MAGNUM PHOTOS WORKSHOPS FREMANTLE
BOOKINGS AND SCHOLARSHIP APPLICATIONS OPEN

FotoFreo 2010: The City of Fremantle Festival of Photography is delighted to announce the opening of bookings for the Magnum Workshop Fremantle, an Australian first and a unique photography experience held in the beautiful port city of Fremantle in Western Australia.

As part of FotoFreo 2010, Magnum Photos will present an intensive, practice oriented five-day photography workshop from 15th – 19th March. Three international photographers from the renowned photography agency, Trent Parke, David Alan Harvey and Chien-Chi Chang, will lead intimate groups of twelve individuals through a program of group and solo critiques, practical, technical and theoretical advice and assistance with successful editing processes.

Participants will be supported to document local interest stories about Fremantle and the surrounding area and apply this to their individual photographic style. The workshop will culminate in a projection of participant work at the attractive heritage building and workshop venue, the Fremantle Arts Centre as part of the festival opening night celebration, and the production of 8”x10” group books printed on premium paper, generously provided by creative publishing and marketing platform, Blurb Books.

Magnum Photos is a world renown cooperative of photographers with offices in Paris, London, New York and Tokyo, founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour. The planned Workshops are an extension of FotoFreo’s long-term relationship with Magnum Photos.

SCHOLARSHIPS FOR WESTERN AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHERS

FotoFreo 2010, with support from the Department of Culture and the Arts, will provide full-fee scholarships for three Western Australian photographers to participate in the Magnum Workshop Fremantle. Placements will be allocated on the basis of technical merit, the ability to construct a narrative using images and the perceived benefit to the applicant’s career.

The Magnum Workshop Fremantle is a headline event for FotoFreo 2010: The City of Fremantle Festival, Australia’s leading biennial photography festival. Established since 2002, FotoFreo is a month long celebration of photography showcasing the work of internationally renown and emerging photographers, generating awareness, inciting discussion and creating a forum for the exploration of ideas and issues relating to the practice and art of photography. As part of the workshop, participants will be actively encouraged to engage in and attend the diverse festival events from 20 March – 18 April. As part of FotoFreo’s extensive programming, each Magnum photographer will present their work through audiovisual presentations at the Notre Dame Theatrette.

Applications open 18 January and close 28 February.


WORKSHOP PHOTOGRAPHERS

TRENT PARKE
Trent Parke was born in 1971 and raised in Newcastle, New South Wales. Using his mother's Pentax Spotmatic and the family laundry as a darkroom, he began taking pictures when he was around 12 years old. Today, Parke, the only Australian photographer to be represented by Magnum, works primarily as a street photographer. In 2003, with wife and fellow photographer Narelle Autio, Parke drove almost 90,000 km (56,000 miles) around Australia. Minutes to Midnight, the collection of photographs from this journey, offers a sometimes disturbing portrait of twenty-first century Australia, from the desiccated outback to the chaotic, melancholic vitality of life in remote Aboriginal towns. For this project Parke was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography.

Parke won World Press Photo Awards in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2005, and in 2006 was granted the ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award. He was selected to be part of the World Press Photo Masterclass in 1999. Parke has published two books, Dream/Life in 1999, and The Seventh Wave with Narelle Autio in 2000. His work has been exhibited widely. In 2006 the National Gallery of Australia acquired Parke's entire Minutes to Midnight exhibition.

DAVID ALAN HARVEY
Born in San Francisco, David Alan Harvey was raised in Virginia. Harvey purchased a used Leica with savings from his newspaper route and began photographing his family and neighborhood in 1956. When he was 20 he lived with and documented the lives of a black family living in Norfolk, Virginia, and the resulting book, Tell It Like It Is, was published in 1966. He was named Magazine Photographer of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association in 1978.

Harvey went on to shoot over forty essays for National Geographic magazine. He has covered stories around the world, including projects on French teenagers, the Berlin Wall, Maya culture, Vietnam, Native Americans, Mexico and Naples, and a recent feature on Nairobi. He has published two major books, Cuba and Divided Soul, based on his extensive work on the Spanish cultural migration into the Americas, and his book Living Proof (2007) deals with hip-hop culture. His work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Nikon Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Workshops and seminars are an important part of his life, and Harvey currently writes a very popular online magazine-blog for emerging photographers.

CHIEN-CHI CHANG
In his work, Chien-Chi Chang makes manifest the abstract concepts of alienation and connection. “The Chain” a collection of portraits made in a mental asylum in Taiwan, caused a sensation when it was shown at La Biennale di Venezia (2001) and the Bienal de Sao Paolo (2002). The shocking, nearly life-sized photographs of pairs of patients literally chained together resonate with Chang’s jaundiced look at the less visible bonds of marriage. He has treated
marital ties in two books—I do I do I do (2001), a collection of images depicting alienated grooms and brides in Taiwan, and in Double Happiness (2005), a brutal depiction of the business of selling brides in Vietnam. The ties of family and of culture are also the themes of an ambitious project begun in 1992. For 17 years, Chang has photographed the bifurcated lives of Chinese immigrants in New York’s Chinatown, along with those of their wives and families back home in Fujian.

A work in progress, “China Town” was hung at the National Museum of Singapore in 2008 as part of a mid-career survey, “Doubleness” Chang’s investigation of the ties that bind one person to another draws on his own deeply divided immigrant experience.