The ONE Project By Hilary Wardhaugh
This video is about The ONE Project By Hilary Wardhaugh.
The ONE Project curated by award-winning portrait photographer Hilary Wardhaugh, is an ambitious exhibition that showcases 28 works by 28 photographers. The images were made using one camera and one roll of film, passed between each photographer between May 2015 and December 2015. The exhibition explores the nature of the photographic image in our digital age. Wardhaugh states:
The ONE Project is a comment that today with access to technology we make millions of images every day, which often renders the ‘image’ to digital noise. I wanted to create simplicity, by limiting myself to only making ONE image of a person, captured in-camera, with no photo manipulation, making the portrait considered, increasing its half-life and its emotional and social value.
The ONE Project is a timely and poetic antidote to the flood of images we see through a screen on a daily basis. As a commercial photographer, Wardhaugh noticed how much of her time was spent in front of the computer, sifting through and editing hundreds of images. Out of those hundreds of images, Wardhaugh realised that ‘often only one image is used, the hero image, with the rest rendered to digital noise, albeit kept on record and deemed necessary to keep’. In contrast, The ONE Project limits photographers to only one image so that no frame has been wasted.
The ONE Project focuses on the type of photography that offers the strongest proof of our existence: portraiture. The exhibition is inspired by photographic theorist Susan Sontag’s statement that ‘Photography furnishes evidence… A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened’. The exhibition asks, if that is true, why we need more than one photographic portrait as proof of our existence. The stakes are high. With only one chance to make the portrait, both the process and the portrait become precious.
Bringing together an impressive list of Canberra photographers, The ONE Project exhibition includes works by National Photographic Portrait Prize Finalists Grace Costa, Sean Davey and Rohan Thompson; Bowness Prize winner Lee Grant and Olive Cotton Portrait Prize winner Cathy Laudenbach, among a host of award-winning AIPP photographic artists. The exhibition will display some of the best contemporary photographic work available today, stripped back to a single analogue camera, and a single roll of film. This project was gratefully supported by NIKON.