Dr Marcus Bunyan

Dr Marcus Bunyan is an artist who works with all forms of image making. His artistic practice investigates the boundaries between identity, space and environment, since 2004 using fighter planes as a metaphor for humanist, environmental and technological themes. He trained as a classical black and white photographer and has recently returned to classical work which continues early explorations of spaces and places, using digital cameras to record glances, meditations and movement through different environments.

Marcus writes the art and cultural memory archive Art Blart which posts mainly photography based exhibitions from around the world, with insightful research and commentary. With over 1,400 posts in its archive, the ten year old website is a research tool and a form of cultural memory. It has a readership of 1,500 people a day and over 5,000 likes on Facebook. The site is being archived by Pandora from the National Library of Australia.

Marcus has recently published an 8,000 word paper on Death the image (2018) which investigates how the act of photography visually writes trauma and through analysis ponders how the camera captures human beings ante-mortem, at the death point, post-mortem and vita ad mortem.

He finished a Master of Art Curatorship at The University of Melbourne in 2013. His doctoral thesis at RMIT University (2001) investigated the link between self-esteem and body image and traced the development of male body image within photographic practice and gym culture. The thesis has been adapted into a website that includes research on photographs held at The Kinsey Institute and The Minor White Archive. In 2019 he undertook a two month photographic research tour of Europe studying some of the great masters of European and American photography such as Brassaï, Berenice Abbott, André Kertesz, Robert Frank, Ara Güler, Robert Capa, Henri Lartigue, Josef Sudek, and August Sander.

Early artistic work investigated personal narratives: the shifting interfaces of identity, sexuality, space, time and environment.

Later artistic work explored personal narratives as more universal themes: the fracturing of identity, the binaries of light and dark, absence/presence, pattern/randomness in spatio-temporal environments.

Current artistic work proposes an understanding of the paradoxes of contemporary life: the fracturing of the image plane, the ethics and morals of humans, the choices human beings make in environments, the hidden threat, the faint cloudiness in the cornea of things seen, unclearly.