Justine Varga: Photogenic Drawing

A photographer who asks viewers to 'look at, rather than through' her photographs..
Lucy McNabb
Published on September 01, 2017

Overview

In her first solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography, Justine Varga invites viewers to experience a large-scale installation that immerses them in photography's unique means of production.

A deeply thoughtful artist who uses analogue techniques, sometimes with a camera and sometimes without one (oh, what, you didn't know cameraless photography was a thing?), Varga is interested in complicating a viewers experience of both time and 'looking', inviting them to join her in interrogating the photographic process itself.

In Photogenic Drawing this process is put on display through a dense layering of test strips – incomplete pieces of a photo that the artist explains as 'not quite photographs'. The result is a rare insight into the decisions made in a photographer's studio and lab, where photographs are 'tested, transformed, rejected, reprinted, found wanting and destroyed'.

Intrigued? Head along to the ACP between September 8 and October 21 for an insight into the parts of a photographer's work that aren't usually given public exposure.

Image: Installation view (cropped), Memoire, Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide, September 2016. Photo: Steph Fuller. Courtesy of the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery.

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