Pacific Exposures

Australian and Japanese photographic connections since the late nineteenth century.

MADA researcher and art historian, Melissa Miles, is leading a new Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project exploring an important but little explored aspect of Australia’s photography history.

Together with her fellow Chief Investigator, the award-winning historian from Monash University’s Faculty of Arts Professor Robin Gerster, Melissa will reveal the historical importance of photography as a medium of cultural connection between Australia and Japan, both long before and ever since the Pacific War. The three year collaborative project examines photography’s role in that shared cultural history, and how it continues to shape Australia’s engagement with Japan today.