History of Australian Photography

Photography at Prahran College in the 1970s was integrated into the art school, a pedagogical environment unlike the universities in which the medium is now taught. James McArdle remembers his experience there of the lecturers and student colleagues and argues for the value of this atelier model in the teaching of art.

A long tradition of scholarship has centered Eadweard Muybridge in Amer-
ican film and photographic history. Despite that centrality, Muybridge’s
photography of the Modoc War, a campaign to exterminate and relocate the
Modoc people, has received scant attention. Drawing on recent historical
scholarship on the Modoc War, this article revisits Muybridge’s photographs
of the war to consider their vision of California’s Native people and their
ancestral territory and argues that Muybridge’s stereographic images laid the
generic groundwork for the Western genre’s settler-colonial imagination of
the nineteenth-century West.

A close reading of Carleton Watkins’s Nugget of Gold—attending to its subject matter, production, world’s fair display, reproduction and circulation, and especially its minerality—reveals a profound identification in late-nineteenth-century US-American society between photography and mining. Representing a fusion of nature and culture, photography has been likened to currency almost from its inception. Yet the material and specifically mineral limitations of this economy have been overlooked, though they establish a direct parallel with another gold-dependent commodity: money. Both were historically curtailed by their analog quality; their proliferation, and hence their value, is limited by extractive labor and material substance.

"Phiction: Lies, Illusion and the Phantasm in Photography" was an innovative exhibition challenging viewers to explore the complex relationship between photography and fiction by juxtaposing diverse examples of Australian photographic imagery with extracts from Australian fiction. By pairing photographs with literary texts, Phiction challenged viewers to question their interpretation of visual imagery and the nature of photographic truth. The exhibition featured works from the Horsham Regional Art Gallery, including both documentary/photojournalistic images and artistic photographs. This unique curatorial approach encouraged viewers to form their own interpretations of the images, rather than relying on traditional captions or explanations. Phiction aimed to appeal to enthusiasts of both photography and fiction, while also inviting readers to explore the similarities between photographic and written narratives. The exhibition prompted a reconsideration of the oft-quoted phrase "One picture is worth a thousand words" and engages with Laszlo Moholy Nagy's 1928 assertion about the importance of photographic literacy in the future

Portraits of Australian Aboriginal women have historically reflected artistic styles, changing perceptions and the unique characteristics of the individual artist, but it was not until the 1950s that Aboriginal women began to be presented by Australian portraitists in a more humanistic and holistic way. In the 1960s, a shift took place in the way Aboriginal women were portrayed, when the Australian artist Margaret Olley [1923–2011] focused upon Aboriginal women differently. She imaged Aboriginal women in terms of painterly aesthetics, ignoring the societal, racial and historical meanings that could have been symbolically attached to her imagery if she had chosen to do so. This article focuses firstly on Olley’s contribution and its interpretation by the Gamilaroi art historian, Donna Leslie. It then extends the investigation of Aboriginal women’s portraiture in contemporary Australian art through the exploration of a select group of paintings by the portraitist Julie Dowling (1969– ), of the Badimaya people of Western Australia. This article is written by an Indigenous Australian author.

A catalogue essay about Paul Lambeth's exhibition, 'All my lifetime it was there...', presented at the Eureka Centre Ballarat from 26 August 2023 - 31 March 2024. The exhibition revisits a 1992 documentary photography project centred on the people and places of Ballarat East. Funded by the National Trust of Victoria, the project's intent was to probe whether the significance criteria for heritage aligned with community understandings of heritage value. 30 years on, the photographs highlight substantial changes in one of Australia's most significant colonial era urban areas.

This article examines cultural representations of the mid-twentieth century mother of schoolchildren in a mass-circulation Australian women's magazine, arguing that schools and schooling have been under-acknowledged in the historiography of mothering, despite their importance in shaping modern childhood and family life. Framing the Australian Women's Weekly as a medium of public instruction, we identify and analyse its advice about schooling, both direct and implied, across a variety of the magazine's sections: in illustrations, news, feature articles, advertising, letters and advice columns. This advice was informed by the popular dissemination of medical, psychological and educational expertise, by managed exchanges amongst the magazine's readers and by the availability of a variety of consumer products. Much of the guidance offered to mothers was aspirational, aimed at educating and thereby modernising the readership. The interconnectedness of advertising and editorial produced visual and textual images of an "educational home" in which children had their learning supported or enriched, just as their bodies were capably fed and clothed. By the 1950s there was an increasing emphasis on interpersonal relations and therapeutic psychology and the Weekly had embarked on a project of encouraging mothers to learn more about schooling, to do more to support their children's learning and to take an interest in education as a social project. Despite her strong and growing connection to the school through her children, however, the school mother was almost always represented as working outside its physical boundaries during this period. In March 1943, the Australian Women's Weekly released a "brilliant Special Issue" aimed at boosting morale on the home front. This had required a marshalling of resources-previous editions of the magazine had been minimised in order to allow more paper for this one. According to the editorial staff, advertisers had "co-operated … to present spectacular color pages carrying patriotic messages". 1 Many occupied a full page and contained narratives meant to blend into the publication's general content. A select few received a special badge: a blue circle with the stars of the Southern Cross and the declaration, "I am an Australian". 1 "We Know You'll enjoy this Brilliant special issue!", Australian Women's Weekly, 13 March 1943, 17. during the period under consideration in this paper, the Weekly often followed american usage with regard to spelling and punctuation.

ohn Rowe Townsend, speaking ofchildren's literature professionals. once made the distinction between 'book people' and 'child people'. He distinguished between those critics for whom texts and those for whom children (their utilization of, or pleasure in, texts) are the object of critical attention. Televised narrative is now the dominant form of children's fiction, yet the media equivalents of the professional 'book people' are yet to find a significant voice in the professional and academic journals. Recent articles on children's film in Lion and Unicorn, together with special issues, like this number of Papers, on 'Children and Media' (my italics), go some way towards filling this silence. However, it is important to note that the publications which address screened narrative for children are generally those specializing in children's literature. The mainstream media and communicationsjournals, when they deal with children's programs at all, almost exclusively publish research informed by the cognitive paradigm. Regulatory and cultural policy is the other major area to feature in discussions, as witnessed by the most recent number of Media Information Australia, incorporating Culture and Policy (Keys & Buckingham (eds), 1999) with its special theme section, Children's Television Policy: International Perspectives. Regulatory policy, in the area ofchildren's culture, is itself influenced by research within the cognitive! developmental paradigm.

The California State Library's Photography Collection The California Section of the State Library in Sacramento possesses one of the oldest and most comprehensive photographic collections devoted to the Golden State. Its social, political and economic past is documented through 24,000 portraits, 25,000 views of places, events, and subjects, and several albums, portfolios, and books illustrated with original photographs. Although these numbers may not be as large as several institutions, it nonetheless includes images that will delight the historian, writer, museum curator, preservationist, and family historian.

Walkabout was an Australian illustrated magazine published from 1934 to 1974 (and again in 1978). It outlived America's LIFE.  combining cultural, geographic, and scientific content with travel literature, and initially a travel magazine, in its forty-year run it featured a popular mix of articles by travellers, officials, residents, journalists, naturalists, anthropologists and novelists, illustrated by top Australian photojournalists. Its title derived "from the supposed 'racial characteristic of the Australian Aboriginal who is always on the move'. What were the causes of its doubling of circulation in the 1960s and its demise from the end of that decade

The Salvation Army lecture Soldiers of the Cross (1900) is famous in Australia for incorporating some of the earliest fiction film shot in Australia into an integrated 'feature-length' production. However, it was predominantly a life-model lantern-slide lecture; and a close analysis of the slides in sequence, correlated with contemporaneous reports, indicates that it made significant innovations on nineteenth-century modes of narrative, and deployed different modalities of time and realism into a highly affective whole. Soldiers of the Cross was therefore an even more important event in Australia's media history than has been perceived hitherto.

Inspired by an intriguing photograph of a painted Bean car with Aboriginal designs, this paper explores the cross-cultural encounter between the renowned adventurer Francis Birtles (1881-1941) and Aboriginal artist Nayombolmi (c. 1895-1967). Meeting by chance during one of Birtles' overland explorations by motorcar and one of Nayombolmi's annual walking route journeys, the two men came together in an area that would become synonymous with the Imarlkba gold mine in present day Kakadu National Park. Their acquaintance, based on mutual needs and curiosity, provides a rare insight into cross-cultural colonial relationships in this frontier region. Beginning in 1929 their interactions continued intermittently as the Birtles-initiated Imarlkba gold mine developed and Badmardi people (and others) joined the workforce. By revisiting the well-known photograph of Birtles' painted Bean car, this paper uses a variety of sources, most notably old and new oral history recordings, to investigate Aboriginal histories and colonial cross-cultural engagements in remote northern Australia, and how newly introduced technologies and material culture could be charged with new meanings.

Anna Koppitz (née Arbeitlang; 1895–1989) was a mid-century Austrian photographer. She willingly pursued political commissions after the Anschluss, and is here argued to have produced propaganda that projected utopian notions of a Nordic Race and German supremacy that justified their destruction of 'inferior' peoples

Group M Group M was an Australian association of photographers who between 1959 and 1965 mounted exhibitions that advocated for photography to be treated as art, and were formative in a revival of the medium in the nation, the awareness of Australian photography internationally, and its acceptance into mainstream galleries in the 1970s.

Gordon De Lisle, who in business styled his name 'De'Lisle',  trained in photography on The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), The Australian Women's Weekly and  the RAAF. After the war in 1947 De'Lisle opened his own photographic studios in the Exhibition Buildings specialising in society portraits, industrial, aerial and automotive photography, He was head of photography at Prahran College.

Installation View offers a significant new account of
photography in Australia, told through its most important
exhibitions and modes of collection and display. From colonial
records to contemporary art, the book presents a chronology
of rarely seen installation views from both well-known and
forgotten exhibitions, along with a series of essays that tell
the story of the individuals and institutions that have proved
essential to the public circulation of photographs. At once
specific and widely contextual in its scope, this long-term
research project from two of Australia’s leading scholars in the
field enriches our understanding of the diversity of Australian
photography by looking at what lies beyond the frame.
Installation View speaks not only to pictures, but to the people
and the places that nurture them.

During the final two years of the First World War, a series of propaganda photography exhibitions were held in London. The centrepieces to these exhibitions were giant mural enlargements. Some of these spectacular battle scenes were artificially coloured and some were composites produced from several different negatives. The exhibitions were popular successes, and the mural images attracted favourable press attention. They also produced a degree of controversy behind the scenes with respect to their status as ‘fakes’.

On the twenty-sixth of September 1917, during the Third Ypres Campaign on the Western Front in Flanders, Frank Hurley and Charles Bean began a long argument about photographic verisimilitude. Captain Frank Hurley, one of Australia's newly appointed war photographers, wanted to combine several different negatives into a single battle tableau, and C. E. W. Bean, Australia's long-standing war correspondent and official war historian, prohibited it.

An examination of a series of recent newspaper articles, each of which is about the 're-discovery' of some previously anonymous person who had featured in a classic Australian photograph. I use Benjamin, as well as recent debates within historiography around the filiation of memory from history, to discuss this phenomenon. I discuss the photograph's peculiar relationship to both memory and history. I locate the new role for the historic photograph as somewhere between the artefactual aura of the classic painting and the discursive mutability of the computer file. I claim a new role for the press which now commands and curates a large archive of images from our past and hence, like public monuments and ceremonies, has a stake in recuperating memory to serve history.

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The Salvation Army lecture Soldiers of the Cross (1900) is famous in Australia for incorporating some of the earliest fiction film shot in Australia into an integrated 'feature-length' production. However, it was predominantly a life-model lantern-slide lecture; and a close analysis of the slides in sequence, correlated with contemporaneous reports, indicates that it made significant innovations on nineteenth-century modes of narrative, and deployed different modalities of time and realism into a highly affective whole. Soldiers of the Cross was therefore an even more important event in Australia's media history than has been perceived hitherto.

Inspired by an intriguing photograph of a painted Bean car with Aboriginal designs, this paper explores the cross-cultural encounter between the renowned adventurer Francis Birtles (1881–1941) and Aboriginal artist Nayombolmi (c. 1895–1967). Meeting by chance during one of Birtles’ overland explorations by motorcar and one of Nayombolmi’s annual walking route journeys, the two men came together in an area that would become synonymous with the Imarlkba gold mine in present day Kakadu National Park. Their acquaintance, based on mutual needs and curiosity, provides a rare insight into cross-cultural colonial relationships in this frontier region. Beginning in 1929 their interactions continued intermittently as the Birtles-initiated Imarlkba gold mine developed and Badmardi people (and others) joined the workforce. By revisiting the well-known photograph of Birtles’ painted Bean car, this paper uses a variety of sources, most notably old and new oral history recordings, to investigate Aboriginal histories and colonial cross-cultural engagements in remote northern Australia, and how newly introduced technologies and material culture could be charged with new meanings.

An essay based on A.H. Fullwood's 'Sketching Letter', written in 1886 of his travels through the New England district of New South Wales for the 'Picturesque Atlas of Australasia'. It's the only contemporary account of an Atlas artist's responses to the people and places he was encountering.

In September 1877 photographer Charles Henry Monkton announced that he had entered into partnership with James Sharp who would shortly be joining him from Melbourne. The venture was not a success and the partnership was dissolved on 15 December barely 3 months after its commencement. But Sharp stayed on in Whanganui building up his photographic business in conjunction with his son Raffaelle. He returned to Australia in March 1881. This paper was first published in New Zealand Legacy in March 2007.

Herbert Deveril is best known in New Zealand as head of the Photo-lithographic Branch of the Government Printing Office, a position to which he was specifically recruited in 1873. He later became a Wellington portraitist and skilled landscape photographer. Where did he come from and what happened to him after his name disappears from the New Zealand trade directories around 1890?  This paper, which first appeared (with limited footnotes) in NZ Legacy February 2013, aims to answer those questions.

John William Lindt's (1845-1926) photography of his house and garden retreat, The Hermitage, in the Yarra Ranges near Melbourne (Australia), attests to contemporary debates on what contemporaries termed the "domestication of science": a call for the common man, and increasingly, the interested woman to participate first-hand in the scientific study of the natural world, especially the disciplines of botany and geography. Recalling the earlier doctrines of German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (l769-1859), who linked the botanical geography of "southern continents" with the development of egalitarian values in art and science and the advancement of modern civilisation, Australian protagonists of such ideals coupled field research by the average citizen with the intellectual progress of the colony. We argue that Lindt's Hermitage, which was designed on Humboldtian principles, also became an important site for scientific activities that were intellectually indebted to Humboldtian ideals. ln order to show how Lindt's photographic images of The Hemitage and surrounds specifically address contemporary discourses on the access to science by non-professionals, including women, we will focus on Lindt's practical involvement in the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, including his participation in scientific expeditions to New Guinea and Fiji, and his use of The Hermitage as a base for "geographical carnivals" and field trips. These images were widely disseminated by Lindt in diverse forms such as stereo-graphs, tourist postcards and in scientific presentations. By these means, Lindt was able to impart to a global audience Humboldtian insights about the botan­ical abundance of the south and its potential to awaken a comprehension of science and art in the general population of Australia.

This comprises a short illustrated discussion of drought photographs taken in 1952 by the major Australian artist Sidney Nolan (1917-1992).
Analysing several examples, the piece discusses the circumstances in which the photographs were taken, and Nolan's working methods with his cameras.  It also shows how the artist's grim images of animal carcasses was steeped in post-war creative values.  Besides directly alluding to Existentialist-inclined art, Nolan used the camera to visually invoke motifs from Picasso's art, Hemingway's writing, and Holocaust photographs.
3pp. & 4 illus.

John Cyril (Jack) Cato, F.R.P.S. (4 April 1889 – 14 August 1971) was a significant Australian portrait photographer in the Pictorialist style, operating in the first half of the twentieth century. He was the author of the first history of Australian photography; The Story of the Camera in Australia (1955).
This is a Design and Art Australia Online (DAAO) entry I have written and uploaded, also to Wikipedia (uploaded 1–4 December 2014), and pending publication on Luminous Lint

The gold rushes of the late 1800s in California and Australia brought about similar cultural and artistic responses: enormous numbers of opportunistic photographers and itinerant artists joined the hordes of immigrants to these new lands in hopes of making their fortune through their art, if not through their luck on the gold fields.  In some cases, photographers worked in both places, creating fascinating images of social life and landscape in these frontier communities and establishing some recognizable photographic techniques; indeed, American photographers were seen as bringing the most advanced photographic styles to Australia, and Americans touted their technical skills to gain favour with Australian audiences.


Of particular interest in these early photographic records is to compare the photographers’ stylistic responses to the landscapes of these frontiers. Photographic images of California most often emphasized the land’s grandeur as evidence of concepts of the Sublime, with a focus on the pioneers’ efforts to conquer and tame the wilderness. In contrast, Australian photographs of the period most often focussed on ‘civilized’ settlement itself, and revealed a deflection of any grandiose sentiments about a landscape of ‘otherness’ for which early settlers initially felt ambivalent. These views give evidence of different ideological attitudes about the landscape in seemingly straightforward images of place.  Nonetheless, a photographic iconography of the land, first formulated in California in the 1850s, continued to inform view photography into the 1880s, by which time the conquest of the American West was already becoming romanticized by writers and artists, and Australian photographers began to apply some of these tropes to their own renditions of this ‘other’ landscape. The question of how and when this photographic aesthetic arrived in Australia remains an intriguing one, and provides fascinating possibilities for further research.

For the colour and the soundtrack to be part of the politics, even a central part of the politics… meant something new by way of embodiment. Much of the political action was about being there, about putting one's body on the line. A demonstration, sit-in or blockade is centrally about occupying space. A nonviolent movement tried to occupy space with bodies, not bullets. It was a key feature of the new left that this embodied politics couldn't stop in the streets: that is, the public arena as conventionally understood. 'Being there' politically also applied to households, classrooms, sexual relations, workplaces and the natural environment." 1