RICKY MAYNARD: Portrait of a Distant Land

Ricky Maynard is a leading Indigenous photographer based on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait between Tasmania and the Australian mainland. Since the late 1980s he has documented his people, from the renowned Moonbird People series (1986), which depicted a Tasmanian Aboriginal community during the annual muttonbird season, to No More Than What You See (1993), which documented Indigenous people incarcerated in the South Australian prison system, to his portraits of Wik Elders in Returning to Places that Name Us (2000). He has exhibited throughout Australia and internationally, and his work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the National Museum of Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW, Queensland Art Gallery and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. He is the recipient of a number of prestigious awards, including the Mother Jones International Documentary Award (1994), an Australian Human Rights Award (1997) and The Kate Challis RAKA Award (2003).

Maynard’s approach to photography attempts to resist the traditional relationship of photographer to subject; as he says:
Standard photographic technique is essentially an act of subjugation, in which people are invariably reduced to objects for the use of the photographer… To build an alternative practice, a convivial photography, we need to abolish this oppressive relationship. Co-authorship must be established beforehand. It is impossible to fight oppression by reproducing it.

In 2005 the MCA has had the opportunity to present the first images of Maynard’s new series Portrait of a Distant Land. The series consists of photographs of Tasmania’s physical and social landscapes, following song lines and ochre trails, tribal movements and historical displacement routes, and creating a form of visual diary derived from collective oral histories. The project records cultural and historical sites significant to Maynard’s people, the Big River and Ben Lomond tribes of Tasmania. Having returned to the Bass Strait after many years elsewhere, Maynard feels he is now well-positioned to engage more closely with his community, in what he considers ‘the most personal and culturally pertinent work of my career’.

Maynard’s approach to social documentary, working in close collaboration with the communities that he photographs, is a major development in the representation of Indigenous people in Australia. This new body of work, which provides a visual record of histories conveyed through stories and song, is not only a poetic and powerful work of art, but also demonstrates significant cultural research for the future.

The Museum of Contemporary Art with the assistance of the Australia Council’s New Australian Stories initiative has also commissioned Ricky Maynard to develop a major large scale public presentation of his works throughout Sydney in October of this year. The outdoor project will display a number of these new photographs on billboard sites and train stations in the metropolitan and suburban areas of Sydney.

The exhibition will comprise of approximately 40 new works and will be available for national and international tour in 2006-2008. The MCA will assist venues taking the exhibition to realise the large-scale format outside the gallery as an additional aspect of the exhibition presentation.

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REGIONAL/NATIONAL TOUR

Ten Days on the Island
23 March 2007- 1 April 2007

Tasmanian Museum and Gallery, Tasmania
March 2008 - April 2008

Cairns Regional Gallery
20 March - 3 May 2009

Port Macquarie Hastings Regional Gallery
19 November 2009 - 24 January 2010

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts’ New Australian Stories Initiative.

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