lens

"I’ve been involved in photographic work for nearly five decades – black and white, colour, film and digital, teaching, curating and exhibiting large scale mixed media, and photo installations.

I was about four years old when, under my parents’ bed, I discovered a shoebox of family photos that had migrated with them from Malta in 1952. I saw my youthful parents, in ‘Sunday best’ in an utterly foreign place. They too were foreign and mysterious. From that moment, I was captivated by photographs .

A photo-portrait is particularly fascinating because, while it freezes an instant of a person’s life, no number of photographs can ever truly represent the complexity of a living person. A photograph can only be a temporal likeness, a kind of phantom. This ‘phantom’ is endlessly fascinating – as much for what it presents as for what it does not reveal."

Pic: Bob Carr book signing with Wyn Jones, Varuna Sydney Writers’ Festival, 19 May 2014, Carrington Hotel Katoomba.