8 AUSTRALIANPHOTOGRAPHY.COM AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY + DIGITAL SEPTEMBER 2015
Quick
snaps
Aussie celebs
bare all in new
exhibitionAn upcoming exhibition at The National Portrait
Galler y, Bare: Degrees of undress, celebrates
the role of the nude and the partial nude in
Australian portraiture.
Featuring over 90 portraits from the Gallery’s
collection, the exhibition includes paintings and
photographs, mostly of Australian celebrities in
various states of undress.
Curator of the exhibition, Penelope Grist,
said she was fascinated to discover almost all the
Gallery’s nude and semi-nude portrait sitters were
Australia’s foremost creatives and sportspeople; the
majority being men with their shirts off.
“Bareness is not as extreme as nakedness and
not as refined as nudity. Bareness emphasises
something about a subject’s identity as well asref lecting society. The decision to uncover part, or
all, of the body in a portrait is at least as significant
as a choice of clothing. Visitors to Bare will see
these portraits in a completely new way.”
The exhibition includes images of Megan Gale, Ian
Thorpe, Michael Hutchence, Billy Slater, Germaine
Greer and Dame Edna Everage, among others.
“Bare will be fun, whilst also interrogating our
instinctive reactions to bareness,” said Grist.
As part of the exhibition the National Portrait
Gallery has also created The Bare Game which
visitors can play online and in the gallery to
discover their own nude alter-ego from art history.
Bare: Degrees of undress is at the National Portrait
Gallery in Canberra until 15 November 2015.
Entry is free.Panasonic GX8:
first MFT camera to
pass 20MP barrier
When it goes on sale in September,
Panasonic’s new Lumix DMC-GX8 will
be the first Micro Four Thirds camera
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20.3-megapixel GX8 is also the first
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anti-shake system that combines sensor-
shift and lens-shift technologies to achieve
more stable hand-held images.
Other key features include 4K
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Unusually, the GX8 has a ‘tiltable’
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the response time from the OLED
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The autofocus system has also been
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System using DFD (Depth From Defocus)
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(around 0.07 seconds) and improves focus
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Wi-Fi and NFC are built in so users
can connect the camera to a smartphone
or tablet to share images or control the
camera wirelessly.
The DMC-GX8 will be available in
September with pricing starting at $1,
for the body-only version.
ABOVE
Ian Thorpe 2002,
by James Houston,
National Portrait Gallery,
Canberra. Gift of the
artist 2002.LEFT
Michael Hutchence 1997,
by Polly Borland. National
Portrait Gallery, Canberra.
Purchased 2000.