A photograph can be grounded in the real world and record, document, and reflect the world around us. It can also be the product of imagination, storytelling and illusion; and on occasion operate in both realms.

Celebrating the opening of Photography: Real and Imagined, NGV Senior Curator Susan van Wyk leads a tour of the exhibition introducing major photographic works from the NGV Collection from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.

Susan van Wyk is Senior Curator of Photography at the NGV. Since joining the NGV in 1989, she has worked on more than sixty exhibitions of Australian and international photography. Recent exhibitions include Olympia: Photographs by Polixeni Papapetrou (2019), Turning Points: Contemporary Photography from China (2019), Colony: Australia 1770–1861 (2018) and Henry Talbot: 1960s Fashion Photography (2016). Over her career she has published widely on photography in books, exhibition catalogues and in numerous journals and magazines.