© National Portrait Gallery 2025
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Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
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In this self portrait, Jerrems holds her camera at her chest, not in front of her face as it usually is in her mirror photographs. Despite compromising conditions – harsh light, cramped space, failing health – she achieves a clean, stark portrait. Other self portraits in this series are far more painful to observe, exposing and offering up her battered, swollen, sliced-up and weakening body as proof of her experience and of the harrowing procedures she was enduring. In this work, however, the focus is on her face with its expression of steely determination, and perhaps even, tragically, hope.
National Library of Australia
© The Estate of Carol Jerrems
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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