Well, we’ve wrapped up another issue of Photo Review and by now it should be at better newsagents everywhere.

My thoughts are now directed to next issue and I’m looking forward to getting stuck in over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, here, to give you some of the flavour of issue 33, is my editorial from same:
Making Choices

There’s never enough room in an issue of Photo Review Australia as far as I’m concerned. Without exception I always want more pages for pictures than could ever be commercially sensible. But of course if you’re in the editor’s chair, it’s your job to discriminate, to sift and to weigh the options.

In my happy career as editor of this fine publication, there are two stories that have been for me particularly gratifying. The first was the series of interviews I was privileged to conduct with the wonderful artist and raconteur, Lewis Morley (published in our Autumn 2007 issue). The second, dear reader, concerns the ten pages of the current issue we’ve devoted to the quite extraordinary work of one E.O. Hoppé. Never heard of him? Well, nor had we, but thanks to a man named Graham Howe, a most astounding collection of images from Hoppé’s single trip to Australia in 1930 has now come to light. Howe was so impressed that he mortgaged his own home to help rescue these and thousands of other images by the German born British photographer.

Just as it was impossible to pick out a representative selection when we were preparing the feature on Lewis Morely’s vast treasure trove of previously unpublished work, so too was it a special kind of agony to narrow the choices down for the Hoppé pages.

Regular readers of these columns will know that when I interview a photographer (or in this case a curator and editor), my practice is to ask them to pull together 15 or 20 of their personal favourites. Then I choose a subset of these that is still larger than the number we can publish. The reason is simple: I want our very talented layout artist Darren Waldren to have enough material to really be creative. Sadly, though this invariably yields terrific pages, it also means that at every step of the way, truly wonderful images have to be left unpublished.

Happily in the case of E.O. Hoppé, it is possible to see the full range of pictures we had to choose from. All you need to do is leaf through a copy of E.O. Hoppé’s Australia. The book should be in better shops a week or two after this editorial sees light of day and I can’t recommend it too highly. I may subsequently be proven wrong, but in my view many of Hoppé’s pictures vault straight from obscurity into the uppermost ranks of Australian photography.

And, speaking of uncovering great talent, ace writer Steve Packer has now moved to Western Australia where only weeks after arriving, he came across the work of Louise Mann. You might think that we’ve pretty much uncovered everything a camera can do, but Ms Mann’s work demonstrates in beautiful fashion that it’s still possible to push the boundaries.

Meanwhile, our man in Victoria, the perspicacious Keith Shipton has news from Australia’s most ambitious photographic event, the - Daylesford Photo Biennale. A monument to passionate volunteerism in the service of photography, the scope of Daylesford must surely make it one of the biggest festivals of imaging in the world.

Technical editor Margaret Brown is not only Australia’s leading photography equipment reviewer, she’s also a pretty dab hand with the microphone and notepad. Her interview with image permanence expert Henry Wilhelm, will leave you much the wiser about the state of play with modern inks and papers (hint: you get what you pay for!). As for the technology, well this issue you’ll find out what Margaret thinks about the Canon’s new EOS-1D Mark III DSLR, the freshly launched Olympus E-510 Four Thirds system DSLR and half a dozen other new releases. I should note too that our tireless Tech Editor maintains a constant stream of product updates and photography news on our website which is, of course, to be found by pointing your browser at www.photoreview.com.au.

Keep shootin’!

-Don Norris