The Vessel of the Self
Photographs 1968 – 78, Bulle Galleries, Melbourne, 2001
The bloc of self-portrait photographs cover the ten years between youth and manhood. The images reveal a maturing self-echoing and foreshadowing the artist’s other explorations in painting and drawing. Bradbeer inverts the traditional practice of using photography to document a reality in order to paint it; he uses the camera to document existential states - his own. This solves ethical problem of owning images as he makes the camera into a tool of introspection without invasion of someone else’s privacy of theft of their image.
Excerpt for ‘The Vessel of the Self’ by Beatrice Faust.