anne marsh, look: contemporary australian photography since 1980
Published by Macmillan, Melbourne, 2010
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 1994 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’s 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.
The book has an unusual structure for a scholarly history, instead of a continuous text with embedded images, it is comprised of three very loosely connected parts. At the launch of the book at Stills Gallery