Antipodes Ed. 1 of 5

No season defines Australia more than summer. Australians are conditioned to cherish summer, to dream it, to love it, to drive around in it with the window down; to love it or leave it, to eat a snag in it and endure it with a smile on one's zinc-creamed face. I mean, it's frankly un-Australian to whinge and whine about summer, right? Just drink some more plonk and get on with savouring the heat and the possums and the cricket and the chiko rolls and the eye-candy and together we can forge the identity of a nation through....the weather. And if all this is too hard, you might just end up the subject of a photo like this one. And once you're in this photo you can actually reveal what might be closer to the truth i.e. that summer is for many a time of melancholic exclusion in a sparsely populated land whose inhabitants, insecure like a teenager, will tend to define themselves via notions of extreme weather, extreme animals and luckily, extreme shyness.

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Alex Frayne has been involved in film and images from his earliest school days. Beginning with an 8mm camera in hand he has continued his love affair with visual media ever since. His stills photography work has earned acclaim and his work is held in galleries including the National Portrait Gallery (two images in the Permanent Collection).

He shoots mainly analogue film formats, including 6x6cm, 6x9cm and 35mm formats. In 2023 his performance MUSIC FOR OTHER WORLDS had its world premiere at the prestigious Adelaide
Festival of Arts, featuring the esteemed pianist Paul Grabowsky responding in real time to a series of his photographs projected.

In 2026 his American Photographic Essay MANIFEST DESTINY premiered at the Adelaide Festival Of Arts to huge acclaim. Rosemary Neil writing for The Australian proclaimed it "the best photographic exhibition I have seen in years."

He has four art books published by Wakefield Press. Simon Caterson, for The Australian, writes: "the last book confirms that Frayne deserves to be thought of alongside Ansel Adams and the other great landscape photographers.' (Landscapes of South Australia, Wakefield Press, 2020).

BOOKS (all published by WAKEFIELD PRESS, ADELAIDE)

-Adelaide Noir, 86pg, 2015
-Theatre of Life, Portraits - 80pg, 2017
-Landscapes of South Australia, 216 pg, 2020 (3 print runs)
-Distance and Desire, 216 pg 2024