Image credit: Anne Zahalka The bathers 1989. C type photograph, 74 x 90 cm. State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 2013. 

New passports, new photography is a celebration of the Gallery’s recent acquisitions of contemporary photography around the theme of portraiture. It brings together over one hundred works – the majority of which will be on display for the first time – which explore how photographers use the camera to reflect, construct and challenge identity.

The exhibition includes several major newly acquired works by Australian Anne Zahalka. Zahalka draws from the history of painting to create tableaux compositions that emerge through layers of social and cultural intervention. In a similar vein, Bindi Cole, Tony Albert, Darren Siwes, and Fiona Foley’s works play with and critique constructed representations of Indigenous Australians in a colonial culture. Landscape has the capacity to shape not only experience, but also the representation of self.

Brad Rimmer’s Silence captures this idea in a series depicting individuals living in the Western Australian wheat-belt. Young artist Jackson Eaton’s Better half series warmly explores complex relationships between himself, his ex-girlfriend, father and his step-mother. American photographer Stephen Shore’s incredibly beautiful self-portrait from 1976 has a similar feel. It pictures Shore taking a photo of himself from bed in a scrappy New York apartment between the road trips that made him famous. New passports, new photography ranges from soft, personal imagery to strong and powerful statements, from the intimate to the deeply political. It represents some of the ways identity is represented and self is shaped through this most accessible yet most challenging of contemporary art-forms. 

THE DETAILS 

• WHEN: 15 November, 2014 - 8 February, 2015, 10am - 5pm 
• WHERE: Art Gallery of WA, Perth Cultural Centre, Perth, WA
• COST: FREE

FURTHER INFORMATION 

For more information you can contact (08) 9492 6600, email admin@artgallery.wa.gov.au, or visit the website, Facebook Page or Twitter.