Photographing live performance art is fascinating. It’s spontaneous, and unscripted. You create artworks or document the movement created by the artist or other participants, with a great freedom of interpretation. Photography transforms the immaterial nature of art performance into something tangible.
Picture Her theatre show
In late 2019 I documented the first Picture Her theatre show by a Ballarat writer, researcher and actor Marg Dobson. The show has just premiered at Footscray Art Centre. In its description it says “the show takes the audience on an investigative performance adventure unearthing a multitude of unknown, forgotten and uncelebrated Australian women photographers from 1850 to the present day. The scene is set: a chance encounter with a pile of discarded glass plate photo negatives sends our sleuthing protagonist on an extensive investigation to uncover the identity of the mystery artist.” After sifting through public records and newspaper archives, Marg uncovers the untold story of a photographer Daisy Harriet Llewelyn, who worked in Ballarat in the 1920s.
