Walking down St Kilda Road on a late spring afternoon—when the heat has almost burned itself out and the light begins to scatter—the bluestone façade of the National Gallery of Victoria seems to steady itself for the evening. Roy Grounds’s design, that long articulated plane of stone and shadow, does not announce itself loudly. It settles into the landscape with a quiet conviction. The water wall at the entrance performs the same gesture on a smaller scale: a soft shifting surface that blurs the distinction between exterior and interior, public street and cultural space.
Across from the entrance, a towering poster for Women Photographers 1900–1975: A Legacy of Light exhibition establishes its own border between the ordinary and the reflective. Dora Maar’s Untitled (Study of Beauty) (1936) appears with sculptural definition: a cheekbone catching a precise band of illumination, the rest of the face held back in composed darkness. The image does not attempt seduction. It is a photograph that trusts its own restraint. In its calm severity, it signals the tone of the exhibition it introduces—not a retrospective filling gaps, but a reframing of the very structures through which photographic history has been narrated.
The exhibition assembles more than eighty women photographers working between 1900 and 1975. Over 300 works from the NGV Collection—prints, postcards, photobooks, magazines—form its foundation. More than 170 of those works have been acquired since 2020, and over 130 are being shown publicly for the first time. The scale alone is extraordinary, but the deeper significance lies in the curatorial argument: women were not peripheral to twentieth-century photography; they shaped it at every turn.
The images trace a broad and turbulent geography—Melbourne, Tokyo, Paris, Buenos Aires—and move through suffrage movements, labour struggles, modernist experiment, war, political transformation, and the rise of women’s liberation. “This exhibition celebrates the work of women photographers who documented the world around them from vastly different places and perspectives,” says Katie Hall, Parliamentary Secretary for Creative Industries. In another context, those words might land as a generality. Here, they are simply descriptive.
Tony Ellwood, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, emphasises that this exhibition forms part of a larger institutional reconsideration. “Like all collecting institutions globally, the NGV has been actively looking at historically underrepresented areas of our collection, including gender. Though this is a long and ongoing process, this exhibition offers an opportunity to celebrate and share the more than 300 works by women photographers, many of which we’ve collected since 2020.” Ellwood’s acknowledgement of institutional history—its gaps, its gradual recalibration—threads through the exhibition itself.
Many recent acquisitions have been supported by the Bowness Family Foundation, whose involvement with the NGV stretches nearly twenty-five years. Additional contributions by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family, Professor Wang Gungwu, and Joy Anderson have further shaped the growing collection. The accompanying publication, co-published with Hatje Cantz, brings together essays by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Helen Ennis, Amanda Maddox, Carla Williams, and Yamada Yuri—an international body of scholarship that extends the exhibition’s reach well beyond the gallery walls.
The exhibition’s opening decades show photography on the verge of transformation. Florence Henri’s sharp geometries, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s psychologically charged photomontages, and Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus images break with pictorialism, embracing crisp lines and conceptual force. Meanwhile, Melbourne photographer Ruth Hollick cultivated a distinctive local modernism: studio portraits and commercial images that circulated widely in the interwar period, revealing an aesthetic sensitivity that evolved in parallel to European and American movements rather than in their shadow.
By the 1920s and 30s, handheld cameras shifted photographic possibility. Ilse Bing, the German-born photographer celebrated as the “Queen of the Leica,” exemplifies the energy of the moment. Her Self-portrait (1931), included in the exhibition, plays contemporary and classical notes at once. Mirrors multiply her image, yet nothing in the composition is gimmickry. The photograph suggests a modern self taking shape—fragmented, reflective, technologically mediated. It is emblematic of the exhibition’s broader argument: women were not on the margins of modernism; they were central to its imaginative expansion.
Light, Witness, and the Politics of Seeing
To begin with Dora Maar is to begin with a photographer who understood light as structure. Her 1930s work—fashion photography, portraiture, experimental compositions, social documentation—shares a precise visual discipline. Maar’s images do not seek dramatic flourish; they refine. Cloth becomes contour. Gesture becomes line. In her street photographs of Paris, she observes without sentimentality, giving weight to the ordinary without romanticising it.
Included in the exhibition is the set of studio portraits she produced of Pablo Picasso between 1935 and 1936. Though the narrative of their relationship often overshadows her work, the images themselves resist biographical reduction. Picasso appears without mythologising—an artist caught in the same play of light and shadow as any other subject. Maar’s authority is evident in the compositional clarity, the rigorous framing, and the emotional distance that avoids both reverence and accusation.
Her Untitled (Study of Beauty)—the image that greets visitors outside the gallery—condenses this sensibility. It is not an image of grandeur but of precision. Its restraint is its strength.
Where Maar builds, Dorothea Lange bears witness. Lange’s photographs for the United States Farm Security Administration brought global attention to the lived realities of the Great Depression. Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936), included in A Legacy of Light, has become one of the most circulated images in photographic history. Yet the exhibition positions it within the series Lange produced that day—frames that reveal her careful negotiation with Florence Owens Thompson and her children. Lange was never interested in spectacle. She sought accuracy, dignity, and the hard conditions behind the image.
Lee Miller’s early work adds another register to this arc. After entering Man Ray’s Paris studio in 1929, she quickly became collaborator, model, and equal—not an easy transformation in a milieu dominated by men. Her portrait of Man Ray from 1931, made in her own apartment, is taut with ambivalence. His gaze is averted; her perspective is steady. Though Miller would later produce some of the most unflinching photographs of the Second World War, these earlier images show an emerging ability to see emotional complexity without resorting to dramatic contrast.
Tina Modotti brings photography into the realm of political action. Working in Mexico during the 1920s, she created images that fuse documentary observation with graphic intensity—workers’ parades, banners, agricultural labourers, the sharp diagonals of political signage. Modotti’s work does not attempt neutrality. It embraces the idea that photographs can participate in social change.
Germaine Krull’s industrial compositions, Annemarie Heinrich’s luminous portraits of Argentine actors and politicians, and Berenice Abbott’s architectural chronicles of New York contribute further dimensions to the exhibition’s account of modernity. Their works share no single style, yet each expands the possibilities of photography as a tool for interpreting the twentieth century.
Modernism at the Edges
One of the most compelling aspects of A Legacy of Light is its willingness to disrupt the predictable centres of modernism. Olive Cotton, a central figure in Australian photography, exemplifies this shift. Her Teacup ballet (1935), included here, is a precise study of geometry and light: modest objects arranged so that their shadows stretch into a form that feels both architectural and performative. Cotton’s broader body of work—landscape, portraiture, domestic interiors—conveys an intelligence attuned to subtle tonal shifts. Her photographs demonstrate that experimentation in Australian photography emerged not from imitation but from deep attention to local conditions.
Lola Álvarez Bravo represents a different register of modernism. Her photograph Las Lavanderas (The Washerwomen), c. 1940, depicts a scene of everyday labour in Mexico—women washing clothes near a waterfront, shadows cast by nearby structures elongating their forms. Bravo saw photography as a cultural instrument, capable of articulating the textures of community, gendered labour, and social rhythm. Her images refuse both exotic nostalgia and ethnographic detachment; they insist on the dignity of ordinary tasks.
Kati Horna adds another dimension. Her photographs from the Spanish Civil War depict conflict through its everyday realities rather than its dramatic peaks. Moments of labour, play and improvised survival become evidence of war’s psychological weight, conveyed without sentiment or sensationalism. Horna’s surrealist work, also included in the exhibition, extends this concern into metaphoric territory: suspended objects, uncanny interiors, domestic dislocation. The images speak to displacement, fear, and resilience across borders.
Together, Cotton, Bravo, and Horna form an alternative constellation—one that reveals modernism as a global set of experiments rather than a movement centred in a handful of cities. Their photographs expand the possibilities of what modernist photography can be: lyrical, political, domestic, migratory, grounded.
Liberation Years and Local Archives
The final decades of A Legacy of Light turn toward the 1960s and 70s, when photography opened into new conceptual, political, and personal territories. In Australia, Ponch Hawkes documented Melbourne with a sensitivity to the shifting social worlds emerging around her. Communal households, feminist organising, early Gay Pride celebrations, urban graffiti advocating childcare and social housing, the Women’s Theatre Group performing beneath a Women’s Liberation banner—Hawkes’s images feel alive with the immediacy of participation. They form an alternative archive of the city: a record of communities inventing new ways to live, act, and collaborate.
While A Legacy of Light brings together more than eighty artists—including Diane Arbus, Berenice Abbott, Lee Miller, Germaine Krull, Tina Modotti, Ilse Bing, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore—the scope of this review is necessarily selective. The exhibition’s strength lies not in the exhaustiveness of its roster but in the multiplicity of practices it sets in conversation, revealing a century shaped by artists whose contributions remain inseparable from photography’s evolution.
Diane Arbus appears here as a counterpoint. Her portraits—unsettling, intimate, resistant to simplification—destabilise the idea that women’s photography is inherently gentle. Arbus’s approach is neither voyeuristic nor sentimental; it is unflinchingly present. Her work extends the exhibition’s exploration of portraiture into more ambiguous emotional territory.
Sue Ford’s sequences, built around the passage of time, and Francesca Woodman’s early self-portraits, which play with vanishing, doubling, and blur, mark photography’s expansion into self-inquiry and performance. Their works reveal a shift from photography as record to photography as questioning.
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s Aveux non Avenus (1930), represented in the exhibition, offers one of the most radical interventions in the history of gender representation. The photomontages—shaved heads, androgynous dress, doubled selves—interrogate identity with an audacity that now feels prophetic.
Mikki Ferrill, Christine Godden, and other practitioners represented in this final section illustrate how women created their own infrastructures for visibility—artist-led publications, community darkrooms, zine networks, and informal systems of exchange. Their contributions shape a history of photography rooted not only in institutions but in collaboration.
Re-seeing the Century
Considered against the broader narratives of photographic history, A Legacy of Light shifts the viewer’s sense of scale. Much of what the exhibition brings forward was present all along; it simply lacked the interpretive structures that enable recognition. The more than 130 works being shown publicly for the first time underscore this point. Their emergence is not an indictment of the past so much as a reminder that archives expand through choice — collecting choice, curatorial choice, institutional choice.
Professor Simon Tormey of Deakin University describes the exhibition as one that “foregrounds the often-overlooked contributions of women to the evolution of photography across the twentieth century… and challenges historical silences.” His observation articulates the exhibition’s central achievement: history deepens when institutions choose to see differently.
The exhibition’s temporal endpoint, 1975, aligns with the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations’ declaration of the first International Women’s Year. Yet A Legacy of Light is not an anniversary project. It is a structural one — an attempt to reposition photographic history in its full complexity, with women’s contributions understood not as supplementary but as indispensable.
In this expanded light, the exhibition’s opening image — Dora Maar’s half-shadowed profile — assumes a quieter but unmistakable authority. What might first appear as a single, sculpturally restrained portrait becomes a threshold into a century reframed. Light reveals form; shadow reveals context. Taken together, they outline a method of looking that remains as necessary now as it was when these photographs were made.
The images gathered here — Lange’s rigorous witnessing, Bing’s mirrored sophistication, Cotton’s luminous geometry, Bravo’s architectural attention to labour, Horna’s psychological nuance, Hawkes’s communal intimacy — do not revise history so much as widen it. They reveal a story of photography that is richer, more distributed, and more intricately interconnected than earlier accounts allowed.
A Legacy of Light does not restore women to a narrative from which they were missing. It demonstrates that the narrative was incomplete, awaiting the illumination of work long kept at the margins. Its insight is simple and profound: photographic history looks different when women’s images are given the visibility, scholarship and cultural space they always merited.
And so Maar’s face — calm, balanced, half-shadowed — acquires its final meaning. It is neither nostalgia nor tribute. It is an aperture: a call to see again, to see more fully, and to recognise that light, in these photographers’ hands, was always a way of knowing.
Exhibition Details
Women Photographers 1900–1975: A Legacy of Light
National Gallery of Victoria (NGV International), St Kilda Road, Melbourne
28 November 2025 – 3 May 2026
A major survey featuring more than 300 photographs, prints, postcards, photobooks and magazines from over eighty women artists working between 1900 and 1975. Over 170 works have been acquired since 2020, with more than 130 presented to the public for the first time. The exhibition includes key works by Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, Olive Cotton, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Ilse Bing, Tina Modotti, Ponch Hawkes, Sue Ford, Kati Horna, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Germaine Krull, Francesca Woodman, and many others.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication co-published with Hatje Cantz, featuring essays by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Helen Ennis, Amanda Maddox, Carla Williams and Yamada Yuri.
Ticketed entry.
Further information: ngv.melbourne
