Church Street Centre for Photography
Joyce Evans | |
|---|---|
| Born | Template:Birth date |
| Died | 20 April 2019 (aged 89) |
| Occupation(s) | Photographer, art curator, educator |
| Known for | Photography, managing Church Street Photography Centre, photography education |
Joyce Olga Evans, B.A., Dip. Soc. Stud. (21 December 1929 – 20 April 2019), was an Australian photographer who began her journey in the 1950s as an amateur and transitioned to professional photography in the 1980s. She managed the Church Street Photography Centre in Melbourne from 1976 to 1982, contributed as an art curator and collector, and taught photography at the tertiary education level.
Early work
Evans was gifted a Leica camera by her father, with her earliest preserved images dating between 1949 and 1951. These photographs captured events such as marches, demonstrations, and youth gatherings, including the 1949 May Day March and the Second World Festival of Youth and Students held in Budapest. In 1967 and 1968, she pursued painting studies under John Olsen at Sydney’s Bakery Art School but later shifted focus to photography after attending the Basel Art Fair. This experience initiated her career first as a gallery owner and subsequently as a practicing photographer.
Church Street Photographic Centre
In 1976, Evans established the Church Street Photographic Centre, a dedicated photography gallery and bookstore located in Richmond, Victoria. It was Melbourne’s third commercial photography gallery of the decade, following Brummels (1972) and The Photographers Gallery (1973). The venue exhibited international photographic works from the 19th and 20th centuries by artists such as Berenice Abbott, Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, André Kertész, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Minor White.
The centre also highlighted significant Australian photographers including Venise Alstergren, Robert Ashton, John Cato, Max Dupain, Rennie Ellis, Fiona Hall, Bill Henson, Frank Hurley, David Moore, Athol Shmith, and Mark Strizic.
Alongside exhibitions, the gallery operated a bookstore that supplied photography books and magazines from both local and international sources to educational institutions. In 1981, Evans sold the book stock to financially support the gallery; this collection became the basis for 'The Printed Image,' a bookstore specializing exclusively in photography.
Church Street served as a venue for guest lectures and workshops led by renowned photographers and editors such as Pete Turner (Creative Camera), Jean-Marc Le Pechoux (Light Vision), John Cato, and Ian Cosier. It also offered darkroom and framing services utilized by artists like Herbert Zangs during his visit to Australia in 1981.
Starting in 1975, Evans collaborated with Horsham Regional Art Gallery directors Jean Davidson and Merle Hathaway as well as Jennie Boddington from the National Gallery of Victoria to develop the gallery’s photography collection. This included acquisitions like Evans’ own work The Ascent (1993).
In late 1981, Evans organized a Final Retrospective showcasing photographers featured since 1977. Despite gaining international acclaim—including coverage in the European publication Print Letter—the Church Street gallery closed in 1982 due to economic challenges. Evans then moved her practice to a private studio while maintaining her role as an Approved Commonwealth Valuer for the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program from 1978 onward.
She continued offering expert advice to public institutions and private collectors across Australia. In 2003, she funded a position at the University of Melbourne that led to the creation of its inaugural photography history course, appointing Daniel Palmer as a part-time lecturer.
Photographer
Following the closure of the Church Street Gallery, Evans enrolled at Photography Studies College in 1982, dedicating herself to photography with a focus on portraiture, documentary, and landscape genres. Among her landscape projects is a photographic essay capturing wildlife road fatalities along roadside verges, produced between 1988 and 1996 using a Widelux F7 35mm panoramic camera. Her photo-book Only One Kilometre showcases images from the Balcombe Estuary Reserve near Mt Martha on the Mornington Peninsula, enriched by poetry and literary pieces from Graeme Kinross-Smith, Pat Raison, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Evans’s photographic travels also extended to the Dandenong Ranges, sections of the Hume Hwy, Australia's Central Desert and outback regions—including locations such as Oodnadatta, Oodlawirra, Menindee, and Lake Mungo—as well as vineyards and villages in the South of France and the historic Jewish cemetery in central Prague.
Her black-and-white portrait work concentrated on intimate environmental portraits that explored the psychological interplay between individuals and their environments. Evans’s portfolio spans a broad spectrum of Australian society, capturing both everyday people and notable personalities such as Marianne Baillieu; Barbara Blackman; Baron Avid von Blumenthal; Tim Burstall; Dur-e Dara; Robert Dessaix; Germaine Greer; Elena Kats-Chernin; Joan Kerr; Ellen Koshland; David Malouf; Dame Elisabeth Murdoch; Lin Onus; Jill Reichstein; and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.
Evans held the position of honorary photographer for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Central Australia, while also documenting rural Australian towns and events for over ten years on behalf of the National Library of Australia.
Education and lecturing
Evans made notable contributions to photography education in Australia. She taught photography history at Melbourne's RMIT University, acted as the inaugural assistant director of Waverley City Gallery (currently Monash Gallery of Art) from 1990 to 1991—the first municipal public collection in Melbourne focused on photography—and was a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne between 1997 and 2010. Additionally, she delivered lectures and led photographic workshops primarily across Melbourne and regional Victoria.
Solo exhibitions
- National Trust Gallery, Melbourne
- 2010: Obscura Gallery, St Kilda East, Victoria
Group exhibitions
- 2011: Phiction: Lies, Illusion and the Phantasm in Australian Photography, Horsham Regional Art Gallery followed by tours at eleven regional and metropolitan galleries
- Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery
- 2015: Streetwise, Photonet Gallery, Fairfield, February 1–22
- 2019: In Her Words: A NETS Touring Exhibition, Horsham Regional Art Gallery (March–May); Wangaratta Art Gallery (November–December)
Awards
- Hasselblad Masters Award (Landscape category), 1985
- Print of the Year Award, IAPP Victorian Division (1985, 1991)
- Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM), awarded in the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours for contributions to photography
Collections
Evans' photographs are part of several distinguished public institutions, including:
- Musée de la Photographie in Mougins, France
- National Library of Australia
- National Gallery of Victoria
- State Library of Victoria
- State Library of New South Wales (Mitchell Library Collection)
- Jewish Museum of Australia
- Castlemaine Art Museum
- Horsham Regional Art Gallery
- Monash Gallery of Art
- Museum of Victoria, Melbourne
- Immigration Museum, Melbourne
Tapestry
In 1995, the Australian Tapestry Workshop in Melbourne transformed Evans' Selby Daffodils (Cotswald Farm) into a tapestry.
Publications
- Kinross-Smith, Graeme, and Joyce Evans. Window to Australia: Photographs. Deakin University, 1987.
- Evans, Joyce. Only One Kilometre. Lothian, 2003.
- Joyce Evans: Imaging the Spiritual 1980–2010, exhibition catalogue, Melbourne: Obscura Gallery, 2010.
- Evans, Joyce. Joyce Evans: My Australia. Dickerson Gallery, 2007.
- Evans, Joyce, and Andrew Harmsen. We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952: A Photographic Memoir. Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2019.
- Syndikas, Alexander, and Joyce Evans. Optical Deformation. A. Syndikas, 1983.
Further reading
- McCulloch's Encyclopaedia of Australian Art (Alan and Susan McCulloch, eds., 2006); p. 409
- Dictionary of Australian Women Artists (Max Germaine, 1991)
- Who's Who of Australian Women (1982, 2007)
- The World's Who's Who of Women (1986)