Ben Apfelbaum

OZ COMIC-CON COMES TO LIFE

Oz Comic-Con, a sci-fi and comic convention, has been held in the capital cities of Australia since 2012 and is a local franchise of the New York Comic-Con.

There are guest overseas film stars, panels and workshops and Cosplay competitions. Cosplay can be lighthearted for some participants but also can be highly competitive as the Australian Cosplay champion goes into a world championship that this year will take place in Chicago.

Cosplayers can wear whatever they like but if you are going to be competitive they must enter into certain categories such as DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Disney Cosplay, Princesses or Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts. There is even a competition for the ingenuity and gadgetry of props.The breadth of the categories give Cosplayers plenty of scope for their creativity but some even I did not understand such as four girls who dressed up as Sandy and The Pink Ladies from Grease.

Because of its proximity to Asia I suspect that costumes would be influenced by a wider range than Santiago’s Comic-Con with a higher contingent of Manga and Anime cosplayers than the United States which seems to be dominated by the movie industry franchises such as Warner Brothers DC Comics, Disney characters, Marvel Comics and video games purveyors.

Held over the Saturday and Sunday of the long weekend at the International Convention Centre, this year seems to have attracted an ever growing number of cosplayers with an even broader range of sci fi and comic alter egos.

Pics by Ben Apfelbaum

Published by Ben Apfelbaum

My photography began when my father handed me the proverbial brownie box camera as a child. As cameras developed I went through Fujica and Olympus range finders graduating to my first single lens reflex camera, the Minolta SRT101, the latter being the greatest facilitator to my growth as a photographer. Digital photography has only added to this. I was a regular contributor to Camera Craft magazine (Australian Camera ) for over three years. During Australia’s Bicentennial year (1988) I made it a personal project to document the celebrations. This culminated in the creation of a book of my photos which was published in 1989. The book was called CELEBRATING AUSTRALIA and came with an accompanying calendar. My works have appeared in a number of publications including the coffee book entitled MY AUSTRALIA (1989), publisher Robertsbridge Severn. This book had a preface by the then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke. I was a co-photographer on a book entitled SYDNEY- DISCOVER THE CITY with text written by Robert Treborlang. Major Mitchell Press was the publisher. Also for two years I was the photographer for calendars celebrating Sydney’s multicultural communities. The two calendars were entitled MULTICULTURAL SYDNEY. My work appeared in a group exhibition held at Sydney’s Town Hall pertaining to the diversity of life in South America to raise money for orphanages there. I have over one hundred photos stored in the New South Wales State Library archive. I had a solo exhibition held in 2007 entitled Ben’s Lens at the Sydney Jewish Museum which celebrated the vibrancy of the Sydney Jewish community. Some of these photos are on the Museum’s permanent display. I have exhibited internationally firstly at the Spruill Gallery in Atlanta Georgia, United States, and in an exhibition entitled Kosher and Co at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Currently I am a regular contributor to J-Wire and this esteemed publication. To celebrate the opening of a permanent Photography Gallery, the State Library of New South Wales selected 400 shots from its archive of over 2,000,000 images to display in the new gallery. An image of mine was plucked out of the multi million photo archive to be part of the inaugural exhibition.