2014 Beauty and Strength: Michael Riley's portraits in black and white

'Beauty and Strength Portraits' by Michael Riley are a series of black and white portrait photographs exhibited at Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery from 21 March to 17 August 2014.

Michael Riley (1960-2004), a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi man, is a well-known photographer, filmmaker, and video artist. The exhibited photographs of First Nations men and women in Australia were taken between 1984 and 1990 in Sydney and printed in 2013.

Riley wrote in 1989: “I just want to show young Aboriginal people living in the cities today; a lot of them are very sophisticated and a lot of them are very glamorous. A lot of them have an air of sophistication which you don’t see coming across in newspapers and television programs.” This can be seen in the stunning close up shots, especially of Hetti Perkins (1990). Hetti Perkins (1965-) is a daughter of activist Charles Perkins and German-born Eileen Munchenberg, and is an art curator.

Hetti Perkins of Art+Soul wrote in 2010 that “Michael’s style of taking portraits was to bring all the ingredients together and then let events take their natural course, while he would appear to just sit back and observe.”

Riley studied photography at Sydney College of Arts and was selected in 2004 for the permanent installation of First Nations art at the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris. The National Portrait Gallery purchased Riley’s portraits for this collection in 2013. The portraits are digitally printed pigment ink photographic prints produced from Riley’s originals. There are 15 portraits in the exhibition.

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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