“Picture Paradise: Asia-Pacific
Photography 1840-1940s”
National Gallery of Australia. Until November 9.
Curated by Gael Newton, ANG Senior Curator of Photography.
Reviewed by Garry Raffaele

IF the brave effort that is the Vivid National Photography Festival is to be judged by one exhibition, it is the astounding show at the National Gallery of Australia.
The medium called photography has gone through many phases ever since founding gallery director James Mollison made it a cornerstone of his time at the NGA.
In Mollison’s day, a major gallery was given over to photo exhibitions. The “Picture Paradise” collection, both large in quantity as in quality, might suggest a return to the halcyon days. We shall see.
To the review in hand: Curator Gael Newton has attempted the Everest of a challenge – to put together an Asia-Pacific collection that truly represents the images of the time and the place.
We are looking at the whole of Australia, the west coast of the US (although at least one image sneaks in from the east coast) and all of Asia – and some from the sub-continent of India. So be warned, it may require several trips to take in the entire exhibition.
From the beginning, “Picture Paradise” is imposing. Early pictures mirror the birth of photography in other places – visiting cards, family photographs, ethnological records all feature in the 19th century.
One wall is filled with some dozen or so prints stitched together to make a vista of Sydney Harbour in 1875, long before the bridge was built.
While much of this work is for recording purposes, there is imagery that defines itself as sophisticated. Milton Miller, a US photographer living in Hong Kong, shot two Asian women, richly dressed but with a sparse background – surely to sell to the family, but standing out as a photograph rich in detail.
Moving into the 1900s, the medium began to stretch. And this expansion comes through clearly in the photos.
Harold Cazneaux, now a well-known name in Australian photography, has an excellent image, “Argyle Cut”, which stands up against anything right up to today’s contributions. Seven children stand in the then-poor part of Sydney, their surroundings crowding in on them.
Important names in international photography have contributions – Walker Evans, Imogen Cunningham, Max Dupain, Alfred Eisenstadt, E.A. Hoppe, Hedda Morrison and others. Hoppe visited Australia and did very strong portraits of characters from some unusual and isolated sites.
The breadth of the exhibition is unquestioned, but what about the depth?
Against all the odds, Newton has given us a collection of photos that not only covers the period more than adequately, but also has done it with skill and daring.
While the line through the rooms is temporal, the quality of the pictures and the historical story will draw you in.
The NGA will rightly be proud of what it has done here – it claims the exhibition is ground breaking. And I believe that it is – in its breadth and its depth, in its colour and in its grand geographic sweep.