Angela Tarlinton’s photographic work uses the realm of adolescence to explore emerging and changing aspects of identity. In her current series she presents us with black and white portraits of small town boys hovering between two worlds, with one foot in childhood they are drawn into the uncertainty of adulthood. At this stage the struggle to answer the central question of identity – who am I really? –is nowhere more apparent.

As Germaine Greer suggested, “delight in the boy can only be sharpened by the pathos and irony of his condition of becomingness” (The Boy, 2003). Becoming involves conflict, struggle and self-conscious searching. Adolescence is a state of awkward transition.

These images present the angst, but also the beauty of becoming.

 “…Tarlinton’s photographs are consumed with the topography of puberty, the semi-clad forms of each subject embodying her visual response to questions of identity and uncertainty, the shift from boy to man, the trauma and the beauty of becoming.

The work is thought-provoking and troubling, in its deliberate juxtapositions of the duality of adolescence, the veneer of toughness and the release of childish joy, the physical and emotional enactment of impending manhood and the attendant questioning of self.”

The Canberra Times, Charly Ogilvie, Aug 2007

Angela Tarlinton was born in Queanbeyan and now lives at Tathra on the NSW South Coast. She has twice been a finalist in the Citigroup Australian Photographic Portrait Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW and her work is in public and private collections in Australia and overseas.

Recent News

2008 
  
‘Last Night’ was a finalist in the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award at the Gold Coast City Art Gallery and was a finalist in The Alice Prize at the Araluen Centre for Arts in Alice Springs

2007  

Winner of the IRIS Award at the Perth Centre for Photography for the image ‘Last Night’

Honorable Mention in the Px3 Prix De La Photographie Paris for the image ‘Soldier Crab’