I use photography as a way to express my love affair with sadness.
When I was young, my parents had a very bitter divorce which had a devastating effect on my soul.
For the longest time I found it impossible to express those feelings of loss. My catharsis is that I photograph in the shadow of my father’s absence.
As a young boy, I discovered the family photo album under my mum’s bed which, upon inspection, had my father’s head cut out of all the photos. This shocking discovery was never mentioned until after my mum’s death. I asked my sister if she had ever seen the album. She had. I was then told that after my sister had gone through my mum’s possessions, she had in fact found a little plastic bag which contained the cut-out heads. My life was predetermined. Photography is my love, my path to redemption.
The photographs presented here, with the addition of one entitled Dead Cat, come from the series Down in the Dumps, which I think of as a demo tape from an obscure black metal band. I don’t think I have anything more to say.
About Glenn Sloggett
Glenn Sloggett (Born 1964) Australian. Glenn Sloggett is a Melbourne based artist who graduated from the Media Arts program at RMIT. He has been exhibiting his highly personalized form of documentary photography since the mid 1990s. His unique approach to street photography reveals how the grand themes of life and death, hope and failure present themselves in ordinary suburbia. Deceptively considered, his photographs’ humor belies a deep empathy for his subjects: the neglected, the lost, and the unloved.
Fatherless and raised in a poor family, he supported himself financially through art school by cleaning booths in sex shops. Dead end manual labor jobs in factories kept him going during difficult times, while depression and anxiety followed.
Stills Gallery in Sydney represented him for fifteen years with exhibitions such as Filthy, Lost Man, and Abandon. The Australian Centre for Photography toured his exhibition Cheaper and Deeper nationally. His work has also appeared in institutional exhibitions including Melbourne Now at the NGV, We Used to Talk About Love at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Australian Vernacular. He was also featured on the ABC TV program The Art Life.
His work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2001 he won the inaugural John and Margaret Baker Memorial Fellowship for an emerging artist, and in 2008 he received the prestigious Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert National Photography Award.
Glenn Sloggett currently works as a chef at St Mary’s House of Welcome, a kitchen serving the homeless. [Official Website]
