People and Portraiture
In a New Light includes photographs of many influential figures in Australian public life during the twentieth century. Artists, writers, musicians, politicians and sports people are featured as well as unknown or ordinary individuals, offering a private, more intimate perspective. Professional and studio photographers are represented alongside amateur and snapshot photographers.
Seen together, these portraits chart some of the major developments in photographic portraiture in recent decades. In short, portraits from the 1930s by photographers such as Harold Cazneaux, Olive Cotton and Max Dupain are unique works. Their mode of production is formal and deliberate, and the prints, made by the photographers themselves, are beautifully controlled. Since the 1960s, the demand for celebrity portraiture has burgeoned so that portraits (for example, of pop and movie stars) are now routinely mass-produced for the publicity industry.
The exhibition also includes a selection of contemporary portraits predicated on the photographer’s engagement with his or her subject.