Articles

In a normal world, if a photographer scoured a city to find a studio with a ceiling high enough to accommodate a hydraulic cherry-picker, it would be reasonable to assume some degree of madness was involved. But not in the world of Melbourne art photographer Samantha Everton. After 10 years of building a career based…

video created by: Jean-Luc Syndikas

Only through a concerted effort does Samantha Everton, in her current series Sang Tong, reveal the impossibly rich tapestry of colours and forms that children have the ability to see without even trying. As adults we forget that children inhabit their dreams; for them the world is full of magic and wonder and possibility—a limitless…

I carry a small sketch pad with me at all times, and whether I am sitting on a tram or walking the streets, if something strikes me I write or sketch it down,” says Brisbane-based photographer Samantha Everton. Some of these ideas eventually get worked into storyboards for shoots, for which she captures her compositions…

It’s 42°C in Brisbane the day we speak to Samantha Everton on the phone – and she’s admitted defeat. “My studio is a bungalow in the backyard,” she says. “On days like this I just have to give up!” Everton’s latest show, Marionettes, hints at notions of surrender too. It consists of a series of…

IN ONE of Samantha Everton’s photos, a well-dressed woman stands at a wooden table with her face planted in a birthday cake, while a white goose looks on. In another, a woman hangs from the picture rail in her bedroom, her legs dangling uselessly, while in another a woman with her back to the audience…

If photographic art is to finally take its rightful place next to other fine art forms in this country, it will be due to work by artists such as Samantha Everton. Everton is an award-winning documentary photographer and a photographic artist, whose first Gold Coast exhibition is being held at Anthea Polson Gallery, where she…

SAMANTHA EVERTON ONCE guilelessly thought of photography as a form of documentation, a way to detail something that already exists, and not about creativity. So how was she to apply her natural talent and affinity for creation – costumes, hair, make-up? While working as a hairdresser in her twenties, Everton was called on to design,…

Submerged in chilly waters off the coast of Victoria’s southern tip, in the Southern Ocean, a young woman gasps for breath. Goose pimples crowd her arms and legs as she struggles against the lapping waves, struggles against the cold, her lips as blue as the dress she wears, which sways with the rhythm of the…

THE underwater shot, featuring the requisite good-looking woman, hair fanning like a mermaid’s, bubbles shimmering about her submerged body, is a staple of dream-like sequences in film, often used as a device to illustrate psychological states. So it is a brave photographer who delves into the subaquatic realm in the hope of capturing something new…