Cherine Fahd

Cherine Fahd is one of Australia’s leading photographic artists. For nearly three decades, she has exhibited, written, and curated works in photography and image-based practices. Her projects often involve members of the public, her family, and friends, exploring how the camera brings people together. Her practice examines the everyday uses of photography in the family album, on social media, and in applied contexts that promote visibility and social inclusion.

Her scholarly research extends to the role of photography in grief and mourning, alongside its social and cultural functions. She is widely published, with her essays and reviews appearing in Sydney Review of Books, The Conversation, Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum, ABC Arts, and in leading international journals including Photography and Culture, photographies, and Philosophy of Photography.

Her photographic methodology for working with communities is highly sought after. She has presented on photography for research impact at the University of Sydney and worked as a research fellow with the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre on multiple projects for the Hunt-Symes Sexuality Institute. She has contributed to the cross-institutional project Cloak: Queer Science, Fashion and Photography, which was shortlisted for the 2024 Eureka Science Prize, and continues to work with Living Lab Northern Rivers on projects with flood-affected communities. She is also a postgraduate student in the Master of Psychotherapy and Counselling at the University of Western Sydney, where she is being trained in practice-based methods of relational person-centered practice that she extends to her photographic work with communities.

Fahd holds a PhD from Monash University and is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Design and Society at the University of Technology Sydney. She was the inaugural co-chair of the Powerhouse Photography Artist Advisory Group and has two forthcoming books: Photographing for the Practices series with Duke University Press, and the Powerhouse Photography book—the first major publication on contemporary Australian photography from the Powerhouse collection. Her keynote lecture, Photography, Suicide and the Limits of Knowing, was presented at the Deathscapes conference for the International Association of Photography and Theory. She is also co-editing an upcoming special issue of Photographies (Taylor & Francis) on Photography and Memory in the Age of AI.

Move Me

As a child, I would keenly watch the intensity of feeling aroused by my family at Lebanese weddings, the way the drum’s tribal call summoned everyone instantly to the dance floor. To this day, this instinctive human drive to move thrills me. I love to watch but am terrified to participate. I can’t dance, or at least I think I can’t. Paralysed by the fear of looking ridiculous, moving my body in ‘dancerly’ ways triggers a psychic drama that, in middle age, I’m keen to explore.

Indeed, I recently watched a documentary on Netflix about a man terrified of dancing. He had chorophobia. This is how I describe myself, but I also know that embedded in my photographic and video work is a closet dancer. I want to tease and coax myself out of the fear of dancing. I want to move with the abandonment and knowledge of those who can and know they can. I want to be the dancer’s double, to have them ‘move me’.

My idea is to work with a choreographer and have them command my movements. I’ll suspend my resistance, and become a rag doll, pliable, putty-like, animated by the moves of another more expert at movement than me. I imagine my first experiment like the dance I would play with my sister in childhood. We would waltz while I stood upon her feet and her upon mine. In this way, I submit myself, and my fear of dancing, to others.

The movement I stage in my work, between people, plays an integral role in communicating intimacy, relationality, proximity and distance between strangers. And yet, movement has taken a backseat in discourses on my work. This performance would certainly shed light on the interdisciplinary value of choreography. I’m aware that my fear of dancing emerges from seeing myself from the outside. I’m standing outside of myself, watching on like a critic, a judge, decreeing how shameful I look moving. I want to see what happens when this inner voice, this judging, is interrupted and severed by someone who is not afraid to dance.

I am interested in how a non-choreographer might employ choreography. This chorophobic is nevertheless drawn to bodily gestures, interrelation and the affordances of two bodies moving and negotiating stranger intimacy?

Without a formal choreographic language, I want you to think of me as the tin man from the Wizard of Oz. When Dorothy stumbles upon him, he has seized up. Rusted solid, he mumbles something she hears as ‘oil can’. Locating the lubricant, she begins to squirt the liquid into his joints, firstly in his mouth, where he says, ‘my God, it feels wonderful to move; I’ve held that axe up for ages’. Dorothy then lubricates his arms and elbows before he tells her that he is empty and that his maker forgot to give him a heart. I want this fantastical scene to point to a unique exchange that, if it occurs, would enable the tin man to put the axe down and feel how good it is to move.