This exhibit features an extract from an ongoing documentary project aiming to provide an insight into Kyrgyz culture and its influence on everyday life in Kyrgyzstan. The film features an interview with an artist we met during visits to the Issy Kul region of Kyrgyzstan in 2011. Our visit took place a few months after a a short but bloody revolution and subsequent ethnic violence in the South of the country that had a seriously disrupting impact on the Kyrgyz national psyche.
In this book I bring together visual work on urban communities that I had been doing long before I had even heard of Visual Sociology, as well as after my encounters with the International Visual Sociology Association. As John Grady might have phrased it — almost 50 years of doing urban sociology visually.
Researching Everyday Lives was produced as part of a multi disciplinary study into health and well being in rural communities in Kazakhstan.
“What shall we do with our girls” is a personal narrative that tells a little of the journey that emerged as a result of uncovering “The Amazons” and subsequent images. The photographs were generative of other creative works. As a result of the photographs, I collaborated with costumier Gracie Matthews to reproduce the operational and dress uniforms of The Amazons. These were then paraded by contemporary female fire fighters as part of my key note address to the Australasian Women in Fire Fighting Conference, Sydney Australia, June 2006.
People Apart: 1950s Cape Town Revisited. Photographs by Bryan Heseltine offers a rich and fascinating insight into South Africa at the very beginning of the apartheid era through Bryan Heseltine’s previously unpublished photography of the early 1950s.
