Photography

Images of the Interior: Seven Central Australian Photographers by Philip Jones

by Helen Ennis •

November 2011, no. 336

Wakefield Press, $39.95 pb, 161 pp

Photography

Images of the Interior: Seven Central Australian Photographers by Philip Jones

by Helen Ennis •

November 2011, no. 336

One section on Australian photography slowly growing on my bookshelves is devoted to anthropological and ethnographic photography. Philip Jones’s latest book, Images of the Interior: Seven Central Australian Photographers, belongs there because of the amount of anthropological material it contains. But it could also take its place among books devoted to vernacular photography, because none of the seven photographers Jones has selected was professionally trained. All were keen amateur photographers who produced substantial bodies of work during the time they lived and worked in Central Australia. The book deals with an epoch of dramatic change, beginning in the 1890s with some of the earliest European photographs of the Centre, and concluding in the 1940s.

Helen Ennis

By this contributor

Helen Ennis is Emeritus Professor, ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory and a past ABR Fellow. She is an independent photography curator and writer specialising in the area of Australian photographic practice. Her publications include Reveries: Photography and Mortality (2007) and Photography and Australia (2007). Her biography Margaret Michaelis: Love, Loss and Photography (2006) was awarded the Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and the prize for Best Book from the Power Institute of Fine Arts and the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. Her most recent book, Olive Cotton: A life in photography (2019), won the Magarey Medal for Biography and the Non-fiction prize in the Queensland Literary Awards in 2020. She is currently writing a biography of Max Dupain.