Photographic Essay : Poppy Kentish
In this ongoing series, we showcase the role photographers play in our relationships with, and perceptions of regional Australia - the places, spaces and experiences that we call home.
There’s a certain light that only exists in the north. The kind that sits low and golden on red dust, catching the shimmer of a floodplain or the quiet curve of a fence line. For photographer and storyteller Poppy Kentish, that light is both muse and message, a way of listening to the country and to the people who live within its rhythms.
“I’m drawn to stillness,” she says. “To the small, in-between moments that often go unseen.”
Her ongoing body of work, Sunday Up North, began as a quiet document, a kind of stockbook of her days, and has evolved into something larger. It is a conversation between people and place, told in fragments of colour and calm. Each image feels like part of a long exchange between red earth and green floodplains, between labour and rest, between the unseen tenderness of daily work and the enduring strength of the land that holds it. “Photography, for me, is how I listen,” Poppy explains. “Each frame is an act of attention.”
Poppy’s philosophy is simple: photography slows people down. “It makes people see, not just look,” she says. Life in regional Australia, she believes, resists neat definition. “It’s layered. It’s hard, quiet, funny, raw. And full of beauty that doesn’t need dressing up.” Her work pushes back against the idea of remoteness. Instead, she finds creativity woven through the everyday: in a tied gate, a repaired pair of jeans, a smoko shared on the tray of a ute. “Out here, beauty and resourcefulness live side by side,” she says. “You don’t separate art from effort. Making and doing are the same thing.”
Through her lens, regional Australia isn’t a backdrop but a living collaborator. The north, with its honesty of light and weather, becomes a studio without walls. The gallery that accompanies Sunday Up North traces the tone and texture of life across northern Australia. Portraits sit beside vast landscapes, the intimacy of one balanced by the enormity of the other. “I take comfort in portraiture,” Poppy says. “I like the exchange in trust, holding someone’s gaze in their own world.” Her landscapes serve as pauses, moments of breath and distance. “They’re not just scenes,” she adds. “They’re small truths about how people live and where they belong.”
What emerges is not a grand statement but a gentle accumulation. Dust and water, labour and rest, isolation and kinship, each image building upon the last until the viewer feels they’ve spent time up north themselves. Together, the series becomes what Poppy calls “a long conversation between people and country.” A record of place, yes, but also of the shared quiet that defines it.
Sunday Up North is less about what happens in the frame and more about what lingers after. A sky turning to honey at dusk. A single pair of boots by the door.
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