Pictures of the World

How do you capture a moment of cultural appreciation or how much a place and its culture has influenced your work? Many artists, whether from the East themselves or travelers through it, have marveled at what they have seen through their lens. Fortunately for us, such photographers have aimed to create fragments of the East through their depictions of everything from vast mountain landscapes to everyday life. In 2014 a photographic exhibition entitled Gardens of the East: Photography in Indonesia 1850s-1940s at the National Gallery of Australia, was the first major survey in the southern hemisphere of photographic art. These pieces of history followed on just decades after the earliest versions of the camera had been developed in the 1850s to just before the establishment of the Republic of Indonesia in 1945. It offered a unique insight into the everyday life, culture and people of a country in south-east Asia, revealing a peek at those still honoring tradition or contributing to developments in contemporary industry. In Artsper’s own selection of works, you will come across artists such as Sean MacLeod and Monica Denevan, whose photographs blur the distinction between cultural documentation and artistic portraiture. She strives to document her travels, with their fragments of the East echoing deep personal connections made with those from another culture and their relationship with the nature and landscape they inhabit…