Women Photographers: 1900–1975
Artwork Labels
Artwork Labels
Exhibition introduction
From the suffragettes of the early twentieth century to the women’s liberation movement, the contributions of women artists working between 1900 and 1975 have been set against the backdrop of significant social, political and cultural change. During this time women made significant strides as image-makers: as artists, documentarians and innovators. Women engaged with a wide range of photographic practices, including portraiture, photojournalism, photomontage and landscape photography, and as key members of avant-garde artistic movements. Their works appear in diverse forms, from prints and postcards to photobooks and magazines.
After many years of campaigning, the United Nations General Assembly declared 1975 International Women’s Year. That same year the NGV presented its first group exhibition of women photographers to coincide with the global celebrations. Fifty years on, Women Photographers 1900–1975: A Legacy of Light offers insight into an evolving era, showcasing the diverse visions and responses of women photographers across the globe.
With leadership support from the Bowness Family Foundation and Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family, more than 130 new acquisitions are featured in this exhibition. The addition of these works has been transformative, allowing for a significant widening of representation and perspectives within the NGV Collection. Together, the works invite consideration of the specific contexts women photographers have navigated in their lives and careers, and the multitude of voices and experiences they represent.
The publication Women Photographers 1900–1975: A Legacy of Light accompanies the exhibition and is also generously supported by the Bowness Family Foundation.
May Moore
New Zealand 1881–1910, Australia 1910–31
Mina Moore
New Zealand 1882–1913, Australia 1913–57
Murial Starr
c. 1913–16
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of the Latrobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, 1992
PH162-1992
Sisters May and Mina Moore established their Wellington studio-portraiture business in around 1907. May, originally trained as a painter, learned to operate the camera while Mina, a schoolteacher, gained skills in printing. Expanding their business to Australia, May established a Sydney studio in 1911 while, two years later, Mina set up a Melbourne studio, which was later taken over by photographer Ruth Hollick. The pair became known for their studio portraits of actors, artists and musicians. Using only natural light, they created dramatic images marked by a striking chiaroscuro effect (a technique involving strong contrasts of light and shade) on the faces of their subjects.
May Moore
New Zealand 1881–1910, Australia 1910–31
Janina Korolewicz-Wayda
c. 1910–20
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of the Latrobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, 1992
PH153-1992
In 1911 the Polish opera singer Janina Korolewicz-Wayda travelled to Australia, where she performed La Tosca in Melbourne and supported Dame Nellie Melba in several Sydney performances. The two had first performed together at London’s Covent Garden. Korolewicz-Wayda was known not only as a wonderful artistic talent but also for making history as the first woman director of the Warsaw Opera.
Mina Moore
New Zealand 1882–1913, Australia 1913–57
Nellie Stewart
c. 1913–16
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of the Latrobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, 1992
PH152-1992
Sisters May and Mina Moore operated their photography studio from 1913 in the newly completed Auditorium Building at 167 Collins Street, Melbourne. This building also housed a concert hall, where recitals, operas and music performances were presented. The location was particularly advantageous for the photographers as it provided a steady stream of performers and productions in need of promotional portraits.
May Moore
New Zealand 1881–1910, Australia 1910–31
Mina Moore
New Zealand 1882–1913, Australia 1913–57
No title (Woman)
c. 1914
gelatin silver photograph
Presented through the NGV Foundation by Janice Hinderaker, Member, 2001
2001.156
Image-makers: Women in photography
By the start of the twentieth century, photography was becoming increasingly accessible to the public in many cities around the world. Previously, the medium was practised by an affluent minority of amateur artists and commercial studios. However, the production of lower- cost cameras gradually opened up photography to the broader public, particularly the expanding middle class. At the same time, women began to participate in photography as both creators and consumers. For many women, photography offered a means of income, a way to document daily life, and a powerful tool for communication and activism.
In England, suffragettes actively used photography to create and share images that were integral to their campaign for women’s right to vote. The suffragettes constructed their images in photographic studios and in the streets, merging style and fashionable dress with politics and self-assuredness. These photographs became crucial in shaping the public image of the suffrage movement.
In Australia, May and Mina Moore ran a successful photographic business. Known for their dramatically lit portraits of stage performers, they responded to the appetite for stylised portraiture as popularised by the suffragettes. At a time of shifting gender roles, May Moore also advocated publicly for women to work in photography.
Gertrude Käsebier
United States 1852–1934
The gargoyle
c. 1900
platinum photograph
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1979
PH27-1979
In the early twentieth century, leading Pictorialist photographer Gertrude Käsebier played a key role in establishing photography as a form of fine art. As a member of the Photo-Secession group alongside Alfred Stieglitz, Käsebier was dedicated to Pictorialism, a style that emphasised artistic expression over documentary accuracy. This photograph, taken in Paris, highlights the painterly, emotional qualities inherent in Pictorialism. Käsebier has created an evocative image using composition and light to transform the scene. After leaving the Photo-Secession group in 1912, Käsebier became a founder and active member of the Pictorial Photographers of America.
Ruth Hollick
Australia 1883–1977
No title (Young woman in hunting costume, model Lucy Crosbie Morrison)
c. 1920
gelatin silver photograph
Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, Member, 1993
PH88-1993
Ruth Hollick attended the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1902 to 1906 and began to photograph commercially around 1908. In 1918, along with her life and professional partner, fellow photographer Dorothy Izard, she took over the studio of May and Mina Moore at 167 Collins Street, Melbourne. Eventually Hollick expanded her studio into the newly completed Chartres House building next door at 165 Collins Street. From 1920 her photographs were regularly included in magazines as well as Australian and British Pictorialist exhibitions and salons. Hollick closed her city studio in the early 1930s but continued working from her home in the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds into the 1960s.
Ruth Hollick
Australia 1883–1977
Thought
1921
gelatin silver photograph
Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, Member, 1993
PH87-1993
This sensitive portrait depicts the artist’s niece Lucy Crosbie Morrison. The pose of the subject, combined with the title, reveals the photographer’s careful direction and artistic ambition. The subject’s outfit, adorned with appliqué gum leaves and a gumnut belt, references native Australian plants. The work aligns with the style of Pictorialism, a popular international photographic trend at the time. Thought was recognised at the 1921 Colonial Exhibition in London, highlighting both its local significance and broader artistic appeal.
Madame d’Ora
Austria 1881–1963, worked in France 1925–40
Untitled
1931
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023
2023.16
Dora Kallmus, known professionally as Madame d’Ora, photographed high-profile figures associated with art, fashion and politics, including Josephine Baker and Coco Chanel. In 1907 Madame d’Ora opened her first studio in Vienna, Atelier d’Ora, one of the first photography studios in Vienna to be operated by a woman. She later moved to Paris, where her career flourished well into the 1930s – Atelier d’Ora was renowned for its glamorous, softly focused portraits – until she was forced to close her studio due to Nazi occupation.
Madame d’Ora
Austria 1881–1963, worked in France 1925–40
The Dolly Sisters
c. 1928
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
2022.900
Around 1928 Madame d’Ora photographed the Dolly Sisters, who were celebrated for their glamorous performances in the 1920s. Jenny and Rosie Dolly, Hungarian-American identical twins, were vaudeville and cabaret dancers adored in Britain, the United States and across Europe for their beauty and erotically charged performances. In d’Ora’s photograph they embody the ideal of the modern woman, with bobbed hair and short skirts, dressed in glittering couture costumes and adorned with pearls.
Trude Fleischmann
Austria 1895–1938, United States 1940–90
The actress Sibylle Binder, Vienna
c. 1926
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
2022.150
Trude Fleischmann studied photography in Paris and, after graduating from the Viennese visual arts college die Graphische, apprenticed in the studio of photographer Madame d’Ora. In 1920 Fleischmann opened her own studio, specialising in female nudes, celebrity and socialite portraits, and glamorous photographs of actors. In 1938 she fled Austria, eventually settling in New York, where she re-established her studio and continued to focus on portraits of high-profile figures. This portrait depicts the Viennese actress Sibylle Binder, who performed throughout Germany and Austria in the 1920s. Binder is photographed in glamorous dress and with the classic short, androgynous hairstyle of the New Woman.
Trude Fleischmann
Austria 1895–1938, United States 1940–90
View of Michaelerplatz, Vienna
Blick zum Michaelerplatz Wien
1929
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.112
Kitty Hoffmann
Austria 1900–1968
Dance group
Tanzgruppe
1930
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.113
Kitty Hoffmann worked and studied at Vienna’s die Graphische visual arts college from 1922 to 1924. Three years later, upon completing her studies, she opened a photographic studio in the city, specialising in fashion and society portraiture. Hoffmann’s photographs were regularly published in popular lifestyle and theatre magazines of the time, including Die Dame von Heute (The Lady of Today) and Die Bühne (The Stage). This photograph depicts dancers from the Trude Goodwin dance group. The dancers form a graphic shape that echoes the oval stage-set behind them, encapsulating the Ausdruckstanz, or ‘expressive dance’ movement, which reached peak popularity in Vienna during the 1920s.
Lotte Jacobi
Germany 1896–1935, United States 1935–90
Head of a dancer
1929, printed c. 1970
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021
2021.791
Lotte Jacobi’s father and grandfather were also photographers, and her great-grandfather studied with Louis Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype. This modernist portrait features Russian dancer Niuta Norskaya. The dancer’s pale, oval-shaped face is encompassed by her wide-brimmed black hat, resulting in a striking study of modern beauty.
Gertrud Arndt
Germany 1903–2000
Mask self-portrait no. 11
Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 11
1930
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.988
While living and studying at the Bauhaus school, Gertrud Arndt created a series of forty-three self-portraits she called ‘mask portraits’. To create this series, Arndt dressed in costumes, placing herself in various stylised settings to produce highly imaginative self-portraits. In this photograph, Arndt is shown draped in textured materials, posing against a patterned fabric backdrop. Straying from the sharp angles and abstracted patterns typical of the modernist photography that was popular at the time, she instead explores her own identity through an experimental portrait. Her work is often compared to that of early avant-garde photographers such as Claude Cahun.
Gertrud Arndt
Germany 1903–2000
Wera Waldek
1930, printed 1984
from the Bauhaus Portfolio I 1919–33 1984
gelatin silver photograph
ed. 34/70
Gift of Galerie Kicken Berlin in memory of Rudolf Kicken (1947–2014), 2024
2024.1016
Originally wanting to study architecture, Gertrud Arndt enrolled at the Bauhaus school in 1923–24, ultimately specialising in weaving. A self-taught photographer, she informally developed her skills while apprenticing at an architect’s office in Erfurt prior to her studies, later photographing buildings for her husband’s architecture firm. Printing this picture in its negative state, rather than turning it into a positive image, Arndt creates a striking dreamlike effect. The portrait depicts fellow Bauhaus architecture student Wera Waldek, who made designs for children’s play furniture and housing interiors. The image forms part of the Bauhaus Portfolio I 1919–1933, published by Rudolf Kicken Galerie in 1984.
New women, new visions
Photography studios flourished in the early twentieth century. In Vienna, Austria, numerous prominent women photographers ran successful businesses, including Madame d’Ora and later Trude Fleischmann and Kitty Hoffmann. While Madame d’Ora’s glamorous portraits retained the soft focus characteristic of turn-of-the- century photography, the women in Fleischmann’s and Hoffmann’s images of the 1920s and 1930s matched the mood of the modern city. With their chic dress and bobbed haircuts, they represented the famed ‘New Woman’, or Neue Frau, an archetype that came to symbolise female empowerment and the shift away from traditional gender roles.
Opening in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, the Bauhaus art school experienced an influx of women students due to changes in the country’s constitution that guaranteed women the right to vote and study. Photography, while not officially taught at the Bauhaus for some years, flourished: it was seen to be an essential means of expression appropriate for the modern age. Lucia Moholy and her husband, Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy, promoted the idea of ‘New Vision’ at the school. The camera was seen as the ultimate mirror of the everyday, while the camera-less images they produced allowed for great experimentation and abstraction.
Lucia Moholy
Czechoslovakia 1894–1915, Germany 1915–33, England 1934–59, Switzerland 1959–89
Bauhaus residences Dessau, kitchen – sideboard
Bauhaussiedlung Dessau, Küche – Anrichte
1926
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023
2023.591
Lucia Moholy is best known for documenting the architecture, people and creative outputs of the Bauhaus school. Her work was often incorrectly attributed to famous men of the school, such as its founder, Walter Gropius, and Moholy’s then husband, László Moholy-Nagy. In this photograph, Moholy captures Gropius’s kitchen in the Masters’ House. The building and the design schools nearby, built between 1925 and 1926, are exemplars of European modern architecture and design. Sharp lines and dynamic angles emphasise the modular design, displaying the modernist principles of photography that Moholy applied to her images of architectural spaces.
Lucia Moholy
Czechoslovakia 1894–1915, Germany 1915–33, England 1934–59, Switzerland 1959–89
Berlin Architecture Exhibition 1928
Exposition d’Architecture à Berlin en 1928
1928
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.111
In 1928 Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy left Dessau for a new life in Berlin. This image documents an innovative housing exhibition showcasing modern living. The display, designed by architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school, featured new housing concepts in Zehlendorf, a Berlin neighbourhood. The graphic lettering on the building translates to ‘Live in a green environment, ideal case: Zehlendorf’. Moholy-Nagy designed the interiors, and Moholy’s images, with their signature focus on starkly contrasting vertical and horizontal lines, highlight their modernist design principles.
Top to bottom, left to right:
Yamawaki Michiko
Japan 1910–2000, worked in Germany 1930–32
Ginza (Street corner)
1933
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.639
Ginza (Women in matching kimonos and white parasols)
1933
gelatin silver photograph, red fibre-tipped pen
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.640
Ginza (Woman walking with 1930s style dress, white, with white hat)
1933
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.642
Ginza (Two women crossing street, one with white hat)
1933
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.643
Ginza (Ginza Palace)
1933
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 20242024.638
Yamawaki Michiko and her husband spent two years studying at the Bauhaus art school in Dessau, Germany from 1930, returning to Japan in 1932. Taken in the summer of 1933, Yamawaki’s Tokyo street scenes show the influence of the Bauhaus vision, while highlighting the differing roles of women at a time of great social change. We see mothers carrying children, women in kimono holding parasols, and moga (modern girls) wearing knee-length dresses and Western-inspired clothes. Yamawaki used details from twenty-one of these photographs to create her bustling modernist photomontage Melted Tokyo, published in Asahi Camera magazine in 1933.
Ginza (Pumps and sandals walking on sidewalk)
1933
gelatin silver photograph, red fibre-tipped pen
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.641
Elsa Thiemann
Germany 1910–81
Design for wallpaper
1930–31
gelatin silver photographs, coloured dyes on card
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.601
Elsa Thiemann
Germany 1910–1981
Design for wallpaper
1930–31
gelatin silver photographs on card
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.600
Elsa Thiemann trained in painting, graphic design and photography at the Bauhaus school. While there, she responded to an advertisement from school director Hannes Meyer for wallpaper designs to be considered for the new Bauhaus collection, planned for production by the wallpaper manufacturer Gebrüder Rasch. Thiemann’s designs used photograms of flowers and hand-coloured swirling patterns, which were meticulously cut, organised and pasted into repetitious symmetrical layouts. While her designs were not manufactured, likely due to their contrast with the brighter patterns ultimately selected for production, they remain as standalone works indicative of the experimental design being practised at the Bauhaus.
Florence Henri
United States 1893–1913, Germany 1913–24, France 1924–82
Still life
Nature morte
1931, printed 1975
gelatin silver photograph
ed. 6/9
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022
2022.783
After studying music and painting, Florence Henri was introduced to photography in 1927 while attending the Bauhaus school. There, she met László Moholy-Nagy and Lucia Moholy, whose influence (especially Moholy’s) led Henri to focus solely on photography. In 1929 she established a studio in Paris, where she became renowned for her avant-garde and experimental practice. In addition to portraits of women, her work often features still-life compositions that combine everyday objects like envelopes and sheets of paper with natural elements such as flowers and leaves. Henri also frequently used mirrors as a means of fragmenting the pictorial space.
Olive Cotton
Australia 1911–2003
Girl with mirror
1938
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992
PH201-1992
Olive Cotton created this image while assisting her colleague and then partner Max Dupain on location at beaches around Sydney. According to Cotton, when Dupain was shooting fashion photographs, she had the freedom to create her own images while the model was ‘waiting her turn to be photographed by Max’. Dupain’s camera tripod cast ‘long slanting lines of shadow’ against the sand. While its creation was incidental, this photograph demonstrates Cotton’s eye for composition and her mastery of light and shade, emphasising the graphic elements of the scene.
Olive Cotton
Australia 1911–2003
Teacup ballet
1935, printed 1992
gelatin silver photograph
ed. 21/50
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992
PH199-1992
Upon purchasing a set of inexpensive cups and saucers to replace the mugs in photographer Max Dupain’s Sydney studio, where she was a studio assistant, Olive Cotton recognised the potential for a dynamic composition. Later describing the handles of the cups as ‘arms akimbo’, Cotton, in her efforts ‘to express a dance theme’, used a spotlight to accentuate shadows, resulting in a ‘ballet-like composition’. Through her deft use of lighting and arrangement of objects, the teacups appear transformed, as if they are ballerinas performing onstage. The image was immediately successful both in Australia and abroad, being included in the London Salon of Photography from September 1935.
Olive Cotton
Australia 1911–2003
Shasta daisies
1937, printed 1992
gelatin silver photograph
ed. 8/25
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992
PH198-1992
‘The camera can do more than merely record an unchanging picture of a subject … The lighting, the relation of the various objects to the shape of picture and many other factors can be changed by the individual, and this is where discernment and personality come into the picture as it were.’ – Olive Cotton
Dora Maar
France 1907–97
Fashion study
c. 1936
gelatin silver photograph
Dora Maar
France 1907–97
Untitled (Study of Beauty)
1936
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021
2021.17
Dora Maar, a French photographer, poet and painter, established her commercial studio in Paris in 1932, quickly gaining recognition as a portrait and fashion photographer. While known as one of Pablo Picasso’s muses and the inspiration for his Weeping woman paintings, Maar was an influential artist in her own right, painting well into her eighties. As a photographer, Maar developed an elegant and experimental style, drawing on her knowledge of avant-garde photography and the ideas underpinning Surrealism. In this work, an advertising commission for the haircare brand Dolfar, Maar explores the ideal of beauty, creating an image in which the subject appears like a classical statue come to life.
Ilse Bing
Germany 1899–1941, United States 1941–98, worked in France 1930–40
Salut de Schiaparelli
1934
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
2022.668
Upon moving from Frankfurt to Paris in 1930, Ilse Bing established a studio known for producing innovative portraits and fashion photography. This photograph was commissioned by fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli for a new perfume called Salut. Bing placed a scattered bouquet of lilies in the composition to represent the perfume’s scent. The image’s dreamlike quality is enhanced by Bing’s experimental use of the solarisation technique, which reverses the tones in a photograph.
At play: The studio, light and shadows
In the 1920s, amid the aftermath of the First World War, many European avant-garde artists experimented with photography to actively ‘see’ the world anew. So-called New Photography emerged during this period, with images characterised by the play of light and shadow, extreme vantage points and the use of sharp focus. These techniques aimed to disorient the viewer – familiar scenes were made to feel unfamiliar.
Artists embracing these styles predominantly worked in studios, creating experimental images that explored the principles of New Photography. Some images were made purely as artistic exercises, while others demonstrate the use of experimental techniques for commercial purposes. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a great demand for modern photography in advertising, newspapers, catalogues and picture magazines. With the wide dissemination of these media, the influence of New Photography travelled far beyond Europe, and can be seen in works by Olive Cotton in Sydney, Lola Álvarez Bravo in Mexico City and Annemarie Heinrich in Buenos Aires.
Annemarie Heinrich
Germany 1912–26, Argentina 1926–2005
Eve’s apple
La manzana de Eva
1953
gelatin silver photograph
Proposed acquisition
German-born Annemarie Heinrich established her own studio in Buenos Aires in 1930 and soon became a major figure in Argentinian photography. She was known for her unique style of portraiture, incorporating dramatic lighting and composition techniques that accentuated the theatrical qualities of her sitters. This work is a modern-day play on the biblical creation story of Adam and Eve. Rather than unleashing the concepts of shame and evil through the consumption of the apple from the forbidden tree, Heinrich’s woman is in control, overshadowing the man in this seductive scene.
ringl+pit
Germany active 1930–33
Ellen Auerbach
Germany 1906–33, Palestine 1933–37, United States 1937–2004
Grete Stern
Germany 1904–35, Argentina 1935–99
Komol
1931, printed 1984
gelatin silver photograph
ed. 1/6
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
2022.149
Named after the childhood nicknames of Grete Stern (Ringl) and Ellen Auerbach (Pit), photography studio ringl+pit was sought after for its highly innovative and experimental work. The studio’s work broke free from feminine ideals and expectations. Komol, an unconventional advertisement for hair dye, is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the shallow nature of commercialised femininity. ringl+pit’s playful productions speak to the safety of the artists’ shared space, described by art historian Elizabeth Otto as ‘a haven of humour and honesty for the photographers in contrast to the outside world that does not understand them’.
Imogen Cunningham
United States 1883–1976
Agave design I
1920s, printed 1979
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1979
PH119-1979
Following the birth of her three sons, Imogen Cunningham had to close her portrait studio in Seattle. However, she found a way to continue taking pictures at home. According to Cunningham, she would spend the afternoons while her children napped photographing her plants, ‘because I couldn’t get out anywhere, and I had a garden’. In this close-up image of an agave, Cunningham focuses on the plant’s sharp lines and the play of light. The image is recognised as one of the most iconic abstracted avant-garde images of the early twentieth century. Soon after its creation, the image was included in the 1929 contemporary exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart, Germany.
Ruth Bernhard
Germany 1905–27, United States 1927–2006
Two leaves
1952
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2025
2025.520
Ruth Bernhard studied art in Berlin before emigrating to New York in 1927, where she worked in the studio of Ralph Steiner. Over the next few years she honed her skills in photography through commercial assignments. Bernhard later moved to California, connecting with fellow photographers Imogen Cunningham, Berenice Abbott and Dorothea Lange. To create this close-up nature study, the artist directed light onto two magnolia leaves using mirrors, exaggerating the leaves’ texture and shape. The result is a modernist-inspired composition that combines light, form and design.
Grace Lock
Australia 1902–95
The fly
c. 1960s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1971
PH365-1971
First taking up photography at the age of fifty-six, Grace Lock worked as a photographer in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s. Through her participation in the Melbourne Camera Club and the Australian Photographic Society, among other photography groups, she was a passionate advocate for amateur photography. She was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to Australian photography in 1981 and received an honorary fellowship from the British Royal Photography Society in 1988.
Lola Álvarez Bravo
Mexico 1903–93
Tribute to Salvador Toscano, Mexico
Hommage à Salvador Toscano, Mexico
1949, printed 1960s
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023
2023.590
Initially photographing alongside her husband, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Lola Álvarez Bravo was one of Mexico’s most prominent photographers. Before separating in 1934, both artists were vital members of the artistic scene that included Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Following her separation, Álvarez Bravo photographed independently as a means of supporting herself and her son. Working across photojournalism, commercial, portrait and artistic photography, she captured life in Mexico. Álvarez Bravo created this image after the death of her friend, filmmaker Salvador Toscano. Lifting a dead crane from a body of water, Álvarez Bravo arranged its lifeless, decaying body on a pile of sand, alluding to the fragility of life and the brutal reality of death.
Lola Álvarez Bravo
Mexico 1903–93
The washerwomen
Las lavanderas
c. 1950
gelatin silver photograph on cardboard
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.607
Throughout her career, Lola Álvarez Bravo took several photographs of women washing their clothes at the waterfront. In this image, a large shadow from a nearby structure is cast over a group of women, children and dogs. The shadow appears to symbolise Mexico’s industrial growth and post-revolution transformation. Álvarez Bravo implemented modernist photography techniques such as high contrasts and extreme viewpoints to transform scenes of everyday labour into graphic compositions of dynamic angles and forms.
Cities, industries, technologies
The early decades of the twentieth century came to be known as the Machine Age due to rapidly increasing automation, technological change and mass production. As cities industrialised, photographers responded by capturing buildings, workers and crowds.
Germaine Krull’s photographs from the 1920s and 1930s exemplify her dynamic, modern vision. Reflecting on the inspiration she gained from photographing cranes and bridges in Europe, which eventually led to the production of her famed 1928 photobook Metal, she said: ‘These steel giants revealed something to me that made me love photography again. From this moment onward, I began to SEE things as the eye sees them, and it is at this moment that photography was born for me.’
Machine Age artists were also experimenting with photomontage, a method that offered radical new perspectives and challenged conventional ways of seeing. Photomontage emerged in direct response to industrial development, as cities expanded and everyday life transformed. Barbara Morgan’s images reflect on the tension between the natural and the constructed. In contrast, Varvara Stepanova and Aleksandr Rodchenko embraced the tools of mass production, combining design, image-making and progressive printing techniques to create graphic publications that promoted the Soviet Union’s industrial power to a wide audience.
Germaine Krull
Germany 1897–1985, worked in France 1926–35
Metal
Métal
1928
64 black-and-white collotype plates, letterpress on paper, black cloth-backed paper-covered board portfolio with ribbons
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023
2023.336
One of the most significant modernist photobooks of the 1920s, Germaine Krull’s Metal portfolio comprises sixty-four images printed on individual sheets, a title page and a three-page preface by the French writer and journalist Florent Fels. Krull photographed iron structures such as cranes and transport bridges in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Marseille and Saint-Malo, as well as the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Krull showcases the beauty and innovation of the structures, conveying the sense of awe that accompanied the rapid industrialisation of the time. The presentation of the photographs – loose, to be arranged however the viewer chooses – is also radical, allowing for endless interpretations.
Aleksandr Rodchenko
Russia 1891–1956
Varvara Stepanova
Russia 1894–1958
USSR in Construction, no. 12 (Parachute issue)
URSS en Construction
1935
illustrated journal: colour rotogravure, 22 pages with fold-out inserts, lithographic cover
Purchased, NGV Supporters of Prints and Drawings, 2019
2019.891
Varvara Stepanova and her husband, fellow artist and designer Aleksandr Rodchenko, were founder-members of the First Working Group of Constructivists. This is a French-language edition of USSR in Construction, a journal that aimed to reflect, through photography, the modernisation of the Soviet Union and to promote its industrial power. The journal employed cutting-edge artistic and printing developments, and this issue was designed by Stepanova and Rodchenko using original ideas around photomontage and page design. Dedicated to the ‘brave Soviet paratroopers’, the so-called ‘Parachute’ issue draws upon the circular form of the opened parachute.
Laure Albin Guillot
France 1879–1962
Hammer in bloom
Le marteau en fleurs
1940s
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.29
Highly regarded in 1930s and 1940s French photography circles, Laure Albin Guillot’s work straddles Pictorialism and New Photography, blending soft, artistic photography with modern, sharp imagery. Albin Guillot was known for her technical mastery. Her wide-ranging practice spanned portraiture, nudes, advertising, landscapes, still lifes, fashion photography and images taken through a microscope. In this photograph, a clenched fist holds a hammer adorned with flowers, set against the receding smokestacks of a factory. Created around 1940, just after the beginning of the Second World War, the image may express solidarity with industrial workers, while the flowers, a poetic inclusion, could be read as a symbol of peace amid war.
Germaine Krull
Germany 1897–1985, worked in France 1926–35
The Eiffel Tower
c. 1928
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
2022.1570
Germaine Krull photographed industrial forms, political upheaval and modern life. Trained in Munich, she opened a portrait studio in 1919, relocating to Paris in 1926. Three years later, Krull’s photographs were included in the renowned 1929 exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart, Germany, the first international exhibition of modernist photography. During the 1920s the Eiffel Tower became a symbol of modernity for many artists, including Krull. In this image, she reimagines the visual language of the man-made structure, highlighting both the beauty and functionality of the famous landmark. Krull led a peripatetic life across four continents, focusing on photojournalism in South-East Asia after the Second World War and later living among Tibetan monks.
Germaine Krull
Germany 1897–1985, worked in France 1926–35
At the Galeries Lafayette
Aux Galeries Lafayette
c. 1930
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022
2022.786
This photograph showcases the illuminated signs of Paris’s Galeries Lafayette, Europe’s largest department-store chain at the time. The moody night scene features the bright words jouets (toys) and Étrennes (New Year’s gifts) on the shopfronts, evidence of the booming economy of 1920s France before the Great Depression. This photograph is a quintessential image of the vibrancy of Paris during the interwar period, one of many that Krull captured throughout the 1930s.
Bea Maddock
Australia 1934–2016
Square
1972
photo-etching and etching
ed. 10/10
Purchased, 1973
P24-1973
In the 1970s, Australian artist Bea Maddock embraced the photo-etching process, which incorporates pen and ink. She regularly used found images as the basis for these works. In Square, Maddock overlaid an image of people in a crowd, taken from ‘a book on movement of people in cities’, with a grid structure. As she said, ‘The actual grid comes from the windows in the National Gallery School, Victorian College of the Arts … the windows had little grills on them … and so they got drawn in because that’s how I saw the world – through those windows.’
Ilse Bing
Germany 1899–1941, United States 1941–98, worked in France 1930–40
Champs de Mars
1931, printed 1994
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
2022.899
Taken atop the Eiffel Tower, this image sees Ilse Bing turn her lightweight 35 mm Leica camera downwards, photographing the people and bustling city below. The distance created by this dizzying viewpoint reduces the scene to a pattern of shapes and forms. Images such as these were characteristic of a ‘new way of seeing’ that was adopted by avant-garde photographers during the interwar period.
Heather George
Australia 1907–83
The last wall of Melbourne’s Old Eastern Markets comes down for the Southern Cross
c. 1966, printed 1978
from the Melbourne, Old Buildings and New Projects series c. 1966
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1980
PH329-1980
Olive Cotton
Australia 1911–2003
Radio telescope, Parkes
1964
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1987
PH210-1987
Shirley Clarke
United States 1919–97
Bridges-go-round
1958
16mm, colour, sound, 7 min 5 sec
Courtesy of The Estate of Shirley Clarke and The New American Cinema Group, Inc. / The Film-Makers’ Cooperative
Shirley Clarke started filmmaking in the early 1950s and was part of the team invited to create motion pictures for the US Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Using leftover project footage, Clarke cut together shots of bridges over New York Harbor to create an abstract sequence of shapes and forms. The bridges appear as if dancing to the two musical pieces accompanying the film, the first by Bebe and Louis Barron, the second by Teo Macero. Clarke altered the colours of the film through experimental editing processes, creating vivid and intense colour fields.
Barbara Morgan
United States 1900–1992
Hearst over the people
c. 1938–39
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023
2023.204
After moving to New York in 1930 with her photojournalist husband, Barbara Morgan turned to photography after a decade devoted to painting and printmaking. While her children were sleeping, she would experiment with avant-garde photographic techniques. In this photomontage, the artist set out to ‘visually distort the consummate distorter’: media mogul William Randolph Hearst, notorious for his sensationalist news empire. Hearst’s grinning face is stretched into a sinister omniscient octopus, its tentacles writhing into crowds of workers on the street. First published in the influential left-wing magazine New Masses, this is a compelling depiction of psychological infiltration. It also, perhaps, proposes Hearst as an effigy of authority for agitators to protest.
Barbara Morgan
United States 1900–1992
City shell
1938, printed 1972
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022
2022.784
For Barbara Morgan, photomontage allowed her to ‘rearrange realities’. Through surreal visual juxtapositions, her works probe the ideas of time and space, and the tensions between movement and stasis, organic and inorganic, masculine and feminine. In this image, Morgan positions five solitary commuters on the winding path of a bright white seashell, their silhouettes echoing the dark void beyond. By placing the shell upon the slanted facade of a skyscraper, Morgan contrasts the natural world with fast-paced industrialisation, reinforced by the repeated lineation of the building and the perpetual pedestrian march.
Left to right:
Margaret Bourke-White
United States 1904–71
Fort Peck Dam, Montana
front cover, Life magazine, first issue, 23 November 1936
published by Time Inc.
magazine: offset lithographs and printed text
Shaw Research Library, Gift of Patrick Pound, 2025
Fort Peck Dam, Montana
front cover, Life magazine, first issue, 23 November 1936, ‘Salesman’s edition’
published by Time Inc.
magazine: offset lithographs and printed text
Shaw Research Library, Gift of Patrick Pound, 2025
Fort Peck Dam, Montana
reproduced on front cover, Life magazine, tenth anniversary issue, 25 November 1946
published by Time Inc.
magazine: offset lithographs and printed text
Shaw Research Library, Gift of Patrick Pound, 2025
When the American publication Life was purchased by Henry Luce in 1936, it was transformed into a photographic news magazine. Its aim was to let its readers ‘see’ the world. Photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White had previously worked with Luce at Fortune magazine, and a year later he sent Bourke-White to the Soviet Union as the first official foreign photographer allowed to create images of Soviet industry. Later, she was the first accredited woman photographer assigned to photograph the effects of the Second World War.
In 1936 Life magazine gave Margaret Bourke-White the brief of seeking out something ‘grand’ and aspirational at the chain of dams being built at the Columbia River basin. The dams were being built to stimulate the economy as the United States grappled with the devastating effects of the Great Depression. The resulting photograph was selected for the first cover of the relaunched Life magazine. An image of modern industry, the composition emphasises the graphic forms and patterns created by the bases of an elevated spillway. The pillars seem to repeat endlessly, overshadowing two workers dwarfed by the enormous construction. Bourke-White’s image is considered an iconic representation of the Machine Age.
For Margaret Bourke-White, the Fort Peck Dam commission was the first of hundreds of assignments for Life. In addition to the original issue featuring Bourke-White’s photograph on the cover, on display here is a small version known as a ‘salesman’s edition’, used to explain the magazine to stockists and store owners. To celebrate Life’s ten-year anniversary, the original magazine was re-photographed in the hands of a young girl – a comment on the magazine’s place in popular culture as being accessible to youth and adults alike.
Margaret Bourke-White
United States 1904–71
Campbell’s Soup #6
1935
gelatin silver print
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.11
Margaret Bourke-White became widely known for her documentation of workers and scenes of modern industry. Her photography was used on the cover of the first issue of Fortune magazine in 1930, and on the first photographically illustrated cover of Life in 1936. Bourke-White often documented aspects of the Machine Age, contrasting machines and human labourers. Taken in a factory owned by Campbell’s, a major American canned-food company established in 1869, this photograph captures part of the canning process. Bourke-White’s framing, which does not show the worker’s face, amplifies the dominance of the machine. The image first featured as a commission for a local food magazine alongside the caption ‘tangled and tricky, spaghetti defeats the mechanic’.
Margaret Bourke-White
United States 1904–71
Beach accident, Coney Island
1952
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1973
PH127-1973
Berenice Abbott
United States 1898–1991, worked in France 1921–29
New York at night
1932, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of an anonymous donor in memory of Rosa Zerfas (1896–1983), 1985
PH36-1985
This photograph of the illuminated buildings of New York is the result of a fifteen-minute exposure taken from high up in the Empire State Building. The idea of documenting a changing metropolis recalls the project of pioneering French photographer Eugène Atget, who recorded Paris as it transitioned from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Berenice Abbott had befriended Atget through fellow American émigré artist Man Ray, for whom she worked as a darkroom assistant after moving to Paris in 1921. Atget’s influence on Abbott was profound: on her return to New York in 1929 she focused on documenting the city’s civic spaces and architecture.
Berenice Abbott
United States 1898–1991, worked in France 1921–29
Changing New York
1939
artist’s book: half-tone plates and letterpress text, blue cloth cover, photographic dust jacket
1st edition
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2022
2022.39
In her funding proposal for the photobook Changing New York, Berenice Abbott described her desire to capture the ‘spirit’ of the city, driven by the realisation that ‘the tempo of the metropolis is not of eternity, or even time, but of the vanishing instant’. The images in the photobook are accompanied by texts written by Abbott’s partner, art critic Elizabeth McCausland. However, recent research has revealed that Abbott and McCausland’s original intentions for the book were significantly different to what was ultimately published, including alternate texts and a more innovative interplay between words and images.
Berenice Abbott
United States 1898–1991, worked in France 1921–29
Old Post Office, Broadway and Park Row, Manhattan, May 25
1938
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021
2021.552
Berenice Abbott
United States 1898–1991, worked in France 1921–29
Park Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street, Manhattan, October 8
1936
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021
2021.551
Berenice Abbott
United States 1898–1991, worked in France 1921–29
Eugène Atget
1927, printed c. 1970–78
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1978
PH72-1978
Berenice Abbott
United States 1898–1991, worked in France 1921–29
Janet Flanner
1927, printed 1980s
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.10
While living in Paris in the 1920s, Berenice Abbott produced an extraordinary body of images featuring the artists, writers and performers in her social circle, such as Eugène Atget, Jean Cocteau and James Joyce. This portrait of American writer Janet Flanner was also captured by Abbott during this time. A journalist who wrote under the pen name ‘Genêt’, Flanner was a long-term contributor to The New Yorker and a prominent member of the expatriate community living in Paris during the interwar period. In this portrait, Flanner is photographed wearing a suit with striped pants and a top hat, upon which are stacked two masks, adding a Surrealist edge to the image.
Left to right:
Gisèle Freund
Germany 1908–33, worked in Mexico 1950–52, France 1933–2000
Simone de Beauvoir
1952, printed c. 1975
type C photograph
Purchased, 1981
PH66-1981
Jean-Paul Sartre
1939, printed c. 1975
type C photograph
Purchased, 1981
PH67-1981
Vita Sackville-West
c. 1938, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1981
PH68-1981
Virginia Woolf
1939, printed c. 1975
type C photograph
Purchased, 1981
PH64-1981
In 1933 Gisèle Freund fled Frankfurt for Paris, where she studied photographic portraiture at the Sorbonne. Uniquely for the time, she used Kodachrome and Agfacolor positive film for her colour portraits of writers and artists in Paris – her portrait of James Joyce was selected as the first colour cover of Time magazine in 1939. That same year she photographed Virginia Woolf at her home in Tavistock Square, London. Freund later recalled of her encounter with Woolf, ‘frail, luminous, she was the very incarnation of her prose’.
Lee Miller
United States 1907–77
Man Ray
1931
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased with funds donated by Joy Anderson, 2024
2024.110
Following a successful modelling career, Lee Miller moved to Paris in 1929. Intending to study under the Surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray, she soon became his assistant, model and lover. This portrait of Man Ray was taken in 1931, when Miller was working out of her small Montparnasse home studio. The artist appears to be lost in thought, his dilated pupils and furrowed brow suggesting an idea revealing itself. While the image shows reverence for the contemplative artist, it also hints at the couple’s domestic ease, with Man Ray appearing comfortable in the presence of Miller’s camera.
Lee Miller
United States 1907–77
Nimet Eloui Bey
c. 1930
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022
2022.123
At her Paris studio, Lee Miller photographed this self-assured portrait of Egyptian model Nimet Eloui Bey. The model’s direct, inescapable gaze grips the viewer, perhaps foreshadowing the conflict to come. In the years after Miller took this portrait, she and her subject’s businessman husband, Aziz Eloui Bey, would pursue a passionate affair, resulting in divorce and the explosive end to Miller’s relationship with artist Man Ray. After leaving Paris, Miller set up a successful new studio in New York in 1932, before marrying Aziz and moving with him to Cairo.
Dora Maar
France 1907–97
Self-portrait at the window, Paris
Autoportrait a la fenêtre, Paris
c. 1935
gelatin silver photograph
Private collection, MelbournePromised gift
Left to right:
Dora Maar
France 1907–97
No title (Pablo Picasso facing left)
1935–36
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022
2022.136
No title (Pablo Picasso facing right, holding a cigarette)
1935–36
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022
2022.137
No title (Pablo Picasso facing left, with left hand to mouth)
1935–36
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022
2022.138
No title (Profile of Pablo Picasso facing left)
1935–36
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022
2022.139
Dora Maar
France 1907–97
Dawn
Aube
1935
reproduced in Minotaure no. 8, 1936
magazine: offset lithographs and printed text
Shaw Research Library
The framing of Dora Maar’s Self-portrait at the window, Paris, c. 1935, is mirrored in this portrait taken by Maar of her friend Jacqueline Lamba, published in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure in June 1936. As art historian and theorist Abigail Solomon-Godeau writes, ‘Lamba might be viewed as contained or imprisoned by the stone wall behind which she stands … Alternately, the photograph might be seen as the space of domesticity, overcome by time and brambles.’ For Solomon-Godeau, it is also, importantly, an ‘exchange between two women artists’.
Dora Maar
France 1907–97
Aperitif in the garden of the Hotel Vaste Horizon with André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Paul and Nusch Éluard. Mougins, 1936–37
1936–37, printed c. 1945
gelatin silver photograph
Private collection, MelbournePromised gift
Dora Maar
France 1907–97
Pablo Picasso standing under reed screening, Mougins, summer, 1937
Pablo Picasso debout sous les cannisses, Mougins, été, 1937
1937
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022
2022.134
After being introduced to Pablo Picasso in 1935, Dora Maar became his lover, model and muse until their tumultuous liaison ended in 1943. During their time together, Maar famously documented the creation of the monumental painting Guernica in Picasso’s Paris studio. This portrait captures the artist at ease, bathed in an endlessly echoing lineation of shadows from the above reed screen. The portrait Maar took of Picasso a year later, displayed nearby, shows him seated outside, his eyes glinting with intensity. Both images were taken in Mougins, near Cannes, an area that Picasso returned to every summer.
Dora Maar
France 1907–97
Pablo Picasso
1938
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022
2022.135
In exchange: Social milieu and collaboration
Bodies, rhythm and movement
From the very beginnings of photography, the female nude genre remained primarily the domain of the male photographer. However, twentieth-century women artists, particularly those working within the avant-garde scene of the interwar period, reclaimed the male gaze, creatively experimenting with the representation of women’s bodies.
Artists such as Laure Albin Guillot and Germaine Krull produced nudes ranging from the intimate and sensual to the contained and stark. Such experimental compositions were also a vital aspect of the work of Florence Henri, whose images allowed for new readings of the body. In the 1970s artists such as Sue Ford continued this legacy of experimentation, combining depictions of women’s bodies with scenes from nature.
Representations of women’s bodies in motion were another means of artistic and physical liberation. The collaborations between dancers and artists, for example Barbara Morgan and Martha Graham, and Ellen Auerbach and Renate Schottelius, allowed for experimentation and dynamic image-making. These creative partnerships were shaped by movement and a shared response between artist and subject.
Germaine Krull
Germany 1897–1985, France 1926–35
Daretha (Dorothea) Albu
c. 1925
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2020
2020.731
This intimate portrait shows the German dancer Dorothea Albu elegantly draped in a feather boa – possibly a reference to her life in show business. The soft focus of the image, along with Albu’s gently closed eyes, creates a serene scene. The work is believed to be from a series of female nudes that Germaine Krull photographed in her Berlin studio between 1922 and 1925.
Florence Henri
United States 1893–1913, Germany 1913–24, France 1924–82
Nude composition
Nu composition
c. 1930
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2021
2021.545
Florence Henri
United States 1893–1913, Germany 1913–24, France 1924–82
Line Viala (Nude study), Paris
1934
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023
2023.11
In the 1930s Florence Henri made numerous photographs of female nudes. These works often feature modern women who appear bold, confident and at ease in their own skin and sexuality. In this photograph, Henri uses dramatic lighting to create deep shadows that contour and highlight the form of actress Line Viala’s body. Henri’s use of a blank canvas as a plain backdrop further accentuates the model as the sole focus of the image. Perhaps Henri’s choice of a blank canvas backdrop is also a subtle reference to the traditionally male-dominated realm of nude female painting.
Laure Albin Guillot
France 1879–1962
Nude study
Étude de nu
1943
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023
2023.589
Spanning fashion and portraiture to advertising and landscapes, Laure Albin Guillot’s images were published regularly in magazines and featured in the first independent Salon of Photography in Paris in 1928. Albin Guillot collaborated with French poet Paul Valéry in the 1930s to create male nude images to accompany his poem ‘La Cantate du Narcisse’ (‘The Song of Narcissus’). She continued to produce numerous nude studies of women throughout the 1930s–40s, such as this closely cropped portrait that enhances the angular lines and features of the sitter’s body.
Anne Brigman
United States 1869–1950
Quest
1931
gelatin silver photograph
Anne Brigman was a major figure in early twentieth-century photography, recognised for her Pictorialist and experimental photographs. In 1929 Brigman settled in Long Beach, California, where she made a series of photographs dedicated to the effects of wind and sea erosion. This evocative image combines two negatives: one of filament erosion patterns, the other of an intertwined couple – Brigman’s niece and her husband – captured from above. The shadowy, obfuscated portrait is enlivened by the silhouetted streams of sand, as though making visible the energy that cascades from the couple’s passionate kiss.
Olive Cotton
Australia 1911–2003
Max after surfing
1939, printed 1998
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of Optus Communications Pty Limited, Member, 1998
1998.251
Here Olive Cotton shows Australian photographer Max Dupain with his face and one arm largely hidden in shadow, while his bare torso, other arm and crumpled shirt are exposed to the light. As in many of Cotton’s photographs, the play of light and shadow are crucial in transforming the body into an abstract combination of curved and angled patterns and forms. Still and intimate, this image captures a moment of transition: Cotton and Dupain were in a relationship when the photograph was taken in 1939, and were married later that year. Cotton was the assistant in Dupain’s Sydney studio before eventually running it.
Louise Dahl-Wolfe
United States 1895–1989
Nude in water
1941
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2025
2025.521
Louise Dahl-Wolfe studied at the California School of Fine Art, but turned to photography upon meeting the photographer Anne Brigman. For twenty-two years, Dahl-Wolfe worked as a principal photographer at Harper’s Bazaar in New York, and is recognised for her significant influence in reinvigorating the publication in the postwar era. Dahl-Wolfe worked on location rather than in a studio, and her photographs were suffused with a fresh, candid sensibility that captured the modern American woman. Beyond her commercial output, she photographed portraits, still lifes and nudes with what critics later described as a sense of ‘languorous sexuality’.
Germaine Krull
Germany 1897–1985, France 1926–35
Nude Studies
Études de nu
1930
24 photogravures, letterpress on paper, white cloth-backed orange paper-covered board portfolio with ribbons
1st edition
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2022
2022.40
One of the most experimental artists of the 1920s and 30s, Germaine Krull photographed a diverse range of subjects, and her images were published widely in magazines and journals. With publications such Nude Studies, created two years after Metal,she is recognised as a pioneer in the single-author photobook format. Nude Studies consists of twenty-four photogravures of female nudes, published with an accompanying introductory text by the artist Jean Cocteau. Created in Krull’s Paris studio, the intimate studies, in which the faces of the women are often obscured, emphasise the sculptural forms of their bodies.
Lotte Jacobi
Germany 1896–1935, United States 1935–90
Photogenic
c. 1950
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.9
Lotte Jacobi
Germany 1896–1935, United States 1935–90
Photogenic drawing
c. 1940
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.198
For more than two decades, Lotte Jacobi created what she described as ‘photogenics’. These enigmatic, highly expressive images were produced without a camera, through an experimental process involving the exposure of photographic paper to a light that was moved throughout the darkroom. The process often incorporated materials such as glass, cellophane and celluloid, and the resulting images seem almost spawned organically. In this work, Jacobi has combined an abstract ‘photogenic’ image with a pair of hovered hands gently cupping a flower in bloom.
Lotte Jacobi
Germany 1896–1935, United States 1935–90
Dancer #16, Pauline Koner, New York
c. 1937, printed 1992
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023
2023.15
Lotte Jacobi worked in Berlin as a portrait photographer and photojournalist in the 1930s. As Hitler rose to power, she renounced her German citizenship and moved to the United States, where she shot for the magazines Life and Time. Shortly after her arrival in New York, Jacobi captured this photograph of the dancer Pauline Koner. She is depicted in a state of dynamism – her billowing costume and whirling limbs seem to emanate lines of sweeping movement. The image was created through the combination of two negatives, one of the dancer and the other of an abstract image created through experimentation in the darkroom.
Barbara Morgan
United States 1900–1992
Martha Graham – Letter to the world
1940
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.27
Barbara Morgan met the pioneering American choreographer and dancer Martha Graham in 1935, and their working relationship lasted over six decades. Graham later reflected in 1980: ‘It is rare that even an inspired photographer possesses the demonic eye which can capture the instant of dance and transform it into timeless gesture. In Barbara Morgan I found that person. In looking at these photographs today, I feel, as I felt when I first saw them, privileged to have been a part of this collaboration. For to me, Barbara Morgan through her art reveals the inner landscape that is a dancer’s world.’
Ellen Auerbach
Germany 1906–33, Palestine 1933–37, United States 1937–2004
R. Schottelius in New York
1953, printed 1992
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023
2023.14
A constant innovator throughout her life, Ellen Auerbach received her first camera in 1928 as a tool to aid her studies in sculpture. The following year, she met her professional and romantic partner Grete Stern in Berlin, where they formed studio ringl+pit. After escaping fascist Germany, Auerbach eventually relocated to the United States and continued her photographic practice, settling among New York’s avant-garde. In this rooftop scene, she captures German dancer Renate Schottelius leaping into the air. In contrast with the surrounding static, imposing skyscrapers, the liberated body in joyous motion serves as a symbol for freedom.
Francesca Woodman
United States 1958–81
Untitled (Providence, Rhode Island)
c. 1975–78, printed after 1981
gelatin silver photograph
ed. 4/40
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2025
2025.523
Francesca Woodman is known for her intimate black-and-white self-portraits and photographs featuring other women sitters. The bodies are often blurred, with faces hidden and appearing to blend into the background. In this self-portrait, Woodman crouches down in the corner of a decrepit room, her patterned gown somehow reflecting – or merging with – the floral wallpaper that peels down in rough remnants behind her. The photograph was created while Woodman was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where she studied from 1975 to 1978 and which produced the majority of her extant photographs following her untimely death in 1981.
Sue Ford
Australia 1943–2009
Temporarily
1969
from The Tide Recedes series 1969–71
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1996
1996.768
Sue Ford’s fascination with experimental techniques was evident in her first solo exhibition, The Tide Recedes, at Melbourne’s Hawthorn City Gallery in 1971. The invitation to the exhibition contained a piece of narrative prose comprising the works’ titles in a sequence. This is one of the few surviving large-scale vintage prints from the exhibition. It demonstrates the artist’s working methods, in which images are distorted, repeated and mirrored. Ford photographed the women nude in a studio, then superimposed those images with negatives of beach scenes, expressing an anxiety that people were becoming too removed from nature.
Sue Ford
Australia 1943–2009
No title (Photogram of two hands and garden path)
c. 1970
gelatin silver photograph
Gerstl Bequest, 2000
2000.60
In the late 1960s and early 70s, Sue Ford created several bodies of highly experimental work. These works involved complex montages, photograms and layered negatives, revealing hours of darkroom experimentation in her Eltham studio in Melbourne’s north-east. Such experiments coincided with Ford’s burgeoning interest in left-wing politics, and her exposure via the media to world events such as the NASA moon landings and the Vietnam War. Ford incorporated imagery and ideas relating to these events, as well as her interest in environmentalism, into these abstracted, Surrealism-inspired works.
Sue Ford
Australia 1943–2009
No title (Nude montage)
1960s
gelatin silver photograph
Gerstl Bequest, 2000
2000.58
Ilse Bing
Germany 1899–1941, United States 1941–98, worked in France 1930–40
Self-portrait
Autoportrait
1931, printed c. 1993
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023
2023.588
Ilse Bing began making photographs in the late 1920s, when she purchased one of the first 35 mm cameras produced by the German company Leica. She made use of the camera’s portability, capturing motion, dizzying angles and contrasts of light, shade and shadow – compositional elements that characterised the New Photography movement. Inspired by Florence Henri, Bing used her camera to disrupt the picture plane. In this famed self-portrait, Bing uses mirrors as a fracturing tool. The self-portrait shows Bing’s reflection holding a camera, accompanied by her side profile in another angled mirror. She controls the various gazes: her own, the viewer’s, the camera’s.
Joan Jonas
United States born 1936
Left side right side
1972
black-and-white video, sound
Purchased, 1975
EA12-1975
Multidisciplinary artist Joan Jonas works across video and performance art to examine the body, new technology and recorded images. In 1972, working within New York’s avant-garde scene, she pioneered the use of video in performance art. Also made that year, the video work Left side right side shows Jonas standing next to a mirror while at the same time using a live monitor to capture her face. She repeatedly gestures to her facial features to delineate differences between the mirror and monitor images. This experimental self-portrait interrogates the nature of perception and subjectivity, offering a prescient meditation on the refraction of the self through constant depiction.
Bernd Becher
Germany 1931–2007
Hilla Becher
Germany 1934–2015
Coal tipple, Goodspring, Pennsylvania
1975
from the Artists and Photographs folio 1975
gelatin silver photographs
ed. 9/60
Purchased, 1976
PH5-1976
In 1959 married artists Bernd and Hilla Becher started photographing industrial architecture, a practice that would continue for over four decades. While predominantly documenting structures throughout Germany’s Ruhr region, they occasionally worked overseas – this work was made on their first trip to the United States. The Bechers created a system for comparing structures: photographing them from a consistent angle, under virtually identical lighting conditions, printing images at the same size and often displaying them in grids. According to Hilla Becher, their archive allows for narratives to naturally emerge: ‘Structural patterns and their transformations … can be proved to exist in the case of such relatively exhaustive comparative series.’
Eve Sonneman
United States born 1946
Real Time
1968–74, published 1976
artist’s book: photo-offset lithographs and printed text, 46 folios, printed paper cover, glued binding
1st edition
Purchased, NGV Supporters of Photography, 2021
2021.683
Real Time is composed of paired photographs taken seconds apart, separated by a black-line border. The ordered presentation allows the viewer to consider the relationship between the images, and the small changes and passing of time between them. Eve Sonneman first showed the photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, before publishing them as a book. In 1976 she saw an advertisement in Artforum from newly established press Printed Matter, which was seeking artists’ books to publish. ‘So I sent [my photographs] in and that work became my first published book, Real Time,’ Sonneman recalled. ‘I was as thrilled as could be!’
Time and mirrors
Photography has long been associated with mirrors and time – as a way of remembering, reflecting and retrieving information. As early as 1859, American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr described photography, specifically the daguerreotype, as ‘the mirror with a memory’.
Many artists use the camera to explore identity through portraits and self-portraits. In Ilse Bing’s 1931 self-portrait, captured with her Leica camera, a mirror disrupts the image, disorienting the viewer. Four decades later, Joan Jonas extended this idea, using a video monitor as a mirror to explore reflection, perception and the self.
By the 1970s, repetition and seriality became central to photographic practice. Through sequences of images, artists such as Eve Sonneman, Sue Ford and Bernd and Hilla Becher explored how photography could record and interpret change – both immediate and long-term. Their images reveal the camera’s dual role as an objective instrument and a conceptual recorder of the world.
Left to right:
In 1973 Sue Ford won the Ilford Scholarship, which awarded her $3000 over two years, access to darkrooms and the chance to study at the Victorian College of the Arts. She was a single mother and one of very few photography students at the school. Ford said of this transformative period, during which she conceived the Time series, ‘I suddenly saw how the camera fitted in … I realised it wasn’t big, spectacular, colourful images … The value of it could record things fairly objectively.’ A dramatic departure from her late 1960s experimentations, the series comprises black-and-white portraits of the same person taken around ten years apart, displayed side by side.
Sue Ford
Australia 1943–2009
Annette, 1962; Annette, 1974
1962–74, printed 1974
from the Time series 1962–74
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund, 1974
PH170.a-b-1974
‘For some time I have been thinking about the camera itself. Trying to explore its particular UNIQUENESS, coming to terms with the fact that I had been trying to ignore for some years, that the camera is actually a MACHINE. … In “Time Series” I tried to use the camera as objectively as possible. It was a time machine. For me it was an amazing experience. It wasn’t until I placed the photograph of the younger face beside the recent photograph that I could fully appreciate the change. The camera showed me with absolute clarity, something I could only just perceive with my naked eye.’ – Sue Ford, Time Series: An Exhibition of Photographs, Melbourne, 1974
Ross, 1964; Ross, 1974
1964–74, printed 1974
from the Time series 1962–74
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund, 1974
PH171.a-b-1974
Jim, 1964; Jim, 1974
1964–74, printed 1974
from the Time series 1962–74
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund, 1974
PH172.a-b-1974
Lynne, 1964; Lynne, 1974
1964–74, printed 1974
from the Time series 1962–74
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund, 1974
PH168.a-b-1974
People and place
Depictions of children, mothers and acts of caregiving have traditionally been recurring subjects in photographs taken by women. According to art historian Naomi Rosenblum, in the early 1900s the photographing of children, particularly children with their mothers, was deemed by commentators at the time to be ‘an especially appropriate assignment for women’.
While stereotyping and gender bias remained significant obstacles for women photographers in the early twentieth century, many still innovated through their image-making, while studio work provided women artists with the opportunity for financial independence. Subjects were portrayed in intensely intimate portraits, making visible the people in domestic settings who were often overlooked in photographs and society more broadly.
In Australia, artists such as Olive Cotton produced landscape photography in the dominant Pictorialist style of nostalgic, softly focused images. Everyday, non-professional photography, or vernacular photography, was also widely produced by women photographers of the period. As shown by Inez McPhee’s photo albums depicting the outdoor adventures of the Melbourne Walking Club and Edna Walling’s albums filled with pictures of friends, animals and plants, photography became an increasingly popular way of documenting daily life.
Alice Mills
Australia 1870–1929
Broothorn Studios, Melbourne
Australia active 1900–1910, 1940s
Joan Margaret Syme
c. 1918
gelatin silver photograph, coloured dyes
Presented through the NGV Foundation by Michael Hayne, 2005
2005.529
Alice Mills, with help from her husband, Tom Humphreys, set up her first photography studio in 1900. Soon after that she was working under her own name in the Centreway Arcade at 259–263 Collins Street, Melbourne. Mills’s portraits were often published in magazines and newspapers, which brought her to the attention of a large audience of prospective clients. Around 1915 she produced a number of large-scale portraits of Hilaire and Joan Syme, the daughters of then managing editor and co-owner of The Age newspaper Geoffrey Syme. The photographs were made in conjunction with Broothorn Studios, which art historians suggest made the extreme enlargements.
Alice Mills
Australia 1870–1929
Broothorn Studios, Melbourne
Australia active 1900–1910, 1940s
Hilaire Syme
c. 1910
gelatin silver photograph, watercolour
Gift of Dr Veronica Condon, Geoffrey Haggard and Jennifer Smyth, descendants of Sir Geoffrey Syme K.B.E., Managing Editor of the Age newspaper (1908–42), 2004
2004.639
An almost opaque layer of paint has been applied to this portrait. The paint obscures some of the details while enhancing others, such as the child’s shiny shoes and the satin sash of her dress. Alice Mills’s portrait of the subject’s younger sister, Joan, has a more conventional treatment in the application of translucent pigments. It remains unclear whether Mills did the hand-colouring. However, having trained in the studio of leading Melbourne photographer Johnstone O’Shaughnessy, she would almost certainly have known about the technique of applying oil-based pigments to photographs to create the illusion of naturalistic colour.
Frame: original, by D. Bernard & Co., Melbourne
Left to right:
Imogen Cunningham
United States 1883–1976
My mother peeling apples
1910, printed 1979
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1979
PH117-1979
My father
1906, printed 1979
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1979
PH116-1979
Imogen Cunningham came from a very low-income family. Despite this, her father, Isaac Burns Cunningham, supported her interest in photography and built her a darkroom at their Seattle home. In this woodshed-darkroom, the teenage photographer, who purchased her first camera around 1901, aged eighteen, was able to start processing and developing her prints. Cunningham’s later portraits of her elderly parents at home are poised and respectful, showing the influence of the softly focused Pictorialist aesthetic.
Clippings, press releases, brochures, reviews, invitations and other ephemeral material relating to Ruth Hollick and the Ruth Hollick studio
Shaw Research Library
Ruth Hollick was widely recognised for her skill in photographing children. In an interview published in 1927, Hollick said: ‘I have always found the work well within a woman’s intellectual grasp, and not too hard a strain from the physical point of view. Although one does not, at this period of women’s freedom, talk of any particular work as being her sphere, there is no doubt but that feminine intuition with children may be particularly helpful … After all the big thing is to catch the real child – show him as he is – no wonderful massing of shadow, no illuminating light is worth a jot if it does not reveal the real Pat or Mollie.’ These materials were collected by Hollick and gifted to the NGV’s Shaw Research Library by her niece Lucy Crosbie Morrison.
In 1928 Ruth Hollick and her partner, fellow photographer Dorothy Izard, held an exhibition at their Collins Street studio of more than 150 portraits of children. Lady Eleanor Mary Latham, wife of then attorney-general Sir John Greig Latham, opened the exhibition, encouraging the audience to consider the possibility of careers for women, with Hollick as a role model: ‘Everyone has a right to try and make a living for herself in any profession she likes to take up.’ The period in which Hollick and Izard operated the studio in Collins Street was extremely productive and successful. In 1929 Hollick was the only woman to participate in the Melbourne Exhibition of Pictorial Photography.
Left to right:
Ruth Hollick
Australia 1883–1977
No title (Seated girl looking over shoulder)
c. 1926
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH118-1992
No title (Little girl holding small book)
1920s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH119-1992
No title (Young girl holding a doll)
1920s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH124-1992
No title (Laughing child)
c. 1926
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH117-1992
Miss Pamela Ann McKewan
c. 1929
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH116-1992
No title (Laughing girl in cap)
1920s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH127-1992
Top to bottom, left to right:
Ruth Hollick
Australia 1883–1977
Bobby
1927
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH115-1992
No title (Baby in striped dress)
1920s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH120-1992
No title (Three children seated on grass)
1920s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH135-1992
No title (Mother and two children)
1920s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH134-1992
Dorothy Izard
England 1882–94, Australia 1894–1972
No title (Girl and two boys in sunlight)
1920s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH144-1992
Ruth Hollick
Australia 1883–1977
No title (Young woman in plaid shawl)
1920s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH129-1992
Ruth Hollick
Australia 1883–1977
No title (Mother and child)
c. 1926
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH128-1992
Olive Cotton
Australia 1911–2003
The patterned road
1937
gelatin silver photograph
ed. 2/25
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992
PH200-1992
‘I think it’s light that I like best of all. I’ve often waited for hours or days until I think I’ve got the right light … The pictures of nature depend so much on light.’ – Olive Cotton
Olive Cotton
Australia 1911–2003
Landsdowne
1937
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1987
PH208-1987
Inez McPhee
Australia 1908–99
No title (Inez McPhee’s album of the YWCA)
1930–37
album: gelatin silver photographs, pen and white and black ink, feather, 26 pages, cardboard cover, stitched binding
Presented through the NGV Foundation by John McPhee, Member and Ann Luck, 2004
2004.567
Inez McPhee was an active member of the Melbourne Women’s Walking Club, founded in 1922. McPhee took her camera on bushwalks with the group and, typical of amateur photographers of the period, compiled albums of the prints. Her albums are filled with images of women engaging in outdoor activities.
Inez McPhee
Australia 1908–99
No title (Inez McPhee’s album of a trip to New Zealand)
1953
album: gelatin silver photographs, collage, pencil, 40 pages, cardboard cover, stitched binding
Presented through the NGV Foundation by John McPhee, Member and Ann Luck, 2004
2004.570
Inez McPhee
Australia 1908–99
No title (Inez McPhee’s album of ADA river trip)
1936
album: gelatin silver photographs, newspaper, pencil and pen and ink, 62 pages, cardboard and leather cover, stitched binding
Presented through the NGV Foundation by John McPhee, Member and Ann Luck, 2004
2004.568
Inez McPhee
Australia 1908–99
No title (Inez McPhee’s album of Melbourne and surrounds)
1932–36
album: gelatin silver photographs, pen and white and black ink, newspaper, 38 pages, cardboard and leather cover with gold embossing, screw binding
Presented through the NGV Foundation by the niece and nephew of the artist, Ann Luck and John McPhee, Member, 2004
2004.569
Left to right:
Edna Walling
England 1895–1915, Australia 1915–73
Doris Oak-Rhind, Edna Walling’s sister
1920s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Barbara Barnes, 1983
PH35-1983
Estelle Thompson
1950s–60s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Barbara Barnes, 1983
PH22-1983
No title (Young woman preparing picnic)
1940s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Barbara Barnes, 1983
PH25-1983
Many-sided indeed: Women in business
‘There is more, much more in the photo question than the mere ability to make a technically perfect photo or picture,’ wrote New Zealand photographer May Moore in a 1916 essay. ‘And when it comes to successfully managing a studio of one’s own, one wants to be many-sided indeed … The woman who is to succeed … must make up her mind to equip on all points just as the men do.’
Women-run photography studios emerged as early as the 1850s in places such as England, Japan, Germany and the United States. However, women faced many barriers to operating their own studios well into the twentieth century, and many had to rely on family support. Photographers such as Ruth Hollick, Karimeh Abbud and Hedda Morrison persevered to successfully manage or independently run photography studios in the 1920s–40s. They produced a wide range of images, from those made for commercial and tourist purposes to documentary, artistic and personal photographs.
Left to right:
Dorothy Izard
England 1882–94, Australia 1894–1972
Ti-trees
1920s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH140-1992
No title (Dappled tree)
1920s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH223-1992
No title (Tree in paddock)
1920s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH145-1992
Dorothy Izard met fellow photographer Ruth Hollick when they were students at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, and they formed both a romantic and a professional partnership. They travelled extensively around regional Victoria in the 1920s and 1930s. Izard was a landscape photographer and, at Hollick’s home studio, was responsible for printing the orders for Hollick’s photographs.
Ruth Hollick
Australia 1883–1977
No title (Sheep under tree)
1920s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
PH136-1992
Left to right:
Ruth Hollick
Australia 1883–1977
Australian Wildflowers
1950s
artist’s book: hand-coloured gelatin silver photographs on buff paper on brown paper mounts, pen and ink, pencil, leaves, brown paper cover, cotton cord binding
Wattle
leaf 1 from Australian Wildflowers
Wattle
leaf 2 from Australian Wildflowers
Ti-tree
leaf 3 from Australian Wildflowers
Heath
leaf 4 from Australian Wildflowers
Red gum
leaf 5 from Australian Wildflowers
Gift of Pamela Jane Green, 2021
2021.467
Karimeh Abbud
Palestine 1893–1940
Tiberias hot baths
1920s–30s
photolithograph, postcard
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 20242
024.833
Karimeh Abbud
Palestine 1893–1940
Nazareth, Mount Tabor
1920–30s
photolithograph, postcard
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.835
Karimeh Abbud was a professional photographer working in the 1920s and 30s. Given a camera by her father on her seventeenth birthday, the teenage Abbud began photographing friends, family and the landscape. From the early 1920s she began professionally photographing women and children in domestic spaces and at social events, and in the 1930s became a celebrated portrait and wedding photographer in Nazareth. During this time she also expanded her commercial practice, selling images of local landmarks for the lucrative early twentieth-century postcard market.
Left to right:
Hedda Morrison
Germany 1908–33, worked in China 1933–46, Sarawak 1946–66, Australia 1967–91
No title (Taoist priest)
1935, printed 1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH108-1976
No title (Taoist novice)
1935, printed 1976
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH109-1976
No title (Taoist priest)
1935, printed 1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH101-1976
Left to right:
Hedda Morrison
Germany 1908–33, worked in China 1933–46, Sarawak 1946–66, Australia 1967–91
No title (Temple roof end)
1935, printed 1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH115-1976
‘I spent my leisure time exploring the city and its neighbourhoods, generally by bicycle. It was impossible to be bored in Peking as there was so much to see and to photograph, and everywhere I was treated with the greatest courtesy and consideration,’ Hedda Morrison recalled of her time in China. ‘I found the people to be willing and obliging photographic subjects, treating my requests with good humour and patience.’ In the thirteen years she lived there, she built up an extraordinary body of photographs, mainly taken with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera. The images are sensitive observations of daily life, Chinese culture and ancient architectural sites.
No title (Yellow River plain at dusk)
1935, printed 1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH119-1976
Left to right:
Hedda Morrison
Germany 1908–33, worked in China 1933–46, Sarawak 1946–66, Australia 1967–91
No title (Morning clouds)
1935, printed 1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH117-1976
No title (Fairy palm cliff)
1935, printed 1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH112-1976
No title (The stone balustrade)
1935, printed 1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH105-1976
No title (Three gnarled pines)
1935, printed 1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH102-1976
No title (Two Taoist priests below the fairy palm cliff)
1935, printed 1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH104-1976
No title (Pine tree above the Yellow River plain)
1935, printed 1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH110-1976
Left to right:
Hedda Morrison
Germany 1908–33, worked in China 1933–46, Sarawak 1946–66, Australia 1967–91
No title (Hua Shan mountain face)
1935, printed 1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH103-1976
No title (The Chessboard Pavilion)
1935, printed 1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH114-1976
No title (Step ladder to the north peak)
1935, printed 1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH113-1976
Hedda Morrison
Germany 1908–33, worked in China 1933–46, Sarawak 1946–66, Australia 1967–91
No title (Lone pine against sunlit cliff face)
1935, printed 1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH118-1976
These photographs were taken in 1935, when Morrison journeyed by train to the Hua Shan mountains in eastern China. She photographed the deep chasms and textures of the mountain ranges, and the Taoist monasteries and monks who assisted the travellers on their journeys.
Showcases 1–5:
Hedda Morrison
Germany 1908–33, worked in China 1933–46, Sarawak 1946–66, Australia 1967–91
Hedwig (Hedda) Morrison studied photography in Munich, later working in Hamburg and Stuttgart. In 1933 she left Germany to become the manager of Hartung’s Photo Shop in Peking (Beijing). She learnt Mandarin and for five years managed the shop’s Chinese staff. In 1938 Morrison began working for an English art collector and dealer in Peking, while also taking on freelance photography projects. The works in these showcases are test prints made in the 1970s in preparation for Morrison’s 1985 book A Photographer in Old Peking. The images provide a fascinating insight into life in China during a period of great transition, showing the continuity of cultural traditions amid civil war and Japanese occupation.
The document
The primary aim of social documentary photography is to draw attention to social issues, often to promote social or political change. This style of photography blossomed during the tumultuous period of the 1930s, when photographers were commissioned by the United States government to document the effects of the Great Depression. The increased popularity of illustrated mass media such as newspapers and magazines also allowed for the broad dissemination of social documentary images and texts.
The ability of social documentary photography to present a purely objective representation of people or places continues to be fertile ground for debate today.
Heather George
Australia 1907–83
Rawhide bed, Wave Hill Station
1952, printed 1978
from The Northern Territory series 1952
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1980
PH328-1980
Left to right:
Heather George
Australia 1907–83
Stockyards, Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory
1952, printed 1978
from The Northern Territory series 1952
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1980
PH6-1980
In the 1950s and 1960s Heather George worked as a freelance photographer and photojournalist. In 1952 Walkabout magazine published a series of photographs George made in the Northern Territory outback, including images of Wave Hill Station, a vast pastoral lease on the lands of the Gurindji people. Fourteen years later, it was to go down in history as the location of a turning point in the recognition of land rights for Australia’s First Nations peoples.
Stockyards, stockmen in distance. Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory
1952, printed 1978
from The Northern Territory series 1952
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1980
PH325-1980
In 1966 around two hundred Gurindji stockmen, domestic workers and their families went on strike at Wave Hill Station. Known as the Wave Hill Walk-Off, this action led to the eventual return of a portion of Gurindji homelands in 1975. Taken over a decade before the walk-off, this photograph features a group of Gurindji stockmen on horses, gathered in the background.
Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson
United States 1895–1965
African Journey
1945
published by the John Day Company, New York
Shaw Research Library
Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson was a writer, performer and intellectual. She and her husband, singer and actor Paul Robeson, were both political activists who used their platform to vocally oppose racism. In 1945 Robeson published African Journey, the first book by a Black woman featuring her own photographs. In 1936 she travelled to Africa with her son, Paul Jr, visiting seven countries, all the while taking photographs with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera. African Journey features a written account of the trip along with the images she took. It is a diary of her encounters with the people she met along the way, and she hoped that the book would be educational for those who read it.
Edward Steichen
Luxembourg 1879–80, United States 1880–1973
The Family of Man
1955
published by the Maco Magazine Corporation for the Museum of Modern Art, New York
Shaw Research Library
Edward Steichen’s influential photography exhibition The Family of Man first opened in 1955 at Museum of Modern Art, New York, later touring to sixty-eight countries. The exhibition came to Melbourne in 1959, where it was held at the Preston Motors Show Room. In the show and accompanying catalogue, Steichen paired Consuelo Kanaga’s image with a phrase from Proverbs 3:18, ‘She is a tree of life to them’. Steichen’s pairing of this biblical phrase with Kanaga’s photograph emphasises the maternal and protective nature of the scene. The image has been known by the title She is a tree of life to them ever since.
Consuelo Kanaga
United States 1894–1978
She is a tree of life to them
1950s
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.599
Consuelo Kanaga worked at the San Francisco Chronicle from 1915, later joining the California Camera Club, where she met photographers Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange and Edward Weston. Kanaga’s image-making was informed by her involvement in liberal politics and the nascent civil rights movement. In 1950 she stayed in an artists’ colony in Maitland, Florida, and documented the lives of Black field workers living there. This refined portrait of a mother with her children became well known around the world after its inclusion in the touring exhibition The Family of Man, curated by pioneering photographer Edward Steichen.
Marjory Collins
United States 1912–85
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
1942, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH164-1975
In 1942 photojournalist Marjory Collins was invited to join the United States Office of War Information (OWI). Commissioned to show ‘ordinary’ American life and how people were supporting the war effort on the home front, OWI photographers played a role in the propaganda war at home and abroad. On assignment in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a major industrial and manufacturing hub supplying American forces during the Second World War, Collins captured this morale-boosting photograph of a jubilant newspaper vendor. The headline of the day’s paper announces the news that Allied forces led by the United States have landed in Oran, Algeria, in an important strategic move against the Axis powers in North Africa.
Marion Post Wolcott
United States 1910–90
Near Wadesboro, North Carolina
1938, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH145-1975
The people in this photograph are the children of tenant farmers. The older child holds the hand of the younger, whose legs are bowed likely due to rickets, a medical condition caused by malnourishment. This is a vivid image that captures both the intimacy between children and the effects of environmental and economic devastation.
Marion Post Wolcott
United States 1910–90
Baptismal service, Morehead, Kentucky
1940, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH144-1975
Marion Post Wolcott
United States 1910–90
Jitterbugging in a juke joint on Saturday night, Clarksdale, Mississippi
1939, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH146-1975
Marion Post Wolcott had a keen sense of social justice, having lived in Austria in the early 1930s, where she witnessed firsthand the rise of Nazism. On her return home to New York in 1933, she was determined to use her photography to raise awareness of social inequalities. While working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the segregated American South, Wolcott witnessed the bleak economic situation endured by African Americans, which was exacerbated by the Great Depression. With an ‘open eye’, Wolcott captured both the positive effects of the FSA and the difficult realities of daily life. Her candid images of African American communities in the South – such as this joyful shot of people dancing – countered the dominant images of Black lives as they were commonly represented in mainstream media.
Marion Post Wolcott
United States 1910–90
Haircutting in front of plantation store after being paid off on Saturday, Mileston Plantation, Mississippi Delta
1939, printed c. 1939
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1980
PH48-1980
Marion Post Wolcott
United States 1910–90
Shenandoah Valley, Virginia
1941, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH142-1975
Marion Post Wolcott
United States 1910–90
One of the judges at the horse races, Warrenton, Virginia
1941, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH143-1975
Marion Post Wolcott
United States 1910–90
Transportation for hep cats Louisville, Kentucky
1940, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH305-1975
Left to right:
Dorothea Lange
United States 1895–1965
Plantation Overseer, Mississippi Delta, near Clarksdale, Mississippi
1936, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH94-1975
This photograph was taken on Dorothea Lange’s first trip to the American South, where racial segregation was still legally enshrined. The composition – a group of African American workers taking a break while their white overseer stands in the foreground – captures the racial and economic tensions that Lange encountered in the South. Soon after it was taken, this image was reproduced widely in a range of publications, from the U.S. Camera Annual 1939 and poet Archibald MacLeish’s Land of the Free (1938) to African American writer Richard Wright’s 1941 book 12 Million Black Voices. Each publication presented Lange’s image differently, highlighting the complexity of seemingly objective ‘documentary’ photographs.
Born a slave, resettled after the Civil War, Carrizo Springs, Texas
1936, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH111-1975
Dorothea Lange witnessed racial segregation in the Southern states and often photographed individuals affected by the resulting social and economic inequalities. This work is also known by an alternate title: ‘Bob Lemmons, Carrizo Springs, Texas. Born a slave about 1850, south of San Antonio. Came to Carrizo Springs during the Civil War with white cattlemen seeking new range. In 1865, with his master was one of the first settlers. Knew Billy the Kid, King Fisher, and other noted bad men of the border.’
Dorothea Lange
United States 1895–1965
Woman of the high plains, near Childress, Texas
1938, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH107-1975
‘We’ve had no work since March. The worst thing we did was when we sold the car, but we had to sell it to eat, and now we can’t get away from here … This county’s a hard county. They won’t help bury you here. If you die, you’re dead, that’s all.’ – The subject of this photograph, Nettie Featherston, to Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange
United States 1895–1965
Greene County, Georgia
1937, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH92-1975
Dorothea Lange
United States 1895–1965
Migrant mother, Nipomo, California
1936, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH90-1975
In March 1936 Dorothea Lange drove past a sign for a pea-pickers camp and, despite her exhaustion, decided to turn off. At the camp, she encountered Florence Thompson and her children, taking a total of seven photographs of the family. According to Lange, compared to her usual practice of interacting with her subjects, she didn’t speak with Thompson very much. This composition, focusing closely on Thompson’s worried expression as her children huddle close by her side, came to symbolise the hardships of the Great Depression, and is one of Lange’s most recognisable works.
As well as symbolising the hardships of the period, Lange’s photograph depicts unconditional maternal care, positioning Thompson as the quintessential mother figure. The simple composition of the image resonated with the 1930s American public, who were moved to support the relief efforts at the core of the Farm Security Administration project. However, despite becoming an icon of twentieth-century photography, Lange’s portrait did not communicate important details about Thompson’s situation and personal life, such as her Native American heritage. Further, Thompson – and her children – later expressed some distress about the ways in which the image was used.
Dorothea Lange
United States 1895–1965
Towards Los Angeles, California
1936, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH96-1975
During the Great Depression, the Great Plains of North America became known as the Dust Bowl. A severe drought turned the soil to dust, leading to the migration of thousands of small-scale farmers who could no longer work the land. Dorothea Lange made many road trips to document the plight of migrants heading west in search of work and opportunities. Many of Lange’s photographs, such as this one, show workers travelling in difficult conditions, on foot and by car. This photograph was also used as the basis for a scene in the 1939 film Of Mice and Men, based on John Steinbeck’s story of two migrant ranch workers.
Top to bottom, left to right:
Dorothea Lange
United States 1895–1965
Drought refugees from Oklahoma, Blythe, California
1936, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH95-197
Escaping the drought and dust storms of the Great Plains region in central North America, many farming families migrated west to California in the 1930s. The fertile lands there differed greatly from the small-scale farming they had known. However, as large companies often managed Californian farms, they required only seasonal or temporary labourers. Dorothea Lange is known to have spent many hours talking and creating connections with the migrant workers she photographed in California. As a way of sharing their stories with the public, Lange documented the exhausted workers and their hardships through intimate portraits such as this.
Real estate sign along highway, Riverside County, California
1937, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH98-1975
Drought-stricken farmers on the shady side of town street while their crops burn up in the fields, Sallisaw, Oklahoma
1936, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH101-1975
‘I had to get my camera to register the things about those people that were more important than how poor they were – their pride, their strength, their spirit.’ – Dorothea Lange
Child living in Oklahoma City, Shacktown
1936, printed c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH104-1975
During the Great Depression, many migrants travelling in search of economic opportunity were forced to create temporary camps along roadsides. For Dorothea Lange, who photographed many such experiences over several years, images like this one were part of a greater project to spark public awareness of the difficulties people were facing. As Lange later said, ‘I had begun to talk to the people I photographed … In the migrant camps, there were always talkers. It gave us a chance to meet on common ground.’
In focus: The Farm Security Administration project
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was established in 1937 as part of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal economic reforms, which provided relief to farmers left impoverished by the hardships of the Great Depression. Led by Roy Stryker, the FSA’s photography program was to be one of the most influential social documentary projects ever developed. Many images were reproduced in newspapers and periodicals to show the harsh realities of life for those living in poverty, with the aim of encouraging public support for the government’s economic policies.
The program ran as part of several government agencies, including the Resettlement Administration (1935–37), then the Farm Security Administration (1937–42) and the Office of War Information (1942–44). Stryker hired a range of photographers for the project and, despite their being given comparable briefs, the unique eye of each photographer is apparent in the over 175,000 pictures produced by the project.
As well as forming a comprehensive pictorial record of American life from 1935 to 1944, the FSA photography program generated some of the most recognisable documentary photographs of the twentieth century, including images by women such as Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott and Marjory Collins.
Dora Maar
France 1907–97
Vendors laughing behind their charcuterie stall, Barcelona
Vendeuses et vendeur riant derrière leur étal de charcuterie, Barcelone
1933
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2021
2021.260
In 1933 Dora Maar travelled to Spain, where she documented the extreme poverty of the country’s cities through people she met on the streets. Aligning with her left-wing politics and opposition to fascism, her photographs honour working-class citizens rather than buildings or monuments. Maar was fascinated by the characters she encountered in La Boqueria, the market in the heart of Barcelona. In this image, she captures a joyful moment as the women vendors playfully turn away from her, hiding their gaze, while a man smiles directly into Maar’s lens.
Nora Dumas
Hungary 1890–1913, France 1913–17, United States 1917–20s, France 1920s–70s, Switzerland 1970s–79
Gypsies Gitans
c. 1930
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 20242
024.606
Much of Nora Dumas’s 1920s and 1930s photography documented rural French life, capturing the daily lives of peasants and farmers. Her sharply focused images were regularly published in popular French magazines of the interwar period, including Vu, Bifur and L’Art Vivant. Dumas took this photograph from a low perspective with her camera pointing up, such that the people appear monumental. There is a feeling of empathy to the image, in keeping with the humanist documentary photography that Dumas practised, and which was promoted by Hungarian immigrant photographers such as Brassaï, Ergy Landau and André Kertész.
Tina Modotti
Italy 1896–1913, United States 1913–21, Mexico 1922–30, 1939–42
Girls in shawls
1924–29
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.28
Tina Modotti is known for her socially and politically charged photographs documenting Mexican working life. For Modotti, art, life and politics were inextricably linked. Her photographs show the artist’s commitment to documenting the lives of women and working people. This image is believed to be from a project exploring the popular arts of Mexico, specifically the shawl-like rebozo, and exemplifies Modotti’s humanist style of documentary photography. It is one of the photographs anthropologist Frances Toor commissioned from Modotti and Edward Weston for the magazine Mexican Folkways, published between 1925 and 1937.
Lillian Bassman
United States 1917–2012
Toreador and Barbara Mullen (for Harper’s Bazaar)
1950, printed 2006
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023
2023.17
Lillian Bassman
United States 1917–2012
Black – with one white glove, Barbara Mullen, Christian Dior, Harper’s Bazaar, New York, 1958
1958, printed 1994
gelatin silver photographartist’s proof
ed. 5/25
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023
2023.12
Lillian Bassman developed a distinctive aesthetic of glamour and elegance in her photographs. Her highly expressive portraits combine dynamic graphic effects with complex printing processes. Bassman revisited many of her early negatives in the 1990s and began reworking them, applying toning and bleaching techniques to further abstract the images. As in many of Bassman’s fashion photographs, the model in this work looks away from the camera, giving the impression of a candid, unposed moment. Bassman altered the image so that the peripheral details are blurred, placing the focus on the model in the spotted dress, emphasising the play of graphic lines and forms.
Lillian Bassman
United States 1917–2012
More fashion mileage per dress, Barbara Vaughn, Harper’s Bazaar, New York
1956, printed 2000s
gelatin silver photograph
ed. 13/25
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023
2023.9
Lillian Bassman began her career as a painting assistant at the Works Progress Administration, and studied fashion illustration and textile design at Pratt Institute in the late 1930s. In 1940 the famed art director of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, Alexey Brodovitch, offered her a scholarship to study under him. This led to her role as art director of the magazine’s spin-off Junior Bazaar. There she worked with photographers such as Richard Avedon and Robert Frank, and in 1947 began working as a freelance photographer in fashion and advertising.
Louise Dahl-Wolfe
United States 1895–1989
Untitled (Fashion study for Harper’s Bazaar)
c. 1950
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022
2022.782
Louise Dahl-Wolfe studied at the California School of Fine Art and began taking self-portraits in 1921 after meeting photographer Anne Brigman. In 1930 Dahl-Wolfe established a professional photography studio in San Francisco, later moving to New York. In 1936 she became a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, a position she held until 1958. Dahl-Wolfe played a key role in shaping the magazine’s visual style during the postwar era. She preferred shooting on location rather than in a studio, creating images with a fresh, candid feel that captured the spirit and style of the modern American woman.
Sue Ford
Australia 1943–2009
Carol
1961, printed 1982
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Margot Nash through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2014
2014.306
Sue Ford shot this portrait in her Melbourne studio on Collins Street, which she ran with her colleague Annette Stephens. Ford and Stephens collaborated with each other and predominantly worked with female friends, creating experimental studio images in their early careers. The subject of this photograph, Carol, worked in the cafe below the studio and appears frequently in Ford’s portraits from the early 1960s. Here she is photographed in front of a hessian curtain, one of several props Ford used to create intimate portraits.
Ingeborg Tyssen
Netherlands 1945–57, Australia 1957–2002
Anzac, Melbourne
1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH187-1976
Recognised for her intuitive approach, Ingeborg Tyssen was one of Australia’s preeminent street photographers. Originally trained as a nurse, Tyssen began to exhibit her photography in 1975. That same year she co-founded the Photographer’s Gallery in Melbourne with Paul Cox and Rod McNicol. Tyssen later studied photography under her future husband, John Williams, and held her first solo exhibition in 1982. Her work was often imbued with a sense of irony and humour, enabling the viewer to see the world through fresh eyes.
Left to right:
Ingeborg Tyssen
Netherlands 1945–57, Australia 1957–2002
Luna Park, St Kilda, Melbourne
1975, printed c. 2004
inkjet print
Gift of an anonymous donor, 2019
2019.520
Prahran Markets, Melbourne
1975, printed c. 2004
inkjet print
Gift of an anonymous donor, 2019
2019.521
‘Whenever possible I carry a loaded camera … I react without too much thought. Rarely do I wait for a situation to resolve itself. Nor do I direct or provoke people. The important aspects are composition, texture and light.’ – Ingeborg Tyssen
Left to right:
Mikki Ferrill
United States born 1937
Untitled
1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.855
Valeria ‘Mikki’ Ferrill is an African American photographer known for her documentation of the Black community in Chicago’s South Side during the 1960s and 70s. Ferrill studied advertising design and illustration at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She eventually became a photojournalist, joining a group of Black photographers from the area who shot for local periodicals and newspapers. Ferrill worked on assignments in Mexico in the late 1960s, returning to Chicago in 1970.
Untitled
1970s
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.854
Throughout the 1970s, Mikki Ferrill frequently documented people at the Garage, a music venue that ran out of a Chicago car garage each Sunday. She passionately photographed the community who frequented the club and became known as ‘the picture-taking lady’. Her intimate approach to photography is evident in the relaxed and uninhibited poses of her subjects. In this image of a man dancing, the subject joyfully plays a napkin like a saxophone. A selection of Ferrill’s images from The Garage series were featured in the first volume of The Black Photographers Annual in 1973.
Peggy Silinsky
United States born 1952, Australia from 1953
Twins and the flying pigeon
1973
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1980
PH341-1980
Collaboration and chance
Many postwar street photographers captured their subjects in the ‘instant’. By embracing close-looking, artists relied on chance to create spontaneous compositions, capturing candid, everyday moments. Photographers such as Diane Arbus worked on the streets of New York City, creating vivid portraits of contemporary American life. Arbus often collaborated with her subjects, producing striking images in the moment or curating compositions for magazine commissions.
Fashion photography was on the rise in the period, with American publications such as Harper’s Bazaar playing a pivotal role in amplifying the art form. Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Lillian Bassman and Toni Frissell were regular contributors to the magazine. Their photographs depicted the idealistic and aspirational modern woman.
Yamazawa Eiko and Tokiwa Toyoko were trailblazing women photographers working in Japan at the same time. Their works reflect the social changes of postwar Japan, expressed through the medium of the photobook.
Left to right:
Maggie Diaz
United States 1925–61, Australia 1961–2016
3AW mobile studio, Elwood Beach
1960s, printed 2014
pigment print
ed. 2/25
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2015
2015.18
Moving to Australia in 1961, American photographer Maggie Diaz established her Melbourne studio specialising in advertising, portraiture and social documentary photography. Among her commercial clients was the local radio station 3AW, which displayed her photographs in its new CBD studio. A 1964 article in Melbourne newspaper The Age described the headquarters, noting with apparent surprise that the commissioned photographs are ‘the work of a woman’.
Ladies at the bar, Tavern Club, Chicago
1957, printed 2014
pigment print
ed. 3/25
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2015
2015.16
Diane Arbus
United States 1923–71
Girl with a cigar in Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. 1965
1965, printed c. 1972–80s
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2024
2024.99
Diane Arbus studied photography in New York with Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch and Lisette Model. In 1963 and 1966 Arbus was awarded John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships. Later, she was included in the 1967 exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski. Her portraits of postwar American characters – children, celebrities, pedestrians, nudists, performers – are compelling, often tragicomic, and filled with curiosity.
‘I don’t press the shutter. The image does, and it’s like being gently clobbered.’ – Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus
United States 1923–71
Blaze Starr in her living room, Baltimore, Md. 1964
1964, printed c. 1972–80s
gelatin silver photograph
ed. 31/75
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2025
2025.519
In 1964 Esquire magazine commissioned Diane Arbus to photograph the stripper and burlesque dancer Blaze Starr. Starr was well known for her longstanding affair with the Louisiana governor Earl Long. She had also performed for the then senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie. Arbus created several portraits, including this vivid image, in which Starr poses in her lavishly decorated living room, her small dog standing attentively behind her. The carpet patterns are echoed in reverse on the curtains. Similarly, the circular armchairs behind Starr are light and dark, with contrasting circular cushions.
Diane Arbus
United States 1923–71
A couple at a dance, N.Y.C. 1960
1960, printed c. 1972–80s
gelatin silver photograph
ed. 12/75
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023
2023.8
Lisette Model
Austria 1901–24, worked in France 1924–38, United States 1938–83
Woman with veil, San Francisco
1949, printed c. 1960
gelatin silver photograph on composition board
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2024
2024.101
In 1937 Lisette Model apprenticed with the photographer Florence Henri in Paris. Model married Evsei (Evsa) Konstantinovich Model, a Russian Constructivist painter, and in 1938 they moved to New York. In the United States, Model connected with artists such as Berenice Abbott and Edward Steichen, before being hired to work for Harper’s Bazaar magazine. In the late 1940s Model befriended Imogen Cunningham and joined the Californian local photographers group f/64. Model became known for her intense, unrelenting street portraits. In 1951 she began teaching photography at the New School for Social Research at Columbia University. A student at this time was Diane Arbus.
Ruth Orkin
United States 1921–85
American girl in Italy, Florence
1951, printed 1980
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022
2022.785
In 1950 freelance photographer Ruth Orkin was included in the Young Photographers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in 1951 Life magazine sent her on assignment to Israel. Before returning to America, she spent time in Italy, where she met a young American painter, Jinx Allen. The women collaborated on a series of photographs commissioned from Orkin by Cosmopolitan magazine for an article titled ‘Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone’. Standing in a Florence intersection, Orkin captured her friend as she manoeuvred through a crowd of men. The resulting image is reminiscent of a movie still – Orkin would go on to co-direct two feature films with her husband in the 1950s.
Helen Levitt
United States 1913–2009
New York
1940, printed 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2024
2024.100
After attending the New York Film and Photo League in 1935, Helen Levitt worked as a documentary photographer, and in 1943 held her first solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Levitt’s photographs are celebrated for their depiction of life in New York, capturing the uncanny in the everyday. She became fascinated by the actions of children on the streets, seeing surreal qualities in their play.
Left to right:
Helen Levitt
United States 1913–2009
New York (Boys fighting on a pediment)
c. 1940, printed late 20th century
gelatin silver photograph
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
2022.898
New York
c. 1940
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2024
2024.960
Yamazawa Eiko
Japan 1899–1995, lived in United States 1926–29
Far and NearEnkin
1962
published by Miraisha, Tokyo
artist’s book: photo-offset lithograph and printed text, 120 pages, hardcover, glued binding
Shaw Research Library
Yamazawa Eiko graduated from the Private Women’s School of Fine Arts (Shiritsu Joshi Bijutsu Gakkou) in Tokyo in 1918. In 1926 she moved to San Francisco, where she studied photography under Consuelo Kanaga. After returning to her hometown of Osaka in Japan, Yamazawa established her own photographic studio in 1931. In 1955 she returned to the United States, where she viewed The Family of Man photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. There was a notable shift in her practice following this experience. This evolution is reflected in her experimental photobook Far and Near, which features both coloured and black-and-white images taken in Japan and the United States, interspersed with texts written by the artist.
Tokiwa Toyoko
Japan 1928–2019
Dangerous Poisonous Flowers
Kiken Na Adabana 危険な毒花
1957
artist’s book: photo-offset lithograph and printed text, 244 pages, hardcover, dust jacket, glued binding
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
2024.783
Tokiwa Toyoko lived and worked in Yokohama, Japan, where she was introduced to photography by her older brother. In the early 1950s she joined the Shirayuri Camera Club, a women’s photography group. During the postwar period, many American soldiers were stationed in Yokohama, which became known for its red-light district, or akasen. Tokiwa became fascinated by the women working in these areas and began documenting their lives. Her 1957 photobook Dangerous Poisonous Flowers showcases both photographs and first-person texts, detailing the daily experiences of the women working in the city.
Left to right:
Louise Dahl-Wolfe
United States 1895–1989
Toni Frissell
United States 1907–88
Lillian Bassman
United States 1917–2012
Harper’s Bazaar, March 1943
Harper’s Bazaar, April 1950
Harper’s Bazaar, December 1953
Harper’s Bazaar, May 1955
Harper’s Bazaar, April 1965
Campbell-Pretty Fashion Research Collection
These issues of Harper’s Bazaar magazine feature images by some of the most significant fashion photographers working during the mid twentieth century: Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Lillian Bassman and Toni Frissell. The 1943 issue, published during the Second World War, was famed for launching the acting career of Lauren Bacall. It features powerful images by Dahl-Wolfe and Frissell, highlighting women’s roles during the war. Dahl-Wolfe captures a Bataan nurse in the Philippines showcasing her uniforms, while Frissell photographs a wounded American Air Force sergeant, assisted by a woman as he writes a letter home. Postwar issues of Harper’s Bazaar from the 1950s and 60s emphasised the idea of the modern, independent woman through international fashion shoots depicting the latest trends.
Left to right:
Diane Arbus
United States 1923–71
Harper’s Bazaar, September 1962
Harper’s Bazaar, June 1963
Harper’s Bazaar, December 1963
Harper’s Bazaar, September 1964
The Campbell-Pretty Fashion Research Collection
For Diane Arbus, like many photographers at the time, opportunities to publish photographs in magazines were crucial. They afforded artists the status of ‘professional photographer’ and were key sources of income. Magazine commissions also enabled wide distribution of photographs and access to interesting people and events. Arbus published her photographs regularly throughout the 1960s in magazines such as Esquire, Nova, The Sunday Times Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar. She made little distinction between her private work and commercial assignments – there is an intimacy and candor evident in her approach across shoots.
Imogen Cunningham
United States 1883–1976
The unmade bed
1957
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023
2023.10
In 1957 Imogen Cunningham was teaching at the California School of Fine Art when she overheard her colleague Dorothea Lange asking her students to photograph an object that they used every day. In response to this, Cunningham set the same task for herself. In the resulting image, prosaic elements such as discarded hair pins and crumpled bedsheets form an elegant still life and an unexpectedly tender portrait of the everyday.
New ways of seeing: Portraits, intimacy, liberation
The 1960s and 1970s saw extraordinary social change around the world. Political activism was on the rise, stemming from the anti–Vietnam War movement. There was an increased consciousness around racial equality, feminism and LGBTQ rights. Photographers also documented the popularisation of alternative ways of living, such as shared housing and collective lifestyles, with images that sometimes appeared in counterculture publications.
Australian women photographers working during this period were among the first to gain access to tertiary photography education. Among the key ideas that emerged through the work of these artists was a focus on community, personal relationships and everyday life.
This exhibition culminates in 1975, a watershed year. It marked the first International Women’s Year, inaugurated through the first UN World Conference on Women, and the height of second-wave feminism. That year the NGV staged the exhibition Six Australian Women Photographers, sometimes referenced as Wimmin, featuring work by Marion Marrison, Melanie Nunn, Fiona Hall, Melanie Le Guay, Ingeborg Tyssen and Jacqueline Mitelman. Fifty years on, many of the images from that exhibition are included here, presented alongside work from the artists’ peers.
Top to bottom, left to right:
Christine Godden
Australia born 1947
Untitled
1974
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
PH113-1991
Untitled
1974
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
PH114-1991
Untitled
1974
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
PH115-1991
Untitled
1974
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
PH116-1991
Left to right:
Marion Marrison
Australia born 1951
Untitled
1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board, 1976
PH228-1976
No title (Grassy sand dunes)
1974
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH29-1975
No title (Landscape)
1974
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH30-1975
For more than four decades, Marion Marrison has been exploring the use of photography in relation to the landscape and environment. Marrison received a diploma of design from the Tasmanian School of Art in 1973 and held her first solo exhibition two years later. In 1978 she began lecturing in photography at the Tasmanian School of Art, and in 2021 was accepted as a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania.
Marion Marrison
Australia born 1951
No title (Lady)
1973
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH32-1975
Melanie Le Guay
Australia 1951–75
Brett Whiteley, Bundanon, Nowra
1974
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH13-1976
Melanie Le Guay studied photography at Sydney Technical College from 1969 to 1970 and worked as a freelance photographer between 1971 and 1975. While Le Guay was the daughter of the Australian fashion photographer Laurence Le Guay, unlike her father, she often took social documentary photographs, representing people, places and events typical of 1970s Australia. This photograph was taken at night in New South Wales. The scene is illuminated as the artist Brett Whiteley walks away from the camera on a frosty evening, towards an empty field. He creates a trail of footprints behind him, as if walking into the unknown.
Jacqueline Mitelman
Scotland born 1948, Australia from 1951
Untitled
1973
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH12-1975
Jacqueline Mitelman
Scotland born 1948, Australia from 1951
Denny
1973
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1975
PH13-1975
Jacqueline Mitelman moved to Melbourne with her family when she was a child. After living and working in France in 1966, she returned to Melbourne in the early 1970s and began taking photographs in 1972. Her work was shown at Brummels Gallery two years later, and in 1976 she graduated from photographic studies at Prahran College. This portrait was part of a larger series that Mitelman created with the woman pictured. The image was shot at Pinacotheca Gallery in Melbourne, a space devoted to avant-garde art, established in 1967.
Left to right:
Leonie Reisberg
Australia born 1955
Untitled
1975
gelatin silver photograph
Presented through the NGV Foundation by Janice Hinderaker, Member, 2001
2001.157
Untitled
1975
gelatin silver photograph
Presented through the NGV Foundation by Janice Hinderaker, Member, 2001
2001.158
Leonie Reisberg studied photography at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology from 1972 to 1973, and at Prahran College from 1974 to 1975. From early in her career, Reisberg was renowned for her finely crafted photographs. In this image, a translucent shirt seemingly glows in front of a window, in an ethereal play of light, texture and shape. Like many women photographers who were practising in the 1970s, Reisberg turned her attention to domestic and often overlooked aspects of life, such as the delicately embroidered shirt she foregrounds in this image.
Carol Jerrems
Australia 1949–80
Untitled
1968
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1971
PH128-1971
‘For me photography has always been a pure art form … I am an artist, whose tool of expression is a camera. My main interest in photographing, as in living, is giving.’– Carol Jerrems, artist statement for the National Gallery of Victoria, 1973
Left to right:
Christine Godden
Australia born 1947
Untitled
1973
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
PH100-1991
Untitled
1973
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
PH94-1991
While living in the United States in the 1970s, Australian artist Christine Godden created tender images of the people, animals and places around her. She studied art in San Francisco and Rochester, New York, with contemporary feminist theory informing her work from this time. Godden’s quiet observation of women’s daily lives is evident throughout her photographs, with their spontaneous, naturalistic representation of bodies.
Top to bottom, left to right:
Christine Godden
Australia born 1947
Untitled
1973, printed 1986
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
PH104-1991
Untitled
1973, printed 1986
from the Untitled series 1974
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
PH106-1991
Untitled
1973, printed 1986
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
PH108-1991
Untitled
1974
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
PH124-1991
Untitled
1973, printed 1986
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
PH103-1991
Untitled
1974
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
PH122-1991
Top to bottom:
Christine Godden
Australia born 1947
Untitled
1973
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
PH94-1991
Untitled
1974, printed 1976
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
PH118-1991
Left to right:
Fiona Hall
Australia born 1953
Me at Wolombi, May 1974
1974
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased through the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund, 1976
PH177-1976
Fiona Hall began focusing on photography in the mid 1970s, following her time as an assistant to British landscape photographer Fay Godwin. Taken with a large-format camera, Hall’s early photographs were influenced by late modernism and formalism, the study of art focusing on the visual aspects of a work. In this image, Hall plays with forms and lines, capturing the elements of the room as if they have been layered, and she positions herself so that her reflection appears as though it is hovering in space. Curator and art historian Helen Ennis writes that while we often expect self-portraiture to reveal the artist, Hall’s photograph seems to conceal her.
Front window of my house in Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, March 1974
1974
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased through the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund, 1976
PH176-1976
Tree, Paddington, Sydney
1974
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased through the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund, 1976
PH178-1976
Shop window, Crown Street, June 1974
1974
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased through the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund, 1976
PH179-1976
Left to right:
In the early 1980s, Sue Ford revisited photographs she had taken early in her career. She recognised her enduring attention to women in her images, selecting works that were then included in her exhibition The Photobook of Women 1961–1982, held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. Through this process, and while immersed in feminist filmmaking and the discourse of the Sydney Women’s Art Movement, Ford came to consider the difference in the representation of women over the twenty-year period. As Ford defiantly stated, this was a difference that ‘women have defined … because no-one else was going to do it’.
Sue Ford
Australia 1943–2009
Carmel and Trish
1962, printed 1988
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1988
PH108-1988
This photograph was taken early in Sue Ford’s artistic career, and features her friends Carmel and Trish posing in a paddock. Although Ford approached her photography seriously, her sense of humour comes through in this image, which has been described as both an experiment and a playful critique of photography. Throughout her career, Ford often turned the camera on herself, as well as on her family, friends and acquaintances, using the medium to explore social and political issues. Her work is aligned with the important wave of Australian feminist photographers active during the 1970s.
Sue Pike
1963, printed 1988
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1988
PH110-1988
Orpheus
1972, printed 1988
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1988
PH112-1988
Micky Allan
1975, printed 1988
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1988
PH113-1988
Carol Jerrems
Australia 1949–80
Kath Walker, Moongalba, one
1974
gelatin silver photograph
ed. 1/9
Gift of Ms Ingeborg Tyssen, 2001
2001.822
Carol Jerrems studied photography at Prahran College in Melbourne, winning several student awards before first exhibiting her work in the early 1970s. Jerrems collaborated with Australian artist Virginia Fraser on the 1974 publication A Book About Australian Women, a suite of portraits featuring a diverse range of subjects. This portrait was taken as part of that project, and an edition is included in the book. The work features Oodgeroo Noonuccal, previously known as Kath Walker, who was an Aboriginal rights activist, poet, WWII veteran, environmentalist and educator. Noonuccal is photographed with her pen poised at the learning centre she established on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island, Queensland) to teach visitors to the island about Aboriginal culture and Country.
Virginia Fraser
Australia 1947–2021
Carol Jerrems
Australia 1949–80
A Book About Australian Women
1974
published by Outback Press, Melbourne
Shaw Research Library
This book features 131 photographs by the Melbourne-based photographer Carol Jerrems, interspersed with interviews and texts edited by Virginia Fraser. Published in 1974, the year before International Women’s Year, it captures a moment in time when many Australian women were deeply engaged in global feminist ideas. Described as a ‘collective portrait’, A Book About Australian Women has become an iconic reference in Australian feminist history. It highlights a diverse group of women involved in cultural life across Australia. Some of those featured include writer Anne Summers, painter Grace Cossington Smith, film director Jennie Boddington and the Wiradjuri tennis champion Evonne Goolagong Cawley.
Carol Jerrems
Australia 1949–80
Myra Skipper, Monsalvat, one
1974
gelatin silver photograph
ed. 1/9
Gift of Ms Ingeborg Tyssen, 2001
2001.821
Left to right:
Viva Gibb
Australia 1945–2017
Me and Sybil
1975
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Sybil Gibb and Rupert Duffy in memory of Viva Gibb through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2019
2019.88
Viva Gibb received a diploma of art from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1965. She then honed her painting skills under Australian artist John Brack at the National Gallery School, where she later earned a postgraduate diploma in printmaking in 1974. Gibb initially used photography as a basis for creating screenprints in the early 1970s, but soon came to appreciate photographs as a means of expression in themselves. Deeply committed to feminism and local activism, she intertwined her personal life with her art, often featuring her children and herself in her work. Every image Gibb made was a statement, reflecting art historian Cornelia Butler’s sentiment that ‘the personal is political, and all representation is political’.
Helen Garner
c. 1975
gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Sybil Gibb and Rupert Duffy in memory of Viva Gibb through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2019
2019.84
Left to right:
Ponch Hawkes
Australia born 1946
No title (Helen at Falconer Street)
c. 1975, printed 2018
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018
2018.1363
Ponch Hawkes began to photograph while working as a journalist for the counterculture magazine The Digger in 1972. In 1973 she moved into a communal house in Melbourne with fellow Digger contributor Helen Garner. Together they produced stories for the broadsheet, documenting new ways of living emerging in inner-city Melbourne in the early 1970s.
No title (In the backyard at Falconer Street)
c. 1975, printed 2018
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018
2018.1367
Ponch Hawkes
Australia born 1946
No title (Summer night in the backyard at Falconer Street)
c. 1975, printed 2018
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018
2018.1366
Left to right:
Ann Newmarch
Australia 1945–2022
We must risk unlearning
1975
colour photo-stencil screenprint
artist’s proof
Michell Endowment, 1978
DC6-1978
Two versions
1975
colour photo-stencil screenprint
ed. 4/22
Michell Endowment, 1978
DC8-1978
After training as an art teacher, Ann Newmarch became a lecturer at the South Australian School of Art in 1969. In 1975 she learnt the technique of photo-screenprinting, which coincided with the development of poster collectives around Australia. Newmarch was a founder and active participant of the Women’s Art Movement, established in Adelaide in 1976. She often combined images with texts advocating for women’s liberation and challenging the expectations around women’s roles in society.
Ingeborg Tyssen
Netherlands 1945–57, Australia 1957–2002
Melbourne
1975
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1976
PH188-1976
Ingeborg Tyssen
Netherlands 1945–57, Australia 1957–2002
Anti-Fraser demonstration, Melbourne
1975, printed c. 2004
inkjet print
Gift of an anonymous donor, 2019
2019.519
Ingeborg Tyssen took this photograph on the streets of Melbourne in late 1975. She captures a protest against the then leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser, following the constitutional crisis that led to the governor-general’s dismissal of Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam on 11 November. The dismissal of the popular, progressive prime minister sparked protests nationwide, particularly among Australia’s youth.
Left to right:
Ponch Hawkes captured powerful images of lesbian love and friendship during Melbourne’s early 1970s gay liberation movement. Hawkes took these photographs for the counterculture magazine The Digger, which was published between 1972 and 1975. The pride and solidarity shown in these images stand in stark contrast to the extreme discrimination lesbians faced during that time. Here Jenny Pausacker wears a button badge on her chest that reads ‘Glad to be Gay’, a bold statement in an era when queer people were often excluded from mainstream society. Such slogans played a key role in lesbian activism, serving as both personal declarations and acts of protest within a broader culture of oppression.
Ponch Hawkes
Australia born 1946
No title (Women holding hands in front of graffiti, ‘Lesbians are lovely’)
1973, printed 2018
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018
2018.1373
No title (Graffiti)
c. 1975, printed 2018
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018
2018.1369
No title (Women’s Theatre Group, performing outdoors beneath a Women’s Liberation banner in the City Square)
1975, printed 2018
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018
2018.1370
No title (Two women embracing, ‘Glad to be gay’)
1973, printed 2018
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018
2018.1372
No title (Fitzroy graffiti)
c. 1975, printed 2018
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018
2018.1368
No title (Graffiti, ‘Braddock…not mild, but sexist’)
1973, printed 2018
gelatin silver photograph
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018
2018.1374