Bill Hatcher Photography

Street Art Show, Sydney

It's unique living in a city where you can paddle your sea kayak over to a big art show. That happened today when Melanie and I crossed the Sydney Harbour to check out the work by over 150 street artist, including Banksy, being exhibited on Cockatoo Island. These are photos of the art.

  

    
           

 
 Also a tee shirt exhibit.

Much of the street art was exhibited an authentic manner and could be found in and on warehouse buildings.  but some works, like these by Banksy, were framed and hanging gallery-style.

Hatcher Photo Exhibit in Missouri

If you are in the Saint Louis area today Sept. 22  I'll be giving a talk at the John Edson Anglin Performing Arts Center on the ECC Campus in Union, Missouri. The event starts at 7 pm and is followed by a reception. The event opens an exhibit of my photography at the ECC Campus. My talk will be about some of my more challenging adventure assignments.

My photos will be on display at the campus until October 31.We'll see you there.

 

Cockatoo Island

Are adventure photographers inherently selfish people? Maybe we are. For the last few weeks I have been enjoying climbing, hiking, paddling and biking all over New South Wales, Australia, but you don't see any photographic proof of that here. Did I make any photos while I was out, a few, but most of the time my hands were full of sweaty bike bars or trying to

Photography and Place

Yesterday I wandered the halls of the Art Gallery in New South Wales in Sydney to view the current free photography exhibit "Photography and Place: Australian landscape photography 1970's until now". The exhibit shows the work of 18 photographers including works by Australian photo luminaries I have long admire including Bill Henson and Ricky Maynard. The photography is by art photographers, but their approach to photographing the Australian landscape is not what I expected to see. What I expected to see were lots of arty-type concept works. What I did see were often simple representative images of the landscape. The photographers approach in these works was to record the landscape as would a historian or documentary photographer. I better stop there or I'll start sounding like a critic and not like a photographer.

The prints are often very big, like the 100x148cm images of wind swept ice in the Antarctic (is that in Australia?) by David Stephenson. You'll find mix of Black and White and the color prints. None of the photography in color was the easy to digest over saturated bright color landscape photography that is popular today. What I enjoyed most in this exhibit were Lynn Silverman's Horizons series she did in 1979 and Paul Ogier's new work from the Emu Field Atomic Test Site. In the exhibit are a couple of Rosemary Laing prints from her Heysen series from 2005, I don't like those as much as her earlier work.However, A couple of floors below are some Laing prints that might be for a new installation-the room was blocked from entry. The  Laing prints I could see include #2, of the burning car in the desert, are from her 2003 series titled "One dozen Unnatural Disasters in the Australian Landscape".

It was also nice to see some prints from the NSW Art Gallery collection that I have only see in books. Like the Perisher Valley prints by Ingeborg Tyssen.

If you have time you really should check out Photography and Place at the NSW Art Gallery.