The Hobart Photographs series
represents an amalgamation of 'found' images, I do not preconceive
the photographs to create a visual narrative or picture story I come
across them as I wander like the flâneur through the world of contemporary
reality. I utilise an automatic SLR camera and generic consumer
colour film, I have no pretence concerning 'pre-visualisation' or conceptual
rigour; the work is created intuitively as I traverse though my everyday
world, the city of Hobart.
I try not to discriminate; my work is democratic in nature, recording the world
as I see it whether that world is tacky, unpleasant, and stupid or just plain
dull. I am drawn to record those forgotten moments between time: emblems of conspicuous
consumption, the lack of subtlety and gratuitousness of contemporary culture
and the dusty decaying corners of our everyday world.
The Hobart Photographs are generally banal in subject; some evoke a sense of
nostalgia or record the detritus of the urban world, while others appropriate
found texts to create ironic statements.
In some ways the work operates in antithesis to the documentary/reportage tradition
within which my aesthetic is grounded, as such I profess no particular preoccupation
or political agenda; like a dazed tourist I stagger though life, occasionally
stopping to point my camera and press the shutter button.
I have a compulsive desire to constantly photograph scenes from my everyday life;
the hunger eats away like an addiction - sated only by the act of photography.
Anthony Curtis, Hobart 2006
Anthony is a photo-media artist based in Hobart, Tasmania. He is a
graduate of the Tasmanian School of Art, completing a Master of Fine Art and
Design degree in 2002. Anthony has participated in numerous group exhibitions
at venues throughout Australia and in Europe, including the Australian Centre
for Photography, the Centre for Contemporary Photography and the Recontres Internationales
de la Photographie, France. Anthony's work is held in a number of
public and private collections in Australia, the United States and United Kingdom,
including the Pinhole Resource collection in New Mexico, USA. Twice a recipient
of Arts Tasmania's Wilderness Residency, Anthony recently travelled to Paris
on an artist's
residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts.
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