Depth Perception / Gamma Games Curated by Rekha Rodwittiya

My love for photography dates back many years. My first encounter with a camera was when my parents gifted me an Agfa Click III at the age of twelve. Looking through a lens opened up a new world to perceive and perhaps more importantly, it made me look more closely at what I was observing. Photography is addictive because it has the immediacy to record – to hold a memory beyond your life time, and offers you a reason to wander and discover outside of what you know to be familiar.

In the past, the expenses of photography were a deterrent to many who may have desired to use a camera. However today the smart phone has popularised photography radically. Digital technology and the phone camera now allows millions of people, of varying ages and diverse economies, to take photographs and circulate them over the internet - making this an activity that is commonplace within their everyday existence. There is a vast history of photography that already exists and has been chronicled. However photography has adapted itself in this era of fast paced quick dissemination, to serve as a popular language of instant communication - resulting as a consequence in the documenting of private and collective recordings of people, that detail what otherwise would be overlooked in the formal scripting of our histories.

To engage with new ideas of how and why we present the articulation of another, within the white cube, interests me both as an artist and as a curator. Depth Perceptions/Gama Games is an exhibition of the works of professional photographers, art practitioners whose works are triggered by the photographs they take, and amateur photographers whose chosen professions have no connection to the world of art – yet each of these individuals take photographs as a means to negotiate their comprehension of the world they live in. It is this juxtaposition of varied perception and differing need that situates and presents fascinating intersections for viewing.

Rekha Rodwittiya
2024