Record of the International Symposium for the 20th Anniversary of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum:
Why Are Photography Museums Necessary?

Photography: A Promiscuous Life
Judy Annear
Former Senior Curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia

Photography: A Promiscuous Life

Judy Annear
In this presentation, I discuss the slippery medium of photography, andwhy museums that focus specifically on the medium, such as Tokyo
Photographic Art Museum (TOP), are important. Equally, I look at why
strong photography departments within museums are necessary. I hope todemonstrate why photography, in all its forms, needs to be a full participant
in institutions that focus on art as much as those that focus on media, andwhy we need to consider what this medium is within its historical, political,
social, and aesthetic contexts.
It is nearly 20 years since I was first invited to TOP, for the 2nd Tokyo
International Photo-Biennale in 1997. I brought Australian artist Patricia
Piccinini to that biennale. Today her work is more concerned with creating
creatures in the world than digitally within a photograph.
In 1997, in Australia as elsewhere, there was an ongoing discussion about therelationship of photography to art; it is worth remembering that Australianart museums had only been collecting photography since the 1970s. I noted
then that photography is used in many ways: to make family snaps, todocument evidence, as a window on the world, and — importantly — topresent complex ideas about the relationship between images, reality and theimagination. These aspects make photography difficult to categorize, which
poses a problem to institutions.
In 1997 the first camera phone by cell phone carrier J-Phone had yet to bereleased (It came out in 2000 in Japan) and the internet had only moved outof universities three years before. The subsequent online image explosion has
called everything into question. My view, however, is that this tsunami ofimages makes the understanding of photography in all its forms even moreurgent. Just as we need to understand our spoken and written languages, fromliterary to vernacular perspectives and from popular to academic viewpoints,
so we need to understand this visual language which is ever more pervasive.
I should note a difference here: spoken language can be seen as humannecessity, while written and visual languages are utilized for many different(and secondary) reasons.

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In the first half of this presentation I present some ideas about thephotographic medium. In the second half I use the major exhibition The
Photograph and Australia, which was seen in Sydney in 2015 and curated
by myself, as a case study for the importance of collecting, exhibiting, andwriting our own histories with photography. The related book can be acquired❖1

For the web page of the exhibition refer
to https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/
exhibitions/the-photograph-and-australia.
Accessed October 25, 2016.

❖1

online.
Fundamental to my thinking as a writer and curator is the constantconsideration of the question, "What is a photograph?" The title of thispresentation, Photography: A Promiscuous Life, is taken from a blog post by
the Calcutta-based writer Aveek Sen. Sen was one of the first contributors,
early in 2012, to Still Searching, the ongoing blog hosted by Fotomuseum❖2❖2

For a list of contributors of Still Searchingrefer to https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/
explore/still-searching/authors, Accessed
October 25, 2016.

Winterthur in Switzerland. It publishes current ideas about the photographic
medium — I recommend dipping in to it. Other contributors have included
Geoffrey Batchen, Charlotte Cotton, Trevor Paglen, Jodi Dean, and English
academic Elizabeth Edwards, who considers "institutions and the productionof photographs."
Aveek Sen writes in his first post:...photography, like love, is one of those irrepressibly miscellaneous
topics of conversation that can’t help opening up, in a rather unruly way,
into other topics even as one tries to discipline one’s thoughts into some
sort of purity and rigor.
…
Historically and in its essential nature, isn’t photography — the word
yoked to writing at its root — suited to this alluring, though often
discomfiting, openness more than any other medium? And what is this
openness but an engagement with the fluidity and accidents of life itself,
the outer as well as the inner life?
Yet, paradoxically, in spite of this openness, photography often leaves
one with the sense of a dead end, an impasse.
This happens at two levels. First, a photograph is always a photograph ofsomething "out there."Hence, its relationship with the world is, at its core, a closed circuit(although it is precisely this deadlock with the real and the material
that could give the photograph its mysterious or heroic quality).
Second, photography is now perhaps the one truly democratic medium:❖3

Aveek Sen, “Photography – A Promiscuous
Life,” Still Searching (blog). Article
published February 29, 2012. https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/stillsearching/articles/26913_photography_a_
promiscuous_life, Accessed October 25,
2016.

❖3

mastering its rudiments is like learning to speak, write, or use a phone.
Sen goes on to unravel the promiscuous mixing that the photograph is always
indulging in: namely, the fact that it is necessarily of something "out there,"and yet it always escapes being only of that thing out there — it contains "an71engagement with the fluidity and accidents of life itself," as he notes.
The photograph therefore always fails to deliver the world as we think weknow it and easily presents something we did not know was there. It is thedeadlock between the medium and the world which gives the photographits mysterious, if not heroic, quality. Further, the medium is democratic,
given the camera’s accessibility in the industrialized world; this has led to anever-expanding range of possibilities for photography. That is, photography
constantly adapts to each technological change, and while the older
technologies appear to be shed as a reptile loses its skin, in fact they are often
incorporated — according to commercial logic as well as photographers' wills.
(I return to this idea of the medium as democratic later in this presentation.)
Instagram and other digital apps allow one to make images look "old";
Snapchat provides endless options for self-improvement. Simultaneously,
many artists are exploring old techniques such as cyanotypes, daguerreotypes,
tintypes, and so on. As we come full circle, it is worth briefly reviewing theevolution of photography.
The birth of the medium was broadcast around the world nearly 180 years
ago. As cumbersome as the practice of photography was then, its advent
inspired all. Artists, writers, and many others could see the medium’s political,
social, and commercial applications. Photography enabled huge public crazes
as technological improvements made greater access and distribution possible.
No other "thing" in the world had ever operated like the photograph.
So personal, self-referential, imaginative was this mirror with a memory,and yet so clinical, evidential, useful for documenting the known world andexploration of the unknown. So precious and unique as a daguerreotype andso eminently marketable, saleable, and collectible as a carte de visite (as soon
as it was figured out how to make multiple copies). How helpful as an aid topainters and policemen and scientists. How beloved to people who wanted
mementoes of what they had seen and things that they could not experiencebut wanted proximity to.
How loud were the denunciations of those who knew that the world
had changed forever with the advent of photography and did not like it.
Correspondingly, how much fun everyone had with the arrival of the Brownie
camera in the late nineteenth century. Probably as much fun as with thearrival of the mobile phone camera little more than one hundred years later.
One of the drives of photography since its birth has been toward instantaneity— the capacity to revisit what we captured within a split second. Given
twenty-first-century screen resolution, we no longer even need to print thephotograph out. We no longer have a paper object unless we really want it,
and given the jewel-like qualities of modern screens and the ability to zoom

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in, for many purposes the screen image is enough. The photograph as object,
therefore, can now reside most intimately with its delivery host, and it cantransit from A to B at the same speed as any data.

❖4

In 2010, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art published a book
Charlotte Cotton and Alex Klein, Words
Without Pictures (New York: Aperture,2010): 36.

❖4called Words Without Pictures . It contains the transcript of a discussion
moderated by Charlotte Cotton and called — that hoary chestnut — "Is
Photography Really Art?", in which artist Michael Queenland asks, well,what is art? The advent of photography in the nineteenth century forcedthat question out into the open, and it has not left the table since. Now
that question is further complicated by others: what is a photograph, giventhat a photograph may never exist beyond the screen? Can a screen-based
image be art? This muddling of what a photograph is or can be operates in a
dynamic relationship to what art can be, and has done so since photography’s
inception.
Can a photograph be art only if it is printed out and presented on a wall?
There are magazine or book photographers who aspire to the wall — forexample, the American Annie Leibovitz. In earlier decades — that is, predigital — the aspiration of photographers was to make it into magazines suchas Life or Vogue. Magazines were then largely superseded by the wall as a host.
What is it about the wall?
Or should that be what was that about the wall? With the accessibility of thescreen, is the wall to fade from view for the still image? Can the photographexist as an object anymore? Younger photographers who are producing theirown books and zines tell me yes, though they have no interest in waiting for
exhibition spaces; they are happy to put their work out in the world in theform of self-made publications, or float them on screens.
In her 2010 book Look: Contemporary Australian Photography Since 1980,
Australian academic Anne Marsh writes:
Any attempt to define the pared-down essence of photography seems
doomed to failure. Historically, modernist photographers argued that art
photography needed to separate itself from the commercial market —to distance itself from documentary, advertising and photojournalism— and sought to establish the essential formal qualities of the medium,
yet their plan failed to contain photography as an artistic territory.
Throughout the modernist period, artists have crossed the borders
between art photography and other photographies. Many photographers
operated across art, fashion, advertising and documentary modes. It
is this multivalent language which is photography, a language which❖ 5 Anne Marsh, Look: Contemporary Australian
Photogra ph y Since 1980 (South Yarra:
Macmillan Art Publishing, 2010): 379
See also Susan Sontag, On Photogra ph y
(Middlesex: Penguin, 1973), 148.

crosses borders, that invigorated the medium. This is as true today as
it was in 1973 — before the art boom in photography — when Susan❖5

Sontag argued that "all art aspires to the condition of photography."73

As photography drives toward instantaneity and digital technology, it is also
pushing — as it always has — for multiplicity, repetition, seriality. This has
partly been motivated by commercial and capitalist requirements, and was
accelerated by scientific and (to some extent) artistic, mnemonic, and mimetic
needs.
Was this also driven by aesthetic considerations? Initially probably not, butsuch considerations were eventually implicated. Never more so than from the1970s until now, a period in which multiple viewpoints became a necessity
for many artists.
What is unique about contemporary approaches to photography is how thephotos are constructed by the photographer/artist and then received andunderstood by the person who looks. This may seem self-evident, but it isof course in tension with the elasticity of the photograph and its refusal to
give up, in any easy way, what it actually is. This latter aspect continues toconfound many contemporary theoreticians.
If the Still Searching blog is any indication, then there is ongoing and lively
discussion and debate. Recalling Aveek Sen’s view at the beginning of thispresentation, here is another (somewhat paraphrased) perspective. In 2010,
the English writer Julian Stallabrass noted in the New Left Review that a"democratic image culture" is still only democratic in terms of industrialized
nations, but it seems more likely to be found on Flickr, Facebook, Instagram,and YouTube than in a museum. However:…in both realms, word and image making is constrained — in a
museum by direct control, on the web by the frame and structure of theinterface — and in both, the ideal of democratic freedom seems distant— for that would require the bringing together of complexity andaccessibility, singular expression and cooperation, and power and mass
participation…
The two realms might best be seen, in terms borrowed from [German
philosopher Theodor] Adorno [writing in a letter to theorist Walter
Benjamin] in 1936 as "torn halves of an integral freedom — to which❖6

however they do not add up."
Nonetheless, museums' embrace of photography is critical: the care,conservation, and dissemination of our various histories since the dawn of
the medium, as well as research into modern and contemporary art, could
not have taken place without this. I point to the simple truism repeated from
Confucius to George Orwell and since: a culture that does not know its
past cannot know its present or future. Photography is vital in making thispossible.

74❖6

Jullian Stallabrass, “Museum Photography
and Museum Prose,” New Left Review 65(Sept/Oct 2010): 93-125.

Before moving on to the case study of the historical exhibition The Photographand Australia, it is worth remembering that a little more than two hundredyears ago in the West, around the time that Australia was colonized by the
British, most people could only see their own face in still water. If you were
lucky you could use a piece of glass or, if you were a bit better off, a mirror.
If you had money you could have a silhouette or drawing made; the very richcould afford a portrait painting.
In the early years of photography portraits were still a rarity, but they soon
became available to all. Now we can reproduce images of anything andeverything to a degree where not being able to do so is almost unthinkable.
This is a profound change in the way we see ourselves and the world.
Photography has changed everything, including art, and we need to consider
the implications at both an institutional and an individual level.
The second half of this presentation briefly encompasses aspects of myresearch toward the exhibition (and accompanying book) The Photograph andAustralia.
My position was first and foremost that of curator. I attempted to make an
exhibition from which a broad audience could draw knowledge and ideas,in addition to engaging in dialogue with historians from various disciplines,
other curators, and artists. The idea was to encourage them to continue thework of researching our own histories and consider how these might fit into
the world at large. Despite the scale of this project, I was only scratching thesurface of the available archives.
The following points formed the backbone of the project:•The Photograph and Australia was the first exhibition to assess Australianphotographic history, drawing on collections nationwide, since 1988.
•It centered on the nineteenth century — due to the dynamic between
the evolutions of Australian colonies (who did not federate into
the nation known as "Australia" until 1901) and the photographic
medium from the 1840s onwards — with a focus on how the colonies
photographed themselves and presented these images to each other andglobally at world fairs•It considered how photography was harnessed to create the idea of anAustralian nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
•It looked at the evolution of mass media (cartes de visite, illustrated press,
and so on) in the nineteenth century and at the digital revolution of
today.
•It presented clusters of photographs identifying people, where and how
they lived, what they did; it included personal as much as public andofficial material.

75

•It considered how our view of the world, ourselves, and each other has
been changed by the advent of photography.
•It presented a contemporary perspective on the past.
•And it was organized by theme, not chronology.
A project called The Photograph and Australia was bound to raise great
expectations. How well it succeeded in meeting these will take time todetermine, maybe a decade or so. I was convinced that it would be disliked
because of what was not covered — much, much more than could ever be
included. To turn that around, I was offering opportunities for others topick up the baton and drill into the themes, the works themselves, and theactivities of the photographers. The very incompleteness of The Photographand Australia was a necessity and a virtue.
In 2010, it was noted that there had not been a major survey in an art
museum of the history of Australian photography that drew on collections
nationwide since the exhibition and eponymous book Shades of Light:
Photography and Australia 1839-1988. This exhibition was seen at the
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra in 1988 — the bicentenary of theEuropean colonization of Australia.
I began my research by examining the photographs that were sent from
Australia to the great world fairs in the second half of the nineteenth century,and by considering what the photographers and the Australian colonies were
trying to do by participating in this way.
The first world fair was held in London's Crystal Palace in 1851. These fairs
were cathedrals to modernity. They were designed to impress audiences withthe magnificence of the made and natural worlds, and to shore up belief
in the power of Empire. In 1862 the editors of the Illustrated Weekly News,❖7

London wrote,
we have exhibitions of nearly all possible and impossible things under
the sun — pigs, paintings, performing fleas, steam engines... yet as there
is nothing more fertile than the imagination of exhibiting mankind,fresh addenda continue to drop in every day.
To the list of exhibits, one can add photographs (which were included in
1851, though none from Australia) and living people.
In 1855, photographs were sent from Australia to the Paris fair, most ofthem showing land and townscapes; local Victorian farmer John Hunter Kerr
sent Aboriginal artifacts which he had also photographed. In 1862, back in
London, a diverse group of photographs — including many of Aboriginal
people — were displayed. Stereographs by Morton Allport in Tasmania werealso sent that year, as were photographs of the finer parts of Melbourne.

76❖7

Illustrated Weekly News, London, October
12, 1862, 2. Quoted in Peter H. Hoffenberg,
An Empire on Display: English, Indian,and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal
Palace to the Great War (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 2001), 13.

World fairs were celebrations of industrialization and modernity. They
enabled personal and public collections to grow exponentially. Individuals
and colonies, professionals and amateurs contributed to them, and emerging
museums such as the Victoria and Albert in London and the Smithsonian
in Washington acquired from them. They enabled sorting, categorizing,collecting, and further examination. In short, the middle of the nineteenth
century saw the birth of the modern era and photography was, as it remains,
an integral part of that era.
In order to encourage investment in and migration to the colony ofQueensland, geologist and amateur photographer Richard Daintree
assiduously exhibited painted photographs in London in the 1870s. Manyof Daintree’s works survive; they are revealing of race relations, as well as
a number of matters to do with their making. Australian photography
documents engagements with indigenous people and new landscapes,
technological change and local adaptations, and the rise of sciences. There arefew grand gestures, few caches of fine prints until the 1920s — and then only
quite small caches. Styles and movements are imported, adopted, and until
the 1950s this happens quite slowly. There is little institutional interest in themedium beyond its capacity as "handmaid" until the 1970s.
Photography’s advent in the industrial revolution, and its integral role in theimperialist and modernist project, uniquely placed it to reflect and interpretthe enormous changes in art, science, and society over the last 180-odd
years. Simultaneously, photography is an amateur endeavor, accessible yet
withholding, seductive yet banal, troubling in its ordinariness.
Just as we believe it is important to understand our written and spoken
languages, so we must understand this visual language which has become soubiquitous and influential. Importantly, the dynamic between the exercise of
power and the eccentricities of the mundane in the medium allows cultures
to invent and reinvent themselves, to make themselves visible in all theircontradictions.
Mining collections — especially photography collections — is not an easy
thing to do. Yet it is necessary work, especially if those outside or peripheral to
the Euro-American cultural axis wish to achieve any visibility at all, whether
internally or externally. We need overviews, otherwise the picture is patchy
and archives are forgotten. In the twenty-first century, when repositories are
becoming daily more and more immense, the task can be overwhelming.
But without overviews and interpretations, as difficult and imperfect as they
always are, as cultures we fail to know and understand ourselves and eachother. We risk losing our many and various histories in the face of dominantsocial, cultural, and political forces.

77

In 2011, the photo historian Geoffrey Batchen reflected on the rash of bookson the history of photography that purport to be national surveys:…at the very moment when global capitalism, mass migrations, moderntransportation systems, and electronic communications have combined
to make a nation-state’s boundaries entirely permeable, these histories
are tenaciously reiterating the notion that a national essence can be
identified and described.
He goes on:...photography is...a differentiated field of practices in which both form
❖8

and meaning can be disconcertingly local.

I would add that these differences, rather than localism, should be celebrated.
The structure of The Photograph and Australia consisted of four overlapping
themes which were spread through the nine rooms of the exhibition and thefive chapters of the book. They are:
1. Aboriginal and settler relations
2. Exploration
3. Portraiture
4. Transmission (encompassing collecting, classifying, and distributing)
These themes clearly emerge from nineteenth-century photography. They
are, in the Australian context, entwined with socio-political history morethan they are with aesthetics and pictorial codes. There is no invention of thelatter in Australia, but there is very much so with the former. This invention
is aligned to the sense of wonder with which early photographers approachedthe medium.
Their appreciation of the information the photograph could impart led me toconsider how the photograph invented modern Australia. This bold question
is worth pursuing because of the sequence of events: Australian colonies weresettled between 1788 and 1836; the ideas around photography were discussed
by Australian intellectuals from around the 1830s. The first photograph wastaken on Australian soil in 1841.
The first of the four themes — photography associated with Aboriginal andsettler relations — is a critical one in Australia. Enshrined in the country's
federal legal system as of 1901 is the notion of terra nullius: that the continent
was empty when settled by Europeans, despite the fact that AboriginalAustralians had been living there for as long as sixty thousand years. The socalled White Australia policy, which was firmly in place from 1901 until the
1970s, had its roots in the 1850s. This policy discouraged non-Europeans

78❖8

Geoffrey Batchen, “Reviews,” Art Bulletin
93, no. 4 (December 2011): 497-501.

from emigrating to Australia; it goes hand in hand with terra nullius and bothare racist.
However, in researching nineteenth-century Australian photography it
became immediately and abundantly clear that the relationship between
settlers and the indigenous played out in complex ways, as did the diversityof immigrants. Christian missions like Coranderrk in Victoria and Poonindie
in South Australia came into being in the mid-nineteenth century in orderto resettle and Christianize indigenous people; photographs show us theirevolution, how viable they were, and then that they were destroyed.
What with all the stories to be told, I settled on two principles. One:because this exhibition was for an art museum, the most beautiful vintage
photographic objects were included, with the caveat that the content
had to be lively in some way. Two: I looked at narratives which tended
to be constructive rather than wholly negative. This is in keeping withthe contemporary indigenous view of representations; there was lengthy
consultation with indigenous communities from the beginning of the project,and permissions were sought.
The process of reclamation of early visual material by indigenous communities
is ongoing. I point to that process as an example of the power of thephotograph. People are able to find out where they came from, who they are
related to, and what happened to their forebears. For example, photographsby German immigrant J. W. Lindt dating from 1873 form a major bodyof work. They had wide international currency in the 1870s and 80s. A
substantial group of these photographs now resides with the community
descended from the subjects.
The second theme is exploration; it has three related parts. For example,
photography’s role in relation to the astronomical exploration of the southernhemisphere is as a contributor of crucial scientific information. Photography’srole in relation to mining, which in Australia is an enormous historicaland contemporary exercise, began with its use to document the physicalcomposition of the land. Lastly, there is the photographic exploration oflandscapes in general.
In pondering the question of whether photography invented modern
Australia, I also began to ask, could modern science exist without
photography?
Photographically mapping the southern skies was part of an important global
endeavor, the Carte du Ciel; photographing local flora and fauna provided
evidence of collectible exotica and enabled crazes such as pteridomania (fernfever); tourism as we know it grew out of the documentation of landscapes’
geology for practical purposes such as mining, as well as the rise of the middle

79

classes. All these things happened throughout the industrialized world, but
in Australia the people, landscapes, flora, and fauna were new and different.
For both specialized and general audiences, photography excited studies
and theories. Photographs could be cited as evidence. Photographs weremore portable than the objects photographed. Photographs could be sorted,enabling expanding systems of classification.
Charles Bayliss was one of Australia’s more remarkable nineteenth-century
photographers. His practice encompassed portraiture, land, and townscapes,
mammoth enterprises such as very large panoramas, and the documentationof scientific advances such as Australian inventor Lawrence Hargrave’s flying
machines.
The third and final genre is the most obvious in the history of photography
regardless of place: portraiture. Although the first documented occasionof a daguerreotype being taken in Australia is 1841, the earliest extant
daguerreotypes — George Goodman's photographs of Caroline Lawson andher children in Bathurst, New South Wales — date from 1845.
The first room of the exhibition included a wall of photographs of some ofthe photographers in the show. A number were self-portraits, or showed earlyphotographers with their mobile studios and more recent photographers with
their tools of trade. I thought it important to show that the photographs in
the exhibition were not necessarily mirrors or windows, but things made bypeople who had various perspectives on what they were constructing and why.
The penultimate room in the exhibition had a 12-metre work by the
Melbourne photographer and filmmaker Sue Ford titled Self-portrait withcamera 1960–2006. This was her final work and consists of 47 photographs
which piece together an active working life. Ford’s work, from early on in her
career, was not concerned with capturing a likeness; it had much more to dowith the consideration of experiences, actions, and the effects of passing time.
From the outset of my research, the circulation of images was a key aspectof the project. This is fundamental to the understanding of the nature of
the photograph from its inception, because it reveals how the drive toward
reproducibility — whether of the world or of itself as a form — was built into
the medium. In other words, it was never enough to simply capture an image,to excise a piece of the world; it was necessary to show this to others, and forthat image to be examined, collected, categorized, circulated, and reproduced.
The final work in the transmission section was a meditation on the circulationof images in the twenty-first century by two Melbourne-based artists, Patrick
Pound and Rowan McNaught. Pound collects vernacular photography fromall over the world; McNaught is a very clever web designer, amongst otherthings. If you head to compound-lens.com on a computer, you can see the80software attempt to read Pound’s collection of photographs which he has
sorted, in this case, by the predominance of round or lens-shaped things.
The work can also be viewed via a smartphone, where you see the completedcomputer "copy" plus a text written by the computer attempting to describe
what it "sees" — much as we try to understand what any photographrepresents.
To conclude, as I was undertaking a history of the photograph in Australia
with all the undertones, and overtones, of colonial and national image
making, I wanted to understand how photographs were used from the 1840sby those who saw their potential to inform, reflect, and invent.
In her 2012 essay The Spam of the Earth, the Berlin-based theorist and artist
Hito Steyerl noted,
The image of the people as a nation, or culture, is precisely that: a❖9

Hito Steyerl, “The Spam of the Earth:
Withdrawal from Representation,” The
Wretched of the Screen. (Berlin: Sternberg
Press, 2012), 160-175.

❖9compressed stereotype for ideological gain.
So how can we collectively approach such image making, and conceivably
undo the stereotypes and reimagine a different set of visual exchanges? I
would propose that researching, writing, and exhibiting the medium in all its
aspects is a good way to start.
Early photography underpins the structure of The Photograph and Australia.
It is inflected, inevitably, by a contemporary perspective. Despite myconstruction of a project which became weighted toward the early years ofthe medium, I was concerned not to recreate the past. The relatively small
amounts of material from whatever period that I was able to bring forth
into twenty-first-century light are points for consideration, and all are ripefor drilling into and expanding into large-scale exhibitions and books intheir own right. Contemporary art appeared in seven of the nine rooms of
the exhibition; in part, this is because many Australian artists have used the
medium to bear witness or to reclaim Australia’s past.
The twenty-first-century museum needs to assist twenty-first-century societyin accessing its history and culture. In this presentation, I have shown someof the reasons why photography can tell us so much about our recent pastand our contemporary society. I have also argued that photography must be
respected by institutions and the public alike for its unique adaptability as
an ever-evolving art object, record, memory aid, mirror, window, cultural
artifact, and treasure trove of possibilities.
(English Editing: Alex Dudok de Wit [Art Translators Collective])81