Design and Art Australia Online

Ricky Maynard, photographer, was born in Launceston, Tasmania in 1953. A descendant of the Big River and Ben Lomond people, in 2007 the artist was based on Cape Barren Island, off the north east coast of Tasmania. Maynard developed a fascination for photography early in life when, at the age of 16, he was employed as a darkroom technician working with aerial photographs at a processing business in Melbourne. Starting with this formative experience, Maynard’s practice has been underpinned by a thorough technical knowledge of chemistry and photographic optics, honed through further periods of study and employment. These included a three year traineeship as a photographer at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra from 1983, and a year’s study at the International Centre for Photography in New York in 1990, funded by a grant from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. Maynard has worked as a photographer’s assistant at the Antarctic Division in Kingston, Tasmania and as a part time photographic teacher at Hobart Technical College. He was also a founding member of M.33 Photoagency in Melbourne.

Maynard’s career as a documentary photographer gained momentum in 1985 when he was commissioned, along with 19 other photographers, to contribute work to the After 200 years project. Established in the lead up to Australia’s bicentenary, the project’s aim was to make possible new approaches to representing Aboriginal people, who historically had so often been the subject of negative and parochial photographic portrayals. Maynard chose to document the lives of members of his community in Tasmania during the mutton birding season, and the result was the Moonbird People (1985-88) series. The spirit of this project, particularly its emphasis on empowering the subject to direct the photographic process, was highly formative of Maynard’s approach to the craft. Maynard remains committed to a humanist approach to documentary photography whereby the objective is not merely to record social life, but to bring compassion, dignity and honesty to the exchange between photographer and subject, and to treat photography as a means of communication that can potentially bring about social change. In Maynard’s words:

'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’ (Museum of Contemporary Art media release, 2005).

Maynard’s work to date has consistently affirmed this philosophy. For example, the No More Than What You See series (1993) resulted from a commission from the South Australian Department of Correctional Services to coincide with the Year of Indigenous Peoples and to engage with the concerns raised by the 1988 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Report. The series, which documented the lives of Aboriginal prisoners in South Australian gaols, was first exhibited at Stills Gallery in Sydney and established Maynard’s ongoing representation by the gallery. In 1994 it was awarded the Mother Jones International Documentary Award, and in 1997 it won the Australian Human Rights Award for Photography. In 2000 Maynard collaborated with writer Tony Birch to produce the publication Reversing the Negatives: a Portrait of Aboriginal Victoria, and this collection of work was exhibited at Gasworks, Melbourne in 2001. The series Returning to Places that Name Us (2000), which was awarded the 2003 Kate Challis RAKA Award, consists of five large scale, intimate portraits of Wik elders. As with all of Maynard’s work, the images resulted from a patient, respectful and collaborative period of association with the subjects, and sought to compel viewers to reflect upon the faces of those whose identity in the public eye had become somewhat reified by the politics surrounding the High Court 'Wik decision’ (1996), which recognised the survival of their native title rights over pastoral land in the Cape York Peninsular.

His most recent series Portrait of a distant land (2005 – 2007) consists of photos taken in Tasmania compiled over the 20 years of his practice, and is partly concerned with undermining the robust myth that Tasmania’s Aboriginal population did not survive colonisation. The series presents an environment humanised by a resilient Aboriginal presence, depicting sites whose significance derives from a range of historical, ceremonial and cultural heritage narratives conveyed by his community’s oral history. In 2005 images from this series were enlarged to a grand scale for display on billboards around Sydney as part of the exhibition 'Interesting times: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art’ curated by the MCA in Sydney. The billboard series toured to the Ten Days on an Island Festival, Tasmania and the Busan Biennale in Korea in 2006. The Portrait of a distant land series was also included in the inaugural National Indigenous Art Triennial 'Culture Warriors’ at the National Gallery of Australia (2007/2008) and the inaugural Photoquai biennale in Paris (2007).

Other significant national and international group exhibitions Maynard has participated in include: 'Urban Focus: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art from the Urban Areas of Australia’ at the NGA (1994); the 'World Retrospective on Documentary Photography’ at the Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City (1995); the Festival of the Dreaming Olympic Arts Festival, Casula Powerhouse Sydney (1997); 'Re-take: Contemporary Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Photography’ at the NGA (1999); and 'Our Place: Indigenous Australia Now’, at the Cultural Olympiad of the Athens Olympics Games, Benaki Museum, Athens (2004). Maynard has also had numerous solo exhibitions across Australia, and his work is included in most major state gallery collections.

Writers:

Fisher, Laura Note:

Date written:

2007

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed