Robert McFarlane (photographer)

Born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1942, he was given a Kodak Box Brownie at the age of 9 by his parents, Bill and Poppy McFarlane. Five years later, while at Brighton High School (today known as Brighton Secondary School) in Adelaide's southern suburbs,[1] he used a recently purchased Durst medium format rangefinder camera to capture an image of a teacher striking a pupil at the school assembly.

Though talented in English and History, McFarlane was an undistinguished student and left school at 16, finding work as a trainee electric welder.[1] He was deeply influenced by the traveling documentary photography exhibition The Family of Man, which reached Adelaide in 1959.

Encouraged by his employers during a brief stint as a copy boy in an advertising agency, he began to work more seriously as a photojournalist, gaining a commission from Walkabout to photograph Professor John Bishop, co-founder of the Adelaide Festival of Arts. On the same assignment, he also made images of author Patrick White, dancer and choreographer Sir Robert Helpmann, actor John Bell, and painter Sidney Nolan.

In 1963, McFarlane moved to Sydney where he worked for The Bulletin and AustralianVogue. With the artist Kate Burness, who later became his first wife, he traveled to London and in 1969, he freelanced for The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times Magazine,[2] and NOVA magazine. He returned to Sydney in 1973 and eventually to Adelaide in 2007.

Though McFarlane specialised in social issues—he worked on a book documenting mental illness—and performance. He also took portraits of a number of notable figures in Australian and international life. These include fellow photographers W Eugene Smith, Don McCullin, Jeff Carter, Max Dupain, David Moore, and Trent Parke; political figures such as Bob Hawke, Gough Whitlam, Charlie Perkins[1][2] and Pauline Hanson; surgeon Sir Edward "Weary" Dunlop; jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli; boxer Henry Cooper; and Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun. His theatrical work saw him cover a number of plays featuring Steven Berkoff, and he photographed the early performances of Geoffrey Rush, Cate Blanchett, and Robyn Archer. McFarlane also worked as a stills photographer for film directors such as Bruce Beresford, John Duigan, Gillian Armstrong, Esben Storm, Phillip Noyce, and PJ Hogan.

In 1985, in the lead-up to the 1988 bicentenary of Australia's European settlement, McFarlane was among 21 photographers chosen to live and work in remote Aboriginal communities in a project that became known as After 200 Years: Photographic Essays of Aboriginal And Islander Australia Today.[3] It remains the largest single photographic project in Australian history and was published both as a touring exhibition and a book.

McFarlane's work is held in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery (Canberra),[4] the National Gallery of Australia,[5] the Art Gallery of New South Wales,[6] the Art Gallery of South Australia[7] and the National Library of Australia. A prominent exhibition was Received Moments, a 48-year career retrospective, which began touring Australia in December 2009[2] and concluded in Adelaide in late 2011. McFarlane was a significant contributor to Candid Camera: Australian Photography 1950s–1970s at the Art Gallery of South Australia (May to August 2010) which also featured the work of Australian photographers Max Dupain, David Moore, Jeff Carter, Mervyn Bishop, Rennie Ellis, Carol Jerrems and Roger Scott.[1]

McFarlane wrote extensively about photography for a number of Australian publications and was a photographic critic for the Sydney Morning Herald for more than 25 years. He also wrote and maintained a website called OzPhotoReview, a blog focusing primarily on fine art and documentary photography in Australia while also discussing technical developments.

Though McFarlane did not write extensively on the subject himself, his idea of the "received moment" attracted media and curatorial attention. Related in some ways to Henri Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment", McFarlane's formulation has been seen as being "gentler, more contemplative".[8] By suggesting the need for the photographer to remain open to the world around, it also has the advantage of containing the seed of a photographic method. Gael Newton, senior curator of photography at the National Gallery of Australia, has written about McFarlane's approach and quotes him as saying "I see making pictures as a receiving of the image. Where you stand, both physically and emotionally, decrees the kind of picture you, through your camera, will receive".[9]

McFarlane's first wife was the artist Kate Burness. He later remarried to the theatre director Mary-Ann Vale and has two children, Morgan (born 1974–1994, to Burness) and Billy (born 1990, to Vale).

He died on 19 July 2023.[10]

• 2017: Jim Bettison and Helen James Award, from Adelaide Film Festival in collaboration with the Bettison and James Foundation[11]

• McFarlane, Robert "Robert McFarlane Photos" website
• Newton, Gael "Robert McFarlane – Celebrated Australian Photographer", page 69, Antiques & Art in NSW, May–September 2009
• Newton, Gael "Robert McFarlane, Received Moments: Photography 1961–2009", Manly Art Gallery & Museum catalog essay
• Newton, Gael "Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839–1988", 1988 Australian National Gallery
• Robinson, Julie "Candid Camera: Australian Photography 1950s–1970s" Art Gallery of South Australia exhibition booklet

• Robert McFarlane Photos
• OzPhotoReview
• Robert McFarlane at IMDb
• Robert McFarlane discography at Discogs