A camera on Gallipoli
Touring and Digital Exhibition
April 2014 to December 2018
In 1915 soldier and surgeon Sir Charles Ryan captured the Australians’ experience on Gallipoli via a series of candid photographs. Ryan’s sensitivity, his empathy with those on both sides, and his eye for the remarkable – and the remarkable in the everyday – are apparent in his photographic work. These images take us behind the stirring accounts of battle being reported at home to reveal the dry, forbidding landscape, tired troops in the trenches, squalid dug-outs, and the horrendous task of burying the dead. Here, in Ryan’s display of mateship, stoicism and dogged endurance, is the spirit of Anzac.
Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey. c May 1915. Two soldiers of the Supply Depot, 1st Australian Division, standing on the beach amongst boxes of corned beef and canned meat. Photographer: Charles Ryan
Beyond the photographs in the exhibition is the story of Charles Ryan’s remarkable life, encompassing his service as a doctor with the Turkish army in 1877–78, his close encounter with Ned Kelly, whom he treated at Glenrowan, his time as a leading Melbourne surgeon, his long service as a senior military officer, and the high civil and military recognition extended to him by his peers.
It is the first time the memorial has produced an exhibition in multiple formats.
There is a framed photographic exhibition, and a digital version.
The framed version will travel around the country to more than 30 locations. The digital version will be displayed in more than 70 locations.