This is a harsh land we inhabit. This continent tests those that choose to live here. If the animals don't get you, the elements will. However there is beauty in this danger. The climates found here are diverse to the extreme. The colours and textures are shocking in their discord. You can at simultaneously be on blood red Mars as well as on a pastel pink tropical island. We can thank Hulia Boz, a Sydney based photographer and founder of Postcard From Australia, for opening our eyes up to the severe beauty of this land we share. Hulia, who got her start shooting celebrities on the red carpet, soon found herself needing a new source of adrenaline, so she turned to the skies, and soon found herself hanging outside helicopters. It is this newfound passion in aerial photography that has seen her creative spark return. And next week she is to host her first Sydney exhibit. ''The amazing colours that I see with my naked eye looking down, especially over the coastline, are mesmerising." Inspired by one of Australia's greatest living artists John Olsen, Hulia wanted to create abstract work herself, without resorting to image manipulation. She spent months researching locations using Google Earth, before discovering the colours of Western Australia, where she found the perfect combination of colour, line, and geometry. You have to remind yourself that this is nature. Naturally occurring, untouched, nature. No post-production or digital tweaking here. Wanderlust inducing photography to say the least. The WA tourism board should make her an official rep for all the traffic she will likely, inadvertently, cause in Broome! "You have this canvas below your feet, looking down through the barrel of a lens, and you're hanging out with the wind blowing your hair at 50 miles an hour. You can never really plan your frame in advance, until the moment you are up there and pressing on that shutter button. This is what I love about aerial photography the most, unlike a magazine shoot of a celebrity where every angle and frame is totally planned." Hulia finds the helicopter rides to be well worth the expense, mentioning that drones, another option for aerial photography, lack the range and quality available to a helicopter shoot. She feels that taking photographs of the ground from an elevated, direct-down position makes her feel more involved in the making of her a work. "I hope that the viewer can really appreciate how incredibly beautiful this country is," she muses. "From the colourful Western Australian landscapes to the coral reefs or the busy Sydney beaches -there are just so many parts of Australia I'm still waiting to explore." With a photographic style that borders both fine art and travel photography, shooting from a helicopter has provided Boz with more than just a new perspective. The seemingly quotidian, when viewed from up in the air, has become a whole new art world for her, and perspective for us. Tuesday, July 18 - Sunday, July 23rd The Special Group Studios Ray Hughes Gallery 270 Devonshire Street Surry Hills, NSW Check it out
