CURATORLAND – REFLECTIONS ON BUILDING THE NGA’S ASIA-PACIFIC PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTION – TAASA Review March 2015

Gael Newton Following her retirement in September 2014 as Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia, TAASA invited Gael Newton to review her last decade with the NGA, where she was responsible for the establishment of a survey collection of Asia-Pacific photography spanning from South Asia to the west coast of the Americas.

For this collection Newton located and negotiated the acquisition of several major private collections of Asia-Pacific photography including one of some 5000 colonial-era Indonesian photographs. Gael Newton, Canberra.

Photo courtesy Paul Costigan W hen Ron Radford AM arrived in Canberra as Director of the NGA in late 2005, I could not have imagined that the next decade of my life would be focussed chiefly on the history of photographic art across the Asia-Pacific region...