Monday, 19 March 2007
6.30pm — 8.30pm
ArtHouse Hotel
[More info]
Guest Speaker
Robert McFarlane
[photo: Tara McLennan]
Robert McFarlane
Robert McFarlane
[photo: Tara McLennan]
Australian photographer Robert McFarlane (b. 1942) grew up in Adelaide, South Australia. He left school at sixteen, first finding work as a factory welder and then as a copy messenger for a small advertising agency. It was in advertising that McFarlane first became passionately interested in photography and received encouragement. In 1963, at the age of twenty one, McFarlane decided to leave Adelaide and move to Sydney, where he soon began freelancing for Walkabout, Flair, and documenting local celebrities for VOGUE.
With encouragement from established photojournalists David Moore and Robert Walker, McFarlane started exploring the two genres of photography that would dominate his career for the next four decades — social issues and performance in cinema and theatre. Apart from the years 1970-73, when McFarlane freelanced in London for the Daily Telegraph Magazine, Nova, and The Sunday Times Magazine, his photographic archive would cover four of the most convulsive decades in recent Australian history.
During this period, the reforming Whitlam Government would be dismissed in 1975, and an articulate, dissident indigenous voice would emerge through radicals such as Charles Perkins (a 1964 McFarlane photo-essay in Walkabout covered Perkins’s life as the first Aboriginal student to study at, and graduate from, Sydney University). With Robert Walker’s encouragement, McFarlane also documented much of the rebirth of Australian drama — on the cinema screen as well in the theatre.
Injured member of Redfern All Blacks Rugby League football team (Redfern Oval)
[© Robert McFarlane 2002]
McFarlane’s journey as a photographer also reveals other intriguing and intimate moments from the lives of some of the most influential creative artists of the last century — from the legendary American photojournalist W. Eugene Smith seen in Greenwich Village, New York in 1973, to jazz great Stephane Grappelli literally playing for his supper in Paris in 1972.
Whether documenting the early professional performances of acclaimed Australian Oscar-winning actors Geoffrey Rush and Cate Blanchett or a young Aboriginal girl making a wish in 1988 in a Queensland country graveyard, McFarlane applies equal rigour to observing the human condition.
McFarlane has photographed over one hundred plays and written extensively on photography as the critic for The Australian and more recently, The Sydney Morning Herald. His photographs are held in the National Gallery of Australia, The National Library of Australia, The National Portrait Gallery, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and numerous private collections.
Robert McFarlane is represented by the Josef Lebovic Gallery in Sydney.