Mayu Kanamori

Michelle Blakeney is a Yaegl woman from the Far North Coast of New South Wales. She has been a photographer for several years, and her continuing passion and ambition is to document her own people's unique culture and history through photography. It is this healing power of photography that fuels her love of the medium. Currently a resident of Sydney, Michelle branched out from her photographic practice to encompass screen-based practice.

Murakami

“We take so many photographs. How do we know which ones are important, which ones matter?” Japanese photographer, entrepreneur and inventor Yasukichi Murakami was the talk of the town in Broome and Darwin in the early 1900s, until the outbreak of the Second World War saw him and his family, like all Japanese in Australia, interned as enemy aliens. Murakami’s photographs were impounded and subsequently lost. Using photographic projections, video, original music, soundscape, and dramatic action, Japanese-Australian photographer and writer Mayu Kanamori goes in search of Murakami’s lost photographs. Uncovering a fascinating story of unlikely friendships, thwarted ambition and unrequited love,Yasukichi Murakami stirs our collective amnesia about the history of the Japanese in Australia. Yasukichi Murakami is a meditation on love, truth and, in a digital age where cameras proliferate, the nature of photography.

a project by Mayu Kanamori.