Eamon and I did a presentation at Guide Dogs Victoria on 18 October 2016, handing over a cheque for $4,025.00, money raised from Eamon’s Soul Mates exhibition.
Great stuff!
Eamon and Andrew Follows presenting a cheque to Guide Dogs Victoria CEO Karen Hayes
Dates: 20 – 25 September 2016
View the Melbourne Fringe Festival program web page for this event.
No Vacancy Art Gallery
34-40 Jane Bell Lane, QV, Melbourne
Opening hours: 11am – 5pm
Wednesday 21 September 6pm – 9pm
Creative Director and CEO of Melbourne Fringe Festival Simon Abrahams
CEO Karen Hayes from Guide Dogs Victoria and “Eamon”
Andrew Follows
Guide Dogs Victoria
Melbourne Fringe Festival
No Vacancy Art Gallery
Many thanks to Darren and CPL Digital for sponsoring the printing of the photographs. Very much appreciated from the wizards at CPL. For all your photographic printing needs.
Many thanks also go to H2o Hand Carwash in Richmond and MVP Lifestyles for their charity car wash and fundraising. You are absolute legends!
For more information please contact the gallery on 03 9663 3795
or Andrew Follows on Mobile: 0400 862 795
Email: andrew@blinkiephotography.com.au
30 August 2016
An eventful weekend at H2o Hand Carwash in Richmond had MVP Lifestyles host a charity event for The Soul Mates Project (Guide Dogs Victoria). Raising funds and getting supercar owners and the community to get together and have an awesome day.
Thank you to Art Blart for this amazing write up on my car photography. The write up appeared on 4th February 2016.
View the full article with all the images in the series.
This is what Dr Marcus Bunyan had to say:
Hats off to my photographer friend Andrew Follows for a stunning set of Australian automobile photographs.
These photographs, taken during daylight at the BP station before the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne, and at twilight on the opposite side of the freeway at the corresponding BP station after the cars have returned from their drive to Frankston, are superb.
Andrew and I have an intense passion for cars. Only through this true immersion and engagement can you get photographs that are so evocative of subject matter, that are so atmospheric of place, space and the cars themselves. These are some of the best car photographs I have seen in a very long time… a kind of Australian vehicular vernacular.
I have sequenced these photographs for Andrew so that they tell a story, a modernist story of light, form and design, interspersed with vibrations of energy (punctum) such as Buick 1956 or XA Ford Faclon coupe GT 1974 Faze 4. Look at the crack in the concrete of this image as it leads into the car which both crouches down and seems to float in the air. Then just look at the clean presence of XB Faclon 500 coupe John Goss special 1975 or the space and light in the image VE Valiant sedan with red Ford pick up truck. God I love them…
To then finish the sequence with that classic Aussie car, HDT Holden LH Torana L34 1978, captured in such an eloquent image of movement and light. Just sensational.
Andrew, you could make a living taking photographs of car art!
Marcus
** Please make sure you enlarge these images to see them to best advantage. **
Andrew Follows
XB Faclon 500 coupe John Goss special 1975
2016
From the series Carmania
Digital photograph
Andrew Follows
HQ Holden Monaro GTS 1972
2016
From the series Carmania
Digital photograph
Andrew Follows
XW GT Ford Falcon 1968
2016
From the series Carmania
Digital photograph
Andrew Follows
Buick 1956
2016
From the series Carmania
Digital photograph
Andrew Follows
Ford Mustang 2 door hardtop
2016
From the series Carmania
Digital photograph
Andrew Follows
VF Valiant coupe 1969
2016
From the series Carmania
Digital photograph
Andrew Follows
HQ Holden Kingswood wagon 1972
2016
From the series Carmania
Digital photograph
Andrew Follows
HDT Holden LH Torana L34 1978
2016
From the series Carmania
Digital photograph
This is REALLY going to change how I take photographs. Remote control from my iPad of shutter/aperture, iso, focusing etc… now I get to have a bigger screen to see the image, to frame and shoot.
BRILLIANT!
Need some funds to buy it now.
More information on Manfroto Digital Director for iPad Air 2.
Manfroto Digital Director in action
These new photographs are part of my ongoing journey and investigation into how I see the world.
I am at the beginning of that path, always learning about the world around me, and how my particular vision affects how I record and feel the world through the images that I take. How shooting into the sun (contre jour), at night, or in glare is totally different for me as a vision impaired person.
What is it that makes my photographs special, uniquely my own?
This is the critical question moving forward.
It is such a privilege going out with a photographer such as Dr Marcus Bunyan, an education on how to place the camera, how to frame the world. New suggestions by him are to link an iPad directly to the camera in the field, so that I can open the images immediately to review them, instead of waiting to get back home and download them to my computer.
This is an exciting concept, one which I will investigate. I will need an attachment to mount the iPad (with hood to stop the glare of sunlight) on the tripod. It will enable me to review images in real time instead of not being able to see the image details until I am home. Stay tuned.
Still awaiting news of my Australia Council grant application. Keeps your fingers crossed!
Andrew
Andrew Follows
Women in pink and red
2015
Andrew Follows
Forgotten sleepers
2015
Andrew Follows
High Rise
2015
Andrew Follows
Entrance to shelter
2015
Andrew Follows
Wood stacked for a fire
2015
Scott Bradshaw
Andrew Follows. The Blind Photographer
2015
Blind photographer; it’s an oxymoron. To interpret the chaos of the world and reconstruct it through the barrel of a lens is intimidating even to the fully sighted. Now imagine 90% of your vision disappearing. Seem like an impossibly daunting task? Try telling that to Andrew Follows.
Legally blind his entire life, Andrew gained a new lease on life in 2008 when he picked up his first “pocket rocket” – a term he has coined for your standard consumer point and shoot camera. In a world where analogue fetishism disregards technology as cold and isolating, digital photography gave Andrew a lens through which he could finally see the big picture.
Meeting Andrew is a revelation. There is no pretension when he speaks of his passion, simply warmth. Despite being exhibited in cities such as Paris, Edinburgh and Luxembourg, Andrew is open to discussing his techniques and working methods. “[Photographers] don’t like to share. They’re very protective on how they take their photographs. With me I just want to show everyone”.
Andrew uses his incredible story to inspire others. He runs a series of workshops inclusive to both the impaired and fully able, to break stigmas and mentalities of what a blind person can and can’t do.
Behind the camera he is confident and decisive. In front of it he is bashful, shy and almost embarrassed. Perhaps as a way to acclimatise to the situation, Andrew immediately directs our photographer. “Open the windows, you’ll get more light… Maybe you could take a photo in the mirror… I think this room would be best for this photograph”.
Andrew refuses to be defined by his condition. He is a photographer above anything else.
“It’ll look better this way. Trust me,” says the blind man.
Andy McCallum
Scott Bradshaw
Untitled (Portrait of Andrew Follows)
2015
My eye condition is called retinitis pigmentosa. It’s an eye disease that affects people differently. So in my case there’s no vision in my left eye and tunnel vision in my right eye. The tunnel would be about the size of a 20 cent piece. I’ve always had it.
Is your eyesight deteriorating?
Yes. Slowly.
Will it ever fully go?
Yeah.
Do you have any idea how long until that happens?
No.
Isn’t that scary?
… Yeah.
Scott Bradshaw
Untitled (Andrew in front of his computer screens)
2015
“If we didn’t have digital we would still have film and I wouldn’t be getting anywhere… It was because you could take the card out and put it though the TV or the computer and all of a sudden I was seeing a lot more than a normal film print. I could magnify it. I started to see more detail; more shapes, more colours, more textures. The camera is my eyes!”
Scott Bradshaw
Untitled (Andrew in front of his computer screens)
2015
“That’s the reason I do the workshops. A – to show the mainstream what it’s like to be a visually impaired photographer through simulator glasses. And for low vision people it’s to show them that you can use the cameras at all. To see the world that they can’t see, just by taking the photo and putting it through the computer.”
Scott Bradshaw
Untitled (Andrew in front a work from his series ‘Night Oceans’ 2012 )
2015
I have a natural eye for photography.
Even though you only have 10% of your vision?
As far as I’m concerned I’m getting there. I’ve still got a lot of work to do. I’ve accomplished in the 8 years I’ve been doing this, what usually takes 10-15 years to do. I’m just scratching the surface… A lot of people just sit at home and wait for the world to come to them.
Andrew Follows
Missing You II
2015
Digital photograph
[Please click on the image for a larger version]
“You know, it is great to see how he is challenging himself. But as soon as I saw the image, I couldn’t help but think that I was interested in how he saw the world – not how well he can compensate for his eyesight issues.
That’s what was great about those first images you curated Marcus [Density 2013]. In some of them, Andrew won against the world in his own way – not every image, but in some of them. But I suppose to actually explore his own presence in a site – the validity of his own perception is a really, really difficult thing – is there a precedence for limitations visually? Grandma Moses? maybe Ralph Eugene Meatyard in terms of his limited lifespan?
To achieve the creation of his own standards against a medium that will record everything – huge challenge.”
Ian Lobb, photographer
The spatial dimension of liminality can include specific places, larger zones or areas, or entire countries and larger regions. Liminal places can range from borders and frontiers to no man’s lands and disputed territories, to crossroads to perhaps airports or hotels, which people pass through but do not live in: arguably indeed all ‘romantic travel enacts the three stages that characterize liminality: separation, marginalization, and reaggregation’. In mythology and religion or esoteric lore liminality can include such realms as Purgatory or Da’at, which, as well as signifying liminality, some theologians deny actually existing, making them, in some cases, doubly liminal. “Between-ness” defines these spaces. For a hotel worker (an insider) or a person passing by with disinterest (a total outsider), the hotel would have a very different connotation. To a traveller staying there, the hotel would function as a liminal zone, just as ‘doors and windows and hallways and gates frame…the definitively liminal condition’.
More conventionally, springs, caves, shores, rivers, volcanic calderas – ‘a huge crater of an extinct volcano…[as] another symbol of transcendence’ – fords, passes, crossroads, bridges, and marshes are all liminal: ‘”edges”, borders or faultlines between the legitimate and the illegitimate’. Oedipus (an adoptee and therefore liminal) met his father at the crossroads and killed him; the bluesman Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads, where he is said to have sold his soul. Major transformations occur at crossroads and other liminal places, at least partly because liminality – being so unstable – can pave the way for access to esoteric knowledge or understanding of both sides. Liminality is sacred, alluring, and dangerous.
Text from the Wikipedia website.
I am the beginning of the end,
the end of every place.
I am the beginning of eternity,
the end of time and space.
Andrew Follows
Soulstice I
2015
Andrew Follows
Soulstice II
2015
Andrew Follows
Soulstice III
2015
Andrew Follows is a professional photographer with a difference. His vision condition, retinitis pigmentosa, renders him legally blind. Andrew’s ability to overcome the hurdles presented to him as a blind photographer makes for an engaging, fascinating and inspirational story.
This podcast was recorded 2012 before I headed to Scotland and went to air on 3CR. Glen who is blind is a great reporter / story teller.
with Glen Morrow
In the next few weeks I will be receiving a Thank You Package for participating in The Exposure Awards. I will also receive a letter of recognition for participation in the Digital Display at the Louvre in Paris on July 13th 2015.
Thank you to everyone who voted on my images for the Exposure Awards.
Very proud and humble but how cool is that.
More information on the awards can be found on the Exposure Awards website.
Andrew
Andrew Follows
Elevation, Doreen
2013
Digital photograph on archival cotton rag
130 cm x 86.5 cm
Andrew Follows Photographer 