In this hands-on experience, Canberra-based documentary photographer David Hempenstall will lead you through exploring the artistic legacy and inspiration of Ian North, whose Canberra Suite 1980-81 features in Seeing Canberra.

North developed a distinctive perspective on Canberra’s suburbs, seeing the city as a matrix of roads, houses, fences and gardens, topped by bright blue skies and largely devoid of people. Recognising the city’s sense of open space, his work challenges any easy view of the planned cityscape as utopian. The artist’s formalist approach celebrates colour while also creating an emotionally disturbing – even dystopian – sense of absence and abandonment. Does his work suggest possibility and beauty, or a deserted ghost-city?

The workshop program will kick off with a curatorial tour of the Seeing Canberra exhibition and an opportunity to view North’s complete Canberra Suite. Your tutor, David, will share his own fascination and engagement with North’s approach to the cityscape, you’ll visit some perhaps lesser known city spaces and you’ll be supported to create your own body of work considering whether, or how, North’s vision of quiet, empty suburban spaces holds true today. If you’re interested in urban landscape and street photography, this is a wonderful opportunity to challenge and extend your existing practice.

PhotoAccess Workshop Series: Canberra Re-Seen

How do you see Canberra? Through its people, buildings or suburban landscapes? Would you like to develop your own unique photographic vision of our city?

Join CMAG and PhotoAccess for a unique photography workshop program developing your unique vision of our city. Presented in conjunction with CMAG’s current Seeing Canberra exhibition, this series of three workshops invites you to explore the diverse ways in which some of the ACT’s leading photographers – Marzena Wasikowska, Ted Richards and Ian North –  have seen and documented life in Canberra.

Inspired by these landmark photographers, you’ll have the opportunity to learn more about each of their practices, investigate CMAG’s collections of their works, and be guided to produce your own portfolio inspired by the artists’ approaches to understanding Canberra. At the conclusion of the workshop series, you’ll be invited to contribute some of your images to a culminating Canberra Re-Seen exhibition. This will be on display in the PhotoAccess Huw Davies Gallery from 10 June – 10 July 2021 and featured in the PhotoAccess Online Gallery.

Join one workshop or enjoy an extended photography experience by enrolling in all three.

Click here to learn more about the Canberra Re-seen workshops.

Image:
Ian North
No.6 from the series Canberra Suite, 1980-81
C-type print from a medium format negative printed c.1984
CMAG, purchased 2012