Points of Focus: Historic Photographs from the Pacific

Head On Photo Festival 2014

Group show

event-detail-person-vertical — Frank Hurley

This event has concluded

Dates: 20140301

Location: Macleay Museum, University of Sydney A12 Macleay Building - science road Camperdown NSW 2006 Australia

Hours: M-F:10-4.30; First Saturday of each month

Entry Fee: Free

Exhibition Event:

Official Opening 10/03/2014 10:00 am

Historic photographs from the Pacific are the result of complex cross-cultural encounters; their stories are many and varied and continue to unfold as we learn more about them. The images in this exhibition span close to a century, the earliest dating from the late 1850s when photography was in its infancy and rapidly growing as a means of recording and communicating ideas. In this period the camera rendered the vibrant hues of the Pacific in shades of black and white.

This exhibition is drawn exclusively from the Macleay Museum’s extensive historic photograph collection. It includes colonial government and missionary images, as well as those of traders, anthropologists, educators and tourists. Through the themes of community, sea and land, governance, spirituality and the market, the images are used as points of focus to examine aspects of Pacific history. The exhibition explores how photographs shape our understanding of the past and continue to provoke new ideas about the Pacific today.