Cally Whitham

Finding beauty where none is immediately apparent and value in banality, photographic artist Cally Whitham’s camera collects images of ordinary things we no longer see. Perceiving, altering and reflecting through nostalgia and memory, she is a pictorialist at heart, layering her photographs with emotion, transmuting the ordinary into the romantic, nostalgic and surreal. Presenting unpromising subjects in an ideal way, she asks the viewer to look more closely at the forgotten or taken-for-granted, to reawaken the value these subjects once held.
New Zealand born, a descendant of British colonists, Whitham is interested in exotic, endemic and introduced kinds of things. She recalls, with perhaps romantic notions, how they were once perceived. Working in the rural margins, she seeks to capture those things that have become more significant in the memory than in the seeing, and invites viewers to reflect on their rural ancestry.
Driven by the desire to preserve forever the memory of her surroundings, aged 11 she used her first roll of film at Christmas to capture favorite things, her aunt’s farm, an old house she wanted to live in and a big tree at the beach.
Touched with beauty, her works explore, through ordinariness and familiari...

Studied two years of Photography at Carrington Design School (Now Unitech) in the early 90's