Vive la Différence: the Photographs of Belinda Brown

The photographs in this exhibition are about that experience for us, and an entirely different one for the photographer. These photographs come from Belinda Brown's encounters. These people caught her eye and kept it, and then they invited her into their homes.

One woman is a neighbour; one is a translator and fashion designer from post-war Berlin. Another is a woman met by chance in a supermarket. Two are long-time friends, others acquaintances, some initially strangers. Belinda has spent time with each of them, on the street, in cafés, roaming paddocks, the beach, studios and always in their homes. These images come out of these experiences, and are informed by the relationships, even if that relationship was established in a single afternoon.

This exhibition is an invitation to see these people and their place in the world, the private place that is a home. These images aren't innocent, but they are well intended, they are informed by a sense of curiosity and by genuine care.

These images are composed, by both the photographer and her subjects; they involve self-conscious acts on both sides of the camera. But the translation of their stories into a single narrative is Belinda's alone. For Belinda these images are about what preoccupy her, and also our, the viewers, assumptions. These images are about the self and its relationship to gender, sanity, sanctity, adornment, creativity and love.

For Belinda these images are a celebration of difference, of the ways people actually live. These images are also a challenge, a way of reminding us that when we see an old woman with a pram, a woman with a moko, a married couple, a potter, a man with a spike through his nose, we make assumptions. We come equipped with notions and in these pictures Belinda disrupts these notions, by insisting on particular versions of her subjects' selves.

This show reveals Belinda Brown as the artist working within a variety of communities, a photographer who insists on an unusual kind of social documentary, one which allows for the construction, by both the artist and the subject, of a self in the world.

Each image in the show is about a connection, and the impact of that connection on the photographer and the subject. By putting these worlds on show, Belinda is telling a story that is intended to surprise and perhaps enlighten. This show is both homage to the people in the portraits and a gesture of defiance - but first it is a celebration.

Laura Kroetsch, June 2005