Yagan Tower Exhibition
People of regional, rural and remote Western Australia on Perth’s Yagan Tower
Beyond the Traffic Lights
This is probably something I should have blogged back in March - but all of a sudden the world got weird, and now here we are a couple of months later, and I’m trying to find some words to go with the photos.
When we set off last year to meander around WA, (“no plan and no time frame”,) it was with the aim of taking photos of the people we met along the way…those West Aussies who live in regional, rural and remote areas.
We had the barest skeleton of a plan for the six months we’d be on the road, and indeed not much thought had been given to any particular outcome from our adventure. It was simply something we’d wanted to do for a long time, and we knew we had a window of opportunity between our children finally being independent, and our parents still being independent.
One of the lovely, unexpected upshots from our 22,000km meander has been an exhibition of 100-plus portraits on Yagan Tower, in the centre of Perth. The main exhibition, Beyond the Traffic Lights, was back in December, although it’s still being screened several times a week throughout 2020.
Steve and I finally viewed the exhibition for ourselves in March, days before the phrase “social distancing” became one we’d use frequently. We were spending a night in Perth (en route to Canberra for the National Photographic Portrait Prize - more on that in another blog post soon), and the lovely folk at Screenwest scheduled the exhibition so we could see it. I was particularly keen to take photos to send to all the lovely people who’d let me loose with my camera all around the State.
It was wonderful to see all their familiar faces, (some passing strangers, others now friends,) up there, 14 metres tall, on Yagan Tower. There were outback publicans, travelling-home-schooling mums, artists, roo shooters, tradies, astronomers, surfers, pastoralists, gold prospectors, dingo trappers and even NASA scientists. Some we met briefly - in a small town IGA, a remote bar ,or on the road in the middle of nowhere - others we spent time with, nights sharing stories around camp fires.
Prior to the exhibition, I called all the people I’d photographed to double-check they were happy to be displayed so publicly. Each and every one said yes, and so many remarked that it was lovely to have the opportunity to show the city folk what lies beyond the traffic lights.
There are stories around each and every one of those portraits…both their story and mine.
If you’d like to see more of their photos, and read a little about each person, have a look at my Travel Journal.
