Luke Le, What are you looking for?, 2021

Where does the meaning of a photograph lie? Where do the limits of its authorship, spectatorship and democracy cross paths? These are questions at the heart of untrained Sydney-based artist Luke Le’s photographic practice. In his first major artist book – What are you looking for? – Le reroutes notions of diarism and the impromptu to broach new aesthetic and philosophical terrains. A kind of open letter to a former life in Melbourne, the book forms both an intensely personal gesture and a wider provocation toward the subjectivities and assumptions that underpin photography itself. These raw, intuitive images – created from scans of degraded Risograph prints – are at once rooted in and free of place. Their dynamic gaze veers toward specificity, but never quite lands. Amidst the noise of their gritty, fine grain, Le’s images leave as many questions as answers.