WYPIN Youth Photography Project

> --> Western Young Person's Independent Network, Footscray, 2009-11

This three year photography project empowered young people in Footscray, Melbourne to bring about positive change in their lives and the community through using images to communicate the current issues which they faced. I designed the photography workshop series to teach the young people skills in visual literacy, photography, and advocacy.  The participant rose to the challenge remarkably and produced powerful work that communicated across culture, age and geography.
The series cumulated in an exhibition of the participants work.

The WYPIN website is here.

Digital Imaging Workshops - Arte Moris

Arte Moris Art School, Dili, East Timor, 2010

I visited the inspiring non-profit, non-institutional fine art school, Arte Moris in Dili in Jan 2010. Set in the crumbling ruins of an old Indonesian museum, around 15 artists live and create there in all manner of eclectically decorated studios and labyrinthine rooms. They run series of art classes for local youth and children - providing a rare chance for young people to learn creative techniques.

The school accepts photographers and artists to work with the local artists, so I ran several workshops in photography and digital imagining for the artists, and donated some cameras so they could introduce more photography into their work.

Arte Moris website














The live-in artists

Friends of Kolkata

Kolkata, India - Melbourne, Australia 2004-present

Friends of Kolkata is a volunteer run Melbourne based organisation that arranges fundraising, educational and volunteer exchange activities on behalf of the Institute of Social Work (ISW), a non-government organisation in Kolkata, India.

Five friends - Chris Turton, Yoriko Otomo, Christian Clark, Lara Thurlow, and myself, volunteered for approximately a month at two Kolkata-based NGOs - the Centre for Communication and Development and The Institute of Social Work in 2004. We managed to have a positive impact on the children in our time there despite our inexperience, and were encouraged by the Indian organisations to take our enthusiasm further on our return to Australia.

So after returning to Melbourne we set up Friends of Kolkata, incorporating and organisating the first event - a fundraising exhibition in August 2005 at Irene Community Arts Warehouse Brunswick. It featured both my own photographs, and some of the images of the Indian children who I had been teaching photography.  In 2007 I led a volunteer trip back to Kolkata which resulted in another, larger photographic exhibition at Melbourne University that shared the stories and experiences of the children.

Friends of Kolkata continues to work with ISW today. The latter organisation seeks to protect children’s and women’s rights by providing communities with access to education, vocational training, microcredit and health services, and by assisting women and children affected by family violence.


Friends of Kolkata


The Institute of Social Work


The Centre for Communication and Development

International Humanity Foundation Projects

International Humanity Foundation, Medan, Indonesia, 2009

I worked with International Humanity Foundation (IHF) at its Medan centre for a month in early 2009.

IHF was founded in 1983 by Carol Sasaki. Today, it is comprised of seven locations in Thailand , Kenya, Indonesia & the United States caring for more than 3,000 children worldwide. IHF is a unique organization in that all those involved at any level consider themselves to be members of the IHF family. It is also unique in that overseas volunteers participate in much of the daily running of the organisation through their coordinated online work. In this way the volunteering costs are far reduced as there is less need for paid staff.

Whilst I was there, I initiated a variety of different small projects, shown in the images below.  Amongst these were photography workshops to encourage the young people visiting the centre to express themselves through images.

The project recommendation report goes into more detail.

IHF website

Applied Imagination Project - NIght/Day

These posts are documentation of the creative project, Night/Day, which explores the phenomenon of hard rubbish.

The images below are a selection from face-to-face interviews that I conducted with Moreland residents around their attitudes and experiences towards hard rubbish.

The questions were:

1. What was the most memorable thing that you have seen in hard rubbish in your area?
2. What types of things are you throwing out in your pile? Is there anything that you are especially glad or find difficult to throw away?
3. If you could organise hard rubbish any way you like, how would you run it?
4. What is your perspectives on material possessions - are you a hoarder or a tosser?
5. Is there anything else you'd like to say about hard rubbish?

These next images are a selection from a large set of long exposure night photographs in the same area. These images take an opposite approach to the day interviews, giving space for the hard rubbish to stand alone in a nocturnal world without people.