Mother in backyard

WALL LABEL: Public Image, Private Lives: Family, Friends and Self in Photography, 2016

One of the assignments during Mark Kimber’s final year at art school was to ’go back to where we grew up and capture a sense of that place and those people from that time’.  Kimber returned to the suburbs of Woodville and Port Adelaide, which he chose to photograph at night. 

At night these places seem to be in a state of flux time wise … these streets and people seemed to hover within an existence that quite beautifully invoked the past for me in a very strong way.

He began with a portrait of his mother, who patiently sat on a chair in the backyard for several hours, while Kimber experimented with different lighting effects and exposure times.

The photograph of my mother is most certainly my favourite photograph of her. It is an image of her in what I see as the golden years of her life when she was well, untroubled, at peace and relatively happy. As such it is for me a wellspring of positive memories of her.

Julie Robinson, Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs