Well after a long gestation period the new exhibition I've been curating at the State Library of New South Wales has opened. Arranged chronologically Shot covers the years 1845 to 2022 and is a major retrospective of photography in Australia. With over 400 photographs by 200 photographers there should be content that is of interest for this group particularly in the early years with some rare photocrayotypes, Australia's oldest extant photo (a daguerreotype by Goodman), and rare Paget plates from Shackleton's expedition by Frank Hurley. Given the desktop version went online this week I felt it was a good time to share with you all. It includes examples of photographic formats from the inception of photography to the present and will be up until November 2024.
Below is an excerpt from the introduction panel ...
This is the first exhibition to comprehensively review the breadth of the photographic archive held at the State Library of NSW — one of the largest, most diverse and significant in Australia. The two million photographs held by the Library represent tens of thousands of stories collectively forming a unique pictorial history of the past 175 years in Australia. The exhibition explores some of these threads — from the earliest surviving photograph in Australia to examples of nearly every format used since the inception of photography in 1839.
The exhibition includes works by some of Australia’s most acclaimed photographers and shines a light on works and formats often considered to be on the periphery of photographic practice. Arranged chronologically, we have aimed to include at least one photograph to represent each year between 1845 and 2022. The images include the work of over 200 press, amateur and street photographers; printers and commercial studios. This exhibition captures only a thin slice of the collection, but these 400 works convey some of the rich rewards to be gained by examining the archive as a whole. We hope this approach allows space to contemplate the myriad stories they represent.
https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/shot
Geoff Barker, 2024
