Ali McCann

Joy is an ode to The Joy of Photography, the seminal beginner’s guide published by Eastman Kodak Company in 1979. It was my introduction to the medium as an adolescent, and it continues to shape how I think about photography’s accessibility, optimism, and visual language. More broadly, the work explores Western visual culture and how our experiences and emotions are shaped through seeing, representing, and responding to images.

At its core, Joy is a meditation on the photographic medium itself, specifically its material, optical, and social dimensions. These are photographs about photographs.

The imagery draws on recurring motifs and romantic tropes from The Joy of Photography. Through various forms of appropriation, these familiar genres intersect and merge to create hallucinatory, uncanny reimaginings of the original material. The kitschiness of the source imagery is amplified, its dated aesthetics reanimated with a mix of affection, irony, and sincerity.

Joy was first exhibited in the group show States of Disruption at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) in Naarm/Melbourne in 2022. Two new works were later included in Frozen Blood at Neon Parc in 2023. The project was shortlisted for the National Photography Prize at MAMA in 2024, and a new iteration, Joy (No dark days), will be presented in the 2026 Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver, Canada.