Ricky maynard biography

  • Ricky Maynard has built a career photographing and documenting the histories of Indigenous communities, primarily in and around his home in Tasmania.
  • Ricky Maynard, photographer, was born in Launceston, Tasmania in 1953 and is a descendant of the Big River and Ben Lomond people.
  • Largely self-taught, Maynard began his career as a darkroom technician at the age of sixteen.

    • •

    Ricky Maynard

    Ricky Maynard, photographer, was born in Launceston, Tasmania in 1953 and is a descendant of the Big River and Ben Lomond people.

     

    Maynard developed a fascination for photography early in life when, at the age of 16, he was employed as a darkroom technician working with aerial photographs at a processing business in Melbourne. Starting with this formative experience, Maynard’s practice has been underpinned by a thorough technical knowledge of chemistry and photographic optics, honed through further periods of study and employment. These included a three year traineeship as a photographer at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra from 1983, and a year’s study at the International Centre for Photography in New York in 1990, funded by a grant from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.

     

    Maynard

    •

    Ricky Maynard

    Biography

    Strangely underestimated, perhaps because his work has circulated more in the realm of documentary photography than art, Ricky Maynard has produced some of the most compelling images of contemporary Aboriginal Australia over the gods two decades.

    Largely self-taught, Maynard began his career as a darkroom technician at the age of sixteen. He first established his reputation with the 1985 series Moonbird People, an något privat eller personligt portrayal of the muttonbirding season on Babel, Big Dog and Trefoil Islands in his native Tasmania. The 1993 series No More Than What You See documents Indigenous prisoners in South Australian gaols. He fryst vatten the recipient of numerous grants and commissions, including a 1990 Commonwealth Govern-ment Award to study at the International Centre of Photography in New York. In 1997 he received the Australian Human Rights Award for Photography and is a recipient of the Mother Jones International Documentary Award.

    The owner of an enviable

    •

    Ricky Maynard

    Maynard undertakes his photographic work with a profound sense of responsibility towards cultural integrity, honesty and truth in picture-making by actively engaging with the people and communities he documents. He inherited this during his time as a trainee photographer at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra. Working with historical images of Aboriginal people in the institute’s digital collection, he began to question the role of photography and the powerful way it frames not just a culture but also a people. Maynard has continued to work and develop his practice within this ethical framework.

     

    Maynard’s photographs take viewers on a journey of understanding the unique rela- tionships Australia has with this country’s First Peoples and to question how the photo- graphic lens has historically framed those relationships. This includes the colonial gaze that dominated much of the

  • ricky maynard biography