Twelve Australian Photo Artists

Photography has been described as the art form of our time. The book Twelve Australian Photo Artists presents Australia's most important practitioners of photography, photo media and photographic arts. Each artist was interviewed and they discussed the selection and presentation of images to provide first-hand and inspiring accounts of their practice. 

On the cover, we feature Rosemary Laing's "weather #10" from 2006. 

Since the publishing of this book. It is with deep sadness that we mark the passing of not one, but two, remarkable Australian artists and women, both the subjects of Twelve Australian Photo Artists. Vale Destiny Deacon, one of our leading indigenous artists and Rosemary Laing, the extraordinary photo artist. May their life and work live on in their many works throughout national collections. Our thoughts are with their families, friends and colleagues.

This book is written by Blair French and Daniel Palmer with editing by Ray Tindale and Peggy Mares.

• Pat Brassington combines dream and memory fragments.
• Brenda Croft investigates Indigenous Australian experience.
• Destiny Deacon employs satire to manipulate racist stereotypes in work that is volatile, humane and generous.
• Simryn Gill negotiates experiences of history and geography through making and circulating photographs.
• Bill Henson pictures the ambiguous zone of adolescent desire in works of imagination and sensibility.
• Rosemary Laing creates large-scale photographic scenes that dramatise human interaction with the natural world.
• Tracey Moffatt fuses violence and humour in images full of artifice that ultimately present real and important subjects.
• Debra Phillips evokes the past reverberating in the present.
• Jacky Redgate investigates vision, space and memory.
• Julie Rrap’s photography is energetic and playful, with strange incongruities and unexpected twists and turns
• David Stephenson uses the camera in an ongoing search for a photographic sublime.
• Anne Zahalka’s photography questions sterotypes and explores the line between the natural and the artificial.