Image:
Sidney NOLAN
Untitled (calf carcass in tree) 1952
archival inkjet print
23 x 23 cm
Gift of the Friends of Benalla Art Gallery, 2004
2005.07
Benalla Art Gallery Collection
26th Mar – 18th Apr 2021
Simpson Gallery
Sidney Nolan was a keen photographer for much of his adult life; he experimented with the versatile image-making potential of the camera, and used a wide-format camera to record Central Australia over a three year span. The 1952 Drought Photographs were, however, the only series the artist intended for exhibition.
The series, presented in full for this exhibition, remains a compelling depiction of Australia’s unforgiving rural heartland—a graphic account of ‘one of the worst droughts in Australia’s history’.
Originally commissioned by The Courier-Mail, the newspaper never published the images as they were deemed ‘too graphic’, with Nolan having drawn inspiration from the petrified bodies he had witnessed in Pompeii. Alongside macabre depictions of animal carcasses scattering the landscape are images of human dwellings, bringing into clear focus the hardship and tenuousness of life on the land.