ art, such as willingness and effort to engage with cultures and languages beyond one’s own. The gallery space, invigilators, and audience are thus made part of the work.

Kirra Jeram

The unseen experience of chronic health: Seeking empathy through photographic practices, 2024

The unseen experience of chronic health is a series of digital self portrait photographs representing my lived experience with chronic illness. Each photograph depicts an other worldly version of the symptoms I regularly experience living with health conditions that include Endometriosis, Polycystic Ovaries, Chronic Fatigue, Gastritis, Anxiety and Vaginosis. Colour, nostalgia and kitsch is utilised as a way to create imagery on a taboo topic without it feeling as isolating or overwhelming. Assigned female at births’ health is complex as there is a lack of research on our bodies the series aims to encourage new viewers who don’t have personal experience on the topic to learn more while simultaneously offer catharsis and support to the audience who do relate to the symptoms depicted. Props, self timer on a digital camera, composited backdrops of my grandparents home and studio lighting are utilised to create discussion around the discomfort of living with invisible illness. Every aspect of the photographs was controlled and created by myself as a way to harness the lack of control over my lived experiences. The composited backdrops represent the heredity nature of health, every illness I experience has been passed on through genetics or family trauma.

Lee O’Donoghue

Song of Souls, 2024

From the bubbling primordial soup of deep time emerges
the complex entangled threads of a world in balance.
Vascular, bronchial, rhythmic, milky,
bright, shadowy and hypnotic,
we are assembled with such orchestral physicality,
yet our souls have drifted so in and out of tune.

Discordant, fractured, greedy, wounded and alone,
we poison the air, water, earth and hearts.
We disentangle.

But. What of us?

We are within arm’s reach.

And I can feel your heart beating from here.

We are a sea apart.

And I can hear your heart beating from where I sit.

So I sit and listen.
I sit and I weave
the song of souls.

Song of Souls is a proposition of hope for the collective soul to overcome despair over a fractious society. A hope to repair and re-balance. In my search for the collective soul, I find hints in light that has travelled billions of years to reach us, connecting us since the beginning of time. I see it in threads of entanglement. There are hints too in the human pulse, the enduring heartbeat of song. The hum.

Matthew Parsons

Human Reproduction, 2024

At passport control, an official scrutinises your photo, comparing it meticulously to your face. After careful examination, they stamp your passport, confirming your identity. Governments worldwide rely heavily on images to verify physical identities, often using images taken by untrained personnel with sub-par equipment. Despite these limitations, these images are accepted as truth. I challenge this notion.

I invite you to examine these larger than life portraits like a border official or law enforcement officer might. I’ve used lighting techniques similar to those used at the local post office and police station when they make ID images, however, my process is very different. I’ve employed highly precise processes and equipment to produce colour correct images with extraordinary detail, the subjects holding colour checkers as a reference not only to mugshots but also accuracy.

Through this approach, I’ve created portraits that question our cultures belief and reliance on photographic representations of physical ‘truth’. These images question the reliability of standard identification photos while showcasing the potential for extreme accuracy and detail in portraiture when using advanced techniques and equipment.

Mei Wah Williams

Substantial and Significant: Changeover, 2024

This work addresses the complexities of family separation and the Family Court system. In family law, it is often advised that the changeover of a child between parents be done in a public place like a fun park, McDonald’s carpark, or shopping centre. These spaces become a happening of awkward and emotional exchanges that eventually become a normalised part of family life. For this work the term ‘substantial and significant time’ has a double meaning, indicating the labour of care disproportionately done by women past and present as well as a term used in family law.

My creative practice takes place between the home and the studio, as a necessity shaped by my dual role as both a mother and artist. I subvert everyday domestic actions and household items as materials such as dish racks, chairs and broken crockery as well as craft items associated with the care of my daughter. This practice enables me to find creativity in the everyday. I aim to bring attention to systems perpetuating gendered power imbalance, causing ecological harm and social issues such as violence against women.

Richard Trang

(Un)Familiar Photos, 2024

Susan Sontag writes that ‘the problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs…this remembering through photographs eclipses other forms of understanding and remembering’ (Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others). When Sontag likens the photograph to a passageway or a thoroughfare, she posits 1) the possibility of being transported within the medium and 2) the existence of (an)other side. Despite photography’s indexicality however, the medium actually blocks memory, preventing access to (an)other. It suspends us at the threshold of remembering.

(Un)Familiar Photos insists beyond the family image, its album, and its facade. It asks viewers to reconsider the familial notion as one that is an idealised narrative. Through methods of layering and projecting, Trang complicates the truths presented in family albums. He incorporates images from a variety of sources; from images of his immediate family, ones found on the internet and to those generated by AI.

As an interactive work, the installation encourages viewers into the family image, subsuming the threshold of ‘memory.’ Here, audience doubles as both presence and blockage. In the work’s shared activation, there is temporal co-production, co-existence, and co-erasure of understandings and interpretations.

Sheydar Hasar

Whispers in the Dark, 2024

Whispers in the Dark is a digital photographic series that intertwines self-portraiture with symbolic imagery to explore the complexities of personal identity. Using strong contrasts and strategic lighting, Sheyda captures her experiences and psychological spaces, both revealing and obscuring different facets of herself.

Self-portraiture, particularly through photography, enables Sheyda to navigate the balance between openness and privacy, selectively revealing and concealing aspects of her narrative. This series invites viewers to reflect on their own choices regarding what they reveal or keep hidden, encouraging introspection into how we present and withhold parts of ourselves.