Ben Apfelbaum

STANLEY STREET COMES ALIVE WITH THE OPENING NIGHT OF THE SYDNEY FRINGE

All images by Ben Apfelbaum (c).

Pasta Gulch (Stanley Street East Sydney) was even livelier than usual as on the third of September the Fringe Festival party visited this Italian cuisine mecca.

The footpaths were packed as foodies spilled out onto the road. The street was lined with musicians from the weird to the conventional to the super cool.

The weird was provided by The Prophets, a band that performed boppy tunes in bizarre masks, to folk practitioner  Brian Campeau and also Matilda Abraham to the smooth jazz of The Jonathon Zwartz Trio.

The Lord Roberts Hotel hosted the hot electric piano of Rai Thislethwayte  as well as the dance grooves of Old Man Funk.

For  connoisseurs of the avant garde, the guitar and drummer duo Showa 44 played discordant music in the window of Bar Reggio whilst a few shops down, Alice Terry serenaded onlookers with her brassy blues voice.

If that was not enough entertainment street performers roamed up and down the Block enveloping themselves and onlookers in a gold foiled blanket as well as adopting enigmatic poses and strides.

The Fringe Festival got off to a flying start  as Sydney Fringe inhabits its home town for the rest of September with highlights including at Camperdown Park, a Silent Disco in World Square, complemented by a Silent Dinner in the Paddington Town Hall and the inauguration of a new arts precinct Off Broadway in Annandale.

Furthermore, nearly every day you can go to see small fringe comedy, music, spoken word, theatre, or intimate circus performances.

The final September weekend will climax with the Global Rhythms concert in Bi-Centennial Park, Glebe.

Full details can be found at http://syndeyfringe.com.

 

Published by Ben Apfelbaum

My photography began when my father handed me the proverbial brownie box camera as a child. As cameras developed I went through Fujica and Olympus range finders graduating to my first single lens reflex camera, the Minolta SRT101, the latter being the greatest facilitator to my growth as a photographer. Digital photography has only added to this. I was a regular contributor to Camera Craft magazine (Australian Camera ) for over three years. During Australia’s Bicentennial year (1988) I made it a personal project to document the celebrations. This culminated in the creation of a book of my photos which was published in 1989. The book was called CELEBRATING AUSTRALIA and came with an accompanying calendar. My works have appeared in a number of publications including the coffee book entitled MY AUSTRALIA (1989), publisher Robertsbridge Severn. This book had a preface by the then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke. I was a co-photographer on a book entitled SYDNEY- DISCOVER THE CITY with text written by Robert Treborland. Major Mitchell Press was the publisher. Also for two years I was the photographer for calendars celebrating Sydney’s multicultural communities. The two calendars were entitled MULTICULTURAL SYDNEY. My work appeared in a group exhibition held at Sydney’s Town Hall pertaining to the diversity of life in South America to raise money for orphanages there. I have over one hundred photos stored in the New South Wales State Library archive. I had a solo exhibition held in 2007 entitled Ben’s Lens at the Sydney Jewish Museum which celebrated the vibrancy of the Sydney Jewish community. Some of these photos are on the Museum’s permanent display. I have exhibited internationally firstly at the Spruill Gallery in Atlanta Georgia, united states, and in an exhibition entitled Kosher and Co at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Currently I am a regular contributor to J-Wire and this esteemed publication.