Michael Chew Michael Chew i(19141465 works by)
Gender: Male
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Works By

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1 Seeing Within, Without, Across and Between : Stories from Cross-Cultural Photographic Exchange Michael Chew , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Swamphen : A Journal of Cultural Ecology , no. 9 2023;

'This paper discusses letters and photo-stories as sites for making strange our familiar relationships with the non-human world, through considering images and methods from the action-research project ‘Portraits of Change’, which explored environmental behaviour change and human/non-human relations through participatory visual dialogue between urban youth in Bangladesh, Australia and China.  In particular, it focuses on various themes arising in the exchange of letters and photo-stories created by students through workshops in Dhaka and Melbourne, and how these can both reinforce and challenge our ways of viewing the non-human world.  These themes, including health, aesthetics and visuality, also highlighted differing environmental perspectives between youth in majority and minority worlds.  The complexity of the multi-sited action-research engagements require methodological adaptations in both the participatory design of the workshops, and analysis of their resulting visual artifacts.' (Publication abstract)
1 Portraits of Change : Photo-Storytelling Across Bangladesh, China and Australia Michael Chew , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Swamphen : A Journal of Cultural Ecology , no. 7 2020;

'Trained in art photography, I initially hoped that my own photography would inspire positive environmental change. However I soon felt uncomfortable with putting my energy towards conventional nature photography, which tends to rely on simplified and polarised emotions of either fear in images of despoiled landscapes or hope in the form of pristine wilderness (Manzo 206) that can serve to reproduce essentialised ideas of nature and culture which are becoming increasingly untenable in the Anthropocene era. In contrast, I gradually found through research, and my own grassroots projects that participatory photography methods—such as photovoice—have the potential to generate rich locally-grounded photo-stories which open up deeper engagements with the complexities of nature-culture relations (Gustafson and Al-Sumait 9).' (Introduction)
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