The biggest-ever survey of the National Gallery of Victoria's photography collection has been unveiled in Melbourne.
Photography: Real & Imagined features more than 300 images, some by global stars of photography: Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gilbert & George, and Nan Goldin.
But seeing is not necessarily believing, as the exhibition delves into the notion of what is real and what isn't: a contemporary question that cuts to the heart of the photographic discipline.
One picture by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto is of a drive-in cinema, but what appears at first to be a blank movie screen is actually the result of the photographer opening his camera shutter for the duration of an entire film.
The trust audiences have in the realness of photographs is tested again and again: Joe Rosenthal’s iconic World War II photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, 1945 shows American marines raising the US flag over the Japanese island.
But it's just one of many examples of documentary photography that has actually been staged for better effect.
Senior curator Susan van Wyk has been developing the NGV's photography collection over the past 30 years.
"There's 14,000 photographs in the collection - and I put all my favourites in this show," she told AAP.
The exhibition spans the 200 years since the invention of photography through 21 sections exploring themes such as conflict, consumption and the environment.
Australian photographers on show include Max Dupain, Olive Cotton, Mervyn Bishop, Polly Borland and Darren Sylvester.
As the discipline of photography developed, the notion of dressing up for the camera with costumes and role play was also taking hold, explains van Wyk.
There is play in the curator's arrangement of images too, with historic virginal photographs of women installed next to a 1988 Cindy Sherman photograph, in which she poses with fake breasts in the costume of Renaissance aristocrat.
Perhaps the endpoint of photographic fabrication is a monumental print by Gilbert & George, titled Forward, in which the Union Jack, chopped up and rearranged, becomes a backdrop for portraits of the artists themselves.
There are also many images that will speak to contemporary audiences with additional resonance due to current events.
One example is Mervyn Bishop’s historic 1975 photograph of prime minister Gough Whitlam pouring sand into the palm of Gurindji elder Vincent Lingiari, at a meeting where Lingiari received the crown lease of his ancestral land.
There are also pictures that alter or enhance reality to get at a deeper truth.
Next to a classic photograph of Yosemite National Park by Ansel Adams is Frank Hurley's image of an iceberg, taken in 1913 during his time as the photographer for the Australasian Antarctic Expedition.
When the explorer Douglas Mawson failed to return with his party, the support ship Aurora was forced to leave Antarctica before the ocean froze around it.
On the return journey, Hurley took a series of photos of icebergs - but the haunting image on display is in fact a construction, made from several negatives of the sky, sea, and ice.
"From Hurley's point of view we have an understanding of what it was like to be there, not exactly what it looked like on that day in that place," van Wyk told reporters.
"It's a work that appears to be real, and in some ways is - because all the elements within it are real."
Photography: Real & Imagined is on display from Friday until February 4 at The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia.
