Personal View: Photographs 1978 – 1986

In 2004, Janine Burke was looking for a photograph she’d taken of Albert Tucker. Crammed into the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in her study, she discovered hundreds of photographs that she’d taken over the years and forgotten about. Best known as an author and art historian, Personal View: Photographs 1978–1986 reveals Burke as an ‘accidental photographer’ who recorded the artists, critics, writers and curators who were her friends and colleagues during a dynamic period in Australian art. Personal View Photographs: 1978–1986 is a casual, intimate, visual memoir that includes Albert Tucker, Betty Churcher, Sue Ford, Allan Mitelman, Jenny Watson, Shane Maloney, John Nixon, Frances Lindsay and Paul Taylor. Living in Carlton in the 70s, Burke was part of a milieu that generated the women’s art movement, feminist exhibitions, radical journals, experimental galleries and provocative art. The common denominator in all these ventures were networks of intense friendships, a catalyst that helped to change the culture. Personal View is a snapshot of an era.