Jeffrey Smart, 1992

A tribute to Jeffrey Smart’s role as the painter of urban isolation and atomisation, Greg Weight’s photograph of the artist – in which the sweeping curve of the tunnel offsets the vertical of the solitary, substantial figure standing on the bitumen – reprises elements of Smart’s best-known work, Cahill Expressway 1962. Not long after he painted Cahill Expressway, Smart moved permanently to Italy. In 2011, he said that might, perhaps, again be able to live in Australia, which had changed a great deal since he left, ‘but I wouldn't like living where the light is so high up in the sky. I would live in Melbourne or Tasmania where the light is lower, like it is here.’

Greg Weight opened his own photographic studio in 1968, taking advertising and magazine photographs and working with the Australian Opera and the Australian Ballet. In 1970 he was invited to work in the consciously creative venue, the Yellow House in Potts Point, Sydney, photographing its artists, installations and activities. Over the next three decades he photographed artists and their works, assembling the collection published as Australian Artists: Portraits by Greg Weight in 2004.

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Gift of Patrick Corrigan AM 2004
Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program
© Greg Weight