Sydney Writers' Festival 2010

Portraits of previous SWF guests by artist, photographer and filmmaker, Juno Gemes. Exhinition runs from Thursday 21 to Sunday 24. 

Juno Gemes is an artist who combines a background in multi-media, cross-cultural arts, with an outstanding career as a photographer. Her work has been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions within Australia and overseas.

Juno Gemes is one of Australia's most celebrated contemporary photographers. In words and images she has spent 40 years documenting the changing social landscape of Australia, and in particular the lives and struggles of Aboriginal Australians, a process that culminated in her being one of the ten photographers invited to document the National Apology in Canberra in 2008.

Yet alongside her more public projects she has spent more than four decades chronicling the lives of writers. Captured at book launches, parties, and in their own homes, these images step behind the public personas of writers as diverse as Dorothy Hewett, John Maynard and Seamus Heaney offering a glimpse of them not as authors, or public figures, but as private individuals.

By turns joyous, quarrelsome, pensive, they are at once an affirmation of their lives as human beings, and a reminder of the fragility, and transience of those lives, even when the work endures. They are also an expression, in the truest sense, of Gemes' long-held belief in portraiture as an archaeology of the self.

To celebrate Juno Gemes' appointment as Photographer-in-Residence to the 2009 Sydney Writers' Festival, the Festival will be presenting an exhibition of projected images featuring former Festival guests on the Café Stage at the Heritage Pier on Thursday 21 May at 1:30-4:30pm.

Juno Gemes will also be making portraits of this year's guests in a specially created studio, The Light Room, located in the Rear Philharmonia Studio and accessed by the entrance behind the Information Booth. All writers are invited to call in at the Studio to make an appointment for a portrait session.

James Bradley