The Ballarat International Foto Biennale has temporarily closed due to Ballarat's latest COVID-19 lockdown announced on Wednesday.
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The photographic festival was due to open to regional audiences on Wednesday after it was put on hold in August due a lockdown.
It was meant to start on August 28 and run until October 24.
BIFB organisers said the festival would recommence when restrictions permitted and it was safe to do so. It has already been extended to January 9.
"We are closely following all Victorian government health guidelines in order to determine a new opening date," a BIFB statement says.
"Affected ticket holders will be contacted directly in the next 48 hours. All scheduled events for the coming seven days (September 16 to 22) will no longer take place. New dates for some events will be announced soon."
Ballarat's David Mac Phail's exhibition, "Looking Forward Looking Back. The Snagger and The Gun" is being held at Armstrong Street's 1816 Bakehouse as part of the biennale.
Mr Mac Phail joined the shearing industry in Australia's "back country" in 1964 and took photos of the people he worked with and the places they worked.
His beautiful photographic series captures Greg at the end of his working life and Paul, with all his working life ahead of him, at Colanya sheep station, 140 kilometres north west of Longreach, Queensland, in 1976.
There are eight photographs in the exhibition, all of which Mr Mac Phail framed with two 120-year-old verandah posts from his house and stained them with lanolin, which comes from wool.
Mr Mac Phail, who was a shearer at the time - not a photographer, said he ran to get his camera to take the photos of the two shearers but he did not know what he was taking or why.
He took most of the photos on a Saturday after a hard week of work.
"I was drawn to take them. I didn't think about it. I ran and took them and only now, decades later, can I look back and make some kind of sense from them," Mr Mac Phail said.
"Something about it I saw really captured my imagination."
Mr Mac Phail used a Fujica SLR with interchangeable screw lenses and Ektachrome and Kodachrome film to take the photos.
He said the fourth photo in the series captured the older man, Greg, with his head down on his heal of his hand.
"I'm thinking this is a defining moment in this man's life. This is where he leaves his working life and into some other life. This is where his identity changes,. These are his last moments of being Greg the shearer," Mr Mac Phail said.
"Seeing those two fellows sitting there on the step looking slightly in each other's direction and slightly ahead, I imagine Greg looking back on his life sitting beside this young fellow with all of his life ahead of him.
"The young fellow looking slightly towards the old man thinking 'what has this old bloke done and where am I going?' It's a kind of a cross over that I find fascinating."
Mr Mac Phail, who is not a professional photographer and has never exhibited the photos before, said if nobody saw his exhibition, he still got a lot out of preparing it.
"I have done what I wanted to do. I really got a lot out of it. The thinking about it, working on it. I have never done anything like this before," Mr Mac Phail said.
Ticket holders who can no longer attend the biennale due to the lockdown will be able to reschedule tickets to a later date during the biennale, and full refunds are available.
For inquiries or details on rescheduling tickets, email info@ballaratfoto.org.
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