Faith Kennedy-Graham

My work throughout the Creative Journaling Competition 2022 consisted of photography, digital creation, and analogue collaging. Each day, the participants were given a prompt, a theme that had to inspire and structure a journal entry. I can’t draw, maybe in the future but right now the best you’ll get out of me is a stick figure. But I didn’t let this stop me, rather, I used other mediums to creatively respond to prompts ranging from ‘sustainable’ to ‘sparkle’.

The main materials I utilized were old magazines, books, archived images and Adobe photoshop. I had one of 3 collages in my journal: analogue, digital or mixed. I visited Lifeline bookshop and The Green Shed to collect my materials. Once I created an analogue collage, I utilized my Brother printer and scanned each work onto my computer.

Another material/medium I utilized was Adobe Photoshop and thanks to my background in editing, I understood how to manipulate photos. Collages such as ‘Fit to fly’ (Day 4), ‘Green lights’ (Day 6) and ‘National Treasure’ (Day 11) focus on physical collaging with minimal editing. But collages such as ‘It’s a roundabout way of seeing it’ (Day 2), ‘Wake me up before you dodo’ (Day 10) and ‘Working (against) each other’ (Day 19) are completely digital. And collages such as ‘What a weird looking sun’ (Day 1) and ‘Morning jolt of coffee’ (Day 3) are mixed media. By playing to my strengths of digital editing and archived photography, I was able to create a themed, cohesive collection that was fun to make.

Faith is a Canberra based photographer and digital creator currently studying a Bachelor of Culture and Heritage at the University of Canberra. Her portfolio is primarily a collection of photography - portraiture, wildlife, and abstract imagery. She is not only interested in digital creating such as prints and collages via Adobe Photoshop but also analogue photography.

In year 9 of high school (2019), she wanted to go on an arts excursion to Sydney with her friends but wasn’t doing an ‘arts’ class, therefore wasn’t eligible. So as an elective, she chose photography; appealing to her as it looked easy and would be the ticket to seeing The Opera House. She had never picked up a camera other than an iPhone. But throughout the unit, she learned the basics of how to hold a camera, how to use different settings and the different elements of snapping a picture. After a year in the unit, she was passionate about photography and wanted to learn more. In year 11 of college (2021), she took digital photography as her major, learning how to apply Adobe Photoshop to photographs. This skill is essential to her work now.

In 2022, she added another photography unit: traditional photography. This was the process of learning, historically, how photographs were taken, produced, and conserved; a difficult but rewarding unit. This involved lots of work outside of class time but reinforced her passion for photography. At the end of 2022, she graduated year 12, gaining a greater understanding of photography innovation. Whilst studying for the next few years, she hopes to expand her work and discover other mediums additional to photography and collaging.