PANORAMICS
John Toohey
Panoramics include three stories built around panoramas created with analogue half-frame cameras. The panoramic format allows us to play with ideas of time and space, the single image created from a series of moments, and space broken down into individual frames. The first story I created was Terra, a landscape history of Western Australia since colonisation. The images are usually accompanied by a text drawn from historical newspaper records tracing stories of people getting lost, breaking down and in other ways succumbing to the innate indifference of the landscape. Various iterations have been exhibited in Australia over the last five years. The second story, At Home He Thinks He's A Tourist, is a more playful account of tourism, inevitably taken while I was being one myself, in Australia, South Korea and Vietnam. Like Terra, it is always expanding as new landscapes are encountered. Some images have been published online by Analog Forever and were shortlisted for 2026 PhotoLucida. The third story, "what If The Apocalypse Has Been And Gone" is a complete account with seven works, all taken one morning in Tokyo around the government buildings in Shinjuku. This series received a special recommendation at the 2025 London International Creative Competition, photography section. Other stories I am working on include 'Stone', a history through stone, and 'Panopticon', where the camera becomes an observer with a sweeping gaze.
Artist
John Toohey
Photographer based in Perth, Australia, working with a variety of film cameras, with an emphasis on landscape history. For the last four years he has organized an annual exhibition of film based photography at Earlywork Gallery in South Fremantle, featuring local, interstate and international photographers. His work has appeared in online magazines like Analog Forever, SXSE, Der Greif and Trois Points. Recently, his writing has appeared in The Pomegranate, London magazine.
