Drysdale

The National Gallery of Victoria is delighted to present to the public for the first time Russell Drysdale’s hitherto unknown and unsuspected work with the camera. We are deeply grateful to Lady Drysdale who, at the end of 1982, generously presented her husband’s photographs to the Gallery. We are also proud, because the material has proved to be the most significant body of work-both artistically and culturally-ever to come into the Photography collection and bears crucial relation to the Gallery’s holdings of Australian art. Drysdale, one of Australia’s most important painters of the mid-century, had been using black and white photography from boyhood, but when he took up colour film and a small 35mm camera in 1955, the artist’s passion for colour very swiftly led to some work of prodigious daring and virtuosity. Between 1955 and 1966 he travelled all over the continent and took along his camera. The result is what we now bring before the public-a great artist’s view of his homeland and its people and a thinking man’s adventurous use of the medium of colour photography at a time when few photographers had grasped its secrets.

Sourced from: Nancy Liesbethe Staub & Jennie Boddington, Drysdale: Photographer, National Gallery of Victoria, 1987, p. 6