Discover art in unusual spaces

WHAT does an office stationery store, a bluestone laneway and a piano bar have in common?

All three are hosting a free photographic exhibition during Ballarat International Foto Biennale.

Photographer Polo Jimenez’s Year 67, a collection of light boxes featuring 67 cars from the year 1967 is hanging in RADMAC Office Choice on Armstrong Street South.

The exhibition is the result of almost three years work which started as a way to celebrate the year Jimenez was born.

“I don’t know much about cars, I just like them,” Jimenez said. “As a photographer I go for their aesthetic, I like their style and shapes and mostly the nostalgic connection.

“My dad used to own a Galaxy 500 back in Mexico so when I was photographing this one, I immediately had a flash back and was transported to the era when I was a kid.

“I was very small so the thing I remember the most about my dad’s car was the buttons on the radio that I used to play with.”

Finding the cars was a combination of attending car shows, scanning car sales websites and some were pure coincidence.

“It was quite an adventure,” he said.

The adventure behind David Bailey’s Old Ballarat exhibition at Uptown on Lydiard Street North began in a second-hand bookshop with a stash of historical photographs.

Bailey, renowned for his wedding photography, realised many of the images were of landmarks still standing.

“I have a love of history and wondered how I could show history and today in one image,” he said. “I built my passion for history into illustrating how the city has changed over time, effectively creating a gradient from past to present in each image.

“Morphing each of my images with the original takes about eight hours to complete and they express how the city has continued to hang on to its heritage, it is still as stunning today as it was back then.”

Extrospection, Rhonda Baum’s body of work on a wall in Bath Lane documents the changes in the light, the sky, the weather and the landscape.

“It’s about place, they are quite abstract in a way, and it’s also the fact that those images could be anywhere,” she said. “It is up the viewer to see what they want to get from seeing those sorts of places because everyone has different memories of the landscape.

“The lane has a lot of foot traffic and I like the idea of people walking past looking and commenting.”

Ballarat International Foto Biennale runs until Sunday, 20 October at various locations across the city. For information go to ballaratfoto.org.