Ben Cauchi’s photographs seem to arrive from another time and place, yet are thoroughly of the present. He works almost exclusively with the wet-collodion photographic process that dates back to the mid-nineteenth century and the ‘birth’ of the medium, producing ambrotypes and tintypes, unique images on glass and metal. Cauchi uses these historic processes to question the certainties of our relationship with the photographic image and with photography itself. He challenges our culture to think through our relationship with the past, with what it means to be contemporary, or to trust in the photographic image.

Cauchi’s is a subtractive practice dwelling on absence, lulls, the uncertain, the opaque and the fleeting elements of life. His shadowy images fixed on metal and glass explore the psychological dimensions of viewing and the nature of photography itself by continually moving within the grey areas between truth and untruth, presence and absence, the empirical and the incorporeal, seeing and believing.

Ben Cauchi was awarded the New Generation Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand and the prestigious Creative New Zealand Berlin Arts Residency in 2012. 

Alongside this exhibitition we are running a poetry competition. Please click here for more details.