Safari and stars

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Exhibition showcases “God’s paint brush”

Bianca Reynaud
Public relations assistant
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia

Karl Lindsay photograph

Karl Lindsay won the Avondale Fine Arts Photography Prize at the Manifest Creative Arts Festival this year with this photograph.

An exhibition illustrating a safari and the stars will be launched by an award-winning local photographer in Avondale Libraries on Thursday.

Our World and the Cosmos features 15 photographs of African and Australia landscapes, night skies and wildlife.

“These photographs allow me to showcase the fabulous paint brush of God,” says Karl Lindsay of Bonnells Bay, an Avondale College of Higher Education alumnus who won the Fine Arts Photography Prize at the Manifest Creative Arts Festival this year. He particularly enjoys photographing the night sky “because it’s something you rarely make the time to see.”

Stars and the Milky Way provide a stunning backdrop to Karl’s winning photograph, which is part of the exhibition. The photograph shows a bicycle framed and lit by the light from a convenience store in the Eastern Province capital of Mambwe, Zambia. The store is called the God Is Able Shop. Judge Aaron Bellette, a lecturer in photo media at Avondale, describes the photograph as having “layers of meanings and elements for the viewer to explore.”

Karl first saw the shop the day before shooting the photograph. “I thought, That would look awesome under a starry night sky.” Fortunately, starry night skies are common in Zambia and Karl got his shot. “It makes the perfect statement,” he says.

A former assistant boy’s dean at a school in Kenya and an intern with the Adventist Development and Relief Agency in Zambia, Karl says he has “left a piece of my heart in Africa.”

His photographs make this obvious. Afternoon Gold, for example, depicts Victoria Falls bathed in sunset. Karl entered the park at dawn and did not leave until dusk. His favourite photograph, Circles in the Sky, is a 15-minute exposure of the African night sky with streaming stars and a silhouette of a tree. “It just shows how insignificant we are,” he says.

Launch: Our World and the Cosmos, Avondale Libraries (Lake Macquarie campus), Thursday, August 28, 6 pm.