'B', nude, Darlinghurst
Australia
7 September 1942 – 19 July 2023
'B', nude, Darlinghurst
1978
gelatin-silver photograph
- Place made
- Darlinghurst, New South Wales
- Medium
- gelatin-silver photograph
- Dimensions
-
22.8 x 15.2 cm (image)
25.2 x 20.2 cm (sheet) - Credit line
- South Australian Government Grant 2009
- Accession number
- 20093Ph13
- Signature and date
- Signed and dated verso, bot.c., pencil "... Robert McFarlane/ ... 1978".
- Provenance
- Robert McFarlane, Adelaide
- Media category
- Photograph
- Collection area
- Australian photographs
- Copyright
- Courtesy Robert McFarlane and Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney
-
WALL LABEL: Public Image, Private Lives: Family, Friends and Self in Photography, 2016
Robert McFarlane was working as a photojournalist in Sydney when he met Beatrice, the subject of this photograph, in a topless restaurant in Adelaide in 1977. After his lunch Robert gave Bea his card, commenting, ’I would love to photograph you sometime’. It was a chaotic time for Bea, who the following year ended up in Sydney and knocked on the door of Robert’s terrace house in Darlinghurst, which Bea describes as a ’creative mess’. Robert offered her somewhere to stay while she sorted out her life.
This image was captured just after Bea had received a new punk haircut, which she regretted, and she was in the midst of a family crisis. After a shower she had curled up on an armchair and Robert, noticing the light falling on her limbs, quickly took the photograph. Bea said of the moment, ’I trusted Robert. I was comfortable in my body, but highly strung emotionally. In that moment I was fragile, but I’d relaxed into a quiet space’.
Julie Robinson, Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs
-
Robert McFarlane: In Memory [display]
Art Gallery of South Australia, 28 July 2023 – 17 April 2024 -
Public Image, Private Lives: Family, Friends and Self in Photography
Art Gallery of South Australia, 5 February 2016 – 18 September 2016