Tony Kearney, a self-described amateur photographer, is a full time director of Designmakers Pty Ltd, a leading industrial design consultancy based in Adelaide. He has been taking photographs since he was given a Kodak Instamatic camera at the age of 10. He writes ‘I’d shoot a roll of film and send the cartridge off in the supplied cloth bag and patiently wait for two weeks to get a packet of twenty, square, colour images in the post. And it seems that this early exposure to square photography is now revisiting me, my photography of choice is based on loading my favoured Tmax100 film into old 6x6 cameras, the older and more manual the better. I often experiment with alternative processes, expired film, low light and quirky old lenses, processing my films in the laundry, hanging them in the shower to dry. Five years ago, in a bid to gain access to a darkroom and to formally learn some skills and processes, I enrolled as a mature age student in Year 11 Photography at Marden Senior College in Adelaide and three years ago I completed Year 12, finishing the year with the highest [course] score in the country and in the process gaining my first qualification in photography.’ In recent years, Kearney and a group of other photographers have mounted a series of exhibitions titled RUST, SALT, TAR, SMOKE, KNOT and GRIT respectively. Kearney won the Royal South Australian Society of Arts Portrait Prize for Photography in 2013, was shortlisted for the International Fine Art Photographer of the Year competition in Paris two years running and was a finalist in the $25 000 Kennedy Contemporary Art Prize in 2014 and the Emma Hack Art Prize in 2016.
