Masterpieces Of Australian Photography

'Photography and Australia' focuses on those aspects of photographic practice that can be considered distinctively Australian. It argues that the colonial experience has been crucial in shaping photographers' concerns.

In our age of uncertainties, globalization, virtual reality and digitalization have inspired (or compelled) photographers to devise new ways of seeing, and distinctions between artist and photographer, fact and fiction begin to fade. Australian photographers continue to carve out a special niche for themselves on the world lens, developing new traditions and evolving forms of expression. Many of the young photographers represented here cast their eyes, like modern anthropologists, towards what is ordinary and even overlooked in our urban landscape as potent signs and symbols of who and what we now are. Photographs by 37 photographers, including Trent Parke, Penelope Davis, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Tara Shield and Kenneth Pleban, range over a series of themes: the 'uncanny', which includes camera-less images; new portraiture, which takes a time-honored subject into fresh creative areas; an examination of physically (but not psychically) vacant spaces; documentary work that considers reality in provocative ways; and photographs that explore the complex nature of modern social groupings. It makes clear that photography continues to be a medium capable of reflecting both the unlimited nature of the physical world and of the imagination.

What is it about photography? How and why did it become the world's most popular art? Another look through the book will show you that the camera can be a prodigious fraud. Always has been. Manipulation of photographs is as old as photography. The digital revolution has now made manipulation easy for anyone with access to a computer.

Catalogue of exhibition revealing the rich interconnections between history and the National library's Collections. Some of the 300 or so photographs have never been exhibited before and are by some of Australia's finest photographers.