Photography & place: Australian landscape photography 1970s until now
Art Gallery of NSW 2011

Debra Phillips, Untitled 7 (view from model plane launch area) 2001, from the series The world as puzzle
l-r Anne Ferran, Ricky Maynard, Rosemary Laing
Rosemary Laing, after Heysen 2005

Photography & place presented the work of 18 artists including Ian North, Rosemary Laing, Anne Ferran, Michael Riley, Ingeborg Tyssen, Simryn Gill and Ricky Maynard. The range of work encompassed ideas of place in relation to historical residue, the sublime, ethnicity, the interface between people and nature, as well as the road in Australian landscape mythologies.

A number of artists in Photography & place deconstructed the view before the camera lens and reconstructed what could be seen in order to present a less partial depiction of the environment. In the 1970s such views included montages of two or more images within the frame, books, and the use of Polaroids and Instamatic cameras.

From the 1980s onwards artists worked increasingly in series rather than single images further exploding notions of fixed pictorial codes and perspectives. The journey of discovery ceased to have romantic connotations and became very much a discovery of detail, occasionally cinematic in scale but as often focussed on the intimacies of the local.

This exhibition looked at earlier work from the 1970s and compared and contrasted intention and effect in relation to more recent photography. It examined photographs which presented very specific views of locations and what that location or place could be taken to represent.

See also WRITING

© the artists