Celebrated Australian photographer Rod McNicol dies aged 79

Celebrated Australian photographer Rod McNicol has died on the age of 79.

Born in 1946, McNicol left Australia for Europe in 1968, spending 4 years travelling and dealing throughout Europe, North Africa and the Middle East earlier than returning dwelling in 1973.

The following 12 months he enrolled in images at Prahran College in Melbourne, the place he studied underneath and befriended famend photographer Athol Shmith.

In 1975, McNicol co-founded The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop in South Yarra, considered one of Australia’s first galleries devoted completely to images.

His first exhibition, shared with Carol Jerrems, was held at Brummels Gallery in 1978. Later that 12 months he moved right into a warehouse studio in Fitzroy, the place he would dwell and work for the remainder of his life.

Through the late Nineteen Seventies and Eighties, McNicol turned recognized for his stark black and white portraits of pals and friends from Melbourne’s inner-city arts group, “artists, actors, drug addicts and other fellow marginals,” as he as soon as described them.

His work evoked the quiet depth of early photographic portraiture, marked by stillness and directness.

In 1989 and 1990 he undertook an Australia Council-funded residency within the most cancers ward of Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital, producing the highly effective collection Art and the Cancer Ward, which was exhibited in 1992.

The expertise led him to step away from images for a lot of the Nineties, earlier than resuming his follow and finishing a Master of Fine Arts at Monash University in 2007.

McNicol received the Australian Photographic Portrait Prize in 2004 and the National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2012 for his portrait of his long-time pal, actor Jack Charles.

His work was usually exhibited in Australia and overseas and is held in main public collections together with the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Portrait Gallery and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

McNicol’s portraits, spanning greater than 4 a long time, type a exceptional file of artistic life in Australia. Vale Rod.