Fine Art Photography
Since 2006 Ogden's work has focused on series' of fine art photography, and extensive work with Aboriginal Australian imagery. His publishing company, Cyclops Press, began production with 'Australienation' in 1999. Partly inspired by a conversation in which Ogden was upbraided whilst in England in his youth, criticising the near genocide of the Aboriginal populations by the colonial immigrants, and subsequent culture clash, Ogden's 2008/9 work 'Portraits From A Land Without People' is considered to be the most comprehensive pictorial history of the Aboriginal people of Australia produced, honoring fully the Aboriginal cultural code which requires permission to be granted by each individual in every picture. To compile the book, and gain the appropriate permissions, Ogden travelled extensively over a four-year period, examining over 300,000 images, and visiting public libraries, galleries, museums and private collections in every state and territory in Australia. Ogden has described the dedication necessary to complete this task as a 'beautiful obsession'.
In November 2011 Ogden released 'Saltwater People of the Broken Bays – Sydney's Northern Beaches', and in November 2012 released the companion book 'Saltwater People of the Fatal Shore – Sydney's South-side Beaches'. 'Slightly Dangerous – The Cyclops' Cypher', released in May 2013, provides an insight into the inspirations and influences behind Ogden's work. In his foreword to 'Slightly Dangerous', photographer Tim Page writes: “This is a life well travelled, of a baby boomer who surfs an existential path across six decades, waxing the best of nostalgia against the odds that are self mitigated by the excesses of those times. It is a heritage of the hippest, most gonzo ‘down-under’ attitudes, rendered by images we all wish we had snapped. As if Hunter S. Thompson and Richard Neville shuffled photo cards with Robert Frank’ian images throughout the deck”.
Read more about this topic: John Ogden (photographer)
Famous quotes containing the words fine art, fine, art and/or photography:
“If you would learn to write, ‘t is in the street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts you must frequent the public square. The people, and not the college, is the writer’s home.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In those rare days, the press was seldom known to snarl or bark,
But sweetly sang of men in pow’r, like any tuneful lark;
Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds were in the dark;
And not a man in twenty score knew how to make his mark.
Oh the fine old English Tory times;”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1890)
“Sweet Benjamin, since thou art young,
And hast not yet the use of tongue,
Make it thy slave, while thou art free;
Imprison it, lest it do thee.”
—John Hoskyns (1566–1638)
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)