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1. Leigh Astbury reviews ‘Anything goes: Art in Australia 1970-1980’ edited by Paul Taylor

(May 1985, no. 70)

... painterly abstraction, minimal art, conceptual art, body art, art photography, feminist art, political art, community-based art and other forms are all included. Yet by the late seventies, as Mary Eagle ...

2. ‘A little college is a dangerous thing’ by D.J. O’Hearn

(March 1988, no. 98)

... and even science and photography; he comes to see there is no certainty unless we choose to believe in human constructs: ‘The law had (certainty); religion had it; Marxism had it: the natural world didn’t ...

3. Maria Takolander reviews 4 Literary Journals

(October 2004, no. 265)

... a bloodhound. The issue begins with an interview with Bob Brown by the editor, David Owen. This is followed by an interesting article by Peter Timms on wilderness photography, its romanticisation and ...

4. ‘The Glass Menagerie: A faithful version of Tennessee Williams’s classic play’ by Clare Monagle

(ABR Arts)

Ensemble Theatre’s The Glass Menagerie offers a faithful but thrilling production of Tennessee Williams’s classic play. This iteration of Williams’s ‘memory play’ retains the historical and geographical ...

5. Gregory Day reviews ‘Enchantment by Birds: A history of birdwatching in 22 species’ by Russell McGregor

(April 2025, no. 474)

... used skins from the Australian Museum to illustrate his bird talks – but that with photography now de rigueur, in this particular instance ‘he was disgusted by Mack’s wanton act of bloodshed’. A few ...

6. Paul Kane reviews ‘At the Louvre: Poems by 100 contemporary world poets’ edited by Antoine Caro, Edwin Frank, and Donatien Grau

(April 2025, no. 474)

... paintings; two composed concrete poems; and three wrote works seemingly unrelated to the project). And what did they all have to say? The Louvre, 2017 (photography by Alessio Mercuri via Wikimedia Commons) ...

7. Richard Leathem reviews ‘Australia at the Movies: The ultimate guide to modern Australian cinema 1990-2020’ by David Stratton

(March 2025, no. 473)

... (1994) is ‘as offensive as it is dim-witted’, Swinging Safari (2017) is ‘a laughless lump of a film’, and of Men’s Group (2008) he says, ‘This grim little film is compromised by tiresome photography (unnecessarily ...

8. Paula Amad reviews ‘A Guide To Gay and Lesbian Writing in Australia’ by Michael Hurley, ‘In With The Tide' by Michael Noonan, and ‘Footprints Across Our Land’ edited by Jordan Crugnale

(April 1996, no. 179)

... Desert women. Though the stories are the focus their meanings are bound neither by their oral origin or their written translations. Photography, painting and text do not capture but provide vital expressions ...

9. Beth Kearney reviews ‘The Use of Photography’ by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

(March 2025, no. 473)

... jealousy, affairs, desire, and more – she asks her readers to see their lives in her writing. Photography is often a tool in this project; Ernaux uses it to interrogate the ways we look back at life ...

10. Alison Stieven-Taylor reviews ‘Until Justice Comes: Fifty years of the movement for Indigenous rights. Photographs 1970-2024’ by Juno Gemes and ‘Imagining a Real Australia: The documentary style 1950-1980’ ...

(March 2025, no. 473)

Photography finds itself at yet another crossroads. In an era of artificial intelligence, the photograph’s role as a document of evidence has again come under the spotlight. Entering this disruptive space ...

11. ‘William Henry Corkhill and the Tilba Tilba Collection’ by Michelle Hetherington

(November 2003, no. 256)

... in photography, but he had, it seems, read a few books on the subject. Over the next twenty years, he would take thousands of pictures of his family, friends and neighbours, seldom venturing beyond the ...

12. Isobel Crombie reviews ‘Dupain’s Australians’ by Jill White

(October 2003, no. 255)

... and creator of stunning images? Not at all. In fact, I believe that it enlivens our understanding of his photography, not to mention the period in which he worked. Far from existing in some rarefied and ...

13. ‘A Universal Brain’ by Kathryn Favelle

(June-July 2004, no. 262)

... years of collecting at the National Library and contains approximately 200 items. In this exhibition, rare books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sit beside the contemporary photography of ...

14. Christopher Menz reviews ‘Treasures: Highlights of the Cultural Collections of the University of Melbourne’ edited by Chris McAuliffe and Peter Yule, and ‘Treasures of the State Library of Victoria’ by ...

(June-July 2004, no. 262)

... most of the juxtapositions of images are less jarring. A section on photographs reminds us that the SLV was founded only nineteen years after the invention of photography in 1835, coincidentally the ...

15. Christopher Menz reviews ‘Treasures: Highlights of the Cultural Collections of the University of Melbourne’ edited by Chris McAuliffe and Peter Yule, and ‘Treasures of the State Library of Victoria’ by ...

(June-July 2004, no. 262)

... most of the juxtapositions of images are less jarring. A section on photographs reminds us that the SLV was founded only nineteen years after the invention of photography in 1835, coincidentally the ...

16. Elisa deCourcy reviews ‘Max Dupain: A portrait’ by Helen Ennis

(January–February 2025, no. 472)

... when galleries and libraries around the country established dedicated photography curatorial departments from the late 1960s and 1970s. This would also be the case at the National Gallery of Australia, ...

17. Kevin Foster reviews ‘The Buna Shots: The amazing story behind two photographs that changed the course of World War Two’ by Stephen Dando-Collins

(January–February 2025, no. 472)

Has any photograph ever changed the course of a war? It is a claim as old as photography itself, expressing a profound faith in the power of the image to communicate and move. However, like most religious ...

18. 2024 Arts Highlights of the Year

(January–February 2025, no. 472)

... York) blended photography, biography, and performance – the despair in neglected Pennsylvanian towns rendered ripe, heavy, and intricately networked down generations and across communities. Bangarra’s ...

19. Ruth Balint reviews ‘The Holocaust and Australian Journalism: Reporting and reckoning’ by Fay Anderson

(November 2024, no. 470)

... attention to in a previous book, Shooting the Picture: Press photography in Australia (2016). Ultimately, it was photographs, not words, that exposed the full horror of the Holocaust to the world. The ...

20. 'Lee: The inarticulable cruelty of war' by Tiia Kell

(ABR Arts)

... London, where she later secures her photography job with British Vogue under editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough). With full access to the Lee Miller archives, the film has been adapted from ...

21. Declan Fry reviews ‘Nonhuman Witnessing: War, data, and ecology after the end of the world’ by Michael Richardson

(October 2024, no. 469)

... then do we invest in the imagistic and linguistic reality that film, photography, and journalism depend upon? Social media here encourages fragmentation, particularly in societies already struggling with ...

22. Scott Stephens reviews ‘Liberalism as a Way of Life’ by Alexandre Lefebvre

(October 2024, no. 469)

... out the barest and most meagre of livings – desperate existences forever memorialised in the photography of Dorothea Lange and John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. The distant thunder of war, ...

23. Felicity Bloch reviews ‘Dora B: A memoir of my mother’ by Josiane Behmoiras

(November 2005, no. 276)

... mother: ‘I have observed my mother grow older alongside me and I have recorded our life in a long accumulation of pictures that I can replay in my mind … I should have chosen still photography. My universe ...

24. John Thompson reviews ‘Frank Hurley: A Photographer’s Life’ by Alasdair McGregor

(February 2005, no. 268)

... of Australian photography in the twentieth century is complete without the inclusion of iconic examples of Hurley’s work, as witnessed in the current National Library of Australia show, In a New Light: ...

25. Stephanie Owen Reeder reviews ‘Belonging’ by Jeannie Baker

(February 2005, no. 268)

Human beings have a strong need to belong, whether it be to a family, a community or humanity at large. In Belonging, Jeannie Baker explores this need. She takes the reader on a visual journey through ...

26. Letters - May 2005

(May 2005, no. 271)

...  During The Summer of Silver (November 2004–April 2005) in Canberra, four of our major institutions presented a wide spectrum of photography exhibitions. Large crowds evidenced the popularity of this ...

27. Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews ‘Hecate vol.30, no.2’ edited by Carole Ferrier, ‘Island 99’ edited by David Owen and ‘Griffith Review 7: The lure of fundamentalism’ edited by Julianne Schultz

(April 2005, no. 270)

... every detail draws you in and makes you wonder. This photograph is one of a series illustrating Andrys Onsman’s article ‘Shooting the Song of the Moonbirds’, which uses Maynard’s photography in its examination ...

28. Ian North reviews ‘Body Culture: Max Dupain, photography, and Australian culture, 1919–1939’ by Isobel Crombie

(March 2005, no. 269)

Like many a portentous new (electronic) media advocate today, the US photographer Paul Strand opined in his 1922 essay ‘Photography and the New God’ that photography unified science and art and therefore ...

29. Julie Robinson reviews ‘Intersections: photography, history, and the national library of Australia’ by Helen Ennis

(March 2005, no. 269)

Photography was introduced to Australia in the 1840s, with the first photograph being taken in May 1841, in Sydney. Since then, photographic images, in all their permutations (including the more recent ...

30. Isobel Crombie reviews ‘An Eye For Photography: The camera in Australia’ by Alan Davies

(March 2005, no. 269)

For nearly 100 years before any public art gallery entered the field, the main institutional collectors of Australian photography were state libraries. Primarily, they bought photographs for their informational ...