Exhibition: ‘Joyce Evans’ at the National Library of Australia, Canberra

Exhibition dates: 4th April – 5th November 2023

Curators: Dr Grace Blakeley-Carroll and Shelly McGuire

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) 'May Day University Labour Club banner, May Day March, Flinders Street, Melbourne' 1951 from the exhibition 'Joyce Evans' at the National Library of Australia, April - Nov 2023

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Students Protesting during a May Day March on Flinders Street, Melbourne
1951
Photograph
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

At far-left, John Clendenin, philosopher and president of University of Melbourne SRC. Banner-bearer Jill Warwick, later a TV Producer, vice-president UniMelb SRC. The Forum Theatre on Flinders Street in the background.

That bohemian force of nature who was Australian artist, curator, teacher, writer, philanthropist, poet, gallery owner and collector Joyce Evans OAM (1929-2019) would have been the first to admit that she was not the most naturally gifted photographer the world has ever known. But Joyce worked assiduously at her craft for over 70 years and became a very fine image maker, picturing her beloved Australia through landscape, documentary and portrait photographs for many a decade.

Her early and historically important photographs of the late 1940s and early 1950s (of which three are in this posting) represent the post Second World War flowering of an Australian civil right movement. Further images from this period can be seen in the book We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans published by Australian Scholarly Publishing in 2019; and you can read my foreword to the book and see more images from it in the Art Blart posting “Nothing emerges from nothing” (2019).

Joyce had an innate knack of putting people at their ease when having their photograph taken. Never without a camera close at hand, she would approach complete strangers anywhere and ask them whether she could take their portrait… and she was never refused. She had the most gracious way about her, as though she was speaking in communion with her subject: whether that be the contemplation of the Australian landscape, Indigenous Australians, or up close and personal portraits of the ordinary or famous. As author Professor Sasha Grishin observes in his book Joyce Evans (National Library of Australia, 2022) she “was an artist who possessed a definite photographic personality… [who] pursued an agenda that shone a light on racism, social inequality and environmental degradation.”

Joyce worked hard at her craft and it rewarded her soul in so many unconditional ways. Her energy for life and photography was full of unbridled enthusiasm. It is therefore a blessing that this passion has now found a permanent home: her complete photographic archive, the Joyce Evans Archive, is now housed at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, an institution for which she did much work over the years. And it is wonderful that they have staged this small exhibition of 27 of her photographs. My only quibble would be the lack of photographs of Indigenous Australians in the exhibition. Other than the portrait of Aboriginal activist Faith Bandler (1951, below) there are no other photographs of her immense engagement with Aboriginal communities and peoples in this exhibition – which is a great shame. Joyce was very proud of her photography of and relationship with remote Aboriginal communities and their people and it would have been nice to see that energy reflected in the photographs in this exhibition.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Joyce Evans was a cherished friend of Marcus Bunyan.

Many thankx to the National Library of Australia for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

The career of Joyce Evans OAM (1929-2019) spans more than six decades of landscape, documentary, and portrait photography. Her work is preserved through the Library’s Joyce Evans Archive, one of our largest collections of images by a contemporary Australian photographer, and contains images which capture essential aspects of Australian life.

“We believed we had an obligation, neither social nor political, to make a difference. We were brought up as children to believe that we had an obligation to make that difference.

If we can find out what we are… that is the artist. This goes to the core element of your being, and the core element of your enquiry remains the same.

If the core part of your life is the search for the truth then that becomes a core part of your identity for the rest of your life. It becomes embedded in your soul.”

Joyce Evans

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) 'Richard 'Dicky' Woolcott, delegate to conference, at NUAUS encampment' 1951 from the exhibition 'Joyce Evans' at the National Library of Australia, April - Nov 2023

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Richard Woolcott AC at NUAUS Conference, Largs Bay, S.A.
1951, printed by David Chisolm and Joyce Evans, 2013
Photograph
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Richard Arthur Woolcott AC (11 June 1927 – 2 February 2023) was an Australian public servant, diplomat, author, and commentator.

The [photographic] form that Joyce found so early in her life was the music and poetry of humanist photographs, images that are subjective, lyrical, and reveal a state-of-mind. Here is passion and belief in the life of human beings, and the exquisiteness, beauty (and death) of the lived moment. You could label them “social documentary photography” if you were so inclined, but labels don’t capture the frisson of the creative process nor the joyous outcome of Joyce’s portraits. It’s as though Joyce, in a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, is making love to the world through her images: neither rational nor cerebral they evoke sensations and feelings, of being here and there, in that past space and time, now, all these years later. These were epic days of change and transformation – of nations, of continents, of cultures and of people. There was death and destruction but there was also such happiness, hope and joy.

Further, what her photographs also depict is the rise of an informed Australian social consciousness after the Second World War. Her important historical and personal photographs shine a light on forgotten people, times, places and actions, such as the broad based youth movements opposition to the atomic bomb, associations and friendships which eventually form the basis for the progressive social and political protest movements of the 1960s. The voices raised later in support of feminism, gay liberation, free love and Vietnam anti-war protests did not appear fully formed, for there was a history of activism… a slow build, a groundswell of public opinion that was the basis for such emerging actions. Nothing ever emerges from nothing.

Marcus Bunyan. “Nothing emerges from nothing,” foreword from the book We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2019

Read the full text and see more early photographic images by Joyce Evans

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) 'Faith Bandler' 1951 from the exhibition 'Joyce Evans' at the National Library of Australia, April - Nov 2023

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Faith Bandler
1951, printed 2012
Photograph
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Faith Bandler AC MBE (27 September 1918 – 13 February 2015; née Ida Lessing Faith Mussing) was an Australian civil rights activist of South Sea Islander and Scottish-Indian heritage. A campaigner for the rights of Indigenous Australians and South Sea Islanders, she was best known for her leadership in the campaign for the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal Australians.

‘I don’t know what sort of photographer I am, but I try to be an honest one.’ ~ Joyce Evans.

This collection-in-focus display contains highlights from the Library’s Joyce Evans Archive, and can be seen in our Treasures Gallery from Tuesday 4 April 2023. Entry to the Gallery is free and no bookings are required.

You can read more about Evans’ life in the NLA Publishing title, Joyce Evans by Sasha Grishin.

Text from the National Library of Australia website.

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Cotswold Farm, Menzies Creek, Victoria
1982
Colour photograph
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Moon over Coober Pedy, South Australia
1988, printed by David Chisolm and Joyce Evans, 2013
Colour photograph
35.2 x 35cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Windmill on Weerewa/Lake George, New South Wales
c. 1983-2012
Colour photograph
35.6 x 37.2cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Desert Car on Gunbarrel Highway, Northern Territory
1991
Colour photograph
21 x 50.6cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Mud Football, Derby, Western Australia
2000, printed 2012
Inkjet on Hahnemuhle photo rag paper
34.3 x 41cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
The Big Galah and Tourist Gift Shop, Kimba, South Australia
c. 2006-2012
Colour photograph
33.6 x 50.7cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Gertrude, Boola Boolka Station, New South Wales
2006
Colour photograph
33.9 x 50.7cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Evidence of Severe Drought at Menindee Dam, Menindee, New South Wales
2006
Colour photograph
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Uluru, Northern Territory
1987
Colour photograph
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans was an unusual phenomenon in the Australian photography scene. Her conversion to photography did not occur until she was already in her 40s, while her engagement in professional photography had to wait until she was 50. She never developed a signature style, nor had she become a template photographer, but she possessed a definite photographic personality. …

As a documentary photographer, Evans considered herself a hunter and gatherer waiting to find the image. She remarked, “as an artist, you channel the energy of the place – the image comes to you as a gift.”

Her oeuvre is remarkable for its diversity and includes landscapes, roadkill, portraiture, social documentation, brothels and erotica – all brought together through a unifying sensibility, the Evans photographic moment. She was also an artist with a social conscience and pursued an agenda that shone a light on racism, social inequality and environmental degradation.

Many of Evans’s photographs demand slow viewing and open up gradually. Uluru, Northern Territory, 1987 (above), shows the rock as if carved by nature. In one sense, it is a very simple photograph in which two colours meet – the brilliant red ochre of the rock and the fathomless blue of the sky. It is also an immensely complex photograph with the mysterious slit – like the womb of the earth – in the centre of the composition and galvanising the viewer’s attention.

Gradually, as you focus into the image, there are signs of human presence at the top of the rock: two climbers on the chain pathway, contrasted with organic shapes created through centuries of erosion – a contrast between the temporal and the eternal. Despite the sense of stillness and silence, there is also considerable movement as the light plays over the textured surfaces.

The photograph is rare in that it defines a space but also distils the spiritual essence of the place and asserts an atmosphere of mystery and contemplative presence.

In 2016, when I was working on a monograph on Evans’s work, she noted: “As a photographer – I have a voice – it is an Australian voice, as I do not know intimately any other culture. It comes at a time when you say: ‘This is my country’. One of the sub-texts, when I pick up a camera, is that I always try to identify the stereotypical that is always defined by that which is on the edge.”

Sasha Grishin. “Joyce Evans, an unheralded icon of photography, the focus of the National Library of Australia,” on the Riotact website 8 October 2023 [Online] Cited 16/10/2023

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Barbara Blackman
1989
Photograph
30 x 40.7cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Barbara Blackman AO (née Patterson; born 22 December 1928) is an Australian writer, poet, librettist, broadcaster, model and patron of the arts. In 2004, she donated $1 million to a number of Australian music organisations, including Pro Musica, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Australian National University’s School of Music and the Stopera Chamber Opera Company. In 2006, she was awarded the Australian Contemporary Music Award for Patronage. Barbara Blackman was married for 27 years to renowned Australian artist Charles Blackman.

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Philanthropist Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, Langwarrin, Victoria
1995
Photograph
24.9 x 37.0cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Dame Elisabeth Joy Murdoch, Lady Murdoch AC DBE (née Greene; 8 February 1909 – 5 December 2012), also known as Elisabeth, Lady Murdoch, was an Australian philanthropist and matriarch of the Murdoch family. She was the wife of Australian newspaper publisher Sir Keith Murdoch and the mother of international media proprietor Rupert Murdoch. She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1963 for her charity work in Australia and overseas.

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Bernard Smith, Victoria
2004, printed 2013
Colour photograph
47.5 x 37.5cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Bernard William Smith (3 October 1916 – 2 September 2011) was an Australian art historian, art critic and academic, considered the founding father of Australian art history, and one of the country’s most important thinkers. His book Place, Taste and Tradition: a Study of Australian Art Since 1788 (1945) is a key text in Australian art history, and influence on Robert Hughes. Smith was associated with the Communist Party of Australia, and after leaving the party remained a prominent left-wing intellectual and Marxist thinker.

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Stephen Dupont
2009, printed by David Chisolm and Joyce Evans, 2013
Photograph
35.6 x 35.6cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Stephen Dupont (b. 1967) is an Australian photographer and director working on films, commercials, magazine and newspaper assignments and long term personal projects.

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
William Yang
1996
Photograph
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

“William Yang [Aust., b.1943] belongs to a generation of artists who used photography to document alternative lifestyles and celebrate social diversity during the latter decades of the 20th century…Yang is the type of social documentary photographer who carries a camera around his neck, ready to capture things with a certain immediacy, as they happen around him.” ~ Museum of Contemporary Art

Joyce Evans was an unusual phenomenon in the Australian photography scene. Her conversion to photography did not occur until she was already in her forties, while her engagement in professional photography had to wait until she was fifty. She never developed a signature style, nor did she become a template photographer, but she possessed a sensibility that has become characteristic of her work, so that you can quickly recognise a Joyce Evans photograph. She was an artist who possessed a definite photographic personality.

Evans combined documentary photography, social photography, landscape photography and studio practice. She also had a social conscience. Although avoiding didactic images or illustrative propaganda, in her documentary work and in her choice of subjects, she had pursued an agenda that shone a light on racism, social inequality and environmental degradation.

This stylish and generously-illustrated monograph shows how Evans’ photography was about capturing not only the surface appearances, but ultimately the essences, of her subjects. It illustrates the Evans’ belief that in silence and stillness you come to feel the spirit of the subject, and that capturing this spirit was the photographer’s goal.

About the author

Professor Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA established the academic discipline of Art History at the ANU and was the Sir William Dobell Professor of Art History and Head of Art History and Curatorship at the ANU until December 2013. He works internationally as an art historian, art critic and curator. In 2005 he was awarded the Order of Australia (AM) for services to Australian art and art history. He has published over 25 books and over 2,000 articles and catalogue essays dealing with various aspects of art.

Text from the National Library of Australia website.

Purchase the book

Cover of the book Joyce Evans by Sasha Grishin

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Vale Joyce Evans OAM photographer (1929-2019)

July 2019

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Untitled [Joyce with camera]
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)

It’s taken me more than a moment of reflection to write this text. The events are almost too close to write about my surrogate mother in Australia, my friend and fellow artist, Joycie. I can only write about the person I knew, not the time before I knew her – and so this will be a very personal reflection on one of the most incredible human beings that I have ever met.

Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light

Vale Joyce Evans.

Human, female, lover, mother, grandmother, wife, poet, publisher, writer, romantic, creative, humanist, universalist, spiritualist, bohemian, pioneer, gallery director, teacher, lecturer, collector, philanthropist, activist, artist, feminist, supporter of artists, Indigenous rights, civil rights, and the disenfranchised, exhibitor… and working photographer.

I met the force of nature that was Joyce Olga Evans (1929-2019) through a mutual friend, Alison Inglis, who knew of our love of photography. It was the start of an intense friendship that lasted just seven or eight years until Joycie, as I used to call her, passed away at Easter this year. Before she passed she knew that she had been awarded an OAM (Medal of the Order of Australia) for service to photography. This was a long overdue tribute to a pioneer and supporter of photography in Australia, one of the first women to be the director of an independent, commercial photography gallery in this country.

Joyce had an incredible passion for and knowledge about photography, whether it was historical Australian or world photographers and their prints from any era, or contemporary artists here and overseas. Her collection of both local and international photographs was almost unparalleled in private hands in this country. She had such a keen eye. When attending a local auction with her she purchased an original William Mortensen for next to nothing. Nobody else had recognised the power and presence of the image by this master artist.

This incisive vision translated into her work as an artist who was a working photographer. At heart, that’s what Joyce was – a working photographer and a storyteller. She believed in photography like photographers get photography… not like an academic or a theoretician, but like an avid fan, an enthusiast, a passionate collector, a teacher. Photography was an integral part of her life, her soul.

She said to me of being an artist, “If we can find out what we are… that is the artist. The core element of your being, and the core element of your enquiry as an artist remains the same. The concerns that you had when you started being an artist are with you until the end. If the core part of your life is the search for truth then that becomes a core part of your identity. It becomes embedded in your soul.”

In this sense, photography becomes something of you, more than just intention – it becomes your essence, your shape…. your physical shape, a tangible thing.

Photography and its spirit inhabited Joyce as Joyce lived in the world. To Joyce, photography was just as much about the world and creativity as it was about the image. The image was just a manifestation of spirit, something that you worked at, recognised, and captured for what it was and could be. As Minor White said, “There is always a dragon in the negative,” and a dragon, that symbol of power, strength, and good luck, lived inside Joyce (see my favourite photograph of her below) and in her work. Her photographs possessed a spiritual and psychological sensation of the place.

As she said, “Making photographs that are memorable requires more than just camera, light and a story. It requires a type of harmony, unity, and an indefinable something, which I can best explain as becoming emotionally attached to the subject so that the images almost make themselves.”

Joyce’s commitment to photography was legendary. She was in it for the long haul.

I was always amazed when we were out in public, going to the exhibitions that we loved to visit, that she would always be taking photographs. Whenever she saw something that interested her out would come her beloved iPhone or digital camera, and she would talk to strangers and their children and take their photos. She was a totally open spirit and had no fear about the path she took. People embraced her, talked to her, responded to her energy and spirit. I remember travelling up to Sydney with her to see an exhibition of her favourite photographer, “Our Julia”, Julia Margaret Cameron at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and just observing that sparkle in her eyes, that unparalleled love that transcends all our pasts and futures in the simple moment of being and looking at these photographs.

Joyce was uncompromising. If she thought you were being a fuckwit she told you so in no uncertain terms. But she was a rock on which I came to depend. As someone said of her, “Joyce wasn’t into niceties and didn’t take any shit from anyone! I hope I grow up to be as tough as her. She was a visionary.” She really did not stand fools gladly (thank god), and had little truck for fine art photographers who didn’t understand the medium, its history or their small place within the grand scheme of things. As the playwright Edward Albee commented at the American painter Lee Krasner’s memorial at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in both her life and her work, ‘… she looked you straight in the eye, and you dared not flinch’. It was the same with Joycie. She could see deep inside you to the core of your being.

Joyce loved helping people. She was so generous of her time and energy, of her wisdom and knowledge. Some of the best times of my life were spent in her kitchen talking about art, love and life. People were drawn to her. As Julie Moss has observed, she was “such a strong, creative and vibrant role model for so many female photographers” in a sea of male prejudice and ambivalence. What Joyce did not do is live on her memories… she was ever active, ever inquiring. She stood up for what she believed. A couple of weeks before she passed she said to me, “I don’t want to go yet, I still have so much that I want to do.” She was still raging against the dying of the light, not going gently into that good night.

But what she achieved in her truly remarkable life is a testament to her unquenchable spirit. In a journey full of determination, intelligence, exploration and love she achieved so much and touched so many. I miss her terribly.

I am the (sublime) space where I am, that surrounds me with countless presences.

Dr Marcus Bunyan July 2019

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Dissipation at the pub: students outside Largs Bay pub while attending N.U.A.U.S. conference, South Australia 1951 – Joyce Zerfas, Jill Warwick, Val Groves
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)

This photograph, showing students smoking and drinking outside the pub at Largs Bay, was published in an Adelaide newspaper. At the time this was considered to be immoral behaviour. Note the man in the background with his fingers up in a derogatory manner.

The names of the three women who have been identified are from left to right: Joyce Evans (nee Zerfas) photographer, Jill Warwick, deceased, (producer of TV programme “It Could Be You”) Val Groves, psychologist. I have been unable to identify the men. ~ Joyce Evans

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Guard Thine Honour, May Day March, Flinders Street, Melbourne
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Ban on Communism Means Fascism, May Day March, Flinders Street, Melbourne
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) 'Reduce Armaments Ban Atomic Bomb' 1951

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Reduce Armaments Ban Atomic Bomb, May Day March, Flinders Street, Melbourne [pictured image-right, Professor Bernard Rechter]
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)

“Making photographs that are memorable requires more than just camera, light and a story. It requires a type of harmony, unity, and an indefinable something, which I can best explain as becoming emotionally attached to the subject so that the images almost make themselves.”

Joyce Evans

“Photography for me is a type of communion with my subject. Like everybody else I take photographs which have little meaning. But sometimes I sense an underlying value in the land, a group of people, a location, and then I make photograph, which is satisfying to myself. I think I would like to call that the way in which the quintessential spirit of what I am seeing has stirred me to need to make a photograph of it.

To me, I am alive, and my life and the life of everything in the world is connected. For me it is that universality that is the basis of my idea of the spiritual. I feel uncomfortable about formal organised religion and am perhaps more than a humanist, a universalist.”

Joyce Evans

“Aesthetically, I enjoy the camera’s capacity to record relationships and detail, which my subconscious may perceive, but I may not fully see.

My appreciation of aesthetics goes back to when I studied painting with John Olsen at the Bakery Art School, Sydney in 1967-1968. Olsen made me aware of the power of the edge of the image to relate to what was not shown in the image. My formal education was further enhanced when I did a degree in fine arts at Sydney University 1969-1971. There, Dr Anton Wilhelm taught me how to read an image. My understanding of the limits and potentials of two-dimensional imagery was expounded by Professor Bernard Smith.

Informally, my knowledge of photography and my practice was refined through formative conversations with a wide range of great photographers such as Andre Kertesz, Max Dupain, Ansel Adams and Bill Henson, Julie Millowick and Linda Connor.

Each of these relationships helped me to clarify my photographic position, which is based on a search for the essence of a subject.”

Joyce Evans

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Rain Dreaming, Yuendumu, NT
2005

Joyce Evans short biography

Joyce Olga Evans is well known in Australian photography. In 1976 Joyce opened Church Street Photographic Centre, a pioneer Australian commercial gallery devoted to Photography. It showcased the best of Australian and International photographers. Joyce exhibited works by Frank Hurley, Imogen Cunningham, Bill Henson, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Julia Margret Cameron, Max Dupain and many other renowned photographers – she says that they were her teachers.

Passionately dedicated to photography, she has had many solo exhibitions of both her landscapes (she photographed in the Dandenongs and Mt Martha regions in the outer Melbourne; along the Hume Highway; in the Central Desert and outback Australia, most notably Oodnadatta, Oodlawirra, Menindee, and Lake Mungo; vineyards and rural villages in the South of France; the old Jewish cemetery in the centre of Prague; and numerous others) and her portraits (she photographed Australian intelligentsia and personalities, including Marianne Baillieu; Barbara Blackman; Baron Avid von Blumenthal; Tim Burstall; Dur-e Dara; Robert Dessaix; Germaine Greer; Elena Kats-Chernin; Joan Kerr; Ellen Koshland; David Malouf; Dame Elisabeth Murdoch; Lin Onus; Jill Reichstein; Chris Wallace-Crabbe; and innumerable others) throughout Australia and Europe.

Joyce has spent two decades documenting Australia for the National Library of Australia, who are acquiring her life’s work for their permanent collection. When this acquisition is complete the Library will hold over 30,000 analogue images and 80,000 digital files. Also included are diaries and other relevant documents and files. Much of this work is destined for display on Trove, the library’s online viewing resource. She has exhibited extensively in Australia and in France and her photographs are held in many major collections. Joyce has been published widely. Her monograph Only One Kilometre was published in 2003 by Lothian Press. It detailed her many years of studying the unique qualities of the Balcombe Estuary Reserve, at Mount Martha as well as poems and articles by distinguished writers. Her work is held in many collections both locally and internationally.

Joyce Evans also plays an important educational role in Australian photography. She taught history of photography at Melbourne’s RMIT University; appointed inaugural assistant director of Waverley City Gallery (now Monash Gallery of Art), 1990-1991, the first municipal public collection in Melbourne to specialise in photography; established and inaugurated a course on the History of Photography and appointed Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, 1997-2010.

Evans worked as an honorary photographer for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Central Australia and for over ten years documented Australian country towns and events for the National Library of Australia. Important publications on Joyce Evans include a monograph Only One Kilometre (Melbourne: Lothian Press, 2003), and exhibition catalogues with essays by Alison Inglis, Eugene Barilo von Reisberg, Tim Page, Victoria Hammond, and many others.

Anonymous text from the Joyce Evans Photographer website Nd [Online] Cited 16th June 2019. No longer available online

William Yang (Australian, b. 1943)
Marcus and Joyce
2018

Being two photographers, the only photograph of Joyce and Marcus together, taken by another photographer William Yang.

Michael Silver (Australian)
Joyce Evans
2013

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Joyce Evans standing in front of Max Dupain’s ‘Sunbaker’ 1937
2018

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Joyce and the dragon
2016

Joyce standing in front of the fireplace at Jacques Reymond’s restaurant for the birthday of her friend Marcus Bunyan. In Chinese mythology the dragon traditionally symbolises potent and auspicious powers and also is a symbol of power, strength, and good luck for people who are worthy of it.