Exhibition in Melbourne and Sydney in 2006

The Composition Française exhibition finds its references in the Surrealist movement that started in France in the mid 1920s. This movement was interested in a photography that was, on the surface, strictly documentary, that invoked images at once apparently banal and out of context.

But these images of pure reality were in fact investigations into an underlying individual or collective subconscious.

The images of Composition Française were taken (rather than made) in Melbourne, which has a particularly rich and complex inner urban landscape, at once accessible to the camera but whose meanings often seem to lie beyond the lens. The French philosopher Roland Barthes once wrote that photography has the unique capacity for recording facts as messages without a code, imagesthat are then laid open for interpretation.

These images were selected on the basis of their strong inherent composition as well as their unusual or poetic content. Different readings of these images are revealed through the juxtaposition of elements within the image and the association of the images with poems by Jacques Prévert. 

The exhibition images are 100cm x 72cm inkjet prints on semi matt paper.