The 1994 publication, Indecent Exposures: Twenty Years of Australian Feminist Photography documents the intersection of the women’s movement and photographic practice in Australia from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.
Catrina Moore argued that photography was not just a medium for feminist artists, but a primary tool for dismantling the "male gaze" and questioning how women were historically represented in art and media. Moore explored how feminist photographers moved beyond simply "taking pictures" to using the camera as a political instrument. She categorizes the work into shifts: Early 1970s work focused on "making the invisible visible," capturing women’s labor, protests, and private domestic lives. And by the 1980s, the focus shifted toward post-structuralism, where artists began deconstructing the "myth" of femininity and how the media constructs gender roles.
The book highlighted how Australian feminists rejected the idea of the "lone male genius" and the "art-for-art's-sake" mentality. Instead, they embraced collective practice with many works emerged from feminist collectives and community posters. Also that some were using text, collage, and series-based images to disrupt the passive consumption of a "pretty picture."
A central pillar of the book is the critique of the Voyeuristic Gaze. Moore discusses how artists like Anne Ferran, Julie Rrap, Micky Allan and Tracey Moffatt reclaimed the female body. They moved away from the "nude" as an object of beauty and toward the body as a site of power, trauma, and identity. Moore provides space for the evolving nature of identity, including: How photography expressed the "displacement" of non-Anglo women in Australia; Critiquing the colonial lens and how Aboriginal women used photography to assert sovereignty and family history.
Indecent Exposures is credited with formalizing the history of feminist art in Australia.
"These photographers did not just want to change the images of women; they wanted to change the way we look at images altogether."
A Gael Newton essay on the book originally published in Art and Australia - Women, Vol 32 No 3, Autumn 1995
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