Celebrated Australian photographer Rod McNicol dies aged 79
Celebrated Australian photographer Rod McNicol has died at the age of 79.
Born in 1946, McNicol left Australia for Europe in 1968, spending four years travelling and working across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East before returning home in 1973.
The following year he enrolled in photography at Prahran College in Melbourne, where he studied under and befriended renowned photographer Athol Shmith.
In 1975, McNicol co-founded The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop in South Yarra, one of Australia’s first galleries devoted exclusively to photography.
His first exhibition, shared with Carol Jerrems, was held at Brummels Gallery in 1978. Later that year he moved into a warehouse studio in Fitzroy, where he would live and work for the rest of his life.
Through the late 1970s and 1980s, McNicol became known for his stark black and white portraits of friends and peers from Melbourne’s inner-city arts community, “artists, actors, drug addicts and other fellow marginals,” as he once described them.
His work evoked the quiet intensity of early photographic portraiture, marked by stillness and directness.
In 1989 and 1990 he undertook an Australia Council-funded residency in the cancer ward of Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital, producing the powerful series Art and the Cancer Ward, which was exhibited in 1992.
The experience led him to step away from photography for much of the 1990s, before resuming his practice and completing a Master of Fine Arts at Monash University in 2007.
McNicol won the Australian Photographic Portrait Prize in 2004 and the National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2012 for his portrait of his long-time friend, actor Jack Charles.
His work was regularly exhibited in Australia and abroad and is held in major public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Portrait Gallery and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
McNicol’s portraits, spanning more than four decades, form a remarkable record of creative life in Australia. Vale Rod.