Jon Rhodes

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Jon Rhodes (born 1947) is an Australian photographer and writer recognized as a pioneer of collaborative work with Aboriginal people in remote Australian communities. His photographs are held in major Australian collections and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Rhodes was born in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, and grew up in Brisbane. After leaving St Peters Lutheran College in 1965, he worked at Academy Photographers and, by 1968, had photographed more than 100 weddings. He then moved to Sydney and briefly tried a job as a cleaner before becoming a photographer at the Tertiary Education Research Centre. He later filmed Balmain, a documentary about containerisation, and in 1972 joined the Commonwealth Film Unit (later Film Australia) as an assistant cinematographer. He became a cinematographer in 1974 and left in 1977 to focus on still photography.

Rhodes’s early, influential work was collaborative. His first solo show, Just another sunrise? (1976), juxtaposed the Yolngu people of Yirrkala with the workers of the Nabalco mine and explored land rights in the region. The exhibition used both single photographs and sequences to tell a story, often emphasizing the cultural divide highlighted by mining infrastructure such as the 19-kilometre conveyor belt. He preferred full-frame, un-cropped images and a cinematic approach to composition, moving away from the idea that a single image could capture everything.

In 1977, Jenny Boddington curated a joint exhibition of Rhodes’s work with landscape photographer Laurie Wilson at the National Gallery of Victoria. He also did commissioned photography for CSR Limited, documenting its Pyrmont refinery for its centenary in 1978 and again in 1982, and contributed to CSR projects on mining and industry. In 1986 he participated in After 200 Years: Photographic Essays of Aboriginal and Islander Australia Today, organized by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. From this project grew the Kundat Jaru mob exhibition, which combined Rhodes’s photographs with those of community members and toured Australia in 1991–1992.

Rhodes spent significant time in the field with Aboriginal communities. In 1990 he worked for five months at Kiwirrkura and later produced Whichaway? (1998–2002), a culmination of his Aboriginal Australia trilogy that traveled to major cities and regional galleries and was shown at the Kluge-Ruhe Gallery in the United States in 2004. His collaborative Site Seeing (1992), with painter Carol Ruff, explored Indigenous sites in the Arrernte country around Alice Springs and beyond, and the project toured to multiple Australian cities in the mid-1990s.

In 2006, Rhodes received an H. C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship, which allowed him to study 36 Aboriginal sites around Sydney, Melbourne, south-east Queensland and western New South Wales for Cage of Ghosts, an exhibition that opened at the National Library of Australia in late 2007. This work blends photography, history and field research to examine how Indigenous and settler histories intersect in the Australian landscape. My Trip (2014), a group show with Micky Allan and Max Pam, highlighted works spanning 1974 to 1990, drawn from his early projects such as Just another sunrise?, Kundat Jaru and Whichaway?

Rhodes continued writing and publishing, producing Cage of Ghosts as a book. It won the 2019 New South Wales Premier’s Community and Regional History Prize for its original, multi-layered presentation of Indigenous histories in Australian landscapes. He published Whitefella Way in 2022, a book that follows eight journeys across sites in New South Wales and beyond, exploring the intertwined histories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and the ongoing impact of colonization. Whitefella Way was shortlisted for the 2023 NSW Premier’s Prize.

Today Rhodes’s photographs are celebrated for their careful, narrative-driven approach and their focus on land rights, Aboriginal sites, and the long history of Indigenous and settler interactions in Australia.