“I never had aspirations to be a photographer,” Jeff Moorfoot explains from the Mining Exchange, the headquarters of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale. He’s just pulled into the office and is busy checking emails, managing orders for frames and coordinating volunteers. It’s a far cry from his days “living in Tasmania on the side of a mountain being a hippie”, but that carefree existence has lead him to this office, and his position as Festival Director of BIFB’11.
“It was circumstance,” he recalls. “My nearest neighbours, who lived further down the mountain, were doing a hobby course in [photography]. I went down there one night and they had their temporary dark room set up… and I saw the development come up in the print tray and was kind of hooked.”
