Joe Ruckli is a lens-based practitioner, educator and researcher living and working in Brisbane.
Joe graduated from the photography program at the Queensland College of Art (QCA), Griffith University in 2011 majoring in photojournalism and social documentary.
He is the former editor of the Australian Photojournalist, an annual social advocacy publication, and has won numerous awards including the Sony World Photography Awards (Student Focus) and Brisbane Lord Mayors Photography Awards.
He is interested in working collaboratively with people whose stories are otherwise under-represented or misunderstood.
Joe’s visual language maintains an ongoing fascination with the lyrical and poetic possibilities of light.
In 2018 and 2019, Joe spent time in Lightening Ridge, a rural mining town in northern New South Wales famous for its large deposits of Black Opal.
Joe shares his search to unearth the idiosyncratic qualities of Lightning Ridge:
“It feels like the edge of the earth,” he said.
“A roadside sign reads ‘population unknown’ with a large black question mark.
“Lightning Ridge has become an escape for hopeful miners, restless drifters and broken recluses looking for somewhere to disappear.
“Derelict cars, makeshift camps and precarious mineshafts dot the barren and hostile landscape.
“Life on the minefields is slow, simple, modest – there’s not much to do but drink and dig.
“Those that mine live a subterranean existence only to surface for more diesel and beer.
“Others forage by hand for an elusive ‘flash’ of overlooked gem amongst the discarded mountains of mullock.
“Today, the Ridge is a cliché tale of boom and bust.
“As the opal exhausts and trade contracts, tourism has transformed the town into a mining caricature.
“Lightning Without Flash meanders off the map, unearthing stray visions of a dusty town and the people who call the Ridge home.”
The exhibition Lightning Without Flash features objects and photographs suggest an inhospitable landscape that belies the beauty of its gems and precarious labour hidden below.
Visit Warwick Art Gallery from 12 May to 9 July 2022 to experience the strange and surreal glimpses of life on the minefields represented in the installations of Joe’s images.
