Echo Chamber: Emerging Research on Photography

CCP’s Echo Chamber presents a series of occasional, ongoing public programs showcasing current emerging research in all areas of photography, including historical research, technology, communications and contemporary discussion.

Applications to present research for future Echo Chamber public programs are welcome.

Chair

Michelle Mountain
Gallery Manager, Centre for Contemporary Photography

Speakers

Kate Robertson
Chronicling Communities: Embodiment and Feeling in Photography

Through photography, Kate Robertson explores ways of chronicling communities that have a collective social and ecological attachment to a particular environment. She is currently working with people from Siwai, Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea. She is interested in understanding how photographic forms might align to community values, in order to offer renewed ways of chronicling. To do this, she is currently exploring how photographic processes might be as perceptible and representational to the subjects being photographed.

Kate is a lecturer and PhD candidate at RMIT University. Recent exhibitions include Land Dialogues, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Wagga (2016); The Alchemists, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney (2015); Garnkiny to Ganyu: Artists who capture the night, GYRACC, Katherine NT (2015); Galerie Pavlova, Photo London, London (2015); and Transforming Landscape, Wallflower Gallery, Mildura (2014)

Christine McFetridge
Along the Path of the Sun: Photography, Empathy, and Community

Statement: Using Susan Sontag’s text Regarding the Pain of Others as a point of departure, Christine McFetridge is researching the capacity of photographs, both as object and act, to evoke empathy. By using methods that emphasise parallels in lived experience between different groups, she aims to understand whether participatory photography might restore a sense of community to a specific place. Ultimately, McFetridge is working towards determining whether photography might have a role in re-humanising marginalised groups.

Christine McFetridge is a New Zealand born photographer and writer based in Melbourne. Her practice and research meet at the intersection of social documentary, storytelling, and the photobook to examine empathy and the correlation between community and belonging. McFetridge has exhibited her work locally and internationally, and this year has been the recipient of two artist residencies with Creative Gippsland and Wyndham City Council.

Kim Munro
The archive of alone

I don’t remember how I started my interest in aloneness, but last year I started to document and collect incidences for my Archive of Alone. These were images I came across or found in markets, frames from films, stories, self help and literature about aloneness, video works of dancing alone, dating profiles, solo voyages and microwave cooking for one. I hunted aloneness in all of its inflections. Yet in these works, there was something paradoxical in the manner in which one could participate. This presentation explores the various ways in which aloneness is framed in cultural and social artefacts and how audiences might engage through participation in rituals of shared aloneness.

Kim Munro is a PhD candidate in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT. Her work focuses on participation, cartography and voice in expanded field documentary. Kim has had films screened on television and at film festivals and sometimes makes work for galleries. Kim also runs Docuverse, a forum for documentary practice and teaches at RMIT and Swinburne.