Church Street Photography Centre
Joyce Evans | |
|---|---|
| Born | 21 December 1929 |
| Died | 20 April 2019 (aged 89) |
| Occupation(s) | Photographer, photographic artist, art curator, collector, photography educator |
| Known for | Director of Church Street Photography Centre; contributions to Australian photography; photography education |
Joyce Olga Evans, B.A., Dip. Soc. Stud. (21 December 1929 – 20 April 2019), was a prominent Australian photographer whose career began in the 1950s. From the 1980s onward, she established herself as a professional photographic artist, served as director of Melbourne’s Church Street Photography Centre (1976–1982), and contributed as an art curator, collector, and university-level photography educator.
Early career
Evans received a Leica from her father, and her earliest preserved images (1949–1951) captured events such as marches, demonstrations, and youth gatherings, including the 1949 May Day March and the 2nd World Festival of Youth and Students, held in Budapest that same year. In 1967 and 1968, she studied painting under John Olsen at Sydney’s Bakery Art School but later transitioned to photography following her exposure to the medium at the Basel Art Fair. This experience catalyzed her dual roles as both photographer and gallery operator.
Church Street Photographic Centre
In 1976, Evans established the Church Street Photographic Centre, a dedicated photography gallery and bookshop located on Church Street in Richmond, Victoria. This venue was Melbourne’s third commercial gallery focused on photography, following Brummels (1972) and The Photographers Gallery (1973). The gallery featured international photographic works from the 19th and 20th centuries by artists such as Berenice Abbott, Eugène Atget, Julia Margaret Cameron, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Elliott Erwitt, Robert Frank, Hill and Adamson, André Kertész, Les Krims, James Newberry, Arnold Newman, Bill Owens, Jan Saudek, W. Eugene Smith, Frederick Sommer, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Jerry Uelsmann, Brett Weston, and Minor White.
Notable Australian photographers exhibited included Venise Alstergren, Robert Ashton, John Cato, Max Dupain, Rennie Ellis, John Gollings, Laurence Le Guay, Fiona Hall, Bill Henson, Frank Hurley, David Moore, Athol Shmith, and Mark Strizic.
Alongside exhibitions, the gallery operated a bookshop supplying both local and international photography publications to educational institutions. In 1981, Evans sold the bookshop’s stock to sustain financial stability; this collection subsequently became the core of 'The Printed Image,' a specialized photography bookstore.
Church Street also hosted visiting artists for lectures and workshops, including figures like Pete Turner (editor of Creative Camera), Jean-Marc Le Pechoux (publisher/editor of Light Vision), John Cato, and Ian Cosier. The centre provided darkroom and framing services utilized by visiting artists such as German Herbert Zangs during his 1981 trip to Australia.
Starting in 1975, Horsham Regional Art Gallery focused on photography under directors Jean Davidson and Merle Hathaway. They consulted Evans among others for acquisitions, including her own work The Ascent (1993).
In late 1981, Evans organized a Final Retrospective featuring photographers exhibited since 1977. Although the gallery gained recognition in European publication Print Letter, it closed its physical Church Street location in 1982; Evans maintained private operations thereafter. In 1978 she was appointed Approved Commonwealth Valuer for Australian and International photography by the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program. She provided advisory services to public institutions and private collectors nationwide and in 2003 endowed a position at the University of Melbourne to launch its inaugural history of photography course with lecturer Daniel Palmer.
Photographer
Following the closure of the Church Street Gallery, Evans pursued formal studies in photography at Photography Studies College beginning in 1982, concentrating on portrait, documentary, and landscape photography. Among her significant landscape projects is a comprehensive photo essay capturing roadside verges with wildlife casualties, produced from 1988 to 1996. This series was created using a Widelux F7 35mm panoramic camera, notable for its rotating lens that generates distinctive distortions. The collection titled Only One Kilometre features photographs from the Balcombe Estuary Reserve located at Mt Martha on the Mornington Peninsula, complemented by poetry and literary pieces from Graeme Kinross-Smith, Pat Raison, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Her photographic repertoire also includes scenes from the Dandenong Ranges, stretches along the Hume Highway, the Central Desert, and remote Australian outback areas such as Oodnadatta, Oodlawirra, Menindee, and Lake Mungo. Additionally, she documented vineyards and rural communities in southern France along with the historic Jewish cemetery in central Prague.
Evans’s black-and-white portrait work is characterized by intimate environmental portraits that reveal deep psychological ties between subjects and their surroundings. Her diverse sitters represent a broad spectrum of Australian society and include figures 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.
For over ten years, she acted as an honorary photographer for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Central Australia and chronicled rural Australian towns and events on behalf of the National Library of Australia.
Education and lecturing
Evans played a pivotal role in advancing photography education within Australia. She instructed courses on photography history at Melbourne's RMIT University, held the position of inaugural assistant director at Waverley City Gallery (now Monash Gallery of Art) from 1990 to 1991—Melbourne’s first municipal public gallery dedicated to photography—and was appointed as a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne from 1997 until 2010. Her educational contributions extended to delivering lectures and conducting 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 with subsequent tours to eleven regional and metropolitan venues
- Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery
- 2015: Streetwise, Photonet Gallery, Fairfield, February 1–22
- 2019: In Her Words : A NETS Touring Exhibition curated by Olivia Poloni, 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 distinguished service to photography
Collections
Evans' photographs are included in prominent public collections such as:
- Musée de la Photographie, 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 created a tapestry version of Evans' photograph Selby Daffodils (Cotswald Farm).
Publications
- Kinross-Smith, Graeme & Evans, Joyce, Window to Australia: photographs, Deakin University, 1987, ISBN 978-0-7300-0498-1
- Evans, Joyce, Only one kilometre, Lothian, 2003, ISBN 978-0-7344-0583-8
- Joyce Evans: Imaging the Spiritual 1980–2010, exhibition catalogue, Obscura Gallery, Melbourne, 2010
- Evans, Joyce & Dickerson Gallery (Melbourne), Joyce Evans: my Australia, Dickerson Gallery, 2007
- Evans, Joyce & Harmsen, Andrew, We had such high hopes: student activism and the peace movement 1949-1952: a photographic memoir, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2019, ISBN 978-1-925801-85-9
- Syndikas, Alexander & Evans, Joyce, 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 editions)
- The World's Who's Who of Women (1986)
External links
- Short description with empty Wikidata description
- Articles without Wikidata item
- 1929 births
- 2019 deaths
- Australian photographers
- Photographers from Melbourne
- Recipients of the Medal of the Order of Australia
- 20th-century Australian women photographers
- People from Elsternwick, Victoria
- Art museums and galleries disestablished in 1982