Glastonbury: Another Stage

25th June 2010 – 24th July 2010

Over the past six years UK Photographer Venetia Dearden has created a temporary on-site photographic studio to document the festival goers, stall holders, charity workers, organisers and celebrity performers that help make Glastonbury the world’s greatest music festival.

This month will see over 150,000 people converge on the British dairy farm of festival founder Michael Eavis to celebrate Glastonbury’s 40^th Anniversary. To coincide with this musical milestone, The Raw Gallery in South Melbourne will become the first commercial gallery in the world to exhibit and offer for sale Venetia’s collection of fine art, limited edition photographs.

Venetia’s Glastonbury festival portraits are shot against a white studio backdrop to remove the sitters from the context of the event. She states

“As a photographer I was magnetically drawn to witness and understand what lies at [Glastonbury’s] core. I decided to create an oasis amongst the crowds where I could meet and document some of the thousands of individuals who travelled from all around the world to make up this vast, eclectic gathering.”

Dearden’s collection of striking and irreverent portraits has been excerpted from the photographer’s newly published book ‘Glastonbury: Another Stage’. Released by German based publisher Kehrer in April 2010, this hardcover book includes 288 colour photographs, a foreword by Michael Eavis and text by Author Candace Bahouth. Unavailable through Australian bookstores, this publication will be available to purchase exclusively through the gallery during the exhibition.

Born in 1975 Venetia Dearden grew up in Somerset, England close to the Glastonbury festival site and she has been attending and working at the festival since a young age. She studied Anthropology at Edinburgh University before a taking postgraduate course in photojournalism at the London College of Printing. Her work was included in the British Photographic Portrait Prize in 2006 and 2007, and two of her works are in the Collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. Venetia’s photographs have appeared in publications such at Vogue, Wallpaper, Harpers Bazaar and The Sunday Times Magazine and her first book Somerset Stories, Fivepenny Dreams was published by Kehrer in 2008. The first exhibition of Venetia’s Glastonbury portraits is taking place at the National Portrait Gallery in London from April-September 2010.

This unique photographic exhibition will open at The Raw Gallery with a VIP launch on Thursday the 24^th of June, the same day as the official commencement of the Glastonbury festival in the UK. Venetia’s collection will then be open to the general public from Friday the 25^th of June. Running for four weeks, the exhibition will conclude on Saturday the 24^th of July. Entry is free.