"World Without End - Photography and the 20th Century"
2000-12-02 until 2001-02-25
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Sydney, , AU Australia

World Without End - Photography and the 20th Century presents the works of 42 eminent twentieth-century photographers through a number of thought-provoking suites that explore relationships In Image-making across time and place.

World Without End brings together some 200 works of acclaimed Australian and international artists whose photographs have shaped our perceptions and our sensibilities of the modern world. Included are works by Eddie Adams, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Karl Blossfeldt, Pat Brassington, Claude Cahun, Max Dupain, Walker Evans, Sue Ford, Eikoh Hosoe, Frank Hurley, Carol Jerrems, William Klein, Man Ray, Chris Marker, Tracey Moffatt, László Moholy-Nagy, August Sander, Alfred Stieglitz, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeff Wall, Weegee and Yva. In addition, more than 80 publications will be included, emphasising the reproduction and distribution of images throughout the twentieth-century.

The twentieth-century is the first to be dominated by image-making — from photography to film, video to digital media. One of the most popular media, photography is also the least understood as vast archives have burgeoned in the belief that these fragments of the world can explain everything about reality. Perhaps this insatiability for images can be understood by the fact that a photograph cannot explain anything, yet it has the capacity to trigger an apparently endless range of imaginative responses. World without Endexamines the imaginative hold that photographs have exercised on both artist and audience in the twentieth century.

Speculations to do with time, memory, mortality and the relationship of the viewer to the image have preoccupied humanity since the beginnings of existence, said Judy Annear, Senior Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, who has spent five years researching and locating the best vintage photographs from more than 30 public and private collections worldwide.

Image-making and the possibility of breathing life into a representation bring forth complex philosophical responses. The invention of photography gave intimacy and immediacy to such issues, continued Judy Annear. Among the forty institutional and private lenders to World Without End are the J. Paul Getty Museum, George Eastman House, the National Gallery in Washington, New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Loans from Australian institutions include the National Gallery of Australia, the Queensland Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria, as well as works from the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s own collection.

Many of the works in World Without End –Photography and the 20th century are of the utmost rarity and will not have been seen in Sydney before. Seldom has such a challenging and compelling exhibition of photography been seen internationally.

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