Family Photos
Eliza Hutchison
Perimeter Editions
Softcover
128 pages
195 x 280 mm
2017
ISBN 9780994388346
Photography has long been uncomfortable with its very nature as a recording device. The same tangible connection to the subject that affords the photographic medium and process its singular charge – its requisite proximity and contact with its referent, and the direct inscription of light on celluloid or sensor – also presents its great anxiety. In a career stretching back to the 1990s, Melbourne artist Eliza Hutchison’s has worked to slice, shred, fold, mirror and sculpt photographic images, materials and surfaces to both activate and complicate the photograph’s chain of command. The images that echo throughout her long-awaited debut book Family Photos – many of which came out of a residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris – both embrace and shatter their collective title. Prised from the swamp of Hutchison and her family’s wider history, present and semiconscious, they ricochet between intense intimacy and collective significance, applying photography’s indexical potential to the most ephemeral and malleable of moments. Here, she makes visible the turbulence of the psychological and the uncertainty and fallibility of memory.
About the Artist
Eliza Hutchison is a South African-born, Melbourne-based artist who uses photography to explore how truth and meaning can be manipulated and hybridised. Her experimental approach involves various modes of in-camera and algorithmic abstraction. Hutchison has exhibited widely in Australia and Asia, with exhibitions including The National 2019: New Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Image-Reader, Centre for Contemporary Photography; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria; and Artificial and Supernatural, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Hutchison’s first monograph Family Photos was published by Perimeter Editions and was shortlisted for the Australia & New Zealand Photobook Award.
About the Publisher
Perimeter Editions is the award-winning publishing imprint of Melbourne-based bookstore Perimeter Books and distribution house Perimeter Distribution. Releasing its first publication in 2012, Perimeter Editions’ focus rests on publishing autonomous books in close collaboration with photographers, artists, curators and writers. Its publications exhibit a criticality and sensitivity to content and form.
