2024 Merit Prize – Atkins Lab

Halcyon Days
Photograph
W: 77cm x H: 77cm

Halcyon Days is the latest image in a series I have been working on for a decade. The series
documents the goings-on at metropolitan jetties in Adelaide. I am fascinated by the intricate
relationships that exist between the youthful groups who jump, flirt and revel in this very
Australian form of social life. As I pressed the shutter in this portrait, I fantasized that I had
possessed that level of beauty and self-assuredness at that age, or any age for that matter.

@alex.frayne

Judges’ Statement

“This works captures time and place and calls back to Australia’s modernist philosophy whilst speaking to Contemporary subject matter.
Celebrating a local rite of passage for young south Australians the image is a positive, uplifting celebration of multi culturalism and young Australians”