Artist Atong Atem's New Annual exhibit brings Africa into focus

But she's humble enough to call herself a "baby" and considerate enough to never forget the life-changing confidence she gained from her brief stay in Newcastle about 10 years ago.

Meet Atong Atem, an Ethiopian-born woman of South Sudanese heritage, who moved to Australia with her family as a child - Wyoming on the Central Coast - and found her way eventually to her career and passion as an artist, with a specialty in examining the post-colonial photography of Africa.

Atem's photography and related video and artworks have captured the attention of the world: she's currently in an exhibit A World In Common: Contemporary African Photography at the Tate Modern gallery in London, Photo Ireland Festival at Dublin, Ireland, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

Atem will have her first exhibit ever in Newcastle as part of New Annual, showing works and video from her Banksia and Surat collections at 134 King Street, from September 22 to October 1.

The Banksia work highlights the experience of African men and women who arrived on the First Fleet in 1788. Atem's work reflects on the important and shifting role that photographic images hold in the migratory experience.

Atem's artistic lens has an intense focus: you cannot look away, there is too much to see, zeroing in on portraits, and self-portraiture, that takes a fresh look at families, fantasies, truth, belonging, mythology.

It was borne from a different intention, but morphed into photography.

"I came to it from a theory, an interest in art theory and art history first," she says of her artistic process. "Initially, the photographic practise wouldn't have existed I suppose if I wasn't trying to write about photographic history, specifically post-colonial photography in west Africa and east Africa.

"I wanted to write about it, and wanted to write about that moment in history when the first colonised people started taking photographs of ourselves rather than being subjects of photographs.

"I wanted to write about that powerful moment in history and how it's affected the way we look at photography and the way that we photograph now.

"Then I thought, as an art student, why don't I make art rather than write, because my medium wasn't literature, my medium wasn't essay writing. My medium was painting. So I had this whole thing, I wanted to explore hand-tinting black and white photographs. So that was how it started.

"I printed off a bunch of black and white photographs [from the] Smithsonian archive, all these really kind of troubling ethnographic photographs, with the intention to hand colour them.

"But then, I think, I don't know, there were questions not so much about ethics at that point, because the photographs, I felt like I was entitled to them because they were kind of problematic, I guess.

"But I wanted to explore my relationship to the aesthetic of ethnographic photographs, in the sense that a lot of them were really beautiful to me even though they had this loaded intent.

"So it felt relevant to me to take photographs, and then print them and paint them myself.

"And I really then liked the colour of the original photographs - we have colour photography, it is a really widely available thing for us right now. So it kind of all went down from 'I'm writing an essay about this thing' to 'I'm gonna make photographic painted works to reference this historical thing' to 'I'm just gonna make photographs in the style of this thing'.

"And this thing, being the point in history when Africans started photographing ourselves, and then fast forward 10 years, and I'm still making photographic works to talk about that moment in history."

Atem's family spent five years in Kenya before finally landing in Australia, where the Gosford suburb of Wyoming became their home. Her first exposure to Newcastle was as a teenager. "My friends and I would always go shopping in Newcastle, because that's where all the best op shops were," she says.

She got accepted at the University of Newcastle to study architecture, settling in a share house across the road from the Callaghan campus in Waratah. In her first week, a housemate took her along to meet some people rehearsing for an upcoming artistic performance. She found herself at Morrow Park Bowling Club, amongst a flock of the most creatively-minded people you could ever meet.

"It was just the most interesting thing I'd ever seen in my life," she says.

The people she met had a profound impact on her. Now living in Melbourne, she counts singer Kira Piru as one of her best friends. She keeps in touch with another good friend, singer Mo'Ju (aka Mojo Juju) - they are both mums now.

"It was so special, in hindsight, it was so special," Atem says. "I don't know if there are very many places that can offer that sort of experience any more. There was something really special about Newcastle there and then."

She has no hesitation in identifying what that Morrow Park commune of creatives meant to her.

"I think it was just seeing it in the people that I admired so much, seeing the possibility of a life where you dedicate yourself entirely to your art and to work at that primarily. And seeing the possibility for that to be very, very enjoyable and rewarding."