© National Portrait Gallery 2024
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Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
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This is a photograph of Jerrems’ hospital bed amid an abundance of cards, flowers and postcards tacked on the wall. It resembles a shrine in its peaceful silence, but there are signs that life continues: a cup of tea on the table, the pillow still creased by weight of her head, and, of course, there is the act of taking the photograph itself, the clearest proof of life but at the same time an oblique reckoning with death. By surrounding herself with pictures, and then immortalising them with her camera, Jerrems attests to how important images were to how she made sense of the world.
A line from one of the poems Jerrems wrote at the time reads:
Death in the next room,
nothing unusual, life goes on.
National Library of Australia
© The Estate of Carol Jerrems
from Saturday 30 November 2024
Carol Jerrems: Portraits is a major exhibition of one of Australia’s most influential photographers. Jerrems’ intimate portraits of friends, lovers and artistic peers transcend the purely personal and have come to shape Australian visual culture.
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