Biography
Christopher Köller works with photography, site-specific installations and video. He experiments with film and a range of equipment and processes, including a vintage Diana plastic camera. He enjoys exploiting the camera’s many technical limitations and flaws to convey both intimacy with and distance from his subjects. While exploring subject matter as diverse as the politics of urban space in Melbourne, Mexico City and Milan, historic garden design, former children’s’ holiday camps of Italy’s fascist era and the radical post-war work of architect Giancarlo de Carlo, Köller imbues his chosen scenes with a moody ambiguity that offers opportunities for multiple readings over time. Köller left Melbourne to travel extensively throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. He returned to Australia to study photography at Prahran College under Athol Shmith and John Cato, graduating in 1980. Between 1993-2009 Köller was Head of Photography at the Victorian College of the Arts and in 2002 completed a Master’s Degree in Fine Art at RMIT University. A book of Köller’s plastic camera photographs of gardens titled Paradeisos was published by M33 in 2011. His work is represented in both private and public collections in Australia and abroad including the NGA, the NGV, AGWA, Griffith University, MAPh and the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris. His portrait of ceramic artist Janet Beckhouse featured in MAPh’s celebrated ‘100 Faces’ exhibition in early 2023.
NotFair Art Foundation
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