RAW – A4 By Four By Four – The Reading Room Til 3 May

The somewhat curious title for this exhibition can be easily explained, thus providing enlightenment to a viewer. Four young Adelaide photographers are exhibiting four of their images, each restricted to A4 size. The four are Genevieve Brandenburg, Elle Dawson-Scott, Meg Cowell and Stephanie Fuller and their approaches are as varied as their names.

Genevieve Brandenburg - Untitled (Hugh Langlands-Bell)

Brandenburg’s most appeal to this reviewer. She lets her subjects read a short poem ‘No Help For That’ by Charles Bukowski and then captures and portrays their responses to its content after discussing it with them. It is by no means a distant extension of her approach to her 3 Minute Project seen at the Fringe with the outcomes perhaps capable of improvement through a direct quote rather than her summation of their thoughts.

Elle Dawson-Scott seems to possess a fascination for people’s feet with the strongest of her images, entitled Gathered, where we are placed at grass level observing a group of people’s legs and in turn they are observing something going on beyond them in the trees. This image certainly leaves many questions about who these people are, what they are tuned into and whether the angle of the images suggests they have come from the locale of the camera or destined to head towards it.

The last time we saw Meg Cowell she produced a series of images of the same subject matter as here, only then they were the size of bathroom mirrors. Again, one’s immediate thought is that the colourful folded objects photographed against a black background are roses but closer inspection reveals they are in fact discarded feminine garments. The effects of light and shadow and Cowell’s use of water to sparkle up the outcomes are effective though the claims for them to be ‘metaphors for the complex transitions of culturalised feminine identity’ are somewhat less tangible.

Steph Fuller presents memories of our childhood, the places and spaces and objects (here Grandad’s Caravan, Nanna’s Porch and the like) that may quickly sharpen up our memories to those wonderful times. The images are nothing special, there is for example no streams of light to spruce up the nostalgia, but if one allows one’s mind to displace the physical photos in front with visions sourced from out of your own memory, the experience is rewarding.