A photographic exhibition depicting the extremes of human emotion will take centre stage at a Leichhardt gallery this month.
Photographer and activist documenter, Barbara McGrady, will fill the rooms of the Boomali Aboriginal Arts Cooperative at Leichhardt with her Protest and Performance exhibition until February 22.
The exhibition curator and fellow photographer Tina McCarthy said the collection’s two themes are fuelled by human emotion. Ms McGrady’s Protest photos witness activists at rallies.
“In Protest where she is covering so many rallies, it’s all about the emotion of the people in the shot who are trying to say something. And in the Performance, she captures the emotion of the artists in the moment.”
As activists themselves, Ms McGrady and Ms McCarthy met at an anti-intervention rally three years ago. Ms McGrady said that while she stands back to capture protests like Occupy Sydney, she cannot help but get involved.
“I look at things sociologically for that’s how I see my world,” she said. “I was [at Occupy Sydney] to document it with my photographs.
“Of course I was all for the 99 per cent and of course that’s how I saw it, and I think my photographs reflect that.”
As a sociology student at Sydney University, Ms McGrady said she studies people and has always been involved in activist movements, making her mark in Aboriginal land rights movements from the “early years”.
Yet when asked about her upbringing, Ms McGrady sees her identity as multilayered as her photographs.
“I call myself Kamilaroi and Murri is the area and I am a Yina,which in my language means woman.
“I say that I come from three places. As a child I spent alot of time in my father’s country, Toomelah, and I went to school at Mungindion, the Queensland border.
[Toomelah] is an unusual town made up of three quarters NSW and one quarter QLD. The hospital where I was born is on the Queensland side, so technically I was born in Queensland.”
After school, Ms McGrady went on to study nursing. However, she said she had always been passionate about photography.
“I just always loved images. I was the official photographer in my family and at about 14 or 15 I would take family portraits.”
From family portraits in the sixties, Ms McGrady went on to capture intense moments of competitive sports such as Indigenous Rugby League.
“I realised the power in images a long time ago and I am absolutely trying to achieve the storytelling and the communication of those intense moments I capture.”
Ms McCarthy said Barbara McGrady has an unending source of energy and her photographs are a medium through which she communicates her study of people.
“Let’s show the world the world as her study about people has now come through the lens.”
By Kristie Beattie
