Time Carved In Stone

 Book Review by Brian Rope

Time Carved In Stone: Benjamin Kopilow

All photographs, text and design by Benjamin Kopilow

Published by Benjamin Kopilow, ©2026. All rights reserved.

1^st Edition. Published in Canberra, Australia

ISBN: 978-1-291-82268-7

The cover of the book - image © Benjamin Kopilow

Benjamin Kopilow is a photographer, teacher and mentor. I have personally experienced Ben in all those roles when he has spoken and shown his images at our local photographic society, and evaluated members’ works providing quality commentary and advice.

Kopilow’s interest in visual art didn’t begin with photography, but with conversations with his painter father as he grew up - about colour, shape, light, and composition. Painting wasn’t his talent, but photography became his way of exploring those same ideas. More than twenty years after a mid-30s career change to photography, this experienced and award-winning photographer says he is still fascinated by the way light, colour and composition can transform an ordinary scene into something memorable.

In 2025 Kopilow and his wife travelled through some of the world's great desert and wilderness places, those of California and the Great Colorado Basin. He says the four weeks journey enabled him to explore and experience those places through form, shadow, texture, colour, and scale. He believes landscapes are sculptures shaped by time, and geological forces, then revealed in different ways by ever changing light.

Using images captured during the journey, Kopilow has now created this book. Time Carved in Stone is not simply images showing readers where they travelled. Much more significantly, this artist (for that is what he is) through his photo-art and accompanying words enables us to vicariously see what he refers to as a journey through deep time.

Each of twenty chapters looks at another place. First up is Death Valley with its salt-cracked floor. The last explores the polished granite walls of Yosemite National Park, well-known for the famous Ansel Adams’ images of it. 

Death Valley © Benjamin Kopilow

Along the way we see various canyons including, of course, the Grand Canyon. The Kolb Brothers (who invented the selfie) pioneered the capturing of this canyon’s beauty in black and white in the early 1900s, but Kopilow’s beautiful colour images here are something else. We see the folded spine of Capitol Reef and the vast red silence of Monument Valley. The artist tells us that all of his landscape images are not merely describing, they allow us to see them in quiet contemplation. He is right.

Before the first chapter there are informative words, a map and an image of the Colorado Basin. Then there are 64 pages of glorious images revealing, amongst other features, Kanab and Horseshoe Bend.

Kanab Sand Caves © Benjamin Kopilow

Next some words about and images of Monument Valley inform and reveal to us that the glorious landscape and the magical sounds of traditional flutes of the Navajo. Then we learn about numerous other locations, including Factory Butte, Hickman Bridge, Escalante, Kodachrome Basin, Maple Mountain Provo, and Great Salt Lake.

In the chapter about Factory Butte there is an illustrated page of information about Buttes, Mesas, Pinnacles and Hoodoos. Here it is, so you can read it and learn if, like me, you need to.

If, again like me, you have never visited some of these places, you may not have even heard their names. Nevertheless, as you explore the pages you will recognise particular features because you have seen photos of them before. But there will be many other features that are new to you. Regardless of which category any particular image fits into for each of us, every one of them is an excellent sensory contribution to our appreciation of the geological history of these areas.

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Land © Benjamin Kopilow

The images in each chapter reveal peaceful places that our minds can return to without necessarily looking at them again. I suspect those who practice meditation would consider them most useful resources.

Bryce Canyon & Fairyland © Benjamin Kopilow

We are able to explore these places that have been shaped by geology – by prehistoric oceans and inland seas, vanished deserts, restless rivers. For hundreds of millions of years, unseen geological forces have been quietly sculpting. It has been said that in these places is North America’s hidden backbone, the ancient core beneath us when flying or driving over, or walking amongst, them.

Moonscape Canyon © Benjamin Kopilow

The quality of both the words and images in this book provide a basis for us to think about the passage of time and its significance in life. Kopilow has used his personal sensory experiences to create images which have transformed the centuries old landscapes into living archives. He has delivered an excellent contribution to what is known as the quiet narrative genre, which relies primarily on his visual storytelling to convey messages, evoke emotions, and provoke thought. It challenges our perceptions and offers a deeper understanding of our human experiences.

Links to make purchases of the book in e-book, paperback and hard cover formats are available on the artist’s website, Lulu, Kobo and Ben’s Books.

This review is also available on the author's blog.

 

 

The Fold : Hoda Afshar

Photography Book Review: Brian Rope

The Fold : Hoda Afshar

Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon & Hoda Afshar

Designed and Published by Loose Joints Studio

Oversized stitched booklet with quadruple-folded debossed cover

245 x 245mm, 228 pp, 435 monotone plates

ISBN: 978-1-912719-64-8

Hoda Afshar began her career as a documentary photographer in Iran. Since 2007 she has been an Australia-based visual artist and documentary maker. She has won various major awards, including Australia’s National Photographic Portrait Prize twice.

Afshar is a member of Eleven, a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators and writers uniquely straddling contemporary art, academia and grass roots community engagement. Considered to be a most innovative visual artist of her generation, she explores marginality, gender representation, and displacement.

Afshar challenges the history of gazes. The gaze (French: le regard), in the figurative sense, is an awareness and perception of others or oneself. In this book, The Fold, she pushes the boundaries of photography, making it a potent instrument of disclosure and resistance. It is both poetic and committed.

Cover_The Fold

In addition to the book, the artist’s first monographic exhibition – opening on 30 September 2025 at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, France - Hoda Afshar. Performer the Invisible also unveils The Fold.

Performer l'invisible

The book – and, I understand, the exhibition - offers a critical re-reading of photographs from the museum's collections’ archives, taken by the French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan de Clérambault during a stay in Morocco in 1918-19. He attempted to investigate his psychoanalytic theories regarding fantasy and facial coverings, producing thousands of photographs of Islamic women, and some males, wearing the traditional white Haik garment of the area, which has now virtually vanished from everyday life there due to colonialism.

By exploring and re-appropriating that image archive, Afshar has questioned the way in which photography, used by dominant powers, has shaped - sometimes made captive – how bodies are represented. The Fold attempts to unpack de Clérambault’s ideas about fabrics, covering, and fetishism.

When she commenced scanning the archive, Afshar found herself unintentionally creating small square images of folded fabric and hidden faces, purely selected by chance. She decided to continue doing so, as a way of referencing the repetition, excess, and obsession with the fold – the very qualities of the Baroque period described by Gilles Deleuze in his 1988 book, also titled The Fold. He was a key figure in poststructuralism and, in that book, proposed a new and radical way of understanding philosophy and art. He introduced a way of practising philosophy that centres on the fold, exploring how difference turns inward to engage with itself.

This is the first time Afshar has drawn upon an archive in her work. Through the recurring motif of a mirror, we are invited to examine our own biases as we view these images, particularly in relation to the veil. 

There are around 24 pages of text in the 122 pages of the book. They primarily comprise two essays - “On Photography and Orientalism” by Ali Behdad, and “Decoding Clerambault – Hoda Afshar’s Unfinished Quest” by Annabelle Lacour, plus a conversation between Afshar and photography historian Taous Dahmani. One brief exchange from that conversation focuses on the key issue of why the women in the image archive are not identified.

Dahmani asks Is their fate to be ever-linked with their photographer’s name? Afshar responds Yes, this is a difficult question to answer and the same one I had in making The Fold – the question of who is missing in this work. On the one hand this is obvious; the women who figure in Clerambault’s photographs. As in so many of the photographs taken in this same milieu, the photographed women are silent; we learn nothing about them.

The bulk of the book is images created by Afshar’s scanning of the Deleuze archive. Here is my small random selection of the image pages.

 

And here are a few individual images provided to the media for use:

Hoda_Afshar_TheFold_Press05

Hoda_Afshar_TheFold_Press11

Hoda_Afshar_TheFold_Press15

Afshar has also created a film which begins with a digital animation re-imagining the scene of de Clérambault’s death – he shot himself in front of a mirror. A camera focusing on his reflected image leads into a sequence in which clinicians and academics offer their assessment of him. An excerpt worth viewing is here.

This review is also available on the author's blog here.

​

THE BASEMENT – Photography from Prahran College (1968-1981)

Photography Book Review: Brian Rope

THE BASEMENT – Photography from Prahran College (1968-1981)

Published by Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) (2025)

Print production Wilco Art Books, Amersfoort (NL) ISBN: 978-1-876764-88-3

277×208mm, 232 pages, 261 images

                                                            

This significant publication celebrates a key period in the history of the Photography Department at Prahran College, during the years 1968-81. First-hand accounts from people illuminate the related gallery scene and the cultural impact of the College.

It starts with a foreword by the Director of MAPh, an introduction by that gallery’s accompanying exhibition curators, and photos of the Basement’s teachers. There are six chapters covering different aspects – early years and exhibitions, new 1970s photography, street photography, making film, performative portraiture, and student life. Chapters are filled with images, as well as words.

There are illustrated insights into the memories and outputs of three students from the time. And there is an index, lists of students and illustrations, acknowledgments and a colophon. It is a most important new contribution to the published history of photography in Australia.

Contributors include Helen Ennis (who has delivered a number of other significant books about Australian photography – most recently Max Dupain: a portrait – reviewed on this blog), Daniel Palmer (who, with Martin Jolly, produced the excellent Installation view: photography exhibitions in Australia 1848-2020 – also reviewed on this blog), and Gael Newton (who researched and curated the Australian Bicentenary exhibition on the history of photography in Australia).

Ennis writes about the early years, Palmer about exhibitions in Melbourne 1960s-1980s, and Newton provides a visitor’s view. Each essay provides excellent context for the images that follow and the chapters to come.

 

 Quirk_Students Peter Johnson, Peter Burgess, Paul Cox & Unknown Potter Prahran _1972

          

Paul COX Age of Aquarius (Carol Jerrems, Jan Hurrell) 1970 gelatin silver print

Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection 2000.85

donated by the artist through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program 2000

reproduction courtesy of the artist

There are chapters by Stella Loftus-Hills (MAPh Curator), Adrian Danks (Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and Media, RMIT University), Angela Connor (MAPh Senior Curator), Bill Henson (a notable leading contemporary photographer) and Susan Van Wyk (NGV Senior Curator), Nanette Carter (photographer turned design historian), Nicholas Nedelkopoulos (contemporary artist), and James McArdle (retired Assoc. Professor, Deakin University). The talent involved with this publication is rather special.

Loftus-Hills’ chapter Down on the Street is about how the conventional art school began to move towards a more progressive teaching approach. A cross-disciplinary approach saw the introduction of a photography department. Teachers fostered creativity and student artists inspired by their desire for personal expression took their cameras to the streets finding and documenting everyday life.

 

Graham HOWE Protester, moratorium to end the war in Vietnam, September 1970

courtesy of the artist

Andrew CHAPMAN Lest we forget 1980

courtesy of the artist

The Danks chapter is about Paul Cox Making Film, frequently casting students as actors and using them as stills photographers and cinematographers, developing their skills and fostering community.

The Performative Portrait chapter has two parts. Connor discovered “many photographic gems” including Polly Borland’s “wonderful student folio from the early 1980s”. And A conversation between Bill Henson and Susan van Wyk is precisely that, with the former responding to questions from the latter.

 

Christopher KOLLER Bauhausler 1980 silver gelatin print

courtesy of the artist

Polly BORLAND Nick 1983 pigment inkjet print

courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf (Melbourne)

Stella SALLMAN Sue on the bed, Bondi 1978

courtesy of the artist

Robert ASHTON

Carol Davies, Peter Crowe, Carol Jerrems, Richard Muggleton 1970

courtesy of the artist

Student Life has three parts. Carter - only at Prahran College in 1974 - writes of “a vibrant and dynamic environment that nurtured creativity, experimentation and community.” Her words immediately reminded me of some social media photography groups I am part of, which very much do the same albeit as online communities. The world has changed, but the immense value of such environments continues.

Nedelkopoulos looks back on his Prahran days with fondness because of their value to the rest of his creative life. And McArdle shares many personal memories; Athol Shmith ordering his students to freeze as they were and look around at the various poses of everyone else as doing that with any person would tell them how to photograph anyone. Cox’s challenge ‘Is it possible to photograph God?’ later inspired him to set the assignment ‘Photograph God’ for his own students.

Most readers will know at least some of the contributors mentioned earlier. I recall the first time I saw an exhibition of Henson’s work - Big Pictures (at the Australian National University’s Drill Hall Gallery). I very much value James McArdle’s major contribution to photography through his blog https://onthisdateinphotography.com/. There are a number of pieces on it about this book and accompanying exhibition.

There are, unsurprisingly, various other very well-known Australian photographers who were part of The Basement. They include the teachers Shmith (one of his books was the first acquired for my personal collection), John Cato and Cox. Then there is Carol Jerrems (recently the subject of a major retrospective at Australia’s National Portrait Gallery – also reviewed on this blog).


This review is also available on the author's blog here.

Max Dupain - A Portrait

Non-fiction Book Review | Brian Rope

Title: Max Dupain - A Portrait

Author: Helen Ennis

Publisher: Harper Collins

Helen Ennis, author of this portrait of Max Dupain, one of Australia’s most famous photographers, has previously written numerous other books including an acclaimed biography of Dupain’s first wife Olive Cotton. I have no doubt this almost identically long new book also will be highly regarded.

Ennis starts this book with a 1984 staged photo of Dupain by Melbourne photographer John Gollings, describing it as an “irreverent homage to a dominant figure in Australian photography” and using it to argue Dupain was “obviously determined to exercise as much control as possible over the terms of his own participation” despite appearing vulnerable. 

The author then describes the three worlds of Dupain – his domestic situation, his work, and his world of “his own creation.” Three things he sought to keep separate throughout his life. In the discussion of this there are a few observations I found myself immediately relating to. Another Australian photographer David Moore, one of Dupain’s long-term friends, is quoted as saying about him “he needed to photograph like he needed to breathe.” I would say the same about many people (including myself) – whether their passions are photography, sport, gardening or anything else.

Ennis also tells us that Dupain’s cousin Lucille thought his photography was a way of escaping from what was going on in the world. And that he, himself, saw his creative task as being to get to the essence of things. She also quotes from a foreword to Dupain’s 1948 monograph written by Hal Missingham, then Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, “Whatever he is photographing there is the same penetration of essentials.”

Those observations by Lucille Dupain and Hal Missingham both ring absolutely true for me. Being creative with their photography is the thing which truly motivates many people. No matter how good their documentary photos, their traditional landscapes, or the portraits taken for paying customers, their real joy comes from creativity during those times when they conceive an idea and then seek to produce artworks in response to that concept.

Ennis shares with her readers some unpublished advice Dupain himself prepared for graduating photography students. Drawing on personal experience, he clearly expressed his view they would have to photograph such things as lousy furniture, industrial complexes, brides and babies to earn sufficient money, because it wasn’t possible to live on “art” photography. However, the author’s book goes on to show and speak favourably about Dupain’s commercial photography as well as his artworks.

Amongst those of Dupain’s images reproduced in the 500+ pages, there are shots of his mother Ena (drying dishes), father George (in his library) and his wives (Olive Cotton and Diana Illingworth). There are some of his paid advertising pieces, beaches and beach culture, nudes, flowers and more. As Ennis discusses the images, we learn about photographers Dupain emulated, the “great creative minds” who most inspired him, his relationships with models, his interest in surrealism, his use of darkness to create mystery, his hatred of war, and the interweaving of his life and his art. There is just so much covered providing, as Ennis intended, a detailed and fascinating portrait of her subject.

Max Dupain - Evening wear advertisement for David Jones (Zara Gaden, Francis Bradford and Douglas Channel), 1938, National Gallery of Australia, purchased 1984

Max Dupain - Jean with wire mesh, c. 1935, National Gallery of Australia, purchased 2006

Max Dupain - Silos through windscreen, 1935, National Gallery of Australia, purchased 1983

There are some famous photos included, including Flight of the spectres made when he was just 21, and which very much impressed another high-profile photographer, Harold Cazneaux. Sunbaker, an impromptu shot of a friend taken in 1938 but not publicly exhibited until 1975, is his most well-known portrait and probably Australia’s most iconic image.

Max Dupain - The Flight of the Spectres, bromoil, 1932, National Gallery of Australia, purchased 1979

Max Dupain - Sunbaker, c. 1938, National Gallery of Australia, purchased 1976

Near the end of the book there is another portrait of Dupain - taken in 1991, just seven years after the Gollings one at the start of the book. This latter image is by another well-known Australian William Yang who also says Dupain sought to assert his control over the session, seemingly to project vitality whilst the resultant image actually reveals a “clearly unwell man.”

In her concluding words Ennis talks about Dupain idolising rare individuals who could rise up and create something extraordinary and poses the question of whether he had done so. She tells us he suspected he was not one of the exalted few, but rather an ordinary man with an exceptional talent. Obtain a copy and read this fascinating book, then decide for yourself.

This review is also available on the author's blog here.