Visual art exhibition review | Brian Rope
Women
Photographers 1853-2018 | Various Artists
National
Gallery of Australia | 11 October 2025 – 1 March 2026
Women photographers 1853–2018 is presented as highlighting “the transformative impact of women artists on the history of photography.” It is another Know My Name project, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) initiative celebrating the work of all women artists to enhance understanding of their contribution to Australia’s cultural life.
I confess expecting to see many more images covering the full period from 1853 to 2018. It actually is a modest selection from the NGA photography collection which, since its inception, has reflected the vital place of women in the medium’s history. Indeed, some of its earliest acquisitions were major works by women.
Highlights from the Australian and International collections have been identified to explore ways in which women artists have used photography to relate stories about themselves and other women. Their works created new ways of seeing how women were shaped by their relationships with the world in which they lived, negotiating its challenges, celebrating its beauty or whatever.
As a result, the NGA most certainly and validly is able to state it is “uniquely placed to consider how photography has changed the worlds in which women live, and how women have changed photography.” For women artists, making photographs arguably has always been an act of resistance. Photography certainly has given women access to spaces of knowledge, artistic practices and technology from which they once were excluded.
In the 1840s, English pioneer botanist Anna Atkins advanced botanical illustration and natural history. She assisted to steward new levels of scientific accuracy with her cyanotypes of algae. Here we see an example of her work from 1853 using what is one of today’s popular mediums.
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Anna Atkins - Heraclium Lanatum, America 1853 from Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns cyanotype, printed image 35.3 (h) x 24.8 (w) cm sheet 47.8 (h) x 37.5 (w) cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1986 |
In 1874 the famous poet Alfred Tennyson asked the Indian-born British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron to make photographic illustrations for a new edition of his Idylls of the King, a recasting of the Arthurian legends. Responding that both knew that “it is immortality to me to be bound up with you,” Cameron willingly accepted the assignment.
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Julia Margaret Cameron - 'Elaine the Lily Maid of Astolat' 1874 albumen silver photograph, image 34.8 (h) x 28.2 (w) cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1979 |
During the 1920s and 1930s, entrepreneurial women ran successful photography studios that brought tremendous innovation to photography’s place in fashion and advertising.
By 1940-41, Austrian-born American photographer Lisette Model was producing very different images. She is primarily known for the frank humanism of her street photography. After relocating to America to escape Hitler, she soon created two innovative series of photographs inspired by the energy of the city. In one, an ankle-high perspective and stylistic blurring powerfully reveal the hurried pace of the metropolis at rush hour.
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Lisette Model - Running legs, Fifth Avenue, New York 1940-41 gelatin silver photograph, image 49.5 (h) x 39.6 (w) cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1981 |
In the 1970s, women photographers influenced by feminism and environmentalism produced personal, political and communal works. In the 1980s and 1990s, various Australian First Nations artists began to reclaim the medium that had played a part in subjecting their ancestors to colonial scrutiny by white settlers.
In 1976, Australian photographer Ponch Hawkes photographed herself and her friends with their mothers in a series Our Mums and us, revealing the rhythms and patterns of intimacy in those families.
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Ponch Hawkes - Rosa and Ruth 1976 - from Our Mums and us gelatin silver photograph printed image 17.7 (h) x 12.7 (w) cm, sheet 25.4 (h) x 20.2 (w) cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982 |
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Cindy Sherman - Untitled film still # 3 1977 - from Untitled Film Stills gelatin silver photograph printed image 16.1 (h) x 24.0 (w) cm, sheet 30.4 (h) x 35.4 (w) cm Frame 43.2 (h) x 58.5 (w) cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1983 |
Annette Messager was born into a family of atheists who took a particular pleasure in their local Catholic church. Her work draws on religious iconography, with unholy intentions. In her 1989 piece, My Vows, tiny photos of body parts are hung in a cluster. Genitals, mouths and eyes hint at eroticism rather than spirituality.
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Annette Messager - Mes voeux [My vows] 1989 gelatin silver photographs, colour pencil on paper, string installation variable 350.0 (h) x 90.0 (w) cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1993 © Annette Messager. ADAGP/Copyright Agency |
Patricia Piccinini (born in Sierra Leone) is an Australian artist who works in a variety of media. She is well-known for The Skywhale, a hot air balloon work, and also for investigating relationships between nature, science and technology. In Psychogeography 1996 she explores the genetic engineering debate. It examines reality and fantasy, by featuring Australian actress Sophie Lee cradling a LUMP™ (Lifeform with Unevolved Mutant Properties), evoking curiosity about a future with malleable human bodies.
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Psychogeography 1996 - from The Mutant Genome Project (TMGP) chromogenic photograph printed image 120.7 (h) x 243.7 (w) cm, sheet 129.2 (h) x 271.2 (w) cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased with Funds from the Moet & Chandon Australian Art Foundation © Patricia Piccinini |
Nowadays, numerous women make artworks testing the limits of photography and its relationship to the world.
This review is also available on the author's blog.