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Abstract
Photographic practice is traditionally divided between photojournalism and fine art photography. In the genre of landscape photography, these two areas are usually separated in their approach to photographing ‘real’ events on the one hand, and spectacle and beauty on the other. Recent photomedia practice-based research has demonstrated representation of landscape is embedded with political and social visual codes. Lynne Roberts-Goodwin’s research contributes to debates in this field by also demonstrating that the visual representation of landscape can draw on fine art aesthetics without compromising its social and political content.
The series of four works, Call it Home 1-4 were the outcome of research conducted in Southern Iran, a site of both cultural/political conflict and paradoxically aesthetic beauty and spectacle. Presented as a series, the images formally progress through the disjunction between panoramic format and monumental scaling of the denuded yet picturesque landscape. The images capture this paradox, demonstrating that photojournalistic content and aesthetic techniques – traditions usually separated in Western visual cultural codes – can occupy the same visual plane.
The work Call it Home 1-4 within the 2007 series Random Acts, was supported by an Australia Council New Work Grant and a UNSW/COFA, Faculty Research Grant in 2006. Works from Random Acts also formed key press and catalogue profiling and were written on and reviewed by: Annemarie Lopez, 'Lynne Roberts-Goodwin', boxoffice, the(sydney)magazine, SMH, issue 48, April 2007, p. 102; Andrew Frost, 'The Anne Landa Award', Photofile, issue 80, winter 2007, p. 65 and Uros Cvoro, ‘The choice of random acts’, Random Acts, catalogue essay, Sherman Galleries, Sydney as well as being covered by international media.