Most people experience architecture through images. Buildings circulate through publications, periodicals, search engines and socials long before, if ever, being encountered in person. If architectural photography contributes to how architecture is received and understood, then few Australian photographers have had a greater influence than John Gollings AM (1944–). Over a career spanning more than five decades and over 12,500 projects (currently stored on a 300-terabyte server), and with seventy-one works acquired for the NGV Collection in 2017, Gollings has helped define the perception of countless buildings, cities and architects. However, he doesn’t just shoot architecture, he mythologises it.
Gollings emerged out of a lineage of postwar Australian architectural photography shaped by figures such as Max Dupain, Wolfgang Sievers and Mark Strizic.1These photographers were mentors and good friends of Gollings. Strizic printed Gollings’ first exhibition of photographs from his time in Papua New Guinea and mentored him in colour printing; Dupain would ring John up constantly to criticise his work; while John knew Sievers through his childhood friendship with Anders Sievers, Wolfgang’s son, and mentored him from age fourteen. This generation defined the postwar Australian architectural image: sharp focus, controlled composition, dramatic vantage points and a commitment to clarity and objectivity.2Maggie Finch, ‘Sharp focus and an unsentimental vision’, National Gallery of Victoria, 8 Aug. 2014, accessed 10 June, 2026. Gollings broke away from this photographic lineage with a distinctive style that was evident from an early age.
Gollings did not shoot buildings and places as he found them; he staged them. At the age of nine, Gollings picked up a Kodak folding camera that he discovered in his father’s workshop (and is still in his possession today). He began experimenting with it immediately, staging compositions with his siblings. At the time, his father ran a nursery. Gollings directed his siblings so that one appeared to be standing balanced on the other’s shoulders when jumping up off a compost heap. The film was processed overnight and by the next morning Gollings received the small contact sheets – a moment of fascination that, Gollings recalls, marked the beginning of his commitment to photography.3John Gollings, Conversation with Timothy Moore, 24 May 2026. If modernist photographers helped us see postwar Australia through black-and-white contrast, Gollings made us see another reality in full technicolour from the 1970s and beyond.
Among Gollings’ most recognised early works are his images of small-scale infill public housing by Edmond and Corrigan and Norman Day, published in Domus magazine. These photographs pointed towards a new wave of postmodern architecture in Australia, reframing the suburban vernacular. The Italian architecture and design journal Domus dedicated its July 1985 issue, titled ‘Ciao Australia, Coast to Coast: The Last Wave’, to Australian architecture following editor Alessandro Mendini’s visit to Australia the previous October, supported by the Australia Council’s Design Arts Board.4Paul Walker and Karen Burns, ‘Constructing Australian architecture for international audiences: Regionalism, postmodernism, and the Design Arts Board 1980–1988’, Fabrications, 2018, vol. 28, no, 1, pp. 25–46. As part of this feature, Domus asked Peter Corrigan of the firm Edmond and Corrigan to commission a photographer to capture the practice’s Kay Street Housing (1983) project for Victoria’s Ministry of Housing.5According to Gollings, Corrigan called him up because Edmond and Corrigan’s photos were rejected by Domus. John Gollings, quoted in Dr Caligari Moves to the Suburbs – The Architecture of Edmond and Corrigan, Toby Reed, RMIT Gallery, 37 min, 2013. In Corrigan’s words, Kay Street was ‘an exercise in myth making’ about the suburbs.6Edmond and Corrigan, ‘Learning from Suburbia’, Domus, 1985, vol. 663, p. 28. Through the abstraction of familiar suburban styles and brick veneer, the project transformed the everyday into something uncanny.
Gollings took up this challenge of myth making. He recounts, ‘It occurred to me because it was being published in Milan, I may as well let the Italians feel we had kangaroos in the streets instead of cats and dogs. I was the head photographer for Melbourne Zoo and so I gave myself permission to go in at night and chase kangaroos around with a flash gun.’7Gollings, Conversation with Moore. Writer Simon Sellars refers to the resulting photos, and others in this period of Gollings’ work,8Examples include Edmond and Corrigan’s Church of the Resurrection, Keysborough (1975–76); Caroline Chisholm Homes’ Keysborough (1980) and Freedom Club, Church of the Resurrection (1978); and Gregory Burgess Architects’ Station Street Housing, Carlton (1983). as introducing ‘a playful surrealism into suburban snapshots’.9Simon Sellars, ‘Recalibrating new suburbia’, Architecture Australia, July 2021, vol. 110, no, 4, p. 65. The three kangaroos may appear playful, but they also evoke the visual language of Ozploitation cinema, the often unsettling genre that traded in exaggerated Australian larrikin stereotypes throughout the 1970s and 80s (John did also work on films, including as a stills photographer for Fred Schepisi.) The kangaroos, their eyes possessed by the flash into red points of light, look like they have taken over the streets after dark.
This period of Gollings’ work emerges from two intertwined contexts, the rise of postmodern thought in Australian architecture and his career in advertising photography, both of which reinforce his broader project of myth making. Gollings entered architecture school in the mid 1960s and many of his colleagues would go on to be renowned architects and educators, including Greg Burgess, Graeme Gunn, John Denton and Bill Mitchell.10Gollings did not complete his architecture education. He kept on deferring until the university wouldn’t let him defer anymore. At university he was influenced by architecture lecturers George Tibbits, Hugh O’Neill and Neville Quarry. The discourse of postmodernism was being introduced, including through the seminal 1972 publication Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Inspired by the book, Gollings shot every building on the strip for his own university history thesis, titled Learning from Surfers Paradise, written under the supervision of Tibbits. The project began Gollings’ obsession with documenting architectural heritage11Gollings obsession with place, architectural history and heritage would continue outside of the Gold Coast. In 1982 Gollings travelled to the ancient ruins of Vijayanagara in India, and would continue to do so for over forty years. Vijayanagara was the capital of the Hindu empire in southern India from the middle of the fourteenth century until its destruction by Muslim armies in 1565. The NGV Collection includes a group of forty-five photographs by Gollings of Vijayanagara, taken between 1982 and 1984. These photographs capture the grandeur, imposing scale and beauty of the City of Victory’s monuments. and the concept of building as signifier, or how buildings operate through systems of signs, whereby meaning is produced through cultural reading rather than purely architectural form. His dedication to postmodernism is evident in the use of irony, humour, collage, quotation and theatricality in his work. Gollings isn’t just photographing postmodern architecture – these photographs are postmodern.
Gollings worked in advertising in the 1970s, which helps explain why he is always trying to sell a building or, at the very least, flatter it. He first took leave from architecture school to assist photographer Peter Gough. Shortly after, he received a call from art director Kevin Orpin, of the ad agency Orpin and Bourne, which led to his first job. Around this time, Gollings overheard an art director in the office discussing a failed shoot during which a visiting photographer had spent a week on a campaign only to produce overexposed and unusable images. Seeing an opportunity, Gollings stepped in and suggested he could salvage the job by reprocessing the work as colour negative rather than transparency, recovering density in the material. The studio processed around two hundred rolls.
A week later he received a call: despite the intervention, the results were still considered unusable. However, he was offered the commission to reshoot the job: ‘Would you like to shoot a Marlborough account for one day for $250?’ Not long after, Gollings had several billboards on Kings Way in Melbourne, effectively launching his advertising career. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Gollings worked for major Australian brands including Sportsgirl, JAG, Prue Acton and TAA. (His tourism campaign for Great Keppel Island has since become something of a touchstone in Australian advertising photography. As he recalls, ‘We invented the Keppel sandwich.’)
‘As an advertising photographer, my task was to invent a photograph that would sell product,’ says Gollings.12Gollings, Conversation with Moore. This attitude translated to his architectural photography, which arose because contemporaries from his architecture school days were starting to get some major projects built and they would ask him to photograph the buildings.
This practice of selling a building and intensifying its meaning through a single, highly constructed photograph is the organising logic of Gollings’ practice. It reflects a broader condition in which architectural meaning is increasingly produced through image construction and circulation. He is not apologetic about this. Rather, he relishes it, a sensibility enabled by the technical latitude of wide-angle lenses: ‘I am known as a wide-angle queen.’13Gollings, Conversation with Moore. Through this expansiveness, his work is defined by strong formal composition and a deliberately didactic, contextual framing: the ‘hero shot’, a singular defining image through which a building enters circulation, whether in a twentieth-century magazine or a twenty-first-century social media feed.
Gollings has very strict rules about composing the hero shot in order to make the one defining picture. The horizon is always centred and the entire building must be visible. He does not particularly favour blue skies or green grass; instead, he is drawn to the hallucinatory clarity of dawn or dusk. When buildings are illuminated, interiors glow, form is intensified. He’s also content to put a strong vertical line – a tree or a power pole – through an image.
People feature less frequently in his images. This is partly due to the technical constraints of shooting on a 4×5 view camera with a hood over his head, where even the shortest exposure might be a quarter of a second. When people do appear, as in his earlier works, they are carefully staged, often as tableaux. Photographs such as Heide 2 interior (Peddle Thorpe Architects, 1993) and Aboriginal Affairs housing (Ted Billson, 1991) resemble Renaissance paintings, while the image of Gollings’ daughter Polly floating mid-air like Wendy in Peter Pan above the Freedom Club (Edmond and Corrigan, 1978) was achieved by photographing her jumping on a trampoline. Or even with a fluffle of rabbits in a JCBa’s Brook Street House (1998). In other examples, figures operate to fulfill a narrative. This is most evident in Inflation Nightclub, 1985, designed by Biltmoderne. Gollings sought to reconstruct the atmosphere of the King Street discotheque while retaining total control over its staging. He used flash and double exposure to layer multiple figures – staff, patrons, friends and a Biltmoderne architect Roger Wood – inside the basement club, which had a large tiled floor and ‘a pixelated pattern in purple, blue and white [that] ran up the bar’.14Timothy Moore, ‘After nightfall: Nightclubs in Melbourne 1983 to 1987’, RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2023, vol. 13, no. 1, p. 39. A strong vertical axis runs through the composition – a greasy, pole-like column topped with an axe-head, straight out of Mad Max. The result is both document and fabrication.
Gollings’ architectural photography work is of a specific era, yet it also transcends it. While his early practice is grounded in the visual culture of postmodernism, his later work sits comfortably within the visual idiom of the twenty-first century. Gollings may describe himself as a ‘tradie’ in this process of image making – he’s simply doing his job – but the work suggests otherwise. As Australian architectural photography increasingly collapses into lifestyle imagery – the styling and shooting of a corner lamp or a vase on a table – Gollings’ work exposes the process through which a building enters the popular imaginary. By combining form, space and myth, Gollings has unapologetically shaped how architecture is seen, remembered and canonised. For him, architecture is always the hero.
Notes
1. These photographers were mentors and good friends of Gollings. Strizic printed Gollings’ first exhibition of photographs from his time in Papua New Guinea and mentored him in colour printing; Dupain would ring John up constantly to criticise his work; while John knew Sievers through his childhood friendship with Anders Sievers, Wolfgang’s son, and mentored him from age fourteen.
2. Maggie Finch, ‘Sharp focus and an unsentimental vision’, National Gallery of Victoria, 8 Aug. 2014, accessed 10 June, 2026.
3. John Gollings, Conversation with Timothy Moore, 24 May 2026.
4. Paul Walker and Karen Burns, ‘Constructing Australian architecture for international audiences: Regionalism, postmodernism, and the Design Arts Board 1980–1988’, Fabrications, 2018, vol. 28, no, 1, pp. 25–46.
5. According to Gollings, Corrigan called him up because Edmond and Corrigan’s photos were rejected by Domus. John Gollings, quoted in Dr Caligari Moves to the Suburbs – The Architecture of Edmond and Corrigan, Toby Reed, RMIT Gallery, 37 min, 2013.
6. Edmond and Corrigan, ‘Learning from Suburbia’, Domus, 1985, vol. 663, p. 28.
7. Gollings, Conversation with Moore.
8. Examples include Edmond and Corrigan’s Church of the Resurrection, Keysborough (1975–76); Caroline Chisholm Homes’ Keysborough (1980) and Freedom Club, Church of the Resurrection (1978); and Gregory Burgess Architects’ Station Street Housing, Carlton (1983).
9. Simon Sellars, ‘Recalibrating new suburbia’, Architecture Australia, July 2021, vol. 110, no, 4, p. 65.
10. Gollings did not complete his architecture education. He kept on deferring until the university wouldn’t let him defer anymore.
11. Gollings obsession with place, architectural history and heritage would continue outside of the Gold Coast. In 1982 Gollings travelled to the ancient ruins of Vijayanagara in India, and would continue to do so for over forty years. Vijayanagara was the capital of the Hindu empire in southern India from the middle of the fourteenth century until its destruction by Muslim armies in 1565. The NGV Collection includes a group of forty-five photographs by Gollings of Vijayanagara, taken between 1982 and 1984. These photographs capture the grandeur, imposing scale and beauty of the City of Victory’s monuments.
12. Gollings, Conversation with Moore.
13. Gollings, Conversation with Moore.
14. Timothy Moore, ‘After nightfall: Nightclubs in Melbourne 1983 to 1987’, RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2023, vol. 13, no. 1, p. 39.