Join us for our extraordinary exhibition by John Grech, an internationally acclaimed cultural historian.

The exhibition showcases ‘rephotographs’ – photographs of recreated scenes from the iconic Holtermann Collection of photographs of 1872. The photographs by John Grech are contemporary views of some of the sites in the Central West of New South Wales photographed by Beaufoy Merlin and Charles Bayliss of the American and Australasian Photographic Company during the 1872-1873 goldrush.

Artist Bio

John Grech is an artist, writer and academic with a BA and Graduate Diploma in Visual Arts (Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney) and an MA and PhD in Cultural Studies (Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney).

John works in visual and time-based media interfacing gallery exhibitions and installations with performance, sound, music, audio features and documentaries, and writing. Thematically, his interests have focused on cities and communities, contemporary life, globalisation, gender, art, film, documentary, culture, history, and heritage. His writing covers a range of genres from fiction and ficto-critical essays to life writing as well as critical-analytical scholarly theoretical publications.

His artistic projects have been exhibited and/or displayed in national and international contexts in Australia, Europe (Malta, Holland, Germany, Greece) as well as in Japan, the USA, and Canada. This has taken place in national and regional art museums, commercial galleries, and curated exhibitions. He has also produced projects for public broadcast, (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, PBS Malta), media organisations (Mediamatic, Amsterdam), institutions Midwestern Modern Languages Association Conference), and websites.

The Holtermann Rephotographs

“The Holtermann Collection is a wonderfully unique photographic collection which represents just some of the work of Beaufoy Merlin, Charles Bayliss, and Otto Holtermann. The Collection is especially significant to Gulgong because it provides a comprehensive photographic record of the town that “mushroomed out of the ground” in just over twelve months. This type of record simply has no precedence anywhere in the world.

When I finally visited Gulgong in 1985, I was instantly captivated by the town’s ability to rekindle a sense of those early photographs. From that point on it was only a simple logical extension to decide to visit those early photographic sites and to rephotograph them. The result, this collection, has created a dialogue between two points in time, between two cultural realities, and between two groups of people.

This project looks more closely at the Human elements. By concentrating on an environment that is almost totally of human invention, it is possible to begin to distinguish between the things that humans do to survive and the cultural artifacts they create to achieve this and the human being. This awareness is given further context by the occasional reappearance of the natural world which hints at both our ability to rearrange it as well as its ability to resist those efforts and serves to remind us that we must still relate to a world that is at once responsive to our will yet still uncontrolled and indeterminate.”