DAYS before thousands of women rallied across Australia in the March 4 Justice protests against the sexual assault and harassment of the sisterhood, the Hunter's first collective of female photographers fittingly hit its stride.
Hunter Women in Photography (WH!P) is led by veteran photographer Edwina Richards, nicknamed Madam Flash by her 23 peers (aka "Whippers") in the collective.
WH!P launched on March 7 at Newcastle Art Gallery and already has two exhibitions in play: member Louise Faulkner is creative director of ARRIVAL, at Newcastle Art Space until March 28. The group project WH!P:HOME opens at Newcastle Art Gallery on March 26 as part of the Last Fridays/Bill Henson schedule. It is curated by Hannah Robinson and the Newcastle Herald's chief photographer Simone De Peak, whose colleague Marina Neil is also in the collective.
"I had next to no expectations of what might happen and now I have a real sense of, 'Holy shit, this is amazing, why hasn't it happened before, let's go for it!'," Richards says, recalling the launch, on the eve of International Women's Day. "I had a moment when I was writing my speech when I thought, 'I have to talk to and on behalf of all these amazing women. It better be good'."
WH!P's name was coined by member Justine Cogan.
"The sharp crack of a whip has been a metaphor for mental agility since the mid-nineteenth century, and we're also not opposed to the vague whiff of BDSM in there giving it a little sparkle," Richards informed the launch audience.
The collective's inaugural members aim to raise the profile of the rich talent pool of female photographers in the region.
"We are shooting for opportunities to exhibit together, to support our growth as photographers, to be able to make a living doing what drives us," Richards says. "We want to run our own race, hone our skills, experiment, talk about business and projects, pricing and gear, being paid properly and actively raising the profile of art photography in the region, particularly after the darkroom closures at the University."
Having honed her grant-writing skills at local collectives including Renew Newcastle, Make Space and Makers and Traders, Richards says WHI!P will soon formalise its status and an application procedure for future members.
"Then we'll look at some ways to form an online platform so no-one has an excuse not to find a woman photographer in Newcastle," she says. "We are creating an essential place and an online presence and talking about the possibilities of a book and applying to do a big show at Newcastle Art Gallery. I personally would love to do a festival. We are dreaming big."
Raised in Warners Bay, Richards enrolled in a communications degree at the University of Newcastle intent on being a writer. Entering the dark room at the university, however, a love affair with photography bloomed, dampening her flirtation with prose. She began her Masters at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney and had her first taste of the power of a collective as she was mentored by female photography "big guns" such as Lynne Roberts-Goodwin, Anne Ferran and Merilyn Fairskye. Later, she was director of photographer of a short film, The Stone Thrower: "It was a tiny indie thing that went around the world and won all these comedy awards. I'm really proud of it."
Eventually, Richards and her young family returned to Newcastle, where she co-founded Make Space with Renew Newcastle's support and established herself as a sought-after freelance photographer.
The seed for WH!P was planted in COVID-19 lockdown. Sitting in her backyard "hiding from homeschooling and clutching a wine glass", Richards recalled the Loud and Luminous festival a year earlier. As one of the 100 female Australian artists invited, she spent its opening night "dancing my socks off" with its founders, Hilary Wardhaugh and Melissa Anderson, lifted by the collective energy. "I wrote about that night: We who spend a big proportion of our lives helping other people's stories be told, have compelling and important stories of our own. And who better placed than a bunch of light hunters to shine a light on each other once in a while?" she told the WH!P launch.
Richards began reaching out to female photographers to gauge interest for a Hunter collective, driven by the personal and professional. She lost six months of wages in a week during the pandemic and valued the business she'd "clawed back" after motherhood. She also felt confident after her involvement in other collectives.
The response was rapid and generous.
"In our first meetings I thought, 'Yes! We're all on the same page, we love each other's work, photography, seeing the stories on how we work and even the boring stuff of how you run your business," she says.
Richards knew if WH!P members combined their stellar CVs, passion and connections that "instead of waiting for opportunities, we could actually just create them."
Newcastle Art Gallery's Aud Development and Visitor Services Coordinator Zana Kobayashi helped pull together the WH!P launch.
Richards deeply admires the WH!P photographers, who have taken diverse pathways in genre and training and all work at a professional level in terms of industry recognition and dedication to their craft. The collective is evolving and she welcomes inquiries from industry trail-blazers.
Defining a camera as "an instrument of bias and perspective", Richards underlines that "those paid to create images that shape our world have real power".
"Taking a look at the statistics of women photographers out there in the world compared to men, it's pretty obvious that the female perspective is underrated and underrepresented," she says.
"Gender identification plays a huge role in how we look at the world and how the world looks at us. How would the world appear to us if there was true gender equality in all areas of photography? What are we missing out on if only half the world is telling the majority of our stories? How would our values, sympathies, priorities, ideas of beauty change? I find it exciting and uplifting to imagine."
She heard recently that when the character of Dana Scully appeared in The X Files, the number of women doing STEM research exploded: "It made me think, where are our female photographer role models on screen? Where's our Scully of the photo world?"
Amid a scalding political landscape on gender equity, Richards says WH!P is timely: "Now feels like a great time to create real opportunities for lots of stories to be told, or told in a different way, and to encourage those women storytellers among us to excel at what they do best."
Faulkner says ARRIVAL illustrates WH!P's dedication to advancing the profile of photography as an art form. "Through both conceptual and realistic photography ... the works share a mix of ruminative, wry and soul-stirring observations of daily life, highlighting the humorous, terrible, elusive and beautiful stories of our days," she says.
HOME will explore the deeply personal subject of the meaning of the word.
"Home is more than a physical space. It can be a longing, a taste, a feeling. It is the watery embrace of the sea, the entanglements of intimacy and domestic life, the colourful heartbeat of family, the slow emotional landscape of a body, the small vignettes of our existence within the expanse of the natural world," says Robinson.
Quick to exalt other female artists, Richards struggles to blow her own trumpet. It is often a very feminine trait and this, she adds, is also why WH!P is a must: "There is such power in having a group that has your back."
WH!P event details are on its Instagram.
