The 2021 exhibition Mervyn Bishop: Australian Photojournalist celebrated the photographer behind Australia's iconic moments.
The exhibition was drawn from the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) collection, the artist’s private archive, and enriched by sound and moving image from the NFSA.
Spanning images from the past 60 years, Mervyn Bishop: Australian Photojournalist ran at the NFSA from 5 March to 12 August 2021.
You can view images from the exhibition on the AGNSW website and learn more about Mervyn Bishop below.
An Art Gallery of New South Wales touring exhibition, presented in collaboration with the NFSA.
Mervyn Bishop was born in 1945 in the New South Wales country town of Brewarrina. His love for photography stems from a chance encounter with its development process, when a schoolfriend’s father showed him how an image could appear, as if by magic, on a sheet of paper in a home darkroom.
You can watch short interviews with Mervyn, as well as curators Coby Edgar (AGNSW) and Tara Marynowsky (NFSA), in the following playlist:
In 1963 Mervyn moved to Sydney and began his 4-year career as a cadet photographer with The Sydney Morning Herald:
In this excerpt from Art + Soul Episode 3: Bitter and Sweet, Mervyn talks to Hetti Perkins about his most famous photograph – Prime Minister Gough Whitlam symbolically pouring sand into the hand of traditional landowner Vincent Lingiari in 1975:
The exhibition also featured images from Mervyn’s time as staff photographer for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (from 1974) and his photographs of influential Australian figures like Lowitja O’Donoghue, Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), Lionel Rose and Jimmy Little.
You can also read the following audio transcripts that appeared in the exhibition:
Time to Listen (c1970) is a transcript of an audio interview with political activist and writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker) in which she discusses race issues in Australia and her role as a poet.
In The Dawn Is at Hand (1989), Oodgeroo Noonuccal speaks of her early childhood on Stradbroke Island, describes how her interest in nature led her to creative writing and then recites several of her poems including ‘Corroboree’, ‘Ballad of the Totems’, ‘Dawn Wail For the Dead’ and ‘We Are Going’.
The following 2021 events and screenings complemented the exhibition:
View a trailer for the exhibition:
Top image:
Cousins, Ralph and Jim, Brewarrina 1966 © Mervyn Bishop
Gelatin silver photograph, 30 x 40 cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
Photo: AGNSW
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.