Bill Henson, Tracey Moffatt & Anne Zahalka

Tracey Moffatt (b. 1960, Brisbane) Tracey Moffatt, photographer and video-artist, is among the best-known Australian artists on the international scene. Her (narrative) photo-series focus on issues like race (Aboriginals), gender and domestic violence. The Up in the Sky series now on show at the Museum of Photography tells the dramatic tale of Australia’s ‘stolen generation’. Although the pictures are entirely staged, they slowly but surely reveal how aboriginal children were torn from their families and placed in government care between 1915 and 1969. Anne Zahalka (b. 1957, Sydney) Anne Zahalka’s photographs bear witness to a simultaneously critical and humorous attitude to Australian society. Each of them seeks to identify the dividing line between the real and the artificial. This interest comes across most clearly in her Leisureland series, which focuses on the contemporary (Australian) leisure industry, in which nature is consistently replaced by an ersatz equivalent: rock climbing is done indoors and the Oceanworld aquarium complex replaces the real sea. And if people do decide to go to the beach, they don’t go for a swim on their own, but take part in an over-organised event like the annual Cole Classic swimming race at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Bill Henson(b. 1955, Melbourne) Bill Henson explores the ambiguous spaces that exist between day and night, nature and civilisation, youth and adulthood, male and female. His photographs of landscapes in the industrial no-man’s land on the outskirts of cities and of androgynous boys and girls struggling with adolescence continue the tradition of romantic painting.