How can photography at an outdoor Australian music festival make the festival, the artist and the photographer more prominent through the use of media

Submission note: Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Visual Arts to the Visual Arts and Design BGO, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Latrobe University, Bundoora.

The contemporary Outdoor Music Festival began in America in 1967. Since that time photography has always been there to document not only the performances but also the changing culture and demographic of audiences. From the start, photographers, through their images, have strived to build a prominence for the festival, the artist and also themselves. The images have also been used to promote the festivals and artists, resulting in more recognition and admiration from the wider public. Over the past decade, the introduction of restrictions on photographers have considerably reduced allowable time for their image capture. This severely limits the ability of the photographer to create the memorable and iconic images associated with the Outdoor Music Festival of the pre-digital era. Radical changes throughout the media industry have had a devastating impact on print circulation across all genres of newspapers and magazines, and images from Outdoor Music Festivals are now uploaded to and compete with a plethora of online content. These challenges have made the successful photographic documentation of Outdoor Music Festivals more difficult but not impossible.