Photo opportunity
This autumn an exhibition has been slowly touring the world. The MILK exhibition has been staged in Australia, first on the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House and then on the riverside walk of Melbourne’s Federation Square. The exhibition was attended by enough marketing and merchandising to make the average onlooker suspicious. But it was worth persevering. The exhibition had real substance, even if it sounded a little corny at first.
MILK stands for Moments of Intimacy, Love and Kindness. The project was the idea of a New Zealander, Geoff Blackwell, who was inspired by Edward Steichen’s renowned ‘Family of Man’ project of the 1950s. Blackwell gained the support of a publisher with deep pockets and soon began an extensive collaboration.
The project was looking for images that celebrated humanity, with an emphasis on immediacy rather than on technical achievement. It sounds simple, but the result was quite extraordinary. The competition attracted 40,000 photos by 17,000 photographers living in 164 countries. Three hundred photos were chosen for the final project. A good number of them are of the sick and dying; many of them reveal pain, ageing and poverty. None of them obscures hope.
Vale Bros
On 26 March, Father John Brosnan was reunited with Ronald Ryan somewhere—be it heaven or nirvana.
John Brosnan was the Catholic chaplain to Melbourne’s notorious Pentridge Prison for over 30 years, and he was with Ronald Ryan when Ryan was hanged on 3 February 1967 at 5pm—the last person to be hanged in Australia.
Brosnan had an extraordinary capacity to ‘walk alongside’ his fellow man or woman—no matter how flawed they might be. Brosnan also understood that many of those individuals in prison had little choice in the matter.
But Brosnan was more than a strong and compassionate force in the lives of prisoners. He was a brilliant and unrelenting advocate for prison reform. Brosnan knew that prison rarely improves a
person’s lot in life and in most cases strips the humanity from him or her.
Perhaps the most fitting tribute to Brosnan’s work would be for Australia to oppose the death penalty in Indonesia, should those accused of the Bali bombings be convicted.
John Brosnan, better than anyone, knew that because humans run the justice system, it is potentially flawed. He knew that human life is precious, and that revenge serves no useful purpose in
civilising a society.
Revenge of the nerds
For those who still think scientists are colourless, white-coated nerds cloned