Photographic works drawn from the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection explore fakery, mirrors and tricks of the light. But Shadow Catchers stops short of today's digital doppelgangers.
Photographer Ansel Adams poses on a bluff with his camera.
Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS/VCG via Getty Images
Where once we subjected friends to post-holiday slideshows, now we share travel selfies live with a remote audience. This study teased out the tension between snapping and experiencing the trip.
At Echo Point lookout in Katoomba, NSW, people watch smoke from the Green Wattle Creek fire beyond The Three Sisters rock formation.
AAP/Steven Saphore
Cherine Fahd, University of Technology Sydney and Sara Oscar, University of Technology Sydney
Instagram bushfire images cut through our news fatigue. This developing brand of photojournalism brings authenticity and a different sense of proximity.
An archive project is restoring the secret history of Namibia's resistance music culture from the 1950s to the late 1980s -- suppressed and censored during apartheid but now touring the world.
At events like the spring races, it’s important journalists actually interact with people when they photograph them.
AAP Image/James Ross
Just as domestic violence was once misunderstood and tolerated, many today fail to grasp how nude photographs can be wielded as weapons of abuse.
A photograph taken by Stasi operatives of suspected defectors at an abandoned restaurant in Kreuzberg, Berlin, in 1962.
Stasi Records Agency Berlin/Bild
30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, covert surveillance images offer us an unparalleled look at the lives of people trying to escape from the east to the west.
A stairwell in the Bronx is the site of one of the movie’s most memorable scenes.
Warner Bros.
Kate Flint, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Images of wildfires are powerful, but can make climate catastrophe seem like something spectacular and distant. So some artists are focusing on the plants and bugs in our immediate surroundings.
Detail from Reed Plummer’s photograph Surge, in which a breaking wave drops tons of water even as it pulls tons of sand from the sea bed.
South Australian Museum
In the days before scuba technology, the celebrated photographer sought to capture the beauty of the reef by placing corals in an aquarium and shooting them. But under stress, they released algae.
Untitled. 2015. Pen and Ink on Paper. 60 x 71 cm.
Ernst van der Wal
Many cities have no standard method for counting the number of people who live in their cars. This means that their issues are often overlooked in policies designed to help the homeless.
Idi Amin at a press conference in Jjaja Marina, Uganda in July 1975.
Courtesy of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation
Hidden for decades in a vault at the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, the photographs depict a regime fixated on establishing order, meting out punishment and stoking nationalism.
Principal Fellow (Hon), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne