The Pilbara is something to be experienced, and the '52 Weeks On: A Pilbara Project Exhibition' too is something to be experienced. This photo exhibition put on by FORM is a culmination of a year's worth of work by award-winning photographers Les Walkling, Tony Hewitt, Peter Eastway, Christian Fletcher and his brother Michael Fletcher (audio-visual).
This is an exhibition of altered landscapes. Mountains of red iron ore and white salt as well as the Pilbara bush, aerial images of island refineries as well as unsual and rugged coastline. You'll even find a portrait of a shopping trolley, and a picture of some workman's clothes drying on a clothes-line. So what you're confronted with is that this is no exhibition of pretty landscapes of the Pilbara.
What is striking is the colour and the contrast. Christian Fletcher's aerials of the white salt flats cut by a straight gravel road, and that of the deep red dirt and the sea separated by another straight line of a gravel road are examples. Peter Eastway's aerial of a river meandering through the green mangrove like a jigsaw puzzle is another. And there's also Tony Hewitt's image of someone putting the finishing touches to a fence on the hot orange dirt against a stark blue sky dotted with cotton-ball white clouds. The colour and contrast is so great, so hot, that you can almost feel the heat emanating from the images.
I have been a fan of Les Walkling, Tony Hewitt, Peter Eastway and Christian Fletcher for a long time. Seeing these images is like seeing the dark side of these gentlemen that you've never thought existed in them. Different, not odd, and almost frightening.
If you're intregued by what I'm saying, then go and see this exhibition for yourself. If nothing else, it'll show you, like it did me, that there are images to be captured and taken in in almost any place.
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