Description
AUSTRALIENATION is a 103 page black & white book featuring portraits of a bi-cultural country. Everyday life rather than grand events inpires Ogden’s work. The Australian landscape, people in that landscape, and the experience of Aboriginal people are familiar subjects in Australia art, writing and photography. Ogden tackles them again here, with a provocative combination of directness, humanitariansim and humour.
A book of photographs can sometimes be so well chosen that turning the pages becomes like reading a poem. Ogden’s black-and-white compilation, spanning every mainland Australian state and the years ‘72-’99, is so exquisitely apt that it achieves this effect. As intimate as a personal diary and profound as a state-of-the-nation address, the collection speaks volumes. Nick Dent, Black and White.
If photos really do rack up 1000 words apiece, John Ogden’s stark black-and-white opus, Australienation: Portrait of a Bi-Cultural Country, says more about this big, brown land in the years from 1972 to 1999 than all the words in the Hansards combined. The Australian Magazine.
Author: John Ogden