Look!: Contemporary Australian Photography since 1980 is a 2010 publication authored by academic Anne Marsh.
It features over 400 vivid colour plates and scholarly essays exploring how technological shifts and mass media transformed photography into a central, multifaceted art form.
The book categorises the work of over 150 Australian artists into distinct themes reflecting broader cultural discourse:
Identity Works - exploring gender, cultural background, and the human condition.
Life: Observations of daily routines and personal narratives.
Experiment: Conceptual and mixed-media photography bridging painting, film, and performance.
Space and Environment: Architectural studies, urban landscapes, and the natural world.
Book Review, Susan Best, 'Performance Photography" Eyeline 2011
It’s been a long time since a major history of Australian photography has been produced. Before Anne Marsh’s book was published late last year, the most recent scholarly book would probably be Catriona Moore’s 1995 text on feminist
photography, Indecent Exposures: Twenty Years of Australian Feminist Photography .
Before that, the bicentennial year of 1988 produced two comprehensive histories: Anne Marie Willis’ book Picturing Australia: A History of Photography and Gael Newton’s exhibition and catalogue, Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988, which included essays by Helen Ennis and Chris Long.
Of course there have been other publications on Australian photography over the last two decades— thematic studies of photography, introductory texts, exhibition catalogues and more focused books on genres of photography, individual artists and so forth—but no one has attempted to create a coherent and comprehensive narrative of photographic developments of the last forty years. For this achievement alone Anne Marsh is to be heartily congratulated.
This book is a very welcome addition to the literature, as well as being a terrific resource. It should be in every university library and on the bookshelf of every photo-media student in the country. The text is very generously illustrated, making this the kind of cross-over book that should appeal to collectors as well as a more general audience for contemporary art. That said, the quality of the reproductions is not consistent. The colour reproductions in particular are often very poor representations of the original images.
