Plimsoll Gallery, 37 Hunter Street, Hobart
An exhibition exploring the enduring value of process and materiality in contemporary analogue photographic practice.
We live in a world where light pours endlessly from our screens, where algorithms anticipate our desires before we can even name them, where images proliferate faster than we can absorb them. In this constant stream of digital immediacy, something essential risks being lost: the quiet weight of the hand, the patience of process, the intimacy of creation.
This exhibition seeks to open a space apart from that acceleration. It invites us to slow down, to step into an environment where images are not delivered instantly but emerge through touch, chemistry, and care. Here, the works of the Analogue Photographic Society guide us back into the darkroom, that site of alchemy and anticipation: the scent of emulsion rising in the air, the soft glow of red light, the gradual reveal of form and tone as a print stirs into being within a tray of developer. To stand in this space is to be reminded that the photograph, before it is an image, is a material object—shaped by process, time, and the hand of its maker.
Within each work lies more than just the final captured scene. The photograph holds the trace of decision and hesitation, of experiment and accident, of the maker’s presence embedded in every grain of silver and every fibre of paper. The softness of focus, the fragility of tone, the unexpected blemish or distortion—these are not flaws but marks of humanity. They are reminders that to make slowly is also to allow for imperfection, for chance, for discovery.
Crucially, this is not a retreat into nostalgia. Rather, it is an affirmation of what remains vital in analogue practice today. At a time when so much of our visual culture is immaterial, disposable, and endlessly reproducible, the artists gathered here insist on the importance of tactility, of slowness, of presence. Their work resists the logic of instantaneity that governs our lives, offering instead images that reward sustained attention, that call us to linger, to dwell.
The exhibition proposes analogue photography as both practice and philosophy: a way of working that privileges the embodied, the material, and the human. It reminds us that the act of making is not separate from the object made; that the photograph is not only what we see, but how it was brought into being. In slowing down, in holding onto process, these artists reveal the enduring significance of material connection in a culture saturated with the immaterial.
Within the stillness of the gallery, the analogue print resonates with quiet insistence. It does not compete with the noise of digital saturation, but instead asks us to pause, to look closely, to feel the presence of the maker through the work. In doing so, it reaffirms that to create with care, to embrace the slow unfolding of an image, is to remain profoundly—and defiantly—human.
Artist name(s): Freya Wells, Claude Tero, Cullen Butters, Jeremy Hemming, Eddie James, Guy Swan, Josh Harvey, Kelly Nerae, Jun Soong, Cassandra McMahon, Jenna Hawley, Aisha Sherman-Noth, Rod Spark, Jenny Bird, Peter Maarseveen, Ursula Woods, Talita McKay Brown, Anna Harrold, Tahlee Barnes
Curated by Josh Prouse
GALLERY OPENING HOURS
14 March - 24 April, 11am – 4pm, Tuesday to Saturday
Closed Sundays, Mondays and public holidays
Image credit: Cullen Butters, Untitled, 2024
