Category Archives: photo-exhibitions

Rod McNicol, The Roses 2024

On Our Collections

When we moved, we dispersed some of our collections and said to ourselves that we should not buy any more. Then we saw this wonderful new work by Rod McNicol.

A previous notice for this was posted on Facebook — but their algorithm removed it.  We have a theory.   Click here for the original piece on our website

Re-constructed Vision

Contemporary work with photography 25th July-23rd August, 1981

Over the recent years I have been searching through my archives for articles and essays that we have since published on our web-site. I had overlooked one exhibition. That was the 1981 Project Gallery exhibition Re-constructed Vision: Contemporary work with photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

It is now uploaded to our web site.

Parting with Your Art ~ November 2021

An update on parting with my archives

Updated November 2021 

Have uploaded more to Parting with Your Artclick here.

This new page is an update on my most recent experiences on parting with my own archive as well as some thoughts that may be useful to others dealing with these downsizing matters

For the full list of pages so far: Click here

Curators and Photography

Have uploaded to our photo-web site a special section on the first photography curators — Australian that is.   We have listed four: Jennie Boddington, Ian North, Gael Newton (me!), and Alan Davies. The listings for Jennie and myself include 1983 interviews by the Australian Centre of Photography. These are very long!  (you have been warned)

Click here for the link.

If you know of any other useful online material on these people, please make contact.

Spot On

the art of film stills photography, 1906–2001

I was approached by Penny Grist of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra to advise on the 2017 exhibition — Starstruck. I then had the great experience of working with the co-curators Penny from the Portrait Gallery and Jenny Coombes of National Film and Sound Archive. This was a fun collaborative research experience — with my essay published in their book for the exhibition. Click here for the essay now online.

Parting with Your Art ~ June 2021

Large Collections and Managing Expectations

Updated June 2021  Have uploaded more to Parting with Your Artclick here.

This page is about managing expectations, large collections, institutional collection policies, points for collectors approaching art museums and archives, recommended first steps — and more..

For the full list of pages so far: Click here

thousands of historic photographs online

Paris Musées launches online photography

Paris Musées, the public institution that manages all of the museums in Paris, has launched a new Collections portal with the public access to more than 100,000 high-resolution digital reproductions of classic artwork and photography.

Click here for the article on DP Review — or here for the portal


above image: 61 rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile, enseigne “Au petit Bacchus”. Paris (IVème arrondissement). Photographie d’Eugène Atget (1857–1927). Paris, musée Carnavalet.

Walter Woodbury

Entrepreneur, Inventor: Woodbury in Indonesia

I have uploaded a small essay I wrote in 2014 about Walter Woodbury in Indonesia. This essay was linked to the exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia — Garden of the East: photography in Indonesia 1850s-1940s. Click here for my essay online.

There’s also another small essay online that relates to a photograph — the one above — titled Serimpies, or dancing girls of the Sultano c.1858 . Click here for that essay.

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For the list of my essays (being updated) click here

 

20th-century Japanese photography

Hanran

Great looking exhibition — get me to Canada

An exhibition organized by the Yokohama Museum of Art in collaboration with the Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada.

Hanran: 20th-Century Japanese Photography
October 11, 2019 to Sunday, March 22, 2020
Click here for the link to the exhibition page — with images at the bottom of the page  that can be enlarged..

 

George Silk

George Silk, Photojournalist

I have several essays online relating to George Silk the photojournalist. Born in Levin, New Zealand in 1916, Silk served as a photojournalist for Life Magazine for 30 years.

He is well known as a war photographer, that part of his career began in 1939 serving for the Australian government in the Middle East, North Africa and Greece.

There are many other aspects of his achievements covered in my essays. Most of my research related to the exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in 2000.

Here are the links to my essays:

Going to Extremes: George Silk, Photojournalist from the NGA exhibition catalogue

Going to extremes: George Silk photographer   essay in Art & Australia

George Silk,Fawn and rainbow trout, tributary of the Madison River, Montana

 

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For the list of my essays (being updated) click here

 

 

 

Curatorland

Writing in the Rain, FX Harsono - Still from colour video 2011  Collection National Gallery of Australia

Following my leaving the National Gallery in September 2014, I was asked by the editor of the Journal of the Asian Arts Society Australia to write about my last decade at the gallery — the decade that saw the establishment of a survey collection of Asia-Pacific photography spanning from South Asia to the west coast of the Americas.

The new collection was largely based around major collections acquired from several major private collections of Asia-Pacific photography including one of some 5000 colonial-era Indonesian photographs.

Here’s that story — click here

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For the list of my other essays (being updated) click here

 

Australian Photography since the 1970s

Michael Riley’s Cloud (2000)

Generations: Australian Photography since the 1970s

This essay was originally published in the catalogue Photographica Australis
for the 2002 exhibition by the Australian Centre of Photography
Curated by Alasdair Foster. Click here

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For the list of my essays (being updated) click here

Frank Hurley & Australian Native Plants

INFORMATION CALL-OUT: FRANK HURLEY

Searching for Frank Hurley along our northern beaches

Did you know that Frank Hurley was a very keen gardener and photographer of wild flowers?

Continue reading Frank Hurley & Australian Native Plants

Photography: Relics of Old London

Yale Centre for British Art, 2016

From the gallery: This exhibition offered a glimpse of the lost architecture of preindustrial London, as captured in a series of carbon photoprints commissioned between 1875 and 1886 by the short-lived Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London.

Continue reading Photography: Relics of Old London

National Galleries of Scotland’s photography

The View from Here, at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

The View from Here, brings together 70 key works that chart the history of landscape photography over the course of 175 years. click here for more.

Exhibition runs 29th October 2016 − 30th April 2017 — click here for the gallery site

Valerie Sparks

Valerie Sparks wins Bowness

tempest-ne

The Monash Gallery of Art has announced that Melbourne artist Valerie Sparks has won the 2016 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize with her work ‘Prospero’s Island – North East’ featuring one of Australia’s most iconic landscapes.

Click here for a link to the artist’s website.

Click here for the link to Monash Gallery of Art