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Photography

December 2011

Best Images of 2011

By Monthly Wire
Ten of the best image galleries of 2011 from around the world as selected by the Shortlist Daily. The most powerful images of 2011– BuzzfeedExtreme instability 37 incredible images from storm chaser Mike Hollingshead.– Triggerpit Vladimir Putin, Action Man Really, what can't he do? – The Atlantic Krishna Janmashtami Brightly coloured images from the festival celebrat

A Journey through North-western NSW with Filmmaker Ivan Sen

By Peter Robb
Ivan Sen was heading for the place that gives its name to his new film Toomelah, the place where he made the film. We drove through Boggabilla, pop. 750, more or less. The two-storey verandahed Wobbly Boot Hotel looked enormous, and Sen talked about the big and violent racial confrontations outside the hotel 30 years or so ago. The only movement in Boggabilla as we passed through now seemed t
Art Gallery of NSW - 24 September 2011 to 5 February 2012

What’s in a Face? Aspects of Portrait Photography

By Sebastian Smee
What can you read into a photograph of a face? Hurt. Happiness. Confidence. Contempt. There’s no limit. Indeed, if you’re anything like me, you can spend hours staring at family snapshots, greedily seeking – and often finding – things that eluded you in the maelstrom of domestic life. My son, breaking into a toothily anarchic smile: he was proud, ecstatically happy that day. My mother looking tired, appraising, concerned: I must
September 2011

New website design: tell us what you think

By Monthly Wire
We’d like to know what you think of the new Monthly website, a long-awaited update on our 2007 design. The bold new website features more photography and illustration to tempt you into spending more time online with Australia’s finest thinkers, journalists and critics. The home page will be updated regularly with topical articles and videos from across t

Helmut Newton and Alice Springs

By Shane Maloney
One day in 1947, a rising Melbourne stage actress walked into a small Flinders Lane photography studio, looking to pick up some extra cash as a model. Expecting a whiskery old man behind the lens, she found instead a dashing young European called Helmut Newton
The 54th Venice Biennale

Vanity Case

By Sebastian Smee
Who would have thought that the first major movement of the twenty-first century would be a revival of trompe l’oeil? I admit, it’s unexpected. But it’s difficult not to notice at this year’s Venice Biennale that – after more than a century of scepti
Terrence Malick’s 'The Tree of Life' and Julia Leigh’s 'Sleeping Beauty'

Like the Day and Night

By Helen Garner
Terrence Malick’s new movie The Tree of Life (in national release), recently garlanded with the Palme d’Or at Cannes, comes muscled up with star power. You want men? You want family? How about Brad Pitt and Sean Penn as father and son? Jessica Chastain as wife and m

Expert Appetite: The Plight of the Connoisseur

By Robert Dessaix
I am in Soups and Tinned Veg at my local Coles supermarket, immobilised by an attack of anomie. Why am I feeling like this? I stare catatonically at the rows of tinned soups, quite unable to move. There is no point in discussing Durkheim and the roots of anomi
Peter Robb on Shaun Gladwell

Lessons in Unlearning

By Peter Robb
When the Olympic Games came to Sydney in 2000 I decided to rent a TV and watch some. Tweaking the rabbit’s ears – no time for an antenna – I watched Cathy and Ian and the others going for gold in extreme blizzard conditions. Outside in the real, mild world I saw t
Knox Grammar’s Adrian Nisbett

The Old Boy

By Malcolm Knox
Knox Grammar, on Sydney’s upper North Shore, was and is a beautiful school. Established in 1924, it feels as if it has been around forever. It has expanded from its original ivy-covered brick buildings set around a grass quadrangle into a large modern campus
David Walsh and Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art

High Priest

By Amanda Lohrey
The Moorilla estate is set on a peninsula of sandstone cliffs that juts out into the Derwent estuary on Hobart’s northern fringe. Framed to the south-west by the looming grandeur of Mt Wellington and to the east by Mt Direction, the slopes of the peninsula a
'Up Close'

The Faith of Images

By Peter Conrad
Why, confronted by a camera, are we expected to smile? A face, as Carol Jerrems said, “tells the story of what a person is thinking”. Although mouths find it easy to lie by twisting their corners upwards, “the eyes”, as Jerrems put it, “reveal the suffering”

The Only Things I Remember From School

By Murray Bail
1) the geography teacher, Mr Sullivan, loose cheeks, throat and bottom lip, and trousers too loose – always hitching them up; a general worn-out appearance in clothing and eyelids. The nicotine-stained fingers, his short-sleeved shirts. Talking about the tropics and coral, he said he had been up in the islands during the War, where he found the coral too s
Alfred Stieglitz’s Lake George Years

The Alchemist

By Peter Conrad
Alfred Stieglitz was the kind of man that Australia, more’s the pity, has never had. Here prophets come from the desert, as AD Hope once dryly remarked, which means they’re mostly too parched to say very much when they stumble out of the scrub into our coastal cities. And would anyone have listened if some crackpot redeemer had mounted the rickety podium of a soapbox at the Domain in Sydney an
John Waters

Divine Intervention

By Peter Conrad
Australia’s girdling oceans used to serve as a prophylactic, our defence against the infectious depravity of the northern hemisphere. The Customs Act 1901 fiercely preserved our innocence; during my adolescence in the late 1960s I made an impatient inventory

Waste-Makers

By Juliana Engberg
The aesthetic of detritus is everywhere at the moment. It’s as if the rubbish bin of the twentieth century has finally been put out for collection – with the legs of the ubiquitous female mannequin sticking out, of course (some things never change). Bricol

Credo

By Bill Henson
Art tends to occur against our better judgment. At the most obvious level this happens when art creates scandal: think of the trials of such works of literature as Madame Bovary and James Joyce's Ulysses and Nabokov's Lolita. That's the obvious shadow of history (as wel

The Pursuit of Usable Beauty

By Gideon Haigh