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Picture Paradise
intro page | main essay | photo processes | the plates | background | bibliography
Background
In 2008 the National Gallery of Australia presented the exhibition and catalogue Picture paradise: Asia-Pacific photography 1840s-1940s. This chronicled developments in photography from India and Sri Lanka through East and Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea and the Pacific islands to the west coast of North America.
At the time, this was the first comparative survey to be undertaken of the history of photography in the Asia- Pacific region, from the formative decades of the 1840s to the 1860s through to the onset of hostilities in the Pacific in the early 1940s during the Second World War.
The majority of the 400 works displayed in the Picture Paradise exhibition came from the Gallery's photography collection, most of which were acquired over the three years prior. These were supplemented by significant loans from public and private collections in Australia, California, Massachusetts, Hawaii, London and Dublin.
By 2005 the National Gallery held some 14,000 photographs. Of these, only a few hundred works had any relation by authorship or content to the Asia-Pacific region outside Australasia and California. The number of works by Asian-born photographers in particular was very low.
Between 2005 and 2008 the Picture Paradise project saw the Asia Pacific collection grow by 10,000 works. Most of these additions came from the acquisition of two significant private collections; over 900 nineteenth-century South Asian, Australian, New Zealand and New Guinea photographs were acquired in 2007 from the extensive collections of Jane and Howard Ricketts in London; and 7000 Indonesian photographs and archival material dating from the 1860s to the 1940s, including a related library of over one hundred rare books, were purchased in 2008 from Leo Haks in Amsterdam.
Other early purchases connected with this project focused on representation of pioneer nineteenth-century Asian-born photographers, including Francis Chit of Thailand and Lai Afong of Hong Kong. There was a large group from the collection of David Knaus of California.
Picture Paradise: Asia-Pacific photography 1840s-1940s reflected the view that the rich and abundant productions of our region have a vibrant shared history deserving of autonomous narration. In line with this focus, the next major photography undertaking was the Gardens of The East involved the acquisition of a collection of Indonesian photographs from the 1860s to the 1940s. Gardens of The East was exhibited in 2014.
The NGA’s Picture Paradise and Garden of the East collections are now valuable resources for biographies, bibliographies and thematic entries on photography in the Asia-Pacific and South East Asian regions.
more on Picture Paradise
intro page | main essay | photo processes | the plates | background | bibliography
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