Woman’s Work: Eight Melbourne Photographers

About the exhibition
This exhibition, the first of original photographs to be held in the Monash University Exhibition Gallery, was an exercise in bringing together a variety of photographic styles and personal views. By concentrating on the work of a cross-section of women photographers in Melbourne, it aimed to set out a theme of perspective, as much as to demonstrate an interplay of talent training, experience and photographic concerns. It was by no means representative of either the full range of work of the photographers, nor the full scope of photography by women in Melbourne. This show offered instead a broad range of types of photography, from documentary and portraiture to landscape and formalist work. Self-reference was rarely apparent, yet each image was essentially personalised. Although the images and concepts of each of the photographers were so varied, their work ubiquitously reinforced the practice of photography as primarily a picture-making process that attempts to structure and give meaning to visual experience.

Text adapted from Jenepher Duncan, then Curator, Exhibition Gallery, Monash University, Clayton Campus

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^{Image: Detail of portrait of Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1974. Library of Congress item number LC-USZ62-47560, New York, United States}