Flatlands: Photography and Everyday Space

By Andrew Frost

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, it’s widely believed that photography is the most truthful of all media and mediums. Quite aside from the ability of the photographer to seamlessly meld together multiple images using a digital toolbox within a computer, that slowly evolving set of technologies that get grouped together as ‘photography’ are themselves tools for constructing fictions – from analogue darkroom photography, digital technologies to cameras of all degrees of sensitivities and sophistication, the camera is a means of creating lies that look remarkably like the real world.

The Art Gallery of NSW’s Flatlands: Photography and Everyday Space is an exhibition from the gallery collection that examines photography’s role in transforming our perceptions of the world, from the a variety of perspectives including such favourites as emotion, memory and desire, while showcasing how technological developments have allowed greater abstractions of the real world, from freeze frames to unusual viewpoints to compressed and abstracted space. With work by 23 Australian and international artists the photographs chart an historical progression to our present moment, where even the ubiquity of photography has not yet to reduce its pervasive eye of an inherent magic.

Until February 3. Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Domain.

www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/flatlands