This Side Up – Michael Kai
This Side Up
The series “This Side Up” features optical illusions, designed alternatives and manipulated room perceptions. The spatial arrangement of the images can be interpreted in contradictory ways – a phenomenon that is based on the way in which we can perceive two-dimensional images as being three-dimensional. In images that use a three-dimensional “parallel” perspective, objects can tip over or invert themselves. A concave room, for instance, may thus seem convex, because a person or object that is also shown in the picture can only exist in a convex room. Apart from being entertaining, the intention of the series is to encourage viewers to wonder: Is the world really the way I see it? Is it the way I believe that I see it? Or is it only a mental construction of how I perceive the environment?
Michael Kai
Born 1980 in Frankfurt, Germany, Michael explored and developed an enthusiasm for photography at a young age. On completion of high school he took the opportunity to work as a journalist and documentary photographer in former Yugoslavia immediately after the war. He then studied photography, completing his master in Photo Design at the University of Applied Science Dortmund, Germany in 2007 and intermediately studied at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia.
Michael is a keen traveller. Prior to moving to Melbourne he lived and worked in Vienna, Austria where he gained further experience in the photography industry, specifically in managing digital workflow and professional retouching. Email: michael@miphotodesign.com
Website: www.miphotodesign.com
Belco Pride – Lee Grant
Belco Pride
Triggered by a piece of graffiti, I find myself lost in the wilderness of where I call Home.
“I always believed it was the things you don’t choose that makes you who you are; your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in these things, like it was something they’d accomplished. Like the bodies around their souls, and the cities wrapped around those. I lived on this block my whole life; most of these people have.”
(Excerpt from Dennis Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone)
Lee Grant
Based in Canberra, Lee Grant looks after 2 kids, an online gallery called “Lightjourneys” and her photography business. She is also doing her Master of Philosophy (department of Photography and Media Arts) at the Australian National University.
Her work has been exhibited at various shows around Australia and the US, such as the “Kodak Salon“ (Melbourne) and the “PhotoPlus Expo World in Focus” in New York. Her work can currently be viewed at the Australian Center for Photography in Sydney as part of a group exhibition called “Inheritance“, and also as a finalist of the “Head on” Portrait Prize.
