The Canberra Contemporary Photographic Prize is an exhibition and competition celebrating both emerging and established talents in photo media. Open to photographers worldwide, regardless of their experience level, this competition is dedicated to showcasing new perspectives in contemporary photography. It offers a unique opportunity for finalists to exhibit their work, providing a kaleidoscopic view of photographic art.

2024 Finalist

Still Life, Mandarin's. 2023. 58 cm x 50 cm

Photographic Collage, Pinhole photograph, silver gelatin paper, flocked paper and glitter vinyl.

My Tragedienne

Claire Conroy

Rogue Pop Up Gallery

2023

This exhibition places onto a stage a female protagonist, an actress playing a tragic role. She is poised, seated, staring serenely outward in a traditional studio portrait setting. She is obscured from recognition through the soft and reversed effects of a pinhole photographic negative.

My Tragedienne is our guide through a series of still images connected in a cinematic fashion. The actress inhabits mysterious staircases and passages held within ruins from far-off places, interiors filled with still-life arrangements. With her, we traverse landscapes paced by the chimes of a clock bell tower. The narrative is soaked in atmosphere, open and strange.

Claire Conroy’s mise en scène has been created with materials from her analogue photographic practice. The protagonist is not autobiographical but inspired by a collage made in 1924 by celebrated artist Hannah Hoch, titled The Tragedienne. This reference is a homage to avant-garde photography from Modernist art movements such as DaDa and Surrealism.

For this exhibition, Conroy presents new collages utilising materials created throughout twenty years of working in the darkroom. Also included are large-scale pinhole photographs made from bespoke cameras created by the artist. The images are meditations on a two-decade-long arts practice creating analogue images and experiments with the alchemy of the darkroom.

Philosopher Susan Sontag notes in her seminal text On Photography that the photograph has an inseparable relationship to history with ‘… its index of moments in time always referring to the past from the second they are taken.’ Conroy looks at how the medium, materials and technology of photography refer to history as much as the subject matter. This exhibition entertains ideas, and relationships photography has to memory, history and our ability to transform and distort the past through ‘re-collection’ or recollection of the past in the present.

Alongside the protagonist in My Tragedienne we travel through a narrative held in the suspense of imagination. My Tragedienne is an evocative exhibition exploring unique photographic images, using increasingly obscure image-making practices to explore the endless possibilities of this medium in contemporary art.

These 35mm slides were recovered from a friend's home that was flooded by over 14m of raging river waters. I scanned and restored many of the slides to near their original state. This particular set have been scanned, enlarged and printed as objects rather than focusing on the images within the slides. The original family photos that were on these slides have been overwhelmed and transformed by the flood waters, much like many friends and families in the horror of the Lismore floods 2022.

Im pleased to be a finalist in this award with my work: 35mm slide recovered in Lismore floods 2022.

During the flood recovery in Lismore I helped clean up at friend’s Theresa and Chas’s house. We found a carousel of Chas’s family slides. I offered to restore anything I could. Through the process of scanning, retouching and restoring the images, I came across this image. I decided to leave it in the poetic state I found it in.

Finalists can be seen here: https://www.artgalleria.com/view-room/42357

My work is exhibited in this exhibition at Campbelltown Arts Centre.

https://c-a-c.com.au/space-yz/#

From the website ……

In times of alarmingly diminishing art school options in the tertiary and higher education systems, Space YZ, curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, draws inspiration from the visual arts legacy of Western Sydney University (formerly known as University of Western Sydney).

From the first graduating class in 1986 to the final cohort as the curtain closed in 2009, the art school was a pioneering hub for experimentation and risk-taking across a broad variety of media.

Staged twelve years since the closure of the art school, Space YZ presents significant early works created by 88 Visual Arts and Electronic Arts alumni during their undergraduate studies or within two years of graduation.

‘Space YZ’ references the university gallery established on campus in 1992. A transitional space, the gallery was literally an oversized corridor connecting the Z Block art studios to the rest of the university on the Kingswood side of the Penrith campus. Less a destination than an idling walkway, Space YZ speaks to the metaphors of transition and connection that abound at art school; where ideologies are challenged and unique artistic identities forged.

Monstrous new photographic works. Dark and shadow forms emerge from the kelp forests of Sydney harbour. 12 new Sea Monsters and three disrupted seaside landscapes exhibited at Rouge Gallery in Redfern.

Strange Shores, a series of enigmatic seascapes reflect the Australian coastline. Pinhole images taken with a 1950’s caravan as a camera (pin hole camera.) Strange Shores hugs the coastline evoking the haunted histories of a colonial Australian landscape. Recalling the Australian Gothic in an analogue photographic space reversals, alchemical solutions, positives and negatives.

Exhibited at Rogue Gallery 2020

The End Festival

A travelling Curio - As part of The End Festival at Hill End NSW. The Caravan Camera Obscura references and reverses Jeffery Smarts painting Nun s Picnic, 1957.

The City of Ladies

Materials: Camera Obscura Caravan and installation including pink elastic, tent pegs, dry point etchings. Performance including, Claire Conroy, Marty Jay, Yul Scarf.

A camera obscura caravan was situated within an allegorical city in a paddock in Kandos. It is based on The Book of the City of Ladies, a 15th century feminist text by Christine de Pizan. The City of Ladies could be moved through, inhabited as well as viewed upside down and in reverse from inside the camera obscura. The work is further documented in a series of four drypoint etchings.

The city works as a metaphor for the ever developing and evolving project of feminism. The City of Ladies continues to be built in the 21st century with communication and collaboration. The performers included female identifying, male identifying and non gender identifying friends. 

The installation incorporated a 30 m long anamorphic distortion of  the 15th century allegorical city with pink elastic. The drawing which was distorted and abstracted in the paddock could be viewed in correct perspective in 9 x 9 cm scale inside the camera obscura.

Photo documentation of performance by Freya Ververis.

These seascapes and landscapes were captured using my pinhole camera created from 1950's caravan. Weltzmertz captures the east coast of Australian in 2015. The retrospective return in this analogue process heralds a moment in photographic history linked to the Romantics and early days of white Australian settlement. The melancholy and menace that haunt the atmosphere in these images reflect on these founding moments in Australian history.

A Travelling Curio of wonderment and delight this retro Caravan from the late 50's has been converted into a pinhole camera, mobile darkroom, studio and a camera obscura. 

These sea (weed) monsters are contacting the 'other' side in a seance calling connection to the wild nature of the sea. These unique one of a kind prints were created directly from seaweed washed ashore after a storm. Then slopping onto photographic paper and captured with light they have been created using an analogue direct contact technique and on archival silver gelain photographic paper.

The Sydney Reef was a branch of the global Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef by the Werthiem sisters from the theiff.org.

This community collaborative installation brought together over 500 people to create the installation. It was co curated by In Stitches Collective who are Claire Conroy, Michaela Davies and Charlotte Haywood and exhibited at The Powerhouse Museum Sydney.

Other worlds evokes the panoptic view of the asylum. The large scale pinhole images reflect on the eye of the camera and the power relationships involved in image making and architecture.

This Series of works came out of a residency at International Artspace Kellerberrin Australia (IASKA) in Western Australia in 2007.

These images were taken using a water tank pinhole camera. The subject of the images are Western Australian salmon gums, they provoke a haunting by the trees that populated forests in this area. It was cleared  for wheat fields as a consequence the water that would have been contained in the land is evaporating leaving the surface of the soil saline.

The installation embeds itself within the intellectual traditions of textiles and the codification of pattern inspired by Joseph Jacquard whose weaving loom is attributed to being the first computer. Michaela Davies, Claire Conroy, Charlotte Haywood extend the tradition by creating a unique code to represent the music.

Using the sensibilities of synaesthesia to separate forms and create disorientation, the work highlights revelations in technology and innovation of the past while using Australian music titles to question current innovation in Australia, particularly in primary industries. Filled with colour the installation references the ‘visual music’ traditions of Australian artist Roy De Maistre, utilising his system of correlating the light spectrum to musical notes.

Travelling across Sydney in a two tonne truck as a camera. These pinhole photographs were taken over 7 days in 2006.

A darkroom in the gallery; the audience is encouraged to take a pinhole camera into the streets and created an image, return to the gallery and develop their prints. This took place at Medium Rare Gallery in Redfern Sydney in 2006.