if only we could take the time: contemporary Australian photography ~ National Portrait Gallery
Canberra/ Ngunnawal Country ~ Nov 30, 2024 - June 1, 2025
‘There is so much beauty around us if only we could take the time to open our eyes and perceive it. And then share it.’ Photographer Carol Jerrems made this tender observation in the preface to her landmark 1974 publication, A book about Australian women, produced in collaboration with writer Virginia Fraser.
Taking its title from this text, if only we could take the time: contemporary Australian photography considers how this impulse to observe, to record and to share continues to propel photographic practice in Australia today. This show, staged alongside the major exhibition Carol Jerrems: Portraits, spotlights the work of three contemporary Australian artists whose work sits in dialogue with Jerrems’ legacy.
Ying Ang, Katrin Koenning and Anu Kumar are photographers who capture
and distil quiet moments. Like Jerrems, they chronicle intimate
relationships and use the camera to mediate closely felt and emotionally
vivid experiences. The gestures that breathe life into a family home,
the swampy dislocation of early motherhood, the interlocked networks of
friends and family. In these works, tenderness, care and connection are
foregrounded and the idea of portraiture is expanded.
