“South”
ACT Legislative Assembly. Until August 11.
Reviewed by Anni Doyle Wawrzynczak

THE 35 works in colour and black and white by eminent, Australian, freelance photojournalists Michael Coyne, Stephen Dupont, Sean Flynn and David Dare Parker bear witness to recent human suffering in Afghanistan, East Timor and Indonesia and to the ‘60s conflict in Vietnam.
This is not an easy exhibition. Many of the desperate, searing images remain in the mind’s eye for days. Flynn, son of Errol, disappeared in Cambodia in 1970.  His mid-‘60s photographs – the single leg of a North Vietnamese soldier and an abandoned American helmet, share a muddy expanse of otherwise empty ground; a young boy under interrogation from Chinese Nung mercenaries in the service of the US Special Forces weeps with terror – appear contemporaneous with photographs taken 40 years later.
Dupont’s “Afghanistan Generation AK” series documents a generation of humans lost to war in a country that he calls “the final frontier of madness and beauty”.  Four Afghan women in burqas wait to see a doctor at Charikar Hospital.  The image is powerful and mysterious; the composition masterful, as light plays amongst the folds of fabric and shadows encroach from the margins.
A single, stunning image from Michael Coyne’s series “The Jesuits – Second Spring” relieves the brutality; an Indonesian boy stands tall and proud, right arm outflung, head thrown back, on the shoulders of a Jesuit priest, who, rising out of the river, raises his own arms, palms extended, in celebration of the powerful, resurrective vision of children at play.
The irritating lack of information in the gallery was mitigated by a post-exhibition visit to http://www.degreesouth.com.