Hybrids : a Photographic Exhibition by Juliana Swatko

To surround oneself with nature is the best way to find a place of comfort and value within the world and that is the sensation created by this exhibition of lush, overgrown botanical rarities. The richly coloured images in this exhibition were made at Sydney's Botanic Gardens; Royal Sydney, Mount Annan and Mount Tomah in the Blue Mountains and Everglades Gardens in the Blue Mountains, using a low-tech plastic Holga camera with medium format colour film. Many exposures, slivers of time, were layered over each other, presenting a final vision based in photographic reality but which dissolves into large dreamlike panoramic environments of vibrant colour and fascinating textures. The film was scanned and digitally reconstructed and manipulated into images that defy the documentary aspects of photography and move instead towards impressionistic, painterly outcomes, through the method of their making, sitting across the boundaries of analog and digital photography. The title Hybrids refers to the subject matter as well as the actual method of image making, which Swatko has been engaged in for most of her photographic career, where in each instance she has worked within a set of defined parameters, using a selected system of image capture, processing or manipulation, that is at first Unpredictable and surprising but through testing and many generations of images, becomes controllable. The light capturing photographic process possesses unique abilities to effect change on an image, through amalgamation, metamorphosis and evolution, which are intrinsic but lesser known aspects of the medium but ones that provide great scope for the production of new visual knowledge and through which new paths are revealed, where the viewer may perceive the world in a different light. Swatko's love of colour and nature is the focus of these images and like a scientist or a gardener, grafting and breeding plants together to create new ones, the photographs also bring together many natural elements of beauty in unexpected ways, merging and transforming into an immersive visual experience which is familiar but yet extraordinary.