You don’t have to put on the red light...
but it helps.
Darkroom prints from the Melbourne film community
Featuring: Jude Geale, Jessie Dinan, Milos Markicevic, Jeremy Lagadec, Bernie Cram, David Pattinson, Alex Tomlinson, Alberto Burgos, Jake Maraldo, Ramona Rosato-Pengelly, Luke Pringipas, Fergus Riordan & Jeremy Hargreaves
an essay:
To come
Alberto Burgos
My work in street photography is an ongoing attempt to validate my daydreams in the subtle fantasy of everyday life. These black and white images, printed on silver gelatin in the darkroom, are both studies of the ordinary and evidence on the quiet strangeness of human presence in public space. I have always been a daydreamer. As a forgetful child I would frequently find myself locked out of my home after returning from school. While awaiting the arrival of family members I would wonder around my home in St Albans in Melbourne’s west often in solitude. I would craft elaborate fantasies to make sense of the world around me. I imagined that a kraken lived in the creek behind my house, feeding on abandoned shopping trolleys—an explanation that gave fantasy to teenage vandalism. These early visions shaped how I see: not just what is in front of me, but what it might become if you let imagination seep through the cracks of reality. Street photography allows me to return to that state of wonder. Each frame begins with the simple act of noticing—how a gesture, a silhouette, or a fragment of light can open to something beyond the surface. The woman crossing the street becomes one with the background as if part of a video game in which the designers used the same texture assets on its models and backgrounds. The silhouettes passing before a large projected painting of a Renaissance face becomes a titan representing both threat and comfort. Heavy rain pelting the ocean creates confusion and textures for our minds to attempt to ground. For me, these photographs are less about documenting the street than about capturing the lonely daydreaming that still lingers from childhood—the fantasies I believe in, and the truths I project into the world. They are not answers but rather evidence.
Jude Geale
Jude is a Melbourne-based analog conspirator whose creative exploration centres on experimental and traditional photographic processes. Navigating multiple analogue formats, including still and moving image, they explore the everyday as a site of quiet significance, slowing down to notice beauty in overlooked details and capturing moments that hold personal resonance. For Jude, the end-to-end experience of film is of increasing importance: the anticipation of shooting, the process of developing at home, and the physicality of printing in the darkroom. This rhythm of delayed gratification connects their vision with both instant film, through Polaroid and SX-70 experiments, and moving image, through Super 8. More recently, they have gravitated towards black-and-white photography, drawn to its textures, contrasts, and intimacy. Currently, they are experimenting with 110, large format, and alternative printing processes, expanding their practice in playful yet intentional ways. Alongside this, Jude is increasingly considering how mixed formats and media representations of work can shift meaning, experience, and connection with audiences. Their pursuit often centres on intimacy and familiarity, whether with people, places, or environments, approached as both storytelling and personal reflection. Inspired by the vibrant analogue community in Naarm/Melbourne, and the friendships formed within it, Jude creates images that invite viewers to feel at home, as though stepping into a scene themselves. Balancing humour, play, and irreverence with moments of seriousness, their exploration remains both personal and generously shared. Artist statement My work with analogue photography is grounded in the desire to slow down, notice, and reflect. I am drawn to the anticipation and ritual of film: loading, shooting, developing, and printing, where every step carries both care and the possibility of surprise. Through still and moving image, I (attempt to) explore intimacy and familiarity in people, places, and everyday environments, treating them as sites of quiet significance. I think of image-making as part storytelling and part personal reflection, with humour and play always edging their way in alongside more serious moments. By experimenting across mixed formats and media, I look for ways to keep the process lively and the outcome open, something that invites viewers to feel at home within the frame.
Luke Pringipas
Luke is a second generation Cypriot and Italian Australian born and raised in the suburbs of Naarm (Melbourne) Australia. His work serves as an archive of his life, filling in the place of his memory-lost. His practice beginning as a way to reframe the suburban condition and reconcile his queer identity in the diaspora. He depicts quotidian scenes of friends and family, rituals and processes, ‘holiday snaps’ and portraits. He focuses his lens on the candid and authentic moments of life unravelling around him. He has a graphic eye capturing images with strong forms, shapes and blocks. The majority of his archive is in colour but he has recently gravitated to black and white, opening up a new way of seeing and expanding his analog-centric photographic practice. He lives and works on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people. In this selection of images Luke opens up his lens to outdoor summer rituals rooted in Victoria: collecting backyard fruit, spending time in the suburban backyard or escapist trips to the mountains or the beaches. The harsh sun positioned on people and places revealing bold and graphic forms.
Milos Markicevic
Milos Markicevic is a Serbian born photographer based in Melbourne. He has lived and worked in Australia since 2017. Formerly a concert photographer in Chicago, he now spends his free time attempting to discreetly capture moments in and around Melbourne’s CBD. Starting with a Game Boy Camera his parents bought him as a kid, he has shot photos in some shape or form ever since. After shooting film for the last 5 years, he finally took the plunge and completed a dark room course. He hasn’t looked back since.
Alexander Tomlinson
I’ve always been fascinated by places that aren’t typically beautiful – Industrial areas, large infrastructure projects, dense urban environments. Places that tend to make you feel small and insignificant but also remind you of what humans are uniquely capable of building. There is something about the texture of materials like concrete and steel, textures that we usually try so hard to cover up with a fresh lick of paint. To see them in their raw state can be confronting, hostile even, but this is often the reality of the man-made world. I think, subconsciously, my photography has taken a lot of inspiration from works like Shaun Tan’s “The Lost Thing”, a favourite picture book from my childhood. Shaun’s stylised depictions of modern-day city scapes combined with his exaggerated use of scale has always spoken to me on a deeply personal level – As I get older and approach a new phase of life in my 30’s, I’m often reminded that I too feel a bit like a “lost thing”, bumbling through the city, and life.
Bernie Cram
Bernie Cram has been shooting film since the 1980s. Lately he has been running District Darkroom in Coburg to aid his film photography addiction and to enable others to experience the joy and proper conclusion to their photographic process, making prints. When not making photos or under the red light at the darkroom, Bernie also shoots portraits on film, works on design projects, teaches design and does photography workshops. Statement The works in this exhibition are part of an ongoing project to photograph quiet, out of the way parts of Central Victoria. My working title for the project is Backroads but I might come up with something more romantic as it progresses. The displayed works have been shot on vintage cameras, either a Rolleicord or a Zeiss Ikoflex both were made in the early 1950s. The softness of the images, provided by the lens coating technology of the time, is certainly something that I am looking for in the work. The project is a little bittersweet because while I love the rural landscape and acknowledge that this is how we get to actually go down to the supermarket and buy fresh food to eat, the photos also highlight the significant change from the original landscape which would have been there prior to European colonization. These photos are all taken on Taungurong Country, my respect to Elders and community and I acknowledge the relationship to country as a vital part of the beliefs of all First Nations people.
Fergus Riordan
Fergus James Riordan is a photographer currently working as co-director of Bard Films and the director of the FJR Project. His recent projects have lead to his works being exhibited at cultural institutions in the United Kingdom and the publication of two photobooks. His works tend to explore themes of history, memory and the sacred, often utilising a highly personal and phenomenological approach. These photographs mark the beginnings of Fergus’ engagement with Australia and Naarm - questioning cultural institutions, creating everyday fictions, searching the anthropomorphic landscape and continuing his work in environmental portraits. Together these constitute an essential part of the process of finding a photographic vocabulary to inform a larger project across Australia.
Jake Maraldo
These works were shot at Sandown Raceway in July of 2025. I chose these photos because they illustrate the paddock atmosphere and experience of the racetrack. The preparations for a race, the scene around the paddock area and the atmosphere of not only being there as a spectator, but also as a race driver itself. I chose photos that were of particular subjects and to avoid wider shots of the general area, as to better highlight the touchstone experiences of viewing motor-racing as a fan: seeing the drivers preparing in the paddock area, seeing the drivers in their cars waiting for the time to pull out onto the track, and seeing the wear and tear that incidents out on track may cause. I shot all of these images on film. I shoot on film because I enjoy the process. Having the physical item is important to me and I find the chemistry and entire process to be very interesting, and I admire the archival qualities of a physical medium to retain such detail over time. I find it more fun to shoot film than digital. I enjoy the challenge of making every shot count and maximising the shots on each roll of film to be as good as I can make them be. I feel this has m ade me become a better photographer over time. You become pickier with shots and I think I have become better at differentiating shots that will be effective from ones that won’t. I have been shooting film for three years, and photography generally for ten.
David Pattinson
My photographic practice shifted after 2009, when I first met and began collaborating with Sam Lambert and Shaka Maidoh of Art Comes First (ACF) in London. Before this I’d been mainly shooting street photography, encouraged by the then new platform Flickr which allowed work to be shared with peers worldwide. With ACF, I continued shooting documentary style, but also began working with them to create iconic still-life,product, documentary, and fashion images for ACF projects. The work we produced, mostly in black and white, and informed by my background in film photography was a shift from the ‘street style’ that populated early Instagram. While I did still shoot on film, I had in 2007 purchased my first digital camera - a Leica M8, and digital allowed us an immediacy that was not practicable with film. As a result, the majority of my work with ACF is digital, and until recently was not able to be printed in the darkroom. While I enjoyed shooting personal work on film, and printing it in the darkroom - I wasn’t much enamoured of inkjet prints and so rarely made prints of the ACF work. That has changed recently as I’ve set up a digital enlarger in my darkroom in Melbourne, allowing me to print these images onto black and white photographic paper directly from the digital originals - done in the enlarger, without having to inkjet print a separate digital negative. All of the works you see here are printed by me, by hand, in the darkroom - on Ilford MGFB glossy fibre paper, directly from the digital originals. Four of them are from my 15 year collaboration with ACF, including the ACF logo image which was used for 10 years as the symbol of the collective and brand, and the fifth is the musician Hayku Kyah - who I have photographed multiple times over the past 10 years.
Jessie Dinan
Small Town Rodeo is a series of images here belong to an ongoing photographic project titled ‘Small Town Rodeo’. I’m looking to build a body of work that captures the spirit of rural Australian life and rodeo culture. In 2017 after relocating back from the states, I needed an escape from city life and challenged myself to go photograph something completely foreign to me and out of my comfort zone. One of those places was the Deni ute muster, a yearly event held in rural New South Wales. A celebration of Aussie culture, utes, booze and country music, it was here that I found myself at my very first rodeo! This 3 day trip sparked my continued fascination documenting and travelling to small town rodeos around Australia. I find the action behind
Jeremy Hargreaves
These prints are a part of a long term project called “love letter”. They express my personal affections to this career I dedicate myself to, and my friends who do so with me. Ballet is exceptionally hard, and unwaveringly valiant efforts are required. I want to document the hardships and the laughter, the joy and pain that we work through. These are pictures I care about deeply, and so it only makes sense that I display them in the way I see as most poetic and beautiful, through printing in the darkroom. I often feel that the analog process is my personal antidote against the whiplash inducing pace of modern life; it is slow and imperfect and thus meditative and healing.
Ramona Rosato-Pengelly
I'm a 24 year old woman born in England and raised in Perth. I do film photography for fun. I'm interested in the different ways a person can live their life. I like photographing places without people in it to focus on how the environment shapes life and I like photographing people who stray from the conventional modes of living.
Jeremy Lagadec
“Jeremy Lagadec (he/him) is a photographic artist living and in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). After graduating from design school, He spent his formative years of his career working in the moving image in branding agencies. In 2023, Jeremy came to Australia to reconnect with extended family and take a break from the creative industry. Working with 35mm photography, he documents his life as a bartender, using his camera as a gateway into scenes of hospitality venues. “Behind Open Doors” is an ongoing photographic project that emerges from the relationship between people and the interaction with their environment. An archive of prominent hospitality venues in the industry. As a bartender, Jeremy has frequented many restaurants and bars… This body of work is composed of some of his favourite venues. Thanks to his rapport with staff, he gains access to perspective unseen by regular costumers. Capturing small overlooked details, the stillness before a dinner service, a quiet morning routine, the lunch rush, staff closing up for the night. These are the in-between moments constitute the rhythm of daily life that forms the working day of every hospitality works. As an artist born overseas and practicing in Naarm, I acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung people as the traditional owners of the lands where we live and pay respects to Elders past, present, and emerging. - Jeremy Lagadec”