Rod McNicol: A Portrait by Yanni Florence

A beautiful limited edition publication, celebrating the work of Rod McNicol.

"The portraits presented here are from an exhibition I shared with Carol Jerrems at Brummels Gallery, South Yarra in 1978. From my first introduction to photography at Prahran College in the 1970s I was drawn to portraiture and specifically to portraits that were direct to the camera. Like a lot of my peers at that time I was drawing my sitters from friends and those around me, often portraying them in their environs. And yet, as is obvious when looking through these portraits, some are taken against a plain background: I was inevitably being drawn towards working in a studio situation, the better to focus in a more singular manner on the sitters themselves. So, in October 1978, towards the end of the Brummels Exhibition, I moved into an old warehouse studio in Fitzroy. I have lived and worked there ever since, continually defining and refining my singular, somewhat obsessive vision of photographic portraiture".

Born in 1946, Rod McNicol studied photography at Prahran College in 1974 and completed an MFA at Monash University in 2007. Since 1978 he has lived and worked in an old warehouse/studio in Fitzroy, Melbourne, where, for more than four decades now, he has refined his passion for photographic portraiture. McNicol has always drawn his sitters from those around him, his peers, his friends, and other subjects from the rich inner-city life of his milieu. With a gentle stillness tempered by an unrelenting directness, he pares photographic portraiture back to something of its bare essence.

In 2004, he won the Australian Photographic Portrait Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW, and in 2012 he won the National Photographic Portrait Prize, held at the National Portrait Gallery. He has works in major collections including: the NGV, the NGA, the NPG, and the AGNSW and the Bibliothèque Nationale, France.

@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.

2024, English

Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm

Edition of 50,

Published by Light of Day Books / Melbourne