Photographers Statement
Jack Picone in Sudan.
Documentary photography enables me to approach people from cultures vastly different from my own and interact with them.
As I document people and tell their stories, further communication is exchanged between the people I document and myself. Finally, when that body of photographs is published, it becomes a catalyst for communication between two or more cultures.
I like the idea that my photographs can be a conduit of communication between different people in different places.
Photography allows me to live freely and approach and interact with a diversity of people free of prejudice with an in-common humanity.
My photographs are both the ‘visual footprints’ of my own life and the life stories of the people I have photographed.
I see myself as a storyteller.
About
Jack Picone is the recipient of several of photography’s most prestigious international awards. These include the World Press Awards, the U.S. Photographer of The Year Awards (POY) and the Mother Jones/IFDP Grant for Social Documentary Photography.
Amongst others, his work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Musem New York, Musée de l’Homme in Paris and Museum aan de Stroom: Amsterdam. His work is held in collections at The Australian War Memorial, State Library of N.S.W and National Portrait Gallery in Australia.
For the past three decades, Picone has covered wars and major social issues in Australia, Asia, Africa, and Europe. He is a co-founder of Australia’s REPORTAGE photography festival, the founder of Reportage Workshops (a series of documentary photography workshops in Asia) and a member of the war photographers collective SOUTH.
He completed a Masters degree in Visual Arts and a Ph.D. in Documentary Photography at Griffith University in Queensland Australia and is a Visiting Professor in photography at universities in Australia and Hong Kong.
Picone’s training in photography was in using black and white film and mastering traditional darkroom print-making. It is a passion that has never faded thanks to the medium’s unrivalled capacity for both subtlety and drama. As legendary photographer Robert Frank expressed it in 1951: “Black and white are the colours of photography. To me, they symbolise the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.” Born in Moree, Australia, Picone is currently based in Bangkok and works globally.