Jesse Thompson

I’m a 20-year-old student and aspiring photographer currently living, working and studying in Melbourne. I grew up in North Eastern Victoria on my parent’s farm, with my two younger siblings. Growing up I enjoyed reading, drawing, running, soccer, skiing, canoeing, camping and in later years photography. I got my first DSLR camera for my 18th birthday and spent the summer holidays exploring its impressive capabilities.

I graduated from High School in Wangaratta in 2011, after which I moved to Canada to work in the ski fields for the winter, a trip which ended up lasting 12 months rather than the originally planned 4. I moved around a lot that year, working and exploring a new country. Being so far from home gave me a plethora of inspiration for furthering my interest in photography and gave birth to what has become somewhat of an obsession. I returned home late in 2012 after which I moved again to attend my deferred place at The University of Melbourne.

The idea of a photography project based around long exposures of the sun is something I first conceived of early in 2011 in my photography class for VCE. I was exploring techniques used in night sky photography, some of which involved exposures lasting several hours which showed the Earth’s rotation in the apparent movement of the stars (Google “Star Trails”). There was something alluring about looking at a single image that captured something that we could never see with our own eyes. Research for photography class led me to find Helsinki based photographer Tarja Trygg, who had been pioneering the technique of solargraphy for several years in Scandinavia. I wrote to her and with a bit of further research decided to begin a solargraphy project of my own.
These early stages caught the attention of Marc, who I knew through a friend, and he proposed we join forces and take the project further. More experimentation and fine-tuning were to follow, and eventually results begun to show.

This exhibition is the work of Marc, myself and Beth; who joined later in 2011. My hope is that people who view our work will firstly be able to understand what they’re looking at, and secondly to be able to appreciate how what they see is not a ‘frozen moment’, as is the case with most photography, but several months condensed into one small frame. For me that’s what this exhibition is really about; the technique, its unpredictability and the surprises it can produce. There’s nothing special or significant I’m trying to convey here - no social comment - its just interesting, and I think that’s enough.