Janina Green
look this way
6 June - 11 July 2026
Opening 2-4pm Saturday 6 June
Look this way brings together a series of vintage hand-coloured photographic portraits of young women made by Janina Green in the early 2000s. Alice, Kate, Zelda and other ‘models’ are subjects drawn from Green’s social circle - friends of her daughter, or daughters of friends. As a series they show us young women at different stages of relating to posing, thinking through the problems and pleasures of how to present oneself to the camera in an era just shy of social media. Their subtle poses, recorded in precise detail by Green's large format camera, oscillate between casual, ambivalent and painterly registers. Made in a period when Bill Henson’s eroticised and voyeuristic Untitled photographs of anonymous teenagers were foregrounded in contemporary Australian photography, Green’s work offers a more maternal gaze upon the figure of the adolescent. Photography is here cast as a tactile, social medium that stages an intimate exchange between artist and sitter. Green’s images document embodied encounters between photographer, subject and print - indexed in the direct gazes of her models and the material traces of her labour in the painting and handling of the photographic paper.
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Janina Green lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, where she has had a long career as an artist and photography teacher at the Victorian College of Arts at the University of Melbourne. Green began her experimental photographic practice in the 1980s when she taught herself large-format photography after studying print-making at RMIT University. Her work makes tender and critical observations about domesticity, motherhood, reading, teaching, sexual politics, theory and psychology.
Born in Germany to Ukrainian parents, who then migrated to Gippsland, Victoria, in 1949, she spent her childhood in the small country town of Yallourn North. Her early years spent in this rural-industrial setting greatly influenced the artist’s understanding of identity as a fluid and dynamic concept informed by past and present sense of place. Moving between Melbourne and Gippsland as a young woman, likewise informed her relationship to image-making as a practice of renegotiating hierarchical relationships between central and marginal perspectives.
Green has recently exhibited with Latrobe Regional Gallery, M.33, MAPh, NGV, Bus Projects and Castlemaine Art Museum. Her work has been acquired by the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria; Art Gallery of South Australia; State Library of Victoria; Monash Gallery of Art; Griffiths University; Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; Albury Regional Gallery; Horsham Art Gallery; Latrobe Regional Gallery; The Pat Corrigan Collection; Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale; and Rotterdam Art Foundation, Netherlands. Green is represented by M.33.
Alice, 2001, unique hand-coloured silver gelatin print, 60 x 56 cm
Janina Green studio portrait