Travelling Exhibitions

Icon and Archive

PB0084_1 Icon and Archive Image A group of AIF soldiers standing on the deck of troopship HMAT Ajana (A31) (detail) PB0084

Icon and archive: photography and the World Wars
Special exhibitions gallery
6 June until 12 October

The Australian War Memorial is showcasing the nation’s photographic record of the two world wars through Icon and archive: photography and the World Wars exhibition.

Photographs are an inseparable part of our memory of war. They have come to play a vital role in our efforts to remember and to commemorate events of which many of us have no direct experience. While they can’t bring home the terrible experience of war, photographs can provide us with images that at least indicate something of its horror. This has been, from the start, one of the primary intentions of the war photograph.

Icon & Archive draws on the Memorial's extensive collection and includes many iconic photographs that have become lodged in our national memory, as well as numerous superb photographs that are less well-known. The exhibition will be accompanied by night-time projections of images onto the exterior of the Memorial’s building.

The exhibition is part of Vivid, the National Photography Festival being held in Canberra.

Icon and archive opens at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra on 6 June until 12 October 2008, before travelling to other capital cities.

Projections

On some evenings, as part of the exhibition, we will project images from the exhibition onto the front of the building. The images are 10 metres high.

Projection dates are:
11, 12 and 13 July
3, 4 and 5 October 2008

The projections start at dusk, and go to about 10.00pm. The set of images will take around 10 minutes to cycle through. Have a look at the thumbnails of all the images.

 

You can see images at our Flickr group of the projections from the first weekend after the exhibition opened.

Vivid Photography Festival Logo

www.nla.gov.au/vivid

P06003.001 Studio portrait of a First World War soldier in uniform and slouch hat A studio protrait of an unidentified First World soldier P06003.001

Searching for a soldier’s identity

The Australian War Memorial is asking the public to help identify a solider from the First World War whose photograph features in Icon & Archive.

The photograph is a studio portrait, taken in Sydney.

If you have any information about the solider in the photograph please contact us:

Email: photographs@awm.gov.au
Post:
Curator of Photographs
Australian War Memorial
GPO Box 345
Canberra, ACT 2601