Upcoming Exhibitions
VIC
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Hicks | Gebhardt | Hawkes
Museum of Australia Photography
23rd November 2024 – 16th February 2025Join us to celebrate the launch of our summer exhibitions at the Museum of Australian Photography: Amos Gebhardt’s Mångata is a poetic series that weaves sound, moving image and photography, with portraits lit entirely by moonlight; 500 Strong is the culmination of an epic project between celebrated Melbourne artist Ponch Hawkes and curator Jane Scott to photograph 500 Victorian women over the age of 50; Snakes and Mirrors shows recent works by Petrina Hicks that contemplate the self-awareness of animals, and our desire to understand the phenomenology of animal life from a human perspective. Hear from the artists and enjoy these three distinct and equally powerful exhibitions.
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Shortcuts - Mitch Pinney
Hillvale Gallery
6th December 2024 - 31st January 2025In 2020 my days fell into a rhythmic routine where I would wander with my camera behind the Coburg drive-in cinema and along the serpentine banks of the Merri Creek. Each evening, I returned home to develop my film, repeating the journey the following day. It was during these excursions that I found a treehouse cradled by the banks. The treehouse could be reached only by foot over stepping stones strewn across the creek bed. It felt like a special location, detached from the tumult and turmoil of the world beyond.
In the years since the lockdowns lifted, I have returned regularly to the treehouse, witnessing its transformations with the seasons. Crude messages and confessions have been scrawled across its plywood walls overgrown blackberry bushes creep ever closer. Under its shelter, a man, recently rendered homeless by the housing crisis, has carved out a sanctuary for himself and his two dogs.
Shortcuts unfolds as an ambling exploration of the treehouse and the wilderness that contains it. Echoing the path of its creation, it travels an undefined trajectory, following flowered sidepaths and leaf-strewn switchbacks, detecting fleeting moments and glimpses of light, circling back upon and intersecting itself. The contours of this exploration reflect the internal musings during its making, and, subtly - similar to the manner in which a sculptural form has its obverse in the mold from which it emerged - gestures toward the broader social and economic environment which has given rise to this space-as-sanctuary. -
Through the Looking Glassoes - Danielle Edwards
Gold Street Studios
23rd October 2024 - 26th January 2025Offical opening 10th November 2024 2pm to 4.30 pm Opening Speech by David Tatnall at 2.30pm
Peering through the looking glass offers surprise and intrigue. When we look at things differently, we often see what was right in front of us in a new and exciting way.
Inspired by nature, invisible radiation and visible light underpin this collection of handcrafted silver gelatin images.
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Melbourne Out Loud: Life through the lens of Rennie Ellis
State Library of Victoria
1st March 2024 – 28th January 2025If there was ever a photographer to take Melbourne’s portrait, it was Rennie Ellis.
Rennie had an uncanny ability to slip into all kinds of social circles and his photographs are the ultimate story of life on the town.
He roamed our places: St Kilda Beach, the MCG, Swanston Street, Sidney Myer Music Bowl. He met superstars: Tina Turner, Mick Jagger, Grace Jones. He stood with crowds on the biggest days of the year: Melbourne Cup, the AFL Grand Final, the Boxing Day Test. He befriended people from all walks of life: athletes and celebrities, punks and protesters, beach goers and party lovers. And he captured it all on camera.
Part of the Photo 2024 International Festival of Photography, Melbourne Out Loud is a collection of iconic, unseen and everyday photographs from one of our greatest chroniclers. A celebration of going out, being seen and being yourself.
NSW
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Student Life: Max Dupain at the University of Sydney
Chau Chak Wing Museum - Univ. of Sydney
Level 4, open until 29th June 2025This exhibition introduces Dupain’s modernist approach to photography in a brilliant and frequently hilarious series of candid shots.
The Australian modernist photographer Max Dupain (1911-1992) documented student life at the University in the early 1950s in a brilliant and frequently hilarious series of candid shots. They show the range of student cultures and interests in the immediate postwar years.
The exhibition introduces Dupain’s modernist approach to photography which combines formal architectural backdrops with candid documentary studies of student life.
One series displays the student floats on which they performed and demonstrated major issues of the day. The Petrov affair inspired one of the floats in 1954, another includes anti-bomb demonstrations.
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Southern Sky Astrophotography 2024
Sydney Observatory
5th December 2024 – 1st February 2025Photofields presents the Southern Sky Astrophotography 2024 exhibition, the 20th edition of the David Malin Awards.
Photography and astronomy have a long association at Sydney Observatory. Observatory Hill has long been a place for people to connect with, observe, understand and tell stories about Sky Country, starting with the Gadigal who carved knowledge about Sky and Sea Country into local rock. Henry Chamberlain Russell, the resident Government Astronomer, began photographing the sky from Sydney Observatory in the early 1870s. His photographs of the Magellanic Clouds were internationally acclaimed. This tradition of photographic observation continues today in Southern Sky Astrophotography.
Awards presented by the Central West Astronomical Society for AstroFest and sponsored by CSIRO Space and Astronomy.
ACT
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Carol Jerrems: Portraits
National Portrait Gallery
30th November 2024 - 2nd March 2025Carol Jerrems: Portraits is a major exhibition of one of Australia’s most influential photographers. Jerrems’ intimate portraits of friends, lovers and artistic peers transcend the purely personal and have come to shape Australian visual culture. Set against the backdrop of social change in the 1970s, her practice charted the women’s movement, documented First Nations activism, put a spotlight on youth subcultures and explored the music and arts scenes of the era.
In a career that spanned only 12 years before her tragic death at the age of 30, Jerrems captured the world around her with curiosity and courage. She was a voracious observer yet also intentional in her approach to narrative and composition. Her photographs play with tension and dramatic impact. They are candid but at times consciously performative; vulnerable but also tough; melancholic yet joyful.
Drawn from the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia and the National Portrait Gallery, the exhibition showcases more than 140 photographs, from Jerrems’ lesser-known early work to the now iconic Vale Street 1975, and coincides with the 50th anniversary of her landmark publication A book about Australian women. Featuring portraits of cultural figures like Anne Summers, Bobbi Sykes, Evonne Goolagong and Linda Jackson the exhibition examines how her work defined a decade and continues to shape how we think about photography today.
On show exclusively at the National Portrait Gallery until 2 March.
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if only we could take the time: contemporary Australian photography
National Portrait Gallery
30th November 2024 - 1st June 2025‘There is so much beauty around us if only we could take the time to open our eyes and perceive it. And then share it.’ Photographer Carol Jerrems made this tender observation in the preface to her landmark 1974 publication, A book about Australian women, produced in collaboration with writer Virginia Fraser.
Taking its title from this text, if only we could take the time: contemporary Australian photography considers how this impulse to observe, to record and to share continues to propel photographic practice in Australia today. This show, staged alongside the major exhibition Carol Jerrems: Portraits, spotlights the work of three contemporary Australian artists whose work sits in dialogue with Jerrems’ legacy.
Ying Ang, Katrin Koenning and Anu Kumar are photographers who capture and distil quiet moments. Like Jerrems, they chronicle intimate relationships and use the camera to mediate closely felt and emotionally vivid experiences. The gestures that breathe life into a family home, the swampy dislocation of early motherhood, the interlocked networks of friends and family. In these works, tenderness, care and connection are foregrounded and the idea of portraiture is expanded.
Photo: Katrin Koenning
WA
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Henry Roy – Impossible Island
AGWA
30th November 2024 – 18th May 2025In a world-first, legendary photographer Henry Roy holds his first survey at The Art Gallery of Western Australia.
Henry Roy – Impossible Island draws on 40-years of recollections and observations as it brings together 113 photos taken from 1983 to 2023. The images were shot in places such as his native Haiti, Ibiza, Paris, Dakar, Cameroon, Normandy, Marrakesh, Thailand, and the Ivory Coast.
Impossible Island channels the many influences that have shaped Roy’s artistic journey including his exile from his homeland of Haiti to his love of literature and passion for New Wave French cinema.
Henry Roy’s work has been of international interest since the 1990s because of the incredible beauty and richness of his imagery, qualities that have made him a sought-after photographer in magazine editorial and exhibition contexts.
His photographic vision was a key component of the new publishing trends in the late 1990s, specifically as a contributor to Purple, and later in the 2000s Hobo magazine.
QLD
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New Light: Photography Now + Then
August 17th 2024 – July 13th 2025With the power to freeze and preserve time, photography has captured imaginations for centuries. This August, step into New Light: Photography Now + Then, an exhibition where past and present converge in a mesmerising display of photography spanning 1890 to 2024.
Immerse yourself in the remarkable tale of amateur Brisbane photographer Alfred Henrie Elliott (1870-1954), whose extraordinary images lay dormant for decades until they were discovered in 1983, stored in cedar cigar boxes beneath a home in Red Hill.