Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia (1848–2020), published in 2021 is a landmark research project by scholars Martyn Jolly and Daniel Palmer. They argue that photography’s history in Australia isn't just a timeline of images, but a history of how those images were staged, socialized, and consumed by the public.
The authors describe their approach as a "parallax view"—using their different academic perspectives to look at how photography has been "socialized" over 170 years. It features a chronology of rarely seen installation views, many retrieved from obscure or "forgotten" archives. This includes everything from 19th-century colonial records and international exhibitions to contemporary art gallery hangs.
By looking at the walls, the lighting, the grouping of images, and the architectural spaces, the book explores how institutions and curators (such as Gael Newton and Judy Annear) have shaped our understanding of what constitutes "Australian photography. The text traces how display modes evolved alongside Australian modernity, moving from the materiality of daguerreotypes and albums to the digital and virtual "installations" of the 21st century.
The book functions as both a sourcebook and a critical history. It includes a rich collection of photographs of exhibitions, showing how works by artists like Olive Cotton or Max Dupain were originally presented to their contemporary audiences. The book includes scholarly chapters that provide a historiography of Australian photography, focusing on the people and places that nurtured the medium.
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