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Friends! We're excited to announce Try Hard Magazine Issue 8.

Essays: Double Take: Doubt and Duplication in the Photographic by Katherine Rooke; Photography/Infraslim by Sara Oscar and Jaime Tsai; and Maddy Henkin on the work of Mike Hewson. Interview: Glenn Sloggett on the occasion of his new book Fibro Dreams.Work: Floor Arrangements by Danny Digby; and There is No Hope by Todd McMillian.

As always it's all online and all free. We hope you enjoy and please share! 

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If any of you are planning on going to check out “The Photograph and Australia” exhibition currently on at AGNSW, which we’re sure many of you are, it would definitely also be worth popping into the State Library to see their “Crowd Source” exhibition.

“Crowd Source” features photos taken in the 1880s by amateur photographer Arthur K. Syer. However, what makes this exhibition more than your standard collection of static, formal Victorian photos is that they were all taken with a hidden camera. Originally taken as reference material for his cartoonist friend Phil May, these photos have a candid, natural quality to them rarely seen in photos from this era, creating a much more immersive depiction of Sydney’s past.

http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/events/exhibitions/2015/crowd_source/index.html

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THM ISSUE 7

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"I think that one’s understanding of the world is important and applicable to everything one makes. How could it not be? There is, perhaps unfortunately at times, no way to escape oneself." - from A Conversation with Ahndraya Parlato & Gregory Halpern by Try Hard Magazine’s Patrick Mason and Benjamin Chadbond on Lavalette’s blog.

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"It is these sunless afternoons, I find, Instal you at my elbow like a bore. The chestnut trees are caked with silence. I'm Aware the days pass quicker than before, Smell staler too. And once they fall behind They look like ruin. You have been here for some time." - To Failure, Philip Larkin Jacob Raupach - Expects from Fell and Radiata

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Getting There:Ed Ruscha

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New and Launched! TRY HARD MAGAZINE ISSUE 6. Featuring the work of Harvey Benge, KK+JLD, Max Creasy, Charlotte McInnes, Kate Beckingham, Kathrine Rooke, Naomi Riddle & Kuba Dorabialski. We would love you to have a look!  

Try Hard Magazine issue 6.

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“If you could fill each square on a calendar with a picture instead of a number, and if each picture could show clearly some event or landscape or recollection or dream that made each day memorable, then after a long time and from a great distance the hundreds of pictures might rearrange themselves to form surprising patterns.” – Tamarisk Row by Gerald Murnane (1974)

Try Hard Magazine interviewed Jason Fulford for Photobook Festival Melbourne.

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Bill Henson - 1985

In 1985 Bill Henson was 33 years old (the same age Jesus was when crucified) and I was born. Not to imply I am part of some kind of holy trinity with Jesus and Bill Henson but the photos in this book do seem to depict an antipodean, inverted lapsarian tale set in the sticky, dusky world of the outer suburbs of 1980's Melbourne. Can't wait to see this one in the flesh.

From publisher's website: 

At the age of 33, one of Australia’s foremost artists, Bill Henson, produced some of the most evocative portraits and powerful dreamscapes of his career. Now nearly 30 years on STANLEY/BARKER has published this transcendental body of work for the first time.

Shot at dawn or dusk, in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, and in the deserts of Egypt, 1985 with its glimpses of faces, figures and places marks the moment when Bill Henson’s long-held desire to find a form for ‘the dream of suburbia’ was realised. Describing this process, Henson says, “I began to realise that these places could be understood as a dreamscape because they affect us so powerfully and with such immediacy as a memento mori. The light, smell, even temperature, as well as the look of these places, animates our memory and gently sharpens our sense of the passage to time.”

Combining photographs of ancient Egypt, with Suburban Melbourne, Henson creates an imaginary world, that shows “the suburban landscape as an interior world that each of us carries around inside us, like childhood, for the rest of our lives.” The photographs in this series are imbued with a sense of unreality. As night falls and we begin to rely upon the heightening sensitivity of our other senses, and as we navigate the darkness, through touch, smell, temperature and sound, and the projections of our imagination into this ambiguous space in which we find ourselves. Just occasionally, this might reintroduce us to the deep mystery of the world.

Available to order now from stanleybarker.co.uk

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TORBJØRN RØDLAND: SENTENCES ON PHOTOGRAPHY

1. The muteness of a photograph matters as much as its ability to speak. 2. The juxtaposition of photographs matters as much as the muteness of each. 3. All photography flattens. Objectification is inescapable. 4. Photography cannot secure the integrity of its subject any more than it can satisfy the need to touch or taste. 5. Good ideas are easily bungled. 6. Banal ideas can be rescued by personal investment and beautiful execution. 7. Lacking an appealing surface, a photograph should depict surfaces appealingly. 8. A photograph that refuses to market anything but its own complexities is perverse. Perversion is bliss. 9. A backlit object is a pregnant object. 10. To disregard symbols is to disregard a part of human perception. 11. Photography may employ tools and characteristics of reportage without being reportage. 12. The only photojournalistic images that remain interesting are the ones that produce or evoke myths. 13. A photographer in doubt will get better results than a photographer caught up in the freedom of irony. 14. The aestheticizing eye is a distant eye. The melancholic eye is a distant eye. The ironic eye is a distant eye. 15. One challenge in photography is to outdistance distance. Immersion is key. 16. Irony may be applied in homeopathic doses. 17. A lyrical photograph should be aware of its absurdity. Lyricism grows from awareness. 18. For the photographer, everyone and everything is a model, including the photograph itself. 19. The photography characterized by these sentences is informed by conceptual art. 20. The photography characterized by these sentences is not conceptual photography.

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Ahndraya Parlato & Gregory Halpern, Chris Wiley and Peter Funch!

Études Books is proud to present the three latest installments of its Blue Books collection. Timed to coincide with the 2014 New York Art Book Fair, this newest set of photographic monographs explores post-industrial America from disparate viewpoints, each augmenting documentarian methods with its own distinctive style and inventive presentation. Each volume similarly denies fixed narrative in favor of pictorial nuance, finding aesthetic possibility in the spaces between observation and interaction. Taken together, they confirm photography’s conceptual range while continuing the Blue Books’ tradition of highlighting noteworthy contemporary artists and image makers.

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GOOD MORNING INTERNET! We're thrilled to announce that we over here at Try Hard Magazine have officially launched our first KICKSTARTER crowd funding campaign and our new issue, ISSUE 5! Please head over to our KICKSTARTER page to support and donate to the next exciting stage of our venture.  We're offering discounted, signed books donated by artists and publishers from around the country - including Louis Porter, Pedro Ramos, Perimeter Books, Rainoff Books and more. AND we've also organised a signed, limited edition of 10 print by Wouter Van de Voorde ++ Try Hard tote bags. Our new ISSUE 5 features the work of Trent Parke, Amelia Groom, Christopher Stewart and Mohini Chandra, Sarah Mosca, Kristian Häggblom, Deb Mansfield, Naomi Riddle and Kent Buchanan - As always that's available for all online and all free on our website. www.tryhardmagazine.com

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Paul Graham

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Short lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on the 'simple shapes of stories.'

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Regarding Susan Sontag Trailer