© National Portrait Gallery 2025
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Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
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A book about Australian women opens with a photograph of a young child. It is Caroline Slade’s (b. 1969) fourth birthday, and her party dress very nearly, but does not quite, match the floral wallpaper. Her pose and gaze are detached and reserved while most other portraits in the book are celebratory. From the contact sheet for this photo shoot (which is included in the exhibition), we know that Slade was happy and playful during the session. In deliberately selecting this shot, with its hesitant pose and rather flat composition, Jerrems softly alludes to the awkwardness of girlhood or perhaps even the precarity of female agency in Australia at this time.
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982.
© The Estate of Carol Jerrems
Carol Jerrems: Portraits is a major exhibition of one of Australia’s most influential photographers. Jerrems’ intimate portraits of friends, lovers and artistic peers transcend the purely personal and have come to shape Australian visual culture.
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