Hyper No 04 by Denis Darzacq

The city of Fremantle in Australia is currently hosting the largest photography festival in the southern hemisphere: FotoFreo 2008 is a "biennial international festival of photography lasting a full month to showcase the work of photographers, to generate an awareness of and a discussion about their work, and to create a forum for the exploration of ideas and issues relating to the practice and art of photography." It's a very long and horribly expensive series of plane rides from New York to Fremantle, which is unfortunate because FotoFreo's list of core exhibitions looks amazing, there are so many photographers whose work I'd love to see in person.

Chief among them is Denis Darzacq, whose work I first encountered through his 2007 World Press Photo prize-winning series La Chute, in which he captures young people seemingly falling at high speed, in the moment before they hit the ground. The photograph above is from his show Hyper et Casqués, now open at the Perth Centre for Photography; "For Hyper," Darzacq says, "I asked young dancers and sportsmen to jump for the camera, inspiring themselves from the aggresive setting of the hypermarket as well as the body language found in mannierist paintings, unreal and exaggerated, futile. A form of resistance against an increasingly rampant consumer society."

Other highlights: Agnès Dherbeys' photos of the ongoing turmoil in East Timor, Chen Nong's hand-colored black and white prints of his recreated terra cotta armies at the Three Gorges Dam, and Wang Gang's portraits of the Yi people in remote China.