Jo Ractliffe

Since the 1980s, Jo Ractliffe’s photographs have reflected her ongoing preoccupation with the South African landscape and the ways in which it figures in the country’s imaginary, particularly the violent legacies of apartheid. In a country with a powerful tradition of social documentary, Ractliffe became known for her distinctive photographic approach in photographing places of violence and conflict, drawing attention to the absent and unseen, traces of meaning beyond the evidentiary.  In 2020 Steidl published a monograph on Ractliffe’s work, Photographs: 1980s – Now. Her photo-books include Being There (2022), Signs of Life (2019), Everything is Everything (2017), as well as The Borderlands (2015), As Terras do Fim do Mundo (2010) and Terreno Ocupado (2008), which documented the aftermath of the war in Angola. Ractliffe is represented by Stevenson Gallery: https://www.stevenson.info/artist/jo-ractliffe

Cherine Fahd

Cherine Fahd (b.1974) is a Lebanese-Australian photographer living and working in Sydney. She has devoted over two decades to examining photography as a dynamic social practice.  Much of her early works present a surrealist engagement with photography, the boundaries between staged and unstaged photography, and how we perform for the camera. Cherine also writes broadly on photography. Her scholarly work has an enduring focus on everyday familial experiences, which often, to humorous effect, provoke questions about race, cultural difference, death, grief and the role of mourning in the family album. Recent research has examined the destigmatisation of infant loss through post-mortem photographs on social media and the political and ethical issues of making death public. Cherine's creative work has been commissioned by leading Australian cultural institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and the Sydney Opera House. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally at the Haifa Museum of Art, Benaki Museum Athens, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.  Cherine's scholarly articles are featured in respected journals “Photographies,” "Photography and Culture" and "Philosophy of Photography." She is the author of three photo books, including the award-winning "Apókryphos" (2019), which won the Australia New Zealand Photobook Award. Cherine holds a PhD from Monash University and is an Associate Professor in Visual Communication at the University of Technology Sydney.