Helen Grace, adjunct professor, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, The University of Sydney It is twenty five years since Allan Sekula first presented 'The Traffic in Photographs' at a national photography conference in Australia and the title of this symposium echoes something of the spirit of that foundational essay. If we understand ‘traffic’ as a more benign everyday term, concerned with general flows (of photographs), the proliferation of digital images in the last twenty five...

Geoffrey Batchen, professor, School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington If all history is ultimately about the present, what kind of historical account of photography can speak to our contemporary moment, a moment when this medium has been incorporated into multi-media communication devices which themselves are the very embodiment of global capitalism? This paper addresses this issue by tracing a history for early photography that makes the...

Jonathan Jones, Kamilaroi/Wiradjuri artist Recording from the frontline, Aboriginal artist Tommy McRae created a unique body of work that captures the flux of colonisation in south-east Australia in the late 1800s. Working in parallel with the advent of photography in Australia, McRae documents vignettes with an eye for detail and framed these within his cultural standpoint at a time when Aboriginals were often voiceless. When corroborated with colonial sources including photographs and...

Keum Hyun Han, independent curator and chief researcher, Asian Culture Information Agency, Asian Cultural Complex, Gwangju From the 1950s to the present, Korean photography has provided an essential and critical platform in terms of modern Korean history, politics, economics and culture. Drawing on research into modern and contemporary Korean photography, this paper considers the making and dissemination of images in and between South and North Korea, and how contemporary Korean...

Helen Ennis, director, Centre for Art History and Art Theory, Australian National University School of Art At first glance it might seem that art museums and galleries in Australia have opened themselves up to different kinds of photographies in recent decades. There have been important exhibitions involving anthropological, fashion, forensic and vernacular photographs to name some of the most obvious. But how free is the flow of historical and contemporary photographs into art museums and...

Patrick Pound, Melbourne-based artist whose collaborative work (with Rowan McNaught) 'The compound lens project' (2014–15) is on display in 'The photograph and Australia' The camera reduces the world to a list of things to photograph. That’s its default setting. Like a frottage of light the photograph lifts everything in its sights. To photograph is to collect images. Photography seems to quietly mutter: if only we could find all the pieces we might solve the puzzle. We are left to dwell in...

Kathleen Davidson, independent scholar, The University of Sydney In nineteenth-century science, the production and circulation of images was a complex process. The advancement and increasing popularity of natural history, in particular, owed less to individual genius than to the collective enterprise of an immense network of practitioners, enthusiasts, expositors and consumers. Furthermore, the dissemination of new knowledge through different types of visual media was crucial to how this...

Erika Wolf, associate professor, Department of History and Art History, University of Otago, Dunedin A pioneer of modernist photomontage, Heartfield is best known for the satirical anti-Nazi photomontages he executed in the 1930s. While extensive attention has been given to Heartfield’s early work and its reception in Soviet culture during the 1930s, the further trajectory of his work in socialist culture after the war has been ignored, largely due to the dismissal of the art and visual...

Judy Annear, senior curator, photographs, Art Gallery of NSW