Picturing Australia: A History of Photography, published in 1989 set out a critical social history that argued that photography has never been a neutral window into Australian life, but a powerful tool used to construct the nation's identity, promote colonial interests, and shape social hierarchies.
Willis argues that early photography wasn't just recording Australia; it was "picturing" it for European eyes. It served to document the land as a resource and to categorize Indigenous Australians through a colonial lens. The book explores the shift from professional studio portraiture and government-commissioned survey photography to the rise of amateur photography, which democratized the medium but also created new social rituals. A major focus was how photography the promoted the "pioneer" myth and the idealization of the Australian landscape.
In the latter part of the book, the author tracked the aesthetic evolution of the medium from the early 20th century soft-focus style of Pictorialism to the sharper more industrial and urban focus of Modernism in the 1930s and 1940s.
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