Brad Rimmer

Raised in Wyalkatchem in the Central Wheatbelt region of Western Australia, Perth based photographer Brad Rimmer seeks to uncover the human within often alienating everyday environs.

Silence is Brad Rimmer’s intensely personal and sometimes painful monograph of life in the once-thriving wheatbelt towns of Western Australia. Born in Wyalkatchem in 1962 Rimmer chose at nineteen to escape what he saw then as a bleak future. In Silence, he presents images that capture the region’s permeating dust, heat and isolation negotiating a delicate balance between hope and despair in his frank portraits of those who remain.

“I was worried about revisiting my old home and going inside the house, but I had no real connection at all. Everything that was in my mind had gone and I felt a strange relief. On my way out of town that evening I thought of how many people had left and never returned, just left for good. I’d never thought about that before,” Brad Rimmer.

Brad Rimmer has won the City of Perth Photo Image Award three times and in 1997 took second place in the Santa Fe Assignment Earth Prize for Photography in the USA. His work has been shown in international solo exhibitions including the 2005 UWA Perth International Arts Festival, the 2004, 2005 and 2008 Pingyao and the 2006 Lianzhou International Photo Festivals in China, the 2006 Brighton Photo Biennial in the UK, Kaunas Photo 08 in Lithuania, and Photoforum PasquArt in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. In 2009 he was awarded a Mid-Career Fellowship from the Western Australian Department of Culture and the Arts to publish Silence. Rimmer is currently based in Perth.He continues to use his artistic practice to probe at the essence of rural Australia and the emotional impact of the natural landscape upon individual psyches.

His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in numerous national and corporate collections, including the National Gallery of Australia and The Art Gallery of Western Australia.

© Brad Rimmer