LAUNCHING JULY 2025 AT THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES
Announcing On Country: Photography from Australia – a landmark publication featuring seventeen of Australia’s best contemporary photographic artists and collectives, accompanying the first-ever group exhibition of Australian photography at the Rencontres d’Arles 2025.
‘Country’ is a term embodied by First Peoples in Australia to describe the lands, waterways, seas and cosmos to which they are connected. It represents Ancestral ties to a place, and the living cultural presence of that place, and references the complex relationship land has to language, family and identity. Being ‘on Country’ is more than just being situated somewhere, it is about being shaped by that place, connected to it, and having a responsibility to care for it.
Placing First Peoples’ practice and relationality at the core of this project – accompanying PHOTO Australia's landmark exhibition at the Rencontres d'Arles 2025 – On Country: Photography from Australia brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists who bear witness to both the visible and invisible aspects of being on Country. Through their work, the project explores old and new relationships between Country and colonialism, community, and identity in Australia today.
Australia has a complex history that is underpinned by over 60,000 years of continuous and unceded First Peoples connection – comprising over 250 different language groups or ‘countries’. There has since been over two centuries of colonisation, whereby settler and diaspora communities have made the continent their home. The nation is a shared space of multifaceted histories and stories, and although colonialism has attempted to suppress First Nations People, their culture has continued and is strong and living today.
In contrast to its historic use as an early tool for ethnographic documentation in Australia, the artists in the exhibition and this corresponding publication embrace photography as a medium for truth telling, self-determination and collaboration, both acknowledging the past and suggesting possible futures. Co-published by PHOTO Australia and Perimeter Editions, On Country: Photography from Australia presents artists who connect to Country in dynamic ways and are shifting the power dynamics inherent in photography, redefining photographic practice on this southern land.
On Country: Photography from Australia features artworks by Tony Albert and David Charles Collins, Ying Ang, Atong Atem, Sonja Carmichael and Elisa Jane Carmichael, Maree Clarke, Michael Cook, Brenda L Croft, J Davies, Liss Fenwick, Adam Ferguson, Robert Fielding, The Huxleys –Garrett Huxley and Will Huxley, Ricky Maynard, Lisa Sorgini, Tace Stevens, wani toaishara, and James Tylor; and texts by Kelli Cole, Pippa Milne, Brendan McCleary, Kimberley Moulton, and Elias Redstone.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition On Country: Photography from Australia, presented at the Rencontres d’Arles from July 7 to October 5, 2025. This publication was made possible through the support of FACEF – French Australian Cultural Exchange Foundation and Gordon Darling Foundation.
192 pages, 23 x 30 cm, OTA bind, softcover, Perimeter Editions x PHOTO Australia (Naarm / Melbourne).