Maggie Diaz, Sands & McDougall Workers, Spencer Street, 1964
Summary
American-born Maggie Diaz (1925–2016) arrived in Melbourne from Chicago as Maggie Fraser on a one-way ticket in 1961, and with just US$5 in her pocket. She was something of an anomaly here, in that she was a woman behind the camera rather than in front of it. Influenced by the groundbreaking 1955 exhibition ‘The Family of Man’ (first shown at MOMA, New York) and the American documentary photography movement, Diaz established herself in Chicago as a visual chronicler of urban life, with a clear talent for portraiture. In Melbourne her practice ranged over both commercial and non-commercial work, and, coincidentally, the City of Melbourne was among her early clients.
The Art and Heritage Collection purchased three of Diaz’s photographs in 2014, each an artist’s proof. These offer candid windows onto the Melbourne print directory company Sands & McDougall, which crafted an evolving compendium of the city’s properties and households, streets and suburbs, from 1857 to 1974 (use the search function above to find the remarkable Sands & McDougall directories in the collection). The three photographs, showing staff at the company during the 1960s, here exiting the building, were purchased for and shown in the exhibition ‘Page Not Found’, curated by Andrew Stephens and held at City Gallery from August 2014 to January 2015.
