Contemporaneity and views from Expatria: past and current landscape practices

ABSTRACT

Views from Expatria: Photographing Place and the Self in Transience echoes the contradictory contexts of accelerated global migration and the recent pandemic border closures and controls. These conditions contribute creative parallels and new relationships to an escalating interest in concepts of place, home, expatriation and transience in contemporary society. As a creative-based research initiative using landscape photography as both a tool and methodology, the project reflects aesthetic trends, legacies and current debates about landscape photography and its contemporaneity. The paper critiques the literature and community of practitioners around concepts of non-place, home, transience and expatriation, and concepts central to the featured artist’s photographic project Views from Expatria (2021). The paper also seeks to explore ways in which the practice is informed by contemporary photographic theories and practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Place photography
• post-photography
• authenticity
• expatriation
• transience
• home

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Zayed University, through R19030, STG014 and R20109 research grants.

Notes on contributors

Ioannis Galanopoulos-Papavasileiou

Ioannis Galanopoulos-Papavasileiou (aka Yiannis Galanopoulos) is an Associate Professor of Art at Zayed University, UAE. Ioannis is a contemporary interdisciplinary visual artist, who has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in UAE, Europe, the US, Australia, China and Japan. His work has been acquired by private and public collections. His expanded photography work examines the relationship between ideated, geographic and virtual place, as well as the connections between objects, artists, media, viewers and society. Ioannis is a regular contributor to scholarly research journals and publications such as CGNet's On the Image and the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. His latest publication includes the article ‘The Post Readymade Photographed Object’ in The International Journal of the Image.

Shane Hulbert

Shane Hulbert is an academic, curator and photographer at RMIT University where he is Associate Professor of Photography. His photographic work has been shown nationally and internationally, most notably at the National Gallery of Victoria and the Centre for Contemporary Photography, both in Melbourne, Australia, and recently at the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, and also the Eyes of Main Street festival in the US. He writes on contemporary art and photographic education, and his practice explores the expressions of a collective national Australian identity through distinct and popular iconography connecting place, history and culture.