Christine Godden’s photographs capture sensual fragments of everyday life, showing intimate portrayals of friends, family and place. As a pioneering figure in Australian photography, her work from the 1970s and 80s reveals a quiet emotional depth, which is conveyed through an intuitive approach to image-making. As well as featuring in Women Photographers, Godden’s Light Touch series from 1976 was recently published in a new artist book released by Melbourne publisher M.33.
Living and studying in the United States, Christine Godden’s work emerged amid a broader reassessment of art photography as a personal and expressive medium. The series she produced this time, Family, 1972–74a (Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991), feels elusive, conveying memory, gesture and mood, with a sense of nostalgia from today’s viewpoint. Images of young friends caught off guard, laughing freely, standing in windows, or holding babies are captured with Godden’s characteristically nuanced approach to light and texture. As she states about this body of work:
At the time I never imagined the family would scatter, that we would all compromise, that many years later the quality of optimism that the closeness of friendship represented in these images would feel so foreign to me… These images are from another time, another place, another photographer.
Godden’s work emerges from personal observation and insight. ‘I was never confident enough to use my photography as others did, like Carol Jerrems and Sandy Edwards, to advocate for women directly,’ she reflects. Nevertheless, her first solo exhibition in Australia, curated by Kiffy Rubbo at Melbourne’s George Paton Gallery in 1976, positioned her within the feminist discourse of the time. ‘At that time, I described my work as an attempt to show “how women see and think”,’ she recalls.
Godden returned to Australia in 1978 to take on the role of Director at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney. Immersed in a growing yet still relatively small art photography scene, she found herself juggling the roles of curator, advocate and artist. ‘Balance eluded me’, she admits.
I was a jack of all trades in a role for which I was completely unprepared. While I was knowledgeable, articulate, and passionate about photography, I was lacking in all areas of management. Funding was tight, and the politics of the visual arts industry seemed impenetrable. During my five years there, my own arts practice gradually faded away.
Godden’s influence on Australia’s photography scene is significant. By promoting awareness of art photography, she helped establish frameworks that later supported the next generation of Australian artists. She explains, One of the key challenges for me was having to advocate constantly for “art photography” against a wall of camera clubs at one end and a strong commercial photography industry at the other. The ACP had already established this difference clearly, and it was well understood in the visual arts milieu, but often misunderstood by the wider public.
When asked what younger generations might learn from her active years, Godden remains humble: Every aspect of visual literacy has changed. Images are now consumed in milliseconds. I’m not sure my era has much to offer. Young artists today seem far more sophisticated politically and socially than my generation, and they have access, if they can afford it, to incredible technology.
After stepping away from active image-making in the 1980s, Godden turned her attention to working in Aboriginal-owned art centres in Central Australia, a shift that continued her commitment to visual culture. Her recent book Light Touch marks a return to her archive, a poetic reflection on time, memory, and perception and an acknowledgement of art and life.
‘Getting old brings a new experience of time passing quickly, and with it the wish to create something lasting,’ Godden reflects
‘My book has not just images but also texts that are important for understanding my work.’ This desire to connect with her visual history speaks to a broader impulse: to make sense of a life lived through photography, where the camera was a constant companion during the early years. As she says, ‘It’s like revisiting diaries and being intrigued by what you wrote and possibly forgot.’
‘I didn’t plan or think ahead with my photographs,’ she explains. ‘I simply had my camera with me in my daily life.’ Her early observations of family, friends and domestic moments now serve as visual records of cultural and social change. They are also sensual and tangible, almost the opposite of what we expect from a mechanically produced medium like photography. Yet the wet strands of hair on a young girl’s back or the sweaty fur of a horse’s flank are moments that you almost feel you can experience. Such is Godden’s poetic approach to depth, framing and light. These works are characterised by their focus on ambiguity and texture. ‘It’s true, many of my images are fragmentary, elusive, and suggestive. There isn’t always a clear subject or complete object,’ she says.
Touch also relates to feminist interpretations of Godden’s work, especially in its focus on the overlooked, the domestic, and the bodily. Although she modestly describes her understanding of feminism as ‘very unsophisticated’, her photographs, from women holding babies to relaxing with family, engage with some of feminism’s core issues: subjectivity, visibility and the politics of everyday life. Reflecting on her formative years, Godden keeps a cautious distance from self-historicising.
When you are surrounded by rapid cultural change, it’s hard to see what’s happening around you and what you are contributing. That understanding comes later, and it’s best done by others. It seems my book, and my inclusion in the Women Photographers’ exhibition at the NGV, are coinciding, accidentally, with renewed interest in Australian women artists, and in Australian women photographers. After 50 years, I hope the work finds its place amongst the women artists for whom I have such admiration.
Natasha Bullock is NGV Senior Curator, Photography
This essay was first published in NGV Magazine, Issue 55 | Nov–Dec 2026.