The Ballarat International Foto Biennale (BIFB) is built around 20 invited artists accompanied by an enormous fringe which is uncurated and open to anyone who cares to mount a show. The invited artists in the Core Exhibition Program include Australian and international artist photographers, many of whom have links to the fashion, media or documentary worlds.

Alex Syndikas, who works in the School of Creative Media at RMIT in Melbourne, is another Australian photographer shown in the festival's core program. He works in the alternative photographic processes tradition:

Chemigrams can be made by painting, dripping or spraying developer onto various areas of a fully exposed piece of paper, or the paper can be activated with a range of chemicals during development. Another technique is covering hands or face with a thin layer of Vaseline and pressing it against a large sheet of photographic paper and then exposed it to light. During the development the developer is prevented from reaching the areas where the Vaseline is.

In Syndikas case he uses this means of artistic expression to produce a variety of surreal imagery by coating models with water-resistant gel then getting them to press themselves on sheets of photographic paper--the impressions then turn to positive images when the paper is developed.

It refers back to the modernist period of Christian Schad, Man Ray and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy in the Dada, Surrealist and Constructivist periods of art, respectively.