A photographer by profession, this year I decided to detox from photographing. The detox lasted two months. My aim was to get off my phone and be more present in my life.
Erwitt standing in front of two of his most famous images, Dog Legs, and California Kiss.
AP / Alamy
Camera rolls reveal how photography is transforming in the smartphone era.
Installation view of Patrick Pound’s People who look dead but (probably) aren’t 2011–2014 on display in Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia from October 13 2023 – February 4 2024. Photo: Lillie Thompson.
Hoda Afshar is one of Australia’s most significant photo media artists. A Curve is a Broken Line at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is her first major survey exhibition.
Charmian Clift in Greek costume (1941).
Frederick Stanley Grimes/State Library of New South Wales
Australian writer Charmian Clift was born 100 years ago today. One rivetting photograph of Clift captures the existential yin and yang explored in her work.
During the pandemic, few of our life events felt worthy of a single Instagram post, inspiring users to celebrate the beauty in mundanity with ‘dumps’.
Raphaela Rosella with Dayannah Baker Barlow, Kathleen Duncan, Gillianne Laurie, Tammara Macrokanis, Amelia Rosella, Nunjul Townsend, Laurinda Whitton, Tricia Whitton, and family, You’ll Know It When You Feel It, 2011–2023. Installation view, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2023.
Photo: Louis Lim.
In You’ll Know It When You Feel It at the Institute of Modern Art, Raphaela Rosella and her co-creators have sought to reclaim and counteract the narratives formed by state records.
Surveying photography’s past, present and future, the new Photography Centre will cement the status of the medium as a leading form of expression in contemporary visual culture.
Still from ‘All watched over by machines of loving grace’ by Memo Akten, 2021. Created using custom AI software.
Memo Akten
Robert Mahari, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Jessica Fjeld, Harvard Law School, and Ziv Epstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Intellectual property law wasn’t written with AI in mind, so it isn’t clear who owns the images that emerge from prompts – or if the artists whose work was scraped to train AI models should be paid.
Lewis Wickes Hine, ‘A little spinner in a Georgia Cotton Mill, 1909.’
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 in. The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (P545)
Beth Saunders, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
While Lewis Hine’s early-20th century photographs of working children compelled Congress to limit or ban child labor, the US Department of Labor is now under fire for failing to enforce these laws.
Barbara Kingsolver’s protagonist, Demon, is much more than his drug habit.
SergioZacchi/iStock via Getty Images
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author is just one of many artists from Appalachia who are probing the crisis in their work, while taking pains to ensure that it doesn’t define the region and its people.
Photograph by Lewis W. Hine of a small spinner at Mollohan Mills, Newberry, S.C.: “She was tending her ‘sides’ like a veteran, but after I took the photo, the overseer came up and said in an apologetic tone that was pathetic, ‘She just happened in.’ Then a moment later he repeated the information. The mills appear to be full of youngsters that ‘just happened in,’ or ‘are helping sister.’
National Child Labor Committee/Library of Congress
Documentary photography aims to portray reality and help transform the world.
Generative AI thrives on exploiting people’s reflexive assumptions of authenticity by producing material that looks like ‘the real thing.’
artpartner-images/The Image Bank via Getty Images
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne