West Coast photographer Carol Maney is due for a busy April. In Queenstown she will launch her book A Wild Place at an exhibition of 12 of her hand-coloured digital photographs at LARQ gallery and elsewhere another exhibition of 15 of her images will tour the state through Tasmanian Regional Art’s Touring Program beginning at Smithton.
There is the book and there are the photographs. The images support the book which, in her words, is a highly personal ‘response to the untamed beauty of the west coast landscape: the scale of the elements, the local humour and stories, the character and resilience of the people.’ It’s important to understand that the images may well be of landscapes but Maney says that she is ‘actually a people photographer.’ A Wild Place is told from the perspective of a narrator who ‘is a somewhat naïve, wide-eyed child who came to live in Queenstown to reconnect with family. The story is a result of explorations into the bush and imaginings gleaned from looking through a camera or listening in on anecdotal hearsay revealing an unvarnished truth. Authenticity and integrity of the place [are] perceived from an unaffected, guileless, sometimes candid viewpoint.’
