Ben Apfelbaum

SYDNEY FESTIVAL : SIXTY PORTRAITS OF FIFTY FIRST NATIONS WOMEN

 

There are sixty haunting portraits of first Nation women of all ages around the Barangaroo Headland. The exhibition is entitled Naabani (Thou shall/Will See); Barangaroo (army of me).

Artist Brenda L Croft is a Gurindji Maingin Mudvurri woman who has presented black and white photographic portraits of contemporary First Nations women and girls. 

The setting is appropriate is I believe Ms Croft wanted to show a link between the warrior woman Barangeroo and those depicted on the foreshore of Sydney harbour.

The photos are deliberately under-expoaed, highlighting the eyes and, on occasions, the skin.

To protect the images from the elements, they were covered in a think plastic material.

The problem for me was that plastic was highly reflective and combined with the under-exposure of the photos, all I saw at times was a reflection of Sydney harbour.

I would dearly love to see these portraits in a gallery, where I could examine them more closely.

As a Sydney Festival it closes on Sunday 29 January, 2023.

Text and photos 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.