Publication Date: May 2011
RRP: $12.00
ISBN: 9781921867026
Format: Paperback
Size: 200mm x 200mm
Pages: 54
Category: Art, Design & Architecture

Personal View

Photographs 1978 – 1986

Janine Burke

Open Access

‘Here Janine Burke, distinguished biographer and art historian, turns photographer to consummate effect. She offers an oddly moving and evocative view of a vanished but vital decade in Melbourne art, at once intimate and casual.’ Patrick McCaughey


In 2004, Janine Burke was looking for a photograph she’d taken of Albert Tucker. Crammed into the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in her study, she discovered hundreds of photographs that she’d taken over the years and forgotten about.

Best known as an author and art historian, Personal View: Photographs 1978–1986 reveals Burke as an ‘accidental photographer’ who recorded the artists, critics, writers and curators who were her friends and colleagues during a dynamic period in Australian art.

Personal View Photographs: 1978–1986 is a casual, intimate, visual memoir that includes Albert Tucker, Betty Churcher, Sue Ford, Allan Mitelman, Jenny Watson, Shane Maloney, John Nixon, Frances Lindsay and Paul Taylor.

Living in Carlton in the 70s, Burke was part of a milieu that generated the women’s art movement, feminist exhibitions, radical journals, experimental galleries and provocative art. The common denominator in all these ventures were networks of intense friendships, a catalyst that helped to change the culture.
Personal View is a snapshot of an era.

Janine Burke is an art historian, biographer, novelist and freelance curator. She has written a series of books about the Heide circle that includes Joy Hester, Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker and The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide.

In 1987, she won the Victorian Premier’s Award for her novel, Second Sight. With the Freud Museum London, she curated ‘An Archaeology of the Mind: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection’ for Monash University Museum of Art and Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney in 2007.

Her most recent book is Source: Nature’s Healing Role in Art and Writing. Dr Burke is a research fellow of Monash University based in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies.


Janine Burke

Janine Burke is an art historian, biographer, novelist and freelance curator. She has written a series of books about the Heide circle that includes Joy Hester, Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker and The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide. In 1987, she...
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