Photography & text by Ward Roberts
Edited by Victor Anton
MINIMUM
With the world becoming busier and consumers wanting more I was looking to produce images that were of a minimalist aesthetic, to contradict these changes.
BILLIONS
One may find the concepts explored in ‘Billions’ confronting, given that the images within this series represent a fast-forming reality, predicted to be the dystopian future not so long ago. But the present is never perceived as the future we envisaged in the past. We move along the arrrow of time as stationary observers, watching the world transform before our very eyes, yet rarely aware of our transition into ‘the future’. Billions removes us from this stationary reality for a brief moment, lifting us to the surface for air. From this detached place, these images allow us to see our world, yet we feel neither comfortable nor uncomfortable about it. We find the challenges of cognitive mapping, the loss of individualism, that theorists like Fredric Jameson were concerned with. But we seem not to feel alarm. Perhaps we have evolved along with our ideas, with our effects on the world and its dynamic entropy. Our minds have unconsciously integrated what was, through past eyes, a forecast of chaos. In our times, the concept of a ‘billion’ no longer overwhelms us. As these photographs show us, we can stay solid and identify connectedness between floating transparencies. We now recognize a new kind of whole. It is a work that allows you to recognize your world and your place within it that is truly effective.
Ward Roberts was born in Australia and after living abroad in Hong Kong for a number of years he relocated to Melbourne in 1994. Ward graduated with distinction from RMIT university in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts in photography.
