Ian North

It is with great sadness that we remember the National Gallery’s founding Curator of Photography, Ian North AM, who passed away on 14 May 2024.

Ian was Director of the Manawatu Art Gallery, Palmerston North, Aotearoa New Zealand, from 1969–71, before moving to Australia in 1971 to take the role of Curator of Paintings at the Art Gallery of South Australia. At AGSA, Ian conducted important work on the Australian artists Dorritt Black and Margaret Preston, and was highly active in the Tarntanya/Adelaide’s contemporary art networks, helping to establish the influential Experimental Art Foundation in 1974. He was appointed the National Gallery’s first Curator of Photography in May 1980, and moved to Kamberri/Canberra in September of that year.

Ian quickly developed the photography department, which by late 1981 included three young curatorial assistants who would each go on to establish their own important careers as curators, art historians and educators, Isobel Crombie, Helen Ennis, and Martyn Jolly. Ian sharpened the photography collection’s focus on exceptional vintage prints and drove a series of highly significant acquisitions that remain the bedrock of the gallery’s outstanding photography collection. Ian and his three assistants were able to acquire substantial bodies of work by many key figures in Australian photography, including Max Dupain and Harold Cazneaux, important series by key contemporary women artists including Julie Rrap and Micky Allan, and many, still extremely significant international acquisitions by artists such as Henry Fox Talbot, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, George Platt Lynes, Robert Mapplethorpe, and work by key modernist women photographers including Tina Modotti, Lucia Moholy and Diane Arbus. When Ian left the National Gallery in 1984, its photography collection was one of the best in the world.

Ian left Kamberri/Canberra in 1984 to consolidate his artistic practice, completing postgraduate work in photography as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of New Mexico, USA, and to take up the role of head of the South Australian Art School. In 1992, he became Professor of Visual Arts at the University of South Australia. He continued his close association with the National Gallery during this time, and was a member of the gallery’s Council from August 1991–December 1995, during which time he worked closely with curators on collection development and planning.

As an artist, Ian produced a number of historically significant bodies of work. Among these is the series of 22 colour photographs of the streets and domestic architecture of Kamberri/Canberra he started to take soon after arriving in the city. The series Canberra suite 1980–81 is one of the great moments in postwar Australian photography and remains a highly significant study of Australian suburban life. Canberra suite is among 46 works by Ian made between 1976–2015 in the national collection.

Our thoughts go to Ian’s wife Mirna Heruc and his many friends and former colleagues across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.