My students and their friends gathered last night at the opening of our Joiners exhibition. The work was made for a David Hockney-style photomontage assignment, to shoot a subject in fifty or more shots and assemble it directly on the wall.

Making a Joiner is a tricky operation. The capture process can be confusing, how do you record a subject in dozens of details? Then the assembly of the prints is challenging because the images don’t align. Joiners run contrary to the normal instincts of a photographer, to create a single perfect rectangular image. A Joiner can take almost any form and often take on a different shape when they are assembled a second time.

The project is part of the Photoimaging course at Melbourne Polytechnic, in a subject I share with Natalie Morawski. The exhibition is on for two more weeks at the St John Street Gallery in Prahran, building B, (Melbourne Polytechnic) open Monday to Friday 12-5pm.