Hillvale Photo Trophy - Hillvale Gallery
Personally, I’ve been a longtime Hillvale Photo fan. I've been dropping my film to be developed by the team there for years - since they had a lil’ tiny shop on a slightly different Brunswick back street from where they now operate their much larger lab and gallery. The Photo Trophy is Hillvale’s annual photography competition, where they print and display all entries in a salon style hang that completely fills the walls of their gallery space. There’s something to be said for a gallery that only showcases one particular art form, and especially photography, which so often gets overlooked in group shows.
This exhibition is the main fundraiser for the annual operations of Hillvale Gallery, with the entry fee of $35 per photo going towards not just the costs associated with this exhibition, but also the year of programming ahead. Artists can decide if prints of their entry are available for sale, with half of the $50 sale price going to the artist and the other half going to Hillvale. Which also makes this a great way for people to buy affordable art!) Other than the coveted trophy, which was of course the main prize (won by Phil Watt with photo #438), there were eight other prizes given out to winning photographers.
While the award is open to all methods of ‘lens based image making’, it’s clear that many of the entries are film. Honestly, I would have expected nothing less from entries into an award hosted by a film lab. This left me wondering of all the film photos entered, how many were from rolls that Hillvale processed themselves? Many of the images in this show feel like a love letter to the act of photography. I’m a half frame girlie myself, so I adored seeing some diptychs from half frame cameras up on the walls, such as #197 by Peregrin Costa and #78 by Bryce Watson. There were some polaroids by Anton Sur (#878) that seemed like experiments with the chemistry of the film. And I don’t know quite enough about photography to be able to explain what was going on with photo #149 by Tobias Titz, but I loved the outcome in that the subject of the photo becomes almost totally obscured by the materiality of the medium itself.
There were a few standouts in the show that truly caught my attention. The first was #768 by Hugh McDonnell; friends playfully attacking each other with water pistols through an open door. This photo translated such careless joy and a nostalgia for summers past, it captured me for a while. Nearby on the same wall was #765 by Florent Goy. A dog’s snout pressed through the bars of a cage, teeth bared in total contrast to the paws below flopped through those same bars very casually. A snarl brought on by its confines, but the body at an easy rest. When researching, I found the crisp black and white photo is part of a series the photographer took at Bangkok’s largest market. None of the photos on display have specific titles or information attached to them, other than a QR which links to the webpage to purchase the print, their entry number, and the photographer’s name and instagram handle. #623 by Alice Nguyen-Manderson stood out to me as well as the judges, with the photographer winning the Fujifilm prize. The disembodied legs sticking up into such a colourful textured space are just the right kinda weird to attract my eye. (If I wasn’t flat broke and looking for a job right now, this is the print I would buy.)
With so many photos on display I caught myself finding particular themes and threads through the imagery. Like the texture of the fence in #545 by Weston Sparkes and the glass in #470 by Courtney Owen, where little hands pressed against the window are the only thing not obscured by the texture. This was similarly repeated in #792 by Alice de Roahn and differently through a mirror in #366 by Harley & Händen. I found myself drawn to other portraits that also conceal the identity of their subjects; #257 by Dylan Pfenning, #860 by Andrew Tan, and the surfers of #831 by Ben Dickson. Portraiture is so personal, I wonder how the prints of these sell in comparison to the other work in the show.
The sheer volume of photos (1014!!!) is initially overwhelming, but then surrenders into a unique way for the standouts to truly jump out at you. It’s fun walking around the space being able to recognise a photographer’s hand in multiple images. I wish I had the time and space to curate a list of all my favourites. This is a stellar lineup of photos which you can catch at Hillvale Gallery until November 16th, with online print sales running until December 14th.