“Photography is a space where I can be
alone in my thoughts, observe and record.”
Justine Varga
Justine Varga
For the
minimalist Australian photographer Justine
Varga the darkroom is a refuge that allows her to “explore other concerns
to do with the photographic medium, philosophy and art in general that are not
wholly reliant on geographic location.”
Varga’s
interest in photography began while she was in high school. As she told the Try Hard Magazine
“Photography was part of my year eight art class. I connected with it
immediately and before too long I was given free run of the darkrooms. I would
be in there most lunchtimes, really whenever I could. I didn’t particularly
enjoy school so it was a refuge for me.”
Now armed with
a Bachelor
of Fine Art’s degree with a photography major from Sydney’s National Art
School, Varga indulges her interest in poetry using analogue photography as her
medium.
As she explained to Sydney’s
Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012 “Poetry has the ability to get to the
core of things and at the same time is difficult to pin even when it is
stripped down, for me it is felt. Like most art forms it becomes very much
about your own experience your relationship to the work, it is personal whether
you read it or create it. And when I think about this, this is largely why I
want to be an artist and why I want to engage with art, to read poetry.”
As the Art
Collector Magazine noted about Varga’s work “In our global environment of
image saturation and infinite reproduction, her work is a welcome shift in the
genre of photography. As is the focus not on self, through portraiture or the
tiring documentation of the social activities of so many millions, but through
symbolic gestures and actions that speak about individual existence in a
private space.”
About her photographic process Varga has said “I enjoy exploring analogue processes, of
late it has drawn me to concentrate on the film surface – this surface for me
is one fundamental point of difference between the two [analogue and digital
photography] and I have begun to exploit its materiality within works… The photographic medium is linked inextricably to time - the very
nature of exposure or capture is dependent on it. Time in this regard has
particularly played out in my camera-less works, such as Desklamp (see above). Exposed for the better part of a year this work
can be read as a moving image – time stretched out and collapsed again into a
single frame. This idea of time also extends to the speed of images. As images
in today’s current climate become ever more immediate and overwhelming in
number – in other words as they accelerate – I feel the need to empty out and
create slow images.”
Examples of
Varga’s can currently be seen at Melbourne’s Centre for
Contemporary Photography until the 6th of September and Sydney’s
MOP Gallery until the 16th
of August.
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