Public Attention

Now entering its 11th season, the Reportage Photography Festival has come a long, long way from its humble beginnings in a Bondi living room. Conceived in 1999 by Stephen Dupont, Michael Amendolia, Jack Picone and David Dare Parker, as an Australian answer to events like the Visa pour l'Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan, France, the festival has taken the next step to becoming the biggest and best of its kind in the Asia Pacific Region. This year marks the first time that it will be presented in partnership with Sydney's Vivid Festival.

“We were sort of frustrated at the time from a lack of interest in our work in terms of galleries and things like that – documentary photography has always had a bit of struggle in the gallery world and we all came from editorial newspaper kind of work, photojournalistic backgrounds,” says Dupont, recalling the impetus for the festival over a decade ago.

“We were interested in bringing that sort of Visa pour l'Image concept to Australia and extending that beyond doing [it] at home with a projector and a white wall or out in the back garden with a white sheet; we were bringing it up to a whole other level. It gave a platform to really show what the photographer saw in terms of a full photographic essay, an edited body of work that all stemmed from the photographer – it wasn't from an art director or from a picture editor – this was often very personal projects so they were often works of long-term projects that these photographers had worked on in their own time and that gave them an opportunity to put these out there and show them in an environment which was the cinema, so together with music and an edited series of slides – we used slides back then so it was like a Kodak carousel,” Dupont points out with a nostalgic laugh.

The festival grew, being hosted at a series of different cinemas over the years – the Valhalla, the Chauvel, the Academy Twin – before being added this year to the Vivid program. As the venues have developed, so has the technology being used by the photographers and that being employed to present their work. For Dupont, it's all part of Reportage's ongoing mission to exhibit work in new ways.

“It comes down to the approach and the style of our festival. Yes, we do exhibit in contemporary spaces and classical gallery spaces but I think a big part of our festival is to find new and innovative ways of showing photography, and so when I made a relationship with Photoville, I just loved the concept of showing pictures in shipping containers so we invited them to be a part of our festival this year,” Dupont explains the partnership with the Brooklyn-based photography initiative. “We've also got a big cube exhibition which is down at Darling Quarter which is four women photographers, four-by-four photos, this massive two-and-a-half square metre cube; and then there's the big outdoor installation, the projections [are] really going to be one of the highlights, out on the Quay next to the MCA, and that brings in at least forty photographers; all our big names are going to be in those projections. The outdoor exhibition space is a big part of us this year and will grow in future festivals with us.”