Russell’s Takeaway Food Van, Queen Victoria Markets 1956 (printed 2016)

Summary

Photographer and writer Jeff Carter (1928–2010) is best remembered for being a visual documentarian of small-town characters and life from the mid-20th century and beyond. In the 1940s, he took to the road with his camera – sometimes with his family, sometimes without – peregrinating the continent in a bid to record the habits and rhythms of unassuming individuals going about their lives. Working predominantly in his favoured black and white, Carter created candid photographs that gave texture and personality to many of Australia’s mainly rural communities. His photographs have been published not only in Australian print media and books, but also in notable international magazines such as ‘National Geographic’ and ‘Paris Match’. Although he preferred the bush to the city, Carter made some remarkable depictions of urban life in mid-century Melbourne and Sydney, including a body of gelatin silver photographs of Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market, taken in 1956. The Art and Heritage Collection acquired four of these from Sydney’s Byron Gallery in 2016. These close views onto market workers – shot in black and white and using only natural light – invoke an ambience, naturalism and romance of the past, but it is a past shot through with the strange familiarity of an institution that pre- and postdates the images.