Ben Apfelbaum

SYDNEY FESTIVAL MEDIA LAUNCH @ THE QT HOTEL

The Festival of Sydney had its media launch last Wednesday at Sydney’s inner city QT Hotel.

The launch featured two of Sydney’s most prominent artists, Marcia Hines and Ursula Yovich.

Marcia Hines will perform in  Pigalle, a new piece commissioned by the Festival, in the Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent within Hyde Park. Set in a Parisian nightclub, Pigalle is a carousel of music, muscles and abandon from the makers of ‘Velvet’ and will star Hines along with iOTA and Bangarra’s Waangenga Blanco. 

Ursula Yovich will star in a play called Man with an Iron Neck along with the acrobatic Legs On The Wall. Yovich bravely tackles the topic of youth suicide within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. This work will be performed at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House.

www.sydneyfestival.org.au

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.