Helen Ennis
Helen Ennis is Emeritus Professor, ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory and a past ABR Fellow. She is an independent photography curator and writer specialising in the area of Australian photographic practice. Her publications include Reveries: Photography and Mortality (2007) and Photography and Australia (2007). Her biography Margaret Michaelis: Love, Loss and Photography (2006) was awarded the Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and the prize for Best Book from the Power Institute of Fine Arts and the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. Her most recent book, Olive Cotton: A life in photography (2019), won the Magarey Medal for Biography and the Non-fiction prize in the Queensland Literary Awards in 2020. She is currently writing a biography of Max Dupain.
There is a recuperative basis to Jane Lydon’s project that the measured tones of academic writing cannot disguise and that gives this book its energy. Lydon’s subject is the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station near Healesville, which was established in the 1860s in what Lydon describes as ‘consensual circumstances’. In the first decade of operation, the Aboriginal residents at Coranderrk achieve ... (read more)
The other day, in a stairwell within the National Library of Australia, I opened a door, expecting it to lead to a corridor and a suite of offices. Instead, I found myself inside a dimly lit room filled with rows of book-laden shelves. As I looked for the exit, I saw a man removing a book from the bottom shelf. Another man walked past me carrying books and said hello. It was like a scene from Bein ... (read more)
Max Dupain, one of Australia’s most accomplished photographers, was filled with self-doubt. He told us so – repeatedly – in public commentary, especially during the 1980s, in the last years of his life. It is striking how candid he was, how personal, verging on the confessional, and how little attention we paid to what he said, either during his lifetime or since (he died in 1992, aged eight ... (read more)
Vivian Maier has received the kind of attention most photographers and artists can only dream of – multiple monographs, documentary films, commercial gallery representation, extraordinary public interest, and now a biography. However, all this activity and acclaim has occurred posthumously. In her lifetime Maier’s mammoth output, estimated at 150,000 photographic exposures and hundreds of reel ... (read more)
This exhibition has a clear aim – to prove that Robert Mapplethorpe ‘is among the most significant artists of his time’. The evidence marshalled by the curators at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum is substantial. They have conducted extensive research, sourced outstanding vintage prints, and provided an illuminating chronological and thematic structure for th ... (read more)
One of the big attractions of this book is the portraits and self-portraits of the photographers who are its subject. Diane Arbus, in the early stages of pregnancy, looks whimsically at her reflection in a full-length mirror; Robert Mapplethorpe's face leaps out of the darkness, paired with his skull-topped walking stick; Margaret Bourke-White perches with her camera on a gargoyle on the sixty-fir ... (read more)
I was very happy, I loved the space and freedom … no, I never regretted coming here.– Olive Cotton, 1998
On the door to Olive Cotton’s room there is a Dymo-tape label with the name ‘N. Boardman’. Boardman has no relevance whatsoever to Olive’s life story. His name is there because Olive and her husband Ross McInerney’s home – what they always called the ‘new house’ – was pre ... (read more)
Everyone, I suspect, has a favourite photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Mine shows two couples picnicking beside what I have always thought was the Marne River but turns out to be somewhere else altogether. Juvisy (1938), as it is now titled, depicts urban workers relaxing near a man-made pond in the suburbs of Paris. This is indicative of the exhaustive research of Peter Galassi and his colleag ... (read more)
Helen Ennis reviews 'Images of the Interior: Seven Central Australian Photographers' by Philip Jones
One section on Australian photography slowly growing on my bookshelves is devoted to anthropological and ethnographic photography. Philip Jones’s latest book, Images of the Interior: Seven Central Australian Photographers, belongs there because of the amount of anthropological material it contains. But it could also take its place among books devoted to vernacular photography, because none of th ... (read more)