Landmark Exhibition Opens November 28, Showcasing Over 300 Photographs and Works by More Than 80 Pioneering Artists
The National Gallery of Victoria International Melbourne (NGV International) is set to unveil one of the year’s most significant photographic exhibitions, Women Photographers 1900–1975: A Legacy of Light, opening on November 28, 2025, and running through May 3, 2026. This meticulously curated exhibition marks a pivotal moment in the museum’s recent strategic focus on celebrating the historically underrepresented contributions of women artists to the evolution of photography in the twentieth century.
Featuring more than 300 rare and innovative photographs, prints, postcards, photobooks and magazines, the exhibition brings together the work of over 80 influential photographers whose images have indelibly shaped visual culture. Among the celebrated names are Diane Arbus, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, and Olive Cotton—artists whose contributions have long been acknowledged, alongside many lesser-known photographers whose work deserves broader recognition. The scale of the exhibition is particularly significant: 170 works have been recently acquired by the NGV Collection, and 130 are being displayed for the first time.
A Global Perspective Across Seven Decades
What distinguishes this exhibition is its international scope and thematic richness. Rather than presenting women photographers as a monolithic movement, the curators have situated these artists against the backdrop of significant social, political and cultural upheaval spanning from Melbourne to Tokyo, Paris to Buenos Aires. The exhibition explores diverse photographic practices like portraiture, photojournalism, landscape photography, fashion photography, and experimental avant-garde imagery, while contextualizing the work within pivotal historical moments, from the suffrage movement at the turn of the twentieth century through the women’s liberation movement and beyond.
This curatorial approach reveals an often-overlooked dimension of photographic history: the rich networks of exchange, information, ideas and support that connected women photographers across geographical and cultural boundaries.
Standout Works and Artists
The exhibition’s roster of featured artists reads like a pantheon of photographic achievement. Alongside the internationally recognized names, the exhibition introduces viewers to Lola Álvarez Bravo, Imogen Cunningham, Kati Horna, Germaine Krull, Tina Modotti, Lucia Moholy, Tokiwa Toyoko, Francesca Woodman, and Yamazawa Eiko, among others.
Among the exhibition’s highlights is a comprehensive selection of photographs by Dora Maar, whose sophisticated practice encompassed fashion photography, social documentary images, and portraiture.
Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936) remains one of the exhibition’s most recognizable works. Commissioned by the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration to document the impacts of the Great Depression on working-class families, Lange’s series of photographs of Florence Owens Thompson and her children resulted in one of the twentieth century’s most enduring symbols of economic hardship and human resilience.
cm (sheet) Purchased, 1975
German-born Ilse Bing earned the title “Queen of Leica” in the 1930s for her pioneering use of the small, hand-held camera—a technological advancement that liberated photographers from the constraints of large-format equipment. Her iconic Self-portrait (1931) exemplifies her modernist sensibility, featuring a complex composition of the artist’s reflection and profile captured across angled mirrors, with the camera itself central to the composition. This work becomes a meditation on the camera as both tool and subject, on vision and self-representation.
The exhibition features Olive Cotton’s celebrated Teacup ballet (1935), a masterwork of light and shadow. Cotton, working as a studio assistant to photographer Max Dupain in Sydney, transformed an inexpensive set of cups and saucers into a dynamic composition through careful arrangement and extended shadows, creating what she herself described as “ballet-like”—a phrase that encapsulates her ability to find extraordinary visual poetry in quotidian objects.
Lee Miller’s trajectory from Paris to wartime documentary photography represents another significant narrative within the exhibition. Miller’s 1931 portrait of Man Ray, her former teacher and lover, demonstrates her capacity for intimate portraiture while asserting her independence as an artist. Taken in her Paris apartment, the tightly framed composition with Man Ray’s averted gaze creates an intriguing tension between presence and distance.
The exhibition also presents the groundbreaking collaborative work of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, two artists who radically interrogated gender constraints through their art and lives.
Lolo Álvarez Bravo’s Las Lavanderas (The Washerwomen), circa 1940, demonstrates the Mexican artist’s passionate commitment to documenting the peoples and cultures of Mexico through dynamic composition. The photograph transforms a scene of everyday labor through strategic use of light, shadow, and perspective, elevating the ordinary to the monumental.
For audiences engaging with contemporary Australian photography history, Ponch Hawkes’s documentation of inner-city Melbourne in the 1970s provides invaluable historical insight. Her photographs capture communal living spaces, urban activism, Gay Pride Week celebrations, and the Women’s Theatre Group performing under a Women’s Liberation banner—visual testimony to a transformative period of social change and feminist activism in Australia.
Image 1: Olive Cotton | Teacup ballet 1935, printed 1992 | gelatin silver photograph, ed. 21/50 36.0 x 29.2 cm (image) Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992 © Courtesy McInerney family and Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney
Image 2: Trude Fleischmann | The actress Sibylle Binder, Vienna c.1926 | gelatin silver photograph | 21.9 x 16.0 cm | Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022 | © Estate of Trude Fleischmann
Strategic Collecting and Institutional Commitment
This exhibition reflects the NGV’s sustained institutional commitment to redressing historical imbalances in its collection. Tony Ellwood AM, Director of the NGV, emphasized this ongoing process: “Though this is a long and ongoing process, this exhibition offers an opportunity to celebrate and share the more than 300 works by women photographers, many of which we’ve collected since 2020.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a significant illustrated publication, co-published with the Berlin-based Hatje Cantz, exploring the images, lives, and stories of women photographers from this pivotal period. The publication features new essays from NGV curators and an impressive roster of international contributors, including leading American art historian and critic Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Emeritus Professor Helen Ennis from the ANU School of Art & Design, World Press Photo lead curator Amanda Maddox, photographer and writer Carla Williams, and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum curator Yamada Yuri.
The exhibition’s timing is particularly resonant, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the first International Women’s Year, declared by the United Nations in 1975—the very year that forms the terminus of this exhibition’s chronological scope.
Viewing Details
Women Photographers 1900–1975: A Legacy of Light will be on display at NGV International, St Kilda Road, Melbourne, from November 28, 2025, to May 3, 2026. Entry is by ticket; further information and ticket purchases are available through the NGV website.
Cover image: Sue Ford | Annette, 1962; Annette, 1974 1962–1974, printed 1974 from the Time series 1962–74 gelatin silver photograph 11.1 x 20.1 cm Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund, 1974 © Sue Ford Archive
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