Canberran Lyndall Gerlach studied eight years of fine art, education and graphic design. She majored in ceramics, printmaking and design, exhibited her paintings and drawings over many years, and was featured in Artist's Palette magazine in 2003 - described as "deliciously opinionated, clued-in and arty". She designed the Barrenjoey High School Badge and won an Australian Branding Design Award.
When Gerlach was a graphic design student in the 1970s, photography involved chemicals, red lights and black bags, a mysterious and wonderful process. In 2019, after 44 years away from photography, she was lent a camera. She soon decided photography was her medium, discovering a love for it and digital art, a niche she is happy with, which fulfils her creative needs. The brushes and pencils were put away.
Gerlach says, "I like to make the ordinary, extraordinary. Photography for me is capturing what I am thinking or feeling, exploring something interesting, or creating something different that 'talks' to someone, and provokes thought or appreciation of the subject ... contemporary artists have never been so free to explore the boundaries of fine art, or photography. Photography is at last free to be a creative medium, not just a medium that records a moment in time."
She says, "For me, a good photographic image must always engage the viewer either emotionally or intellectually."
Just one year into her new medium, and using the borrowed camera, she was a finalist in the 2020 Mullins Australian Conceptual Photography Prize. This year, she has again been a finalist in the Mullins, been commended in the Australia's Top Emerging Photographers competition and the Mono Awards, and been featured on the LensCulture website and in FRAMES magazine's Digital Companion.
Earlier this year Gerlach revisited previous old park haunts in Sydney that gave her solace among environmental chaos. She found herself wrapped in memories, jangled by the pace and close-quarters living, but exhilarated by the geometry and design. The city pulled at her sense of design and curiosity. She explored movement in deep, water views - often reflecting splashes of light and drifts of fast-moving patterns on the buildings.
A resultant series of 12 exquisite composite images, City-ness, are all about structure, in architecture, town planning, and society. They can be seen at lyndallgerlach.com/contemporary-art-photography/city-ness-composite-series.
Gerlach says, "In every image of this body of work there is the same visual element representative that is representative of the city's underlying and inescapable structure. Composed of two strong vertical lines and several rectangular shapes that represent the city's windows and building structure, the element binds photographic images across layers of meaning."
FRAMES is an international community created in 2020 by an independent publisher in Switzerland. The publisher's team produces a quarterly 112-page printed photography magazine, "because excellent photography belongs on paper". It features work of both established and emerging photographers of different genres and mediums.
They also publish a weekly newsletter. Then they have an app that delivers two carefully selected images every day to smart phone users, with the stories behind the shots and photographers' advice. And the monthly Digital Companion Gerlach was featured in, plus a podcast on which they talk to photographers about their images, experiences and personal stories. Now Gerlach has been featured on the podcast, in a 43-minutes piece, a significant achievement for this reborn photographer.
Gerlach says "it is not ever the accolade, but the journey that is the reward. What happens along the way is sharing life and growth". Nevertheless, she deserves these accolades.
