With a recent solo exhibition and a new project involving 900 images, it’s hard to believe that Josh Wells was ever feeling uninspired in his chosen medium.
“I was feeling really low about photography because I realised that I had sort of developed my technical knowledge to the point where I was no longer ever really pleasantly surprised. If a photo was going to turn out well, I knew why and I knew it was going to before the fact. I was still getting photos that I was happy with, but I wasn’t able to get that sort of ‘oh wow’ experience anymore. And I was also really cherishing time away from the camera because…photography is my job and I don’t want to be constantly burdened by my job.”
The cure for this melancholia turned out to be his honeymoon holiday.
“I brought a camera and I was enjoying myself. It was on that holiday I picked up a copy of Susan Sontag’s book On Photography which talks about tourists using photography as a way to distance themselves from what they’re experiencing, lest they be profoundly influenced by the world around them. It was validating everything that made me feel kind of in the dumps about photography in that moment.”
At the same time, Josh was delighted to realise he was having fun taking photographs.
“I thought well I’m enjoying taking photos on holiday. What is it about being in a different place that makes you feel compelled to take photos and how do I bring this back home? And that’s what became the exhibition that I just wrapped up, Fikacam, which is using my cavoodle Fika as a sort of perpetual tourist.”
Josh trained Fika to “look” and stay still while he nestled behind him to take pictures from the perspective of the ever-curious dog. These images of his local community were recently exhibited at the Kent Street Gallery in Victoria Park, with all works hung at Fika’s height.
“I figured if I had to bend down to take the photos and to do the install, everyone else had to bend down to see them!”
Much of Josh’s engagement with community arts exhibitions is directly attributable to his mum, textile artist Louise Wells.
“She’s been an incredible help. Obviously photography and textile are very different, but they are both a little bit sidelined by the major mediums, like painting and printmaking, what people think of as art. So some of the avenues that she was exploring made me think I don’t need to just be doing student group shows and things. There are all of these other ways I can be putting stuff out there – and to not shy away from doing things at a community level. I’ve come away from that really actually valuing community and the contribution that art can make to communities.”
Josh’s contributions to community art have been recognised in the form of several art awards. He won the Major Acquisitive Prize at the City of Stirling Awards in 2023 for Six Seasons, a compilation of photos of native flora, one for each of the six Noongar seasons. A black and white portrait of pasta chef Danny Lenzarini won the Contemporary Images category in the City of Vincent’s 2023 Local History Awards.
No stranger to documenting local spaces and personalities, Josh has now embarked on a new series that aims to capture images of Hyde Park in an impressionistic style. A happy accident with a digital camera in Hyde Park was the spark that lead to this aesthetic.
“I had a little digital camera and I just liked a scene. I took it and it went to focus and it didn’t find the right point of focus, and I thought that’s still kind of pretty. That just kind of sat for a long time and I thought I should come back to that but never really had a sort of grounding reason to keep at it.”
Finding out about the European shot-hole borer and its impact on the trees of Hyde Park gave Josh the impetus for the series. When he learned from other photographers that the trees they would regularly photograph were already gone, the project took on a new sense of urgency.
Josh aims to take 900 images, representing the 900 trees that are slated to be culled. Starting from 900, the works are titled in descending order. Using a 1967 Hasselblad camera (which he describes as “beautiful Swedish precision clock-making but also built by a country of people who fully read the manual before using something”), Josh is taking advantage of intentional lens blur to create detailed, very fine grain images that can be enlarged almost infinitely.
“On the metre square print you can come up so close and it’s still not pixelated. You can see the globs of grain, but then you have to really, really back up and it never actually fully comes into focus. It comes back to the ideas of impressionism, pointillism. Can we create something that is more real to how we see a scene by not having crisp focus?”
Employing his deep technical understanding and unique pieces of photographic equipment, Josh is capturing the changing environment of one of Perth’s most loved parks. The images are soft, beautiful expressions of the rapidly disappearing trees. They have also given Josh a wonderful way to combine his theoretical knowledge with his artistry and commitment to telling community stories.
Josh Wells is exhibiting three of his impressionistic-style photographs of Hyde Park in this year’s Fine Art@Hale exhibition. Come along over the weekend of 19-21 July to enjoy them in person.
