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 galleries? What kinds of photographs are being collected and exhibited? Why, for example, are anthropological photographs from the nineteenth century widely collected but those from the present are not? This paper argues that there are some significant blockages affecting the traffic of photographs into institutions that predate the arrival of digital photography and the internet. These blockages have their origins in the 1970s and 1980s when photography was being legitimised and institutionalised in many parts of the world. Ennis draws on her curatorial practice at the National Gallery of Australia and her own role in what Vince Aletti has described as the institutionalised and categorical delimiting of photography. While such efforts were undertaken in good faith by historians and curators of photography they belonged to a particular historical moment whose distortions are still with us, arresting the flow of vibrant, compelling photographs and blocking the view of photography’s extraordinary polymorphousness.