Capture is an Australian magazine I download—only occasionally—when the cover manages to earn it. Not out of bad habit, but because it is, almost always, more of the same. It is a publication devoted to professional and emerging photography, broadly acknowledged as one of the field’s established editorial platforms. It offers technical analyses, equipment reviews, practical guides, and reports on international trends. It also covers competitions such as The Capture Awards and Australasia’s Top Emerging Photographers. It combines professional rigor with the promotion of new talent, which makes it, at least regionally, a solid point of reference for photographers, educators, and the visual industry at large.

Its Summer 2025–26 issue—released, paradoxically, in the middle of winter—presented the results of The Capture Awards, whose winners, runners-up, and Top 15 were announced in the first days of December. The competition opened on April 21, 2025, and closed on September 18. Its six categories—Portrait & People, Landscape & Environment, Wedding & Event, Advertising & Fashion, Documentary & Street, and Art & Conceptual—recognize at least one Winner and one Runner-Up each, adding up to twelve principal awardees, plus a considerable constellation of finalists listed among each section’s Top 15. The magazine published the complete set of results.

The editor notes that they received 1,400 submissions—broad, competitive, and conclusive regarding the scale of this year’s edition.

The magazine—something it only recently dares to articulate—reaffirms its intent to reward photographs that come from the real world, not from digital conjuring. A stance it insists on maintaining at a time when AI and automated post-production are reshaping the medium.

I reviewed the ninety acknowledged works. I gave the main awards a closer look and found nothing of interest. Only one image caught my attention—filed under Art & Conceptual.

Perhaps for its singularity: a photograph that reduces a female body to a pair of legs dangling from an industrial structure. A fragmented identity, diluted into an absurd, theatrical pose that pulls the gaze toward a pair of shrieking high-heels—condensed emblems of everything the composition has already amputated.

It is not a pleasant image; nor is it a reasonable doubt. Can a rough, almost hostile environment suffocate the artifices of desire? At the very least, it confuses and arrests.

Without showing the face or most of the body, the figure acquires a surprising narrative charge. Lacking identity, it overflows with intention. It provokes an anxiety to complete the scene, to imagine what brought her here, what waits on the other side. How do I climb up?

The photograph holds itself through a chromatic balance as rigorous as it is shameless. The red of the heels vibrates against its ceremonial opposite: a disciplined green. Immediately above, a pink surface where the legs—sturdy yet precarious—rest, topped by an autonomous blue. These flattened, almost painterly fields flirt with Pop from the conceptual flank. Every element of the image is painfully ordinary; only its manipulation elevates them into a sign where unease is barely grazed by a sordid humor.

I always look for the center because that is where the author nails his intention. The shoes. They clamor for attention like a bicycle bell. Emblems of a codified femininity, rendered absurd when confronted with a metallic, industrial, cold environment. Every reading of the body becomes denatured. Without question, we are witnessing a deliberate accident. What happens when the human becomes a visual object with the same ontological weight as a piece of structure? Where did the character vanish? The anecdote pushes us yet again to consider the body as surface, as sign, as fiction.

The piece is titled Strut, which may mean “to walk with excessive confidence,” with an inflated posture, an air of superiority. But it can equally mean “a structural support.”

What is Dane Beesley trying to say with this circus? Something profound? Is he attempting to ignite a debate on the signifying body through a flamboyant composition of flat, almost serigraphic color? Or is he simply a smart-aleck—a joker who had the image flash across his mind in situ? Something closer to a Kabarettist thrust?

There is no way of knowing. But the legs with which he tries to seduce us—because the intention is unmistakable—generate a narrative far broader than their outline. One that oscillates between grace, estrangement in the Brechtian sense (Verfremdungseffekt), and staged artifice. Is it a commentary on the cultural construction of desire, neutralized by the cold violence of metal, scrutinized by a cloudless sky, by an insolent blue?

Too much theater, Dane.

Dane Beesley

He is described as “an Australian photographer known for his work in portraiture, urban culture, and music, as well as for conceptual imagery that blends spontaneity, theatricality, and an expressive use of color. His work often explores the threshold between the documentary and the performative, building scenes in which the everyday acquires a surreal, ironic, or pop-inflected tone. Beesley has photographed extensively across the Australian music scene, alongside developing artistic projects recognized in specialized publications.”