AUSTRALIAN ART Exhibition Catalogue

Junctions is an exhibition of photographic portraits created by Gerson Bettencourt Ferreira during his residency at IASKA. Bettencourt’s penetrating and empathetic images depict a broad cross-section of residents and visitors to the small town of Kellerberrin captured in everyday public and private settings. The subjects pose consciously and deliberately, having momentarily interrupted everyday activities to engage in a brief silent exchange with the photographer. The resulting images are dignified and compelling in their unadorned directness. Bettencourt’s work is in this sense quite antithetic to the tradition of ‘spontaneous’ photography that feeds on images of people caught unaware by an intrusive photographic eye seeking the quirky, the shocking or the picturesque

About the artist:
This exhibition follows previous projects that Bettencourt developed in the USA, Africa, France, Portugal and Germany. Throughout his work to date, the artist’s approach has been to identify a specific site and systematically engage with the diverse people who inhabit it. Sites of previous projects included an African town, a suburb of San Francisco, a popular beach in Portugal and amateur sporting clubs in Berlin. Each body of images is presented to the public in two formats: as an exhibition and as photographic book. The layout of the works is an important component in Bettencourt’s exhibitions, as photographs are printed in different sizes and arranged in varying clusters and patterns. But what underpins both books and exhibitions is an attempt to create images that capture the universal humanity and individual distinctiveness of the people engaged in the silent dialogue that takes place across the threshold of the photographic lens.

pp. 92 illusts #190823 First Edition