Up-And-Coming Contemporary Photographers From Australia

Winner of the 2015 National Photographic Portrait Prize in Australia, Hoda Afshar is a Melbourne-based documentary photographer who has completed a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art–Photography and currently works as a lecturer at Photography Studies College in Melbourne. Born in Tehran, Iran, Hoda’s work reflects her relationship with her homeland while confronting issues of representation, displacement and identity politics.

‘In the Exodus, I love you more.’

Atmospheric and evocative, Jane Brown’s hauntingly melancholy photographs are characterised by vacant settings and wistfully grey landscapes. Depicting the absence of people in places shaped by human interaction and interference, Jane is able to captivate viewers. She is often listed as a finalist for many art and photography awards and prizes, and her work has been featured in publications including Art Collector Magazine, Art and Australia, The Australian and The Age newspapers.

Having recently held a solo exhibition at Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo, Japan, where he also completed a residency program, Melbourne-based Jordan Madge has wasted no time ensnaring the masses since graduating with a Bachelor of Photography (Documentary) in 2015. Fixated on a subject’s journey, Jordan uses image appropriation, found objects and his own photographs to enforce narrative in his photography.

Born in Melbourne in 1978, Christopher Day is a visual artist whose photos never reach a stage of completion, always existing in the absurd realm of the in-between where the source material is constantly re-adapted and morphed into something new. Presented as distorted collages, Christopher’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Intent on capturing the essence of black photography in colonial Africa, South Sudanese-born Atong Atem takes pride in arranging staged photographs which explore identity through portraiture. Focusing on African iconography and diasporic traditions, Atong can recreate the types of photos one would find in family albums of the diaspora.

Based in Adelaide, James Tylor’s work depicts Australia’s contemporary cultural identity seen through his multi-cultural lens which encompasses Nunga (Kaurna), Māori (Te Arawa) and European (English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Iberian and Norwegian) ancestry. James has acquired a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Photography) and a Honours in Fine Arts (Photography) and has since honed a specific interest in 19th-century Australia while employing both historic and innovative processes to produce his photos.

Sydney’s shapeshifter Caroline Garcia is a ‘culturally promiscuous’ hybrid artist who blends performance art with new media as a means of showcasing exotic rituals and feminine clichés. To create her work, Caroline samples pop culture and colonial imagery. She has exhibited at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, The Centre of Contemporary Photography and recently took part in La Pocha Nostra’s Live Art Lab in Greece.

Upon completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2013, Anna Higgins went on to present solo exhibitions including Higgs Boson, TCB art inc in 2013; Ma at 3331 Chiyoda, Tokyo; Super Panavision, West Space Gallery in 2014; and more recently, Double Negative at The Substation in 2015. Anna works with 120mm film and incorporates abstracted found imagery that she re-contextualises through collage, projection and other analogue methods to create photographs that explore the very essence of how images are perceived, particularly in an amorphous state.