Jesse Marlow

Marlow's personal work has been published in three books of his own, and in various books with others; it has been exhibited in a number of solo exhibitions in Australia, and group exhibitions internationally; and is held in the public collections of the City of Melbourne, and the State Library of Victoria, both in Melbourne, Australia. He won first prize in the 2011 London Street Photography Festival's International Street Photography Award, and in the 2012 Bowness Photography Prize.

He was a member of the Australian documentary photography collective Oculi, from 2003 to 2012, and was a member of the In-Public street photography collective from 2001.

For his first book, Centre Bounce: Football from Australia's Heart (2003), Marlow documented a series of Australian rules football carnivals (a national championship series) in Aboriginal Australian communities in the Northern Territory. He made trips to the outback (the vast, remote, arid interior of Australia) over four years to photograph the game that has a rich tradition and is played with a "commitment and passion not seen anywhere else around the country". Marlow's second book, Wounded (2005), shows people going about their routines, yet with visible injury. He was inspired after breaking his arm and unable to operate a camera, he became tuned to noticing others in a similar position and they were subsequently all he photographed for the next two years. He has said that his "aim with the project was to show that despite people suffering obvious superficial injuries, human beings dust themselves off and get on with life." These first two books were made in black and white. For his next book, Don’t Just Tell Them, Show Them (2014) he changed to colour photography. All his personal work to date has been made on 35 mm film, using rangefinder cameras.

Marlow became a member of the In-Public street photography collective in 2001. He was a member of Oculi, an Australian documentary photography collective, from 2003 to 2012. He then joined M.33, both a collective of Australian photographers and gallery representation.

Marlow says he was first inspired to make street photography at age eight by the book Subway Art (1984), which documents the early history of New York City's graffiti movement. He subsequently borrowed his mother's SLR camera and documented graffiti in Melbourne during school holidays, with his mother driving him around. He continued to photograph graffiti for ten years. His photography education was a "basic one-year course in photography at a commercial college". Marlow says he was next significantly inspired at college by the work of photographers Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Alex Webb, and more recently by architecture, design and the Australian painters Jeffrey Smart and Howard Arkley.

Jesse Marlow (1978) is an Australian street photographer, editorial and commercial photographer who lives and works in Melbourne.