Art

Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture 1901–1939 by Laurie Duggan

Item: Ghost Nation
Author: Isobel Crombie

by Isobel Crombie •

June 2001, no. 231

UQP, $22.95pb, 292pp

Art

Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture 1901–1939 by Laurie Duggan

by Isobel Crombie •

June 2001, no. 231

Laurie Duggan’s study of ‘imagined space’ in Australian visual culture arrived on my desk, with a certain synchronicity, the day after I saw the film Memento. In their distinctive ways, both these works seem indicative of our age, offering unstable and fractured accounts of space and time at a moment when virtual reality seems to be untying our formerly fixed Western notions of these concepts.

Isobel Crombie

Isobel Crombie has worked as a Curator of Photography since 1979. She began her career at the National Gallery of Australia and, since 1988, has been Senior Curator, Photography, National Gallery of Victoria. She regularly curates exhibitions on the history of Australian and International photography and has published widely on aspects of the medium. Recent publications include, Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture, 1919-1939 (2004); Light Sensitive: Contemporary Australian Photography from the Loti Smorgon Fund (2006); Body Language: Contemporary Chinese Photography (2008); Re-view: 170 years of photography (2009); and Fred Kruger: Intimate Landscapes (2012).