WOVEN
THREADS
1997
Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne
1997
Gallery 4a, Sydney
1998
SELECTED WORKS: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
1998
Anne Zahalka’s method in this project is to provide intimate and documentary portraits of a group of women while at the same time revealing the potential that photographic technique has to manipulate and to objectify it’s subject matter so that the viewer can see for themselves the manipulation of the image by the photographer .
works
overview
Commissioned by Community Aid Abroad.
This body of work investigates specifically the place of women in two indigenous communities in the Philippines. The photographs explore these via traditional and contemporary photographic modes, the documentary, the ethnographic/ anthropological and the touristic raising questions about the limitations of these forms of representation.
…. Zahalka’s repetition of the image and signposting of its manipulability serve to foreground the constructedness to which the cultural is subject in the process of photography. Most effective is her critique of postcard photography, a genre which ossifies and commodifies cultural difference (more often than not the difference of subaltern ethnic groups), turning it into a hollowed-out sign of colourful and unique national identity’.