Contemporary Australian photography 1980 to the present: data

Contemporary Australian art photography has burgeoned over the last 25 years but there has existed no dedicated book length study in the field. This ARC funded Discovery Project has enabled Monash researcher Anne Marsh to fill this gap and place Australian photography in the international arena, which should lead to more scholarship on Australian work. It contributes one of the most comprehensive collections of Australian photographic art ever compiled. Photography and photo-based media is at a critical historical juncture with digital technologies opening up new possibilities for modes of representation and display. The project aims were to chart shifts in practice in relation to theory and technology, and to analyse what has been overlooked in postmodern photographic criticism, highlighting the specificities of Australian practice. The dataset showcases the images and work of individual art photographers from 1980 to 2008 organised by the themes: environment, life, identity, space and experiment. The main outcomes of the project are a book, namely, 'Contemporary Photography since 1980', published in 2010, plus a complementary website. The book includes, critical essays, a timeline and over 400 coloured images representing 191 artists, accompanied by descriptive captions; while the website presents the work of around 20 photographers not published in the book and over 700 further images. The data which has been collected consists of over 1200 colour images from more than 200 artists from all over Australia, artists’ curriculum vitaes (CVs), bibliographies, biographical information, lists of available publications, a list of artists with titles of works and dimensions as well as a list of contact names. The book and web site will be of interest to researchers, Australian artists, curators, dealers and the general public.