Local News: Profile Picture

Jordan Madge anxiously awaits the opening day to the Photobook Melbourne Festival, as he is the only student chosen to participate.

The 20-year-old is completing his final year of his bachelor of photography at Photography Studies College (PSC) in Southbank.

“My tutor Katrin Koenning (also featured in the festival) put my name forward and I got chosen to feature in the exhibition,” Jordan explained. “Being alongside Katrin is incredible because her work is amazing.”

Some 17 photographs of Jordan’s Backwoods collection will appear in the festival. The collection demonstrates Jordan’s love of telling a fictional story through photo-journalism.

“It’s a look into the life of a hermit, with sparsely inhabited landscapes and where that hermit might have gone. It’s a fictional story following a character, looking through different bushland and looking for solitude and stillness.”

Majoring in photo-journalism, Jordan says he prefers to document his own fictional stories, and following them as if they were real.

“The work I did can be classed as photo-journalism and art at the same time because it is fiction-based. It’s sort of contemporary stuff that is a bit different.”

Spending most of his time in the city to hang out with friends or attend university at PSC, Jordan welcomes the days when he can drive towards Healesville and explore towns along the way, all for the sake of photography.

“There’s lots of little towns and side streets. I went down some weird roads. It was good going on my own because I was following or re-tracing the steps of this fictional character who had been on his own for over 30 years,” he said.

Jordan believes that his love of photography began in 2011, remembering how his father’s camera had caught his eye.

“I really didn’t know much about photography and I thought it looked cool. Dad had some photos of his own on the wall that looked nice,” said Jordan.

“I asked for a camera for my birthday that year. I think that is when I began to enjoy photography and it became the main path for me.”

Jordan was also lucky enough to attend the Obscura Festival in Malaysia in 2014 with a group of students.

“Taking the photography experience out of the context of uni was really nice, it was good to see things on an international scale,”
he said.

Jordan explained that his influences were based on his everyday experiences, like-minded people and his peers.

“I get a lot of influences from my teachers here at PSC. They are where I think I want to be and are doing things that I am interested in. They are great motivators,” he said.