Ella Rubeli has always been exposed to photography. “I fooled around with a hand-me-down camera as a child, led by my photographer father and dabbled in the darkroom at high school,” she says. But it wasn’t until her final year of a journalism degree where she discovered that photography was the career she wished to pursue. “Now, I use photographs as my main storytelling medium.”
After leaving university, Rubeli decided to venture into photojournalism leading her to online journalism site, The Global Mail, where she covered a wide range of subjects from tuberculosis to taxidermy. This developed Rubeli’s eye for all that is human. She uses her photography to draw people’s attention to things that are often unseen. “I am interested in documenting people on the fringes of society, in telling the stories that are often left untold,” she says.
Further expanding her photographic repertoire into the realm of videography, it was her attraction for the untold stories of humanity that led a 23 year-old Rubeli to winning the Walkley Young Photojournalist of the Year in 2013 with her two video documentary pieces, Trying to Beat TB and Lives Apart: Katherine Cummings. She has recently been nominated for the 2014 Walkley Young Journalist of the Year in the camerawork category. She has also been a Head On Portrait Prize semi-finalist and has had her still photographs and short films published in The Guardian (UK and Australia), New York’s Narrative.ly, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Global Mail.
Rubeli is currently studying documentary filmmaking at AFTRS in Sydney, freelances as a photographer for corporates and Fairfax Media and is working on a personal chiaroscuro photographic series entitled Loneliness At Parties.