Earlier in the year, we asked our photo community on Instagram to start tagging their best images to our hashtag #headoninteractional to get featured on both our socials and in Head On Interactional. The response was amazing! We have almost 5,000 incredible photos posted to the tag. It was so difficult to choose the best – here is a small fraction of those we loved. This is an ongoing project, so join in for your chance to be featured.
Chris Bekos
@xhristo
Chris Bekos grew up in a creative environment, surrounded by his mother’s oil paintings, beginning his journey into photography beneath the red light of the darkroom in high school. He hasn’t looked back since seeing his first black and white paper print come to life in the developing tray. He is influenced by surrealism, minimalism, conceptualism, and the New Topographic, appreciating the sense of ambiguity in these movements. They make him look deeper, find something new within them, and experiment with his own photography. For Chris, photography based on ideas is more exciting and powerful than photography dealing with technique. Employing significant amounts of negative space to draw attention to the main subject, Chris uses photography as a tool of investigation and to unmask the mechanical nature of how we view the world.
Emanuele Roberto de Carli
@emadeca
Emanuele Roberto de Carli is a photographer from Milan. His entrance to the world of photography was one of osmosis. After he graduated with a degree in geography, he wanted to immortalise the space around him and the moving elements within each scene. ”I try through photography to show the geographical space surrounding people’s lives and their stories.” Emanuele loves to travel and document the world and has photographed 44 countries, most recently in Kabul in June 2021. He is inspired by great photographers who have formed the history of photo reportage. Through his photography, Emanuele exposes social inequalities and environmental issues worldwide, with interests in the urban environment and the social and economic changes caused by globalisation and climate change.
Gerry Orkin
@gerryorkin
Describing his current work as somewhere between documentary and street photography, Gerry Orkin draws influence from 70’s and 80’s British documentary and American colour photographers. His early work documented his concerns around social justice. Gerry’s work with indigenous communities is held in several national collections and has appeared in exhibitions, monographs and books. Gerry also co-founded Photo Access Australia’s first photographic centre. He has taught photography for many years and coordinated community and documentary photographic projects. Many of his programs working with young people, people of colour and people with disabilities have been exhibited. Most recently, Gerry has been collaborating with his partner, Julie Coddington. He’s been using his mobile phone on a couple of ongoing projects, capitalising on the mobile’s unique capabilities to create personal work.
Glenn Homann
@blueboy70
Glenn Homann has always been interested in design, which, he believes, translates into his compositions in photography. He is particularly attracted to a minimal aesthetic, ways to get the maximum interest in each photograph for the least input. The works of Jeffrey Smart encapsulate the same elements that Glenn looks for in imagery and design. Glenn also likes to explore and has a love for science. For him, photography naturally sits right in the middle of those three elements – design, science, and curiosity.
In his search for beauty and meaning in the everyday, he photographs using a smartphone. He has won many awards, including the abstract category of this year’s iPhone Photography Awards. For Glenn shooting with his phone speaks to the same minimalist approach outside the frame he tries to represent within.
Gloria Salgado Gispert
@gloriasalgadogispert
Gloria Salgado Gispert started taking photos in her teenage years after receiving her first camera, the same one her mother had used to document her childhood. Gloria recorded her high school and university years, much as her mother had, documenting her life and those around her, family friends and people she met along the way. In her 50s she still does the same. Gloria aims to reveal beauty in the ordinary, to show gesture and emotion, ‘those illuminating moments’. Not a fan of theatrics, she loves photographing unposed scenes. Gloria’s images reflect parts of herself, and for her, a good project should be personal. Her family documentary project Show me the way home was a recipient of this year’s Australian Photo Awards Stories.
Ilana Rose
@ilanarose_docophoto
Ilana Rose has always been mesmerised by photographs and their ability to capture a moment in time forever. When her teachers built an in-school darkroom, Ilana was hooked. It spurred her Bachelor of Arts in photography, early newspaper work, and ensuing career in photography. Over that 25-year career, her work has been widely published in the country’s top publications and exhibited globally. She is passionate about story-telling and social justice issues. Ilana’s work usually takes the form of long-term documentation projects, with interviews that give voice to people underrepresented in mainstream media. She advocates for and highlights the humanity, strength, and resilience of unseen communities. In 2019, she published and exhibited her first book ‘This Chicken Life: stories of chickens and the Australians who love them’.
Phil Duval
@orca5067
Phil Duval started taking photographs to record travel, family gatherings and time with friends. A fun introduction to photography basics through trial and error, he eventually drifted away from the art. When his kids left home, Phil had more time to travel and picked up a digital camera. His travel photos began improving again. Through experimentation and the occasional night class and workshops, Phil started seeking out candid street portraits and urban landscapes alongside his travel photos. Before Covid-19, he travelled to India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam to learn from Maciej Dakowicz. Phil gravitates toward scenes with high contrast and bright colours. In addition to his interest in street portraits, he likes documenting spectators and participants at events like rodeos, and motorsport showcases.
Rowena Meadows
@rowenameadowsphoto
Rowena is a psychologist turned documentary and commercial photographer, born with an unavoidable inclination to observe, an intense discomfort with perfection and a desire to understand and deconstruct human identities. Her work with families offers an opportunity to reflect, reframe and shift the way they see themselves, individually and as a system. Applying the philosophies of narrative therapy to her work, Rowena seeks to understand and reflect both dominant and previously un-storied aspects of identity. Rowena has worked for various brands, bringing her storytelling skills to a commercial setting, creating relatable and compelling imagery for businesses. In 2019, she co-founded the annual Storytellers Photo Conference, an international gathering of the documentary family photography community. She has been a finalist in many photography awards and won the documentary category of Australia’s Top Emerging Photographers in 2018.
Sigrid Debusschere
@sigrid_debusschere
After studying economic science at the University of Ghent, Sigrid Debusschere moved to Brussels and worked as a marketing manager for many years. In 2010 she left the corporate world to follow her passion for photography. She pursued fine art photography classes and became passionate about the printing process. For Sigrid, developing her pictures in black and white adds to the contrast and drama and makes them ageless. She likes taking street portraits and projects documenting daily life, including event photography, a great combination of having fun while immortalising moments. She held a successful solo exhibition of her black and white portrait series ‘Street Portraits’ in Belgium in 2015. Her latest project documents circus families to reveal their strong sense of tradition and the stories between the acts and daily life.
Suzanne Phoenix
@photospunctuatemylife
Suzanne Phoenix has always enjoyed documenting people and places. Hooked on photography since getting her first camera in her teens, Suzanne’s work documents and explores hers and others’ reactions to different and challenging environments. She is fascinated with what is behind peoples’ masks, examining the themes of mundanity, the extraordinary, performance, loneliness, connection, the forgotten and broken, sexuality and gender. She has developed her own style, but she doesn’t let it constrict her, allowing the subject and emotion to drive her compositions. She prioritises the themes that she believes need more representation and visibility.
Vasco Transcoso
@transcosovasco
Born in Lisbon in 1944, Vasco Transcoso spent his childhood influenced by reproductions of great painters in an illustrated encyclopaedia. His fascination was instant and perhaps his first step toward constructing an aesthetic eye. After a career in gastroenterology, Vasco reignited his passion for photography, starting with landscapes. By the end of 2014, he began to take photos in public. Over the years, Vasco’s photographic voice changed; he began shooting in colour with a compact camera. His work explores and focuses on the light in what he calls the ‘urban kaleidoscope’, when colours emerge between silhouettes and deep shadows. In 2020 he self-published a book (“99”) with 99 images from a Project (2016-2019), mainly in his hometown in the city of Caldas da Rainha.
Zorica Purlija
@zorica_purlija
When she was younger, Zorica Purlija photographed what felt natural to her and full of light. Despite studying photography and graphic design, she didn’t pursue a career in photography until years after her second son was born. Then she became consumed by the practice. Simply following her passion, she’s always searching for a way of showing beauty, vulnerability, and recognizable shared experience. Zorica’s photography frequently features her daughter, the beautiful landscapes around her and her mother. Recently graduating with a Master of Art from UNSW, Zorica explores psychological spaces, primary relationships and their impact on our future selves, accidental chance photographs playing a part. She notes the influence of her mentors Sandy Edwards and Sara Roney. Her current exhibition (Fade into You) blends landscape and portraiture.
Header image: Chris Bekos, @xhristo
About the author
Maxwell Aldred is a communications student at the University of Technology, Sydney and an intern for the first edition of Head On Interactional.
Photographers/Artists
Chris Bekos
Emanuele Roberto de Carli
Gerry Orkin
Glenn Homann
Gloria Salgado Gispert
Ilana Rose
Phil Duval
Rowena Meadows
Sigrid Debusschere
Suzanne Phoenix
Vasco Transcoso
Zorica Purlija
