You’ve noticed perhaps that the posts are thinning out. ‘Where are they?’ you wonder. I’m distracted from this blog by a major project which has recently experienced a success…

Since 2012 Phil Quirk and Peter Leiss have worked at getting a major exhibition to serve as a tribute to Prahran College where, through the 1960s and 1970s, we were students, the disciples in photography of marvellous lecturers and mentors, particularly Athol Shmith, John Cato and Paul Cox. I joined them in 2017, after an exhibition of some of the Prahran graduates had been shown at MAGNET gallery thanks to the selfless efforts of Colin Abbott.Now, working together, we have the ambition of creating a show that would encompass and showcase the extraordinary range of work by a greater number of our colleagues in the diploma course.

What times they were, and all the more because the 1970s, right around the globe, was a period of a re-awakening to the artistic potential of photography!

Instamatic, Polaroid, point-and-shoot and 35mm reflex cameras made photography a folk art. For some, who were prepared to delve more deeply into its chemistry and photometry and to bend it to their vision, it was a medium of personal expression they shared with a growing community of practitioners and audiences.

This was the case in Australia too.

Simultaneously a new wave of feminism, sexual freedoms, ever-louder anti-war rhetoric, a thwarted swing to the left in politics, new music, conceptual and performance art (which in the following decade was to become ‘post-modernism’), and kindled Prahran students’ passions and coursed through their imagery, despite their threadbare budgets.

Teachers and students revelled in the rich subject-matter of working-class Prahran, amongst diverse demographies of St Kilda, Toorak, South Yarra and Elwood. Nearby were Australia’s first independent photography galleries; Brummels (showing Australians); and Photographers‘ (exhibiting famous American photographers), and both showing Prahran graduates. Around the corner was the National Gallery of Victoria, with the first department of photography in any Australian state gallery, only a tram-ride away.

Our great news is that the Museum of Australian Photography has accepted our exhibition proposal and it will be shown there in 2025.

I am working on the remarkable and varied biographies of notable alumni of the 1960-1980 period, all of them stories of extraordinary achievement in our medium in its myriad genres; photography, as I say, is about everything!

You can join me to read these at prahranlegacy.org