A new book display curated in collaboration with PHOTO Australia is now open in the V&A Photography Centre. Titled New Photobooks from Australia, the selection showcases recent publications by Australian women photographers. Shown on open shelves alongside the extensive Royal Photographic Society Library in the Kusuma Gallery (Room 98), the books are available for visitors to pick-up and read. Pippa Milne, Associate Curator, PHOTO Australia, explains more in this post.
PHOTO Australia is a major new photography biennial in Melbourne celebrating Australia’s vibrant photography sector and providing an exchange with the global photography community. Founded by Elias Redstone in 2018, the delivery of the inaugural PHOTO 2021 International Festival of Photography and subsequent editions evidenced how Australian photography was often overlooked overseas. Opportunities like this display of photobooks at the V&A is part of an initiative to encourage audiences to engage with exceptional photographers from Australia.
Curated specially for the V&A and previewed during PHOTO 2024, this selection of recent photobooks by 16 Australian women engages portraiture, documentary and experimental photographic practices to explore the concerns of our time. In doing so, these varied publications offer compelling insights into this country’s land and peoples.
Australia has some extreme landscapes and climates that have shaped communities. We have observed with delight the way that several artists turn their lenses and minds to the places they encounter, producing insightful and enigmatic portraits of these locations. Abigail Varney’s Rough & Cut conjures the surreal and seemingly farfetched place of Coober Pedy, a South Australian country town shaped by the opal mining industry, while Liss Fenwick’s astounding first book, Humpty Doom, considers her hometown of Humpty Doo. Fenwick has placed personal, naïve images from her teens alongside more maturing imagery, foregrounding this small agricultural town in the scorched Northern Territory. Isabella Capezio processes emotional experiences and her book, Feeling Loss is a tentatively bound bundle of highly saturated, contrasting images of a fire-ravaged Australian landscape interleaved with postcard sized photographs, evidencing regrowth and hope amid the charred trees and the shrouded sun.
Similarly surreal, yet incorporating experimental photographic practices is Ambient Pressure by Rebecca Najdowski. Manipulating negatives and surfaces, she draws attention to the way that both places and photographs are constructed. Landscape is equally sculptural in the work of collaborators Honey Long and Prue Stent, whose Drinking from the Eye entwines the artists’ bodies in a performative dance with the earth itself. Zoë Croggon and Janina Green, with their books How to Cut an Orange and Reproduction respectively, also experiment with photographic practice in their long-term engagement with the repositioning of photography through intervention and recontextualization, demonstrating humour, vitality, and poetry.
Photobooks, as portable objects, offer a special means of capturing and communicating variety within Australian photographic practice. Many of these books are deeply personal but resonate across cultures and locations. Wendy Catling deftly addresses her mother’s experience with domestic violence in her sombre and tender publication Nightshade. Ying Ang’s intense and embodied book, The Quickening, is meticulous and layered, examining new motherhood and the postpartum experience from within. Motherhood is also framed with tender attention by Lisa Sorgini in Behind Glass, which makes visible the love and tedium of raising a child during the pandemic lockdowns. In NUÑEZ by Ilsa Wynne-Hoelscher Kidd, the artist meditates on the beauty and generosity of female friendship.
Portraiture remains an impactful vehicle for a range of subjects. Mia Mala McDonald’s Once in a lullaby gathers portraits of ‘rainbow families’, celebrating the diversity of rapidly changing communities and what it means to be family in Australia. The portraits within Naomi Hobson’s Adolescent Wonderland embody the energy and hope of young people within a loving community, offering a direct narrative from a First Nations perspective. Atong Atem’s Surat joyfully and respectfully reperforms the portraits that the artist’s parents brought with them to Australia as refugees from Sudan, connecting to her roots while establishing a new way of remembering through photography.
Winner of the 2024 Australian and New Zealand Photobook Award, Ghar by Anu Kumar is a small book of great depth. In a beautifully edited suite of portraits and vignettes, the book creates a portrait of place and identity as Kumar returns to her birthplace in India after growing up in Australia, using her medium format camera to process the sensation of being both at home and at odds.
From the V&A’s Photography Centre, Australia seems a distant island of vast expanse, but despite this geographical difference, the stories that artists in Australia are tackling through photography are both specific and universal. They bear witness to the concerns held by these women about the world around them, the society that they are shaping and the medium of photography, which they have chosen to work with. This is a small selection of talented women photographers making photobooks in Australia and offers just a glimpse into the breadth of photographic energy being produced on this Southern Continent.
PHOTO Australia respectfully acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands upon which they work and live, and the rich and diverse Indigenous cultures across what is now called Australia. For over 60,000 years, Indigenous arts and culture have thrived on this sacred land, and PHOTO Australia honour Elders and cultural leaders past and present.
New Photobooks from Australia is on view until November 2024 at the V&A South Kensington.
