Description

Extended Data

DAAO URL

https://www.daao.org.au/bio/mervyn-bishop

Birth Place

Brewarrina, NSW, Australia

Biography

Born and raised in Brewarrina in north-west New South Wales, Mervyn Bishop was first introduced to photography by Vic King, a local amateur photographer. Bishop would enthusiastically watch King in his darkroom and it was here in this cold Brewarrina room that Bishop first became hooked on the 'magic’ and mechanics of photographic printing. Bishop’s mother, too, was a keen photographer and was forever taking photographs of the Bishop children. It was an Anglican priest, Brother Richard, who first encouraged Bishop to purchase a camera. So began Bishop’s life in the world of the still image, a life far removed from the town of Brewarrina, a life almost unimaginable for a young Aboriginal boy growing up in the 1950s.Photography lit a fire in the belly of Bishop and nothing would extinguish it, least of all the racial barriers that existed in Australia at that time. Australia was still in the grip of the White Australia Policy, although the dismantling of it had begun in 1949, it was not fully abolished until 1973 by the new Labor government, lead by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.Whilst at school Bishop received a bursary from the Aborigines Welfare Board and was assisted by a group of sub-editors at the Sydney Morning Herald to “help deserving Aboriginal school students” (Bishop in Moffatt 1991, p.7) to further their study. Bishop began his photographic career in 1963 as a cadet photographer for the Sydney Morning Herald . Working there allowed Bishop access to people and places most photographers of the day could only dream of. He was present at the 1965 Roy Orbison concert in Sydney where he captured Orbison both on stage performing and backstage relaxing. It was at this concert that Bishop shot images of Orbison’s support act, The Rolling Stones, on their first tour of Australia. (The Rolling Stones images were printed and presented for the first time in the 2006 'Access All Areas’exhibition at the City of Sydney Library, Customs House, Circular Quay).In 1968 Bishop shot photographs of Barry Humphries in his dressing room at the Tivoli Theatre before and after dressing up as Edna Everidge. He photographed the Pan-Am jet crash at Sydney airport in 1969 and in 1971 he shot the image he called Life and Death Dash in which a nursing nun was rushing a young boy into the emergency ward of St Margaret’s Hospital in Darlinghurst. It was this photograph that won Bishop the 1971 Australian News Photographer of the Year award. In the 'In Dreams’catalogue Bishop was interviewed by Tracey Moffatt about what happened after winning that award; “it was customary at the Herald “ Bishop stated “that if any photographer won the award they would instantly get promoted, but that wasn’t to be for me. I was quietly told that I wouldn’t be getting promoted; the reasons weren’t exactly spelled out. I knew I hit a barrier in what I had to remind myself was still a white world. Here I was the only Aboriginal press photographer in Sydney and possibly Australia. The Herald had given me a break and for that I was grateful but now I was shown that there were limits.” When Moffatt asks him why he did not protest he answered, “I had to maintain a sense of propriety in the hope that maybe other Aboriginal people would be able to gain employment there as well” (Bishop in Moffatt 1991, p.8).In 1974, after his time at the Herald , Bishop relocated to Canberra with his wife, Liz, and began working for the newly formed Commonwealth Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra where he was employed to document the lives and conditions of Aboriginal Australians during some of the country’s most politically turbulent and active years. Working for this organisation gave Bishop an entrée into Aboriginal Australia that had not been granted to any other photographer at the time. Of course being Aboriginal helped break down any barriers of suspicion his subject may have had about the media, but this privileged access was a double-edged sword as Bishop was, in many cases, charged with the responsibility of guaranteeing that his images would be treated with integrity and respect once they left his hands. During this time Bishop shot the image Prime Minister Gough Whitlam Pours Soil Into Hand of Traditional Land Owner Vincent Lingiari ( NT 1975), which was to become his most recognised photograph and the 'poster-image’ for the Land Rights Movement.Bishop returned for a short stint at the Herald in the 1980s and was also a photography teacher at Tranby Aboriginal College in Glebe and the Eora Centre for the Arts in Chippendale. Bishop credits his Tranby colleague Andrew Dewdney for allowing him to read his images with a new eye, to see them as portraits or artworks rather than press images. In 1991 his exhibition, “In Dreams: Thirty Years of Photography 1960 – 1990”, curated by Tracey Moffatt, opened at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney.In 2000 Bishop was employed as a stills photographer on the set of the highly acclaimed movie Rabbit Proof Fence , though this was not his first job as a stills photographer, in 1996 he had worked on the Warwick Thornton directed short film, Payback . In 2000 Bishop was the recipient of the Australia Council for the Arts’ Red Ochre Award, an annual award recognising the lifetime achievements of an individual Aboriginal artist.Fellow photographer William Yang was commissioned by the Sydney Opera House in 2004 to direct a spoken word performance of Bishop that would take the audience on the journey of the life and times of Mervyn Bishop. Titled Flash Black , this performance opened at the Sydney Opera House during the Message Sticks Festival of 2004 and toured nationally including the inaugural Dreaming Festival at Woodford in Queensland in June 2005.In 2006 Bishop was invited by the City of Sydney Council to stage an exhibition at their exhibition space in the City Library at Customs House, Circular Quay. This exhibition, 'Access All Areas’ , was curated by the author and displayed approximately thirty oversized printed photographs selected from Bishop’s 50,000 plus catalogue of images, most of which had never before been publicly displayed. In 2008 Hetti Perkins of the Art Gallery of NSW curated Bishop into the exhibition 'Half Light: Portraits From Black Australia’, where his images sit alongside the work of Destiny Deacon, Vernon Ah Kee, Ricky Maynard, Peter Yanada McKenzie, Brenda L. Croft, Richard Bell, rea, Brook Andrew , Darren Siwes, Christian Bumbarra Thompson, Genevieve Grieves, Dianne Jones, Tony Albert and Michael Riley.The Dubbo Regional Gallery – The Armati Bequest staged a solo exhibition of Bishop’s work that was curated by Adnan Begic of the Western Plains Cultural Centre in late 2008 (continuing through to March 2009) titled 'Mervyn Bishop: Journey of a Photographer’ . His work also featured in 'Sorry… More Than a Word’, an exhibition that was staged at Parliament House in Canberra and commemorated the first anniversary of the Motion of Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples. Bishop’s work is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Australian National Maritime Museum and The National Gallery of Australia. Writers: Allas, Tess Date written: 2009 Last updated: 2011

Born

b. 1945

Summary

An award winning photo-journalist, Mervyn Bishop was the first Aboriginal photographer for the 'Sydney Morning Herald'. Bishop's extensive career began in 1963 and in 2008 his work was included in the exhibition "Half Light: Portraits From Black Australia" at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Gender

Male

Died

None listed

Age at death

None listed