John Ogden (photographer) - Fine Art Photography

Fine Art Photography

Since 2006 Ogden's work has focused on series' of fine art photography, and extensive work with Aboriginal Australian imagery. His publishing company, Cyclops Press, began production with 'Australienation' in 1999. Partly inspired by a conversation in which Ogden was upbraided whilst in England in his youth, criticising the near genocide of the Aboriginal populations by the colonial immigrants, and subsequent culture clash, Ogden's 2008/9 work 'Portraits From A Land Without People' is considered to be the most comprehensive pictorial history of the Aboriginal people of Australia produced, honoring fully the Aboriginal cultural code which requires permission to be granted by each individual in every picture. To compile the book, and gain the appropriate permissions, Ogden travelled extensively over a four-year period, examining over 300,000 images, and visiting public libraries, galleries, museums and private collections in every state and territory in Australia. Ogden has described the dedication necessary to complete this task as a 'beautiful obsession'.

In November 2011 Ogden released 'Saltwater People of the Broken Bays – Sydney's Northern Beaches', and in November 2012 released the companion book 'Saltwater People of the Fatal Shore – Sydney's South-side Beaches'. 'Slightly Dangerous – The Cyclops' Cypher', released in May 2013, provides an insight into the inspirations and influences behind Ogden's work. In his foreword to 'Slightly Dangerous', photographer Tim Page writes: “This is a life well travelled, of a baby boomer who surfs an existential path across six decades, waxing the best of nostalgia against the odds that are self mitigated by the excesses of those times. It is a heritage of the hippest, most gonzo ‘down-under’ attitudes, rendered by images we all wish we had snapped. As if Hunter S. Thompson and Richard Neville shuffled photo cards with Robert Frank’ian images throughout the deck”.