THE LANGUAGE OF LIGHT: ASHLEY GILBERTSON

Seven different Australian photographers, each with a significant body of work and each with a different photographic style: Ashley Gilbertson is a photojournalist.
Born In Australia, Ashley now lives and works in New York. In his teens Ashley started photographing his skateboarding friends. He had a good eye and became very involved in filming refugees both in Australia and later internationally, ending up in the Kurdish enclave of northern Iraq just before the Iraq war started. When the war began he was embedded with US marines, eventually publishing a book of his time there called Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer’s Chronicle of the Iraq War. His time in Iraq was harrowing and he returned to the US with PTSD. In the US he subsequently made another book– Bedrooms of the Fallen - using photographs of the bedrooms left behind by 40 fallen soldiers.
Since this time he has photographed many subjects for the New York Times, and has just been back in Melbourne for the launch of his exhibition at NGV about the COVID-period in New York, titled Requiem to New York.