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AUSTRALIENATION |
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AUSTRALIENATION is a 103 page black & white book featuring portraits of a bi-cultural country. Everyday life rather than grand events inpires Ogden's work. The Australian landscape, people in that landscape, and the experience of Aboriginal people are familiar subjects in Australia art, writing and photography. Ogden tackles them again here, with a provocative combination of directness, humanitariansim and humour.
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AUSTRALIENATION
draws from three decades of John Ogden's work in Australia.
With a provocative mix of directness, humanitarianism
and humor, this quietly subversive book addresses
the process of reconciliation between Australia's
indigenous peoples and the many cultures that came
later. |
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FOREWORD :
When Murphy's
Law and twisted European references met Aboriginal
Law the result was tragic and atrocious. The indigenous
people were brutally pounded to the point of extinction
and the Australian nation took into its soul a psychosis
of guilt and denial, an alienation from the truth
of self, which like the freakishness, would flow immeasurably
into many aspects of Australian life and transform
it forever.
Look into John Ogden's photographs and you may feel
something of this psychosis? Look again and there
is the freakishness, that weird Australian re-ordering
of things, sometimes delightful or hilarious and sometimes
disturbing. But look further and deeper and there
mercifully is a simple and universal human joy, the
most enduring and sane reference point from which
any society may try to know itself.
John Ogden's work, in the tradition of the best humanist
photographers, stands as a valuable and compelling
reference point by which we may, as a culture, understand
ourselves and by which, as a nation, we may not be
so alienated from the truth of who we really are.
Michael Leunig |
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REVIEW :
A book of photographs can sometimes be so well
chosen that turning the pages becomes like reading
a poem. Ogden's black and white compilation, spanning
every mainland Australian state and the years '72
to '99, is so exquisitely apt that it achieves this
effect. He beings, movingly, with the open facesof
aboriginal children in the Northern Territory :
he then shows the indigenous presence in inner-city
Sydney, and in prison. Abruptly the focus turns
anglo: little white kids, subcultures, suburbia,
the army, the old and the eccentric. Gradually people
vanish altogether from the picture to be replaced
with images of urban decay and futility, walled-up
doorways and 'registered lawns'. The environment
closes in, and the punchline hits home. There are
no koalas or Harbour Bridges on show here, just
everyday scenes conveyed with unaffected humour,
subtlety and humanity, as intimate as a personal
diary and profound as a state-of-the-nation addrses,
the collection speaks volumes.
Nick Dent, Black and
White Magazine
December 1999
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