The Compelling Photographic Portrait 2023

In this four-week course participants will explore the intricacies of conceptually driven portrait photography. Through theoretical insights, practical exercises, and group discussions, students will learn to create meaningful and powerful portraits that transcend mere representation. This short course will be guided by distinguished Perth based Australian photographer Toni Wilkinson whose masterly skills in portrait photography have been recognised in a recent international Monograph publication Tough Pleasures.

This course is open to beginners, mid-career practitioners, and professionals, but it is limited to twelve students.

Prerequisite: You are familiar with photography, and have basic camera skills.

Dates: Saturdays

Courses are subject to minimum enrolment. Please register early, within 7 days of the start-date, to reduce the likelihood of course cancellation and to ensure you receive all course-related materials in time to prepare for class.

Cost: Members $490 / Non-Members $520

Tea, coffee, and light refreshments provided.

Not a Member? Become a Member and receive discounts for all PCP events, workshops and more.

Location: The Perth Centre for Photography, 357 Murray Street, Perth WA

Born in London Toni Wilkinson is a photographer based in Perth, Western Australia. She uses the camera to reveal beauty and menace in her images. The works cross genres to interrogate the world from a maternal, feminist perspective and testify to photography's unique capacity for ambiguity.

Toni Wilkinson's approach to photography offers an opening for risk and possibility via the image, that is enhanced with each photograph's relationship to the next. Interconnections and contradictions collide in a practice that thrives on an urgent way of looking.

Toni Wilkinson is coordinator of Photography and Illustration at the School of Design and Built Environment, Faculty of Humanities, Curtin University in Western Australia. Toni has exhibited internationally and widely throughout Australia and her photographs are held in significant national collections such as the National Portrait Gallery, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, City of Perth, Murdoch University, Edith Cowan University, St John of God Health Care and others. She completed her PhD in 2012 and is a current board member of the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

'A double gesture of seizing the familiar, but only so as to possibly recreate it, is one of the greatest strengths of Toni Wilkinson's photography ... Such a spirit of 'staying with the trouble' resounds in Wilkinson's photography, as she is able to both arrest our gaze and transform our sense of the shared muddle of images and forms that make up public spaces.' F Russell, Eyeline 87 Magazine, 2017.