TOLARNO GALLERIES is pleased to present
Robert Rooney: Portrait Photographs 1978 - 1987.
Spanning a decade, Robert Rooney’s unpolished photographs are an insider’s view of Melbourne’s art scene in the 1980s and a fascinating document of the period. The complete series of seventy-five Portraits is being exhibited for the first time.
'These portraits,' says Rooney, 'were to be as perfect as I could make them. There were certain rules – to use available light, no matter how dim (long exposures and a hand-held camera), and no cropping.'
Over the years we’ve seen glimpses of Robert Rooney’s photographs of famous art people. Some, like the photograph of Howard Arkley taken in 1980, have been much reproduced and a small group were exhibited in Robert Rooney’s exhibition: From the Home Front at Monash University in 1990.
Not widely known, is that throughout the eighties Rooney quietly photographed a ‘who’s who’ of the Melbourne art world culminating in an absorbing series of seventy-five portaits of artists, curators, gallery owners, gallery directors ‘and other art world people’. Included are painters Peter Booth and Fred Williams, museum directors James Mollison and Ron Radford and star curator Paul Taylor of Popism fame.
Press release courtesy Tolarno Galleries.