The biggest-ever survey of the National Gallery of Victoria’s photography collection has been unveiled in Melbourne.
Photography: Real & Imagined features more than 300 images, some by global stars of photography: Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gilbert & George, and Nan Goldin.
But seeing is not necessarily believing, as the exhibition delves into the notion of what is real and what isn’t: a contemporary question that cuts to the heart of the photographic discipline.
One picture, by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, is of a drive-in cinema: what appears at first to be a blank movie screen is actually the result of the photographer opening his camera shutter for the duration of an entire film.
The trust audiences have in the realness of photographs is tested again and again: Joe Rosenthal’s iconic World War II photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, 1945 shows American marines raising the US flag over the Japanese Island.
But it’s just one of many examples of documentary photography that has been staged for better effect.
Senior curator Susan van Wyk has been developing the NGV’s photography collection over the past 30 years.
“There’s 14,000 photographs in the collection – and I put all my favourites in this show,” she told AAP.
The exhibition spans the 200 years since the invention of photography through 21 themes, with areas dedicated to photographs about conflict, consumption and the environment.
The Australian photographers on show include works by Max Dupain, Olive Cotton, Mervyn Bishop, Polly Borland and Darren Sylvester.
As the discipline of photography developed, along with the idea of photographs capturing reality, so did the notion of dressing up for the camera with costumes and role play, explains van Wyk.
There is play, too, in her arrangement of images, with historic virginal photographs of women installed next to a 1988 Cindy Sherman photograph, in which she poses with fake breasts in the costume of Renaissance aristocrat.
Perhaps the endpoint of photographic fabrication is a monumental print by Gilbert & George, titled Forward, in which the Union Jack, chopped up and rearranged, becomes a backdrop for portraits of the artists themselves.
There are also many images that will speak to contemporary audiences with additional resonance due to current events.
One example is Mervyn Bishop’s historic 1975 photograph of prime minister Gough Whitlam pouring sand into the palm of Gurindji elder Vincent Lingiari, at a meeting where Lingiari received the crown lease of his ancestral land.
Photography: Real & Imagined is on display from Friday until February 4 at The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia.