Matt Marasco is a Melbourne-based photographer exploring life and landscapes at home and abroad. He acknowledges the Wurundjeri people who are the Traditional Custodians of the land on which he lives and works. Sovereignty was never ceded: it always was and always will be Aboriginal land.
Matt is also a sessional academic and a graduate researcher at La Trobe University. His PhD thesis, titled Hegel and Photography: Developing the Negative, applies G. W. F. Hegel’s dialectical aesthetics to contemporary photography theory and practice. It shows how Hegel’s thought can reshape photographic theory and how photography can inform Hegelian aesthetics. His research highlights the centrality of contradiction to understanding the history and meaning of photography.
He is currently working on a project, provisionally titled Little Gold, which critically examines the history of physiognomy and its relation to photography. Combining images and text, it explores photography as an indexical trace akin to the marks left by fingerprints or the patterns read in palms. By situating photography within the broader practices of divination and the physiognomic sciences, it aims to reveal the historical and conceptual implications of these interconnected systems of signification.
mattmarasco@gmail.com
Awards
Finalist, Contemporary Landscape in Photography (CLIP) Award, Perth Centre for Photography, Perth, Australia, 2022.
Winner, Ilford Excellence in Photomedia, 2020 Ilford CCP Salon, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australia, 2020.
Winner, Best Darkroom Print, 2020 Ilford CCP Salon, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australia, 2020.
Discussions & conferences
The Scientific and Cultural Milieu of Proto-photography: The Historical Proximity of Photography to Hegel, Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference, Deakin University, Australia, 2024.
Hegel's Two Tartuffes and the End of Art, Humanities & Social Sciences Graduate Research Conference, La Trobe University, Australia, 2024.
The Idealism of Bill Henson, Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference, Bond University, Australia, 2021.
Judges and Winners Speak, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australia, 2021.
Henson, Hegel and the Concept of the Impossible, Australasian Postgraduate Philosophy Conference, University of Adelaide, Australia, 2020.
Hegel, Anthropology and Art: An Online Seminar, La Trobe University, Australia, 2020.
Towards a Hegelian Critique of Photography, Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference, University of Melbourne, Australia, 2019.
Passwords to the City, 2nd International Multidisciplinary Conference on Baudrillard Studies, Oxford Brookes University, England, 2018.