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The exhibition Something About Us consists of a number of elements. On one level, it aims literally to present 'something about us'; that is, something about the community of Logan. At the same time, it is as much about the possibility of documentary photography generating such discussion. The exhibition features photography by some twenty-eight Logan residents who took part in a series of workshops, and by Angela Blakely and David Lloyd, who conducted those workshops with Julian Bowron, the exhibition's curator. Broadly speaking, the work focuses on concepts such as community, identity, and celebration. Much of the work is drawn from a project in which the workshop participants documented their celebrations of Australia Day. Given these subjects, the project could easily have slipped into feel-good representations or nationalistic pride; thankfully, these pitfalls are successfully avoided. One of the strongest elements in the work is a sense of the diversity of individuals within the community, and those things that are common to us all as well as those that are unique.
While the idea of photo documentary as a mode of story telling is raised several times in the catalogue essay, one gets the clear sense (in the images themselves as well as in their presentation) that these are but individual pieces of the story. Much is made of photography's ability to 'capture' truth in an image. Whether it is acknowledged or not, we can never truly know another person's experience, and the most we can hope from an artwork or image is that it provoke some sense of identification or empathy with the subject. The works in Something About Us range from humorous and celebratory occasions to intimate, evocative, and