The 15 portraits in Moment are dispersed around the gallery walls at about waist height and each sits in a beautifully crafted light box. Each image is 11 centimetres in diameter and the sitters are connected to one another either as family or friends.

The “moment” of the exhibition title refers to the “moment” the artist captures each subject after they have sat for a time with their eyes closed and then opened them. This action, according to the accompanying text, apparently allows him “to capture the subject as their most authentic self”. This is not easy for viewers to determine (unless they know the subjects) and for me we are presented with 15 people staring directly at the artist, captured at a very particular and confronting “moment”.

The eccentric display was just that. The ability to lift the boxes from the wall, however, added another dimension to the activity of looking and to how we view a portrait. I did not know any of the sitters but in holding the boxes a sense of familiarity entered the activity of viewing the artwork.

The act of touching and holding gave an intimacy to the viewer-artwork relationship and in the case of the portrait added the element of the sitter so the dual relationship expanded to a triple one viz. viewer-artwork-sitter. I don’t of course mean this literally but the expansion of the normal ways of looking certainly changed my relationship with each sitter.

The box structure holds clear references to the formats of 19th-century portrait photography. I am thinking in particular of the (often) leather cases with velvet surrounds that characterised the presentation of ambrotype portraits, a presentation that insisted on viewers holding the image in their hands before placing it on a table or other place.

Mohell’s choice of a low height for displaying the boxes on the walls invited viewers to look down and into the images again adding a forced intimacy that fitted with the ability to lift the works from their hanging devices. I remain undecided about this exhibition. I didn’t see any connections between the sitters, nor do I see any special vulnerability that is not present in any portrait, and I don’t know what I see that I “might usually miss”.

David Rosendale’s The Fall 2017-2018 is the result of “a 12-month photographic study of seasonal change and environment, in the Alpine region of Fall’s Creek in Victoria”. Like its subject, it is full of majestic and beautiful images. Rosendale is skilled at capturing the myriad nuanced textures of nature as well evoking its changing moods that not only announce seasonal changes but provide those tonally variant palettes that he so marvellously captures.

Rosendale’s choice of sites is that of the artist. His compositional vocabulary is skilfully compiled so that the hidden geometries of the natural world obviously inform his overall pictorial structure. His use of diagonals is particularly adept and exemplified in a number of works in the exhibition. In Falls Creek # 69 (Cat. 9) the stark beauty of nature and its sometimes harrowing power is beautifully captured. Nature’s contemplative side is presented as an almost monochrome abstract in Fall’s Creek # 29 (Cat. 3), its abstraction broken only by the inclusion of a triangle of rocky shoreline at the left-hand corner of the image.

The magnificence of the mountain landscape makes reference to the 18th-19th-century Sublime and the example of artists like Turner and indeed von Guerard is difficult to ignore. The realness of Rosendale’s subject aligned to his considerable skill, however, subsumes aesthetic progenitors and the works in this exhibition are a testament to the power of both artist and the natural world that is his subject.

Joshua Thomas’s Points of Contact is concerned with the relationship between father and son and specifically with that of his own relationship with his father. The first image in the exhibition – No One Knows Who Took this Picture (Cat. 1) – sets the tone in a very clever way. It is a coloured picture of a mother and young child, surrounded by an incomplete jigsaw, whose subject (I think?) repeats the photographic image it surrounds. The metaphor of the jigsaw that is life waiting to be put together is pointed and sets the tone for the 18 black-and-white images that constitute the main body of the exhibition.

The protagonists are introduced as Forlorn (Cat.2) and Forlorn Self Portrait (Cat.3). In the former the father holds his head in his hands in a pose of vulnerable resignation. The black background sets a dark and moody tone that permeates the series as well as giving emotional depth to this particular image. The image of the artist demonstrates an equal vulnerability and resigned acceptance of the situation between father and son. The overall docudrama character of the exhibition gives each image the feel of its being a film still, part of an ongoing presentation of which each is a part.

The use of black-and-white underscores the preceding and allows the artist to imbue a range of aesthetic and emotional takes throughout the exhibition. The subtle nuances available in the use of black-and-white are beautifully capitalised on by Thomas who demonstrates a skilled and astute understanding of his medium.

His interiors hold special poignancy with empty rooms bereft of warmth or awaiting completion speaking of the fragile difficulties that accompany the father-son relationship. The positioning of figures within the spaces again underscores the distance between the protagonists. In The Destroyed Room (Cat. 16), Room of the House # 2 (Cat. 17) and Room of the House # 3 (Cat.18) the father has his back to the viewer, a pose that points to the physical and emotional coldness of the spaces he inhabits as well as his own emotional states. The backward stance also intimates a concealing of those states and thus brings into play that poignant vulnerability that Thomas so beautifully captures.

The final image – Family Portrait (Cat. 19) – shows father, son and family pet in an embrace that speaks of the need for both physical and emotional contact that is an essential ingredient in all our lives.

Thomas’s Points of Contact is a clever series in which the stark black-and-white aesthetic of individual images allows the artist to achieve tonal and visual equivalents of the emotional range and depth at play in human relationships.