On 4 May a new exhibition of the Prahran alumni opened at MAGNET Galleries in Melbourne’s Docklands precinct.

The exhibition was secured in discussions held only last November, in 2024—gathering forty exhibitors and including the 1980s cohort for the first time, was quite a feat for an exhibition of such a scale!

Here is the opening speech:

Welcome to Magnet Galleries on the Lower Yarra Delta, an important meeting place for peoples of the Kulin Nation. I acknowledge the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung, traditonal owners of this land on which we meet today. I pay respect to their elders (note the word!) past and present and those emerging.

They were here 40,000 years or more ago and their legends record the flooding of Port Philip Bay 10,000 years ago and its brief drying up 1,000 years ago. We respect that longevity; longevity, time and age is my theme here today to introduce and open this exhibition.

But first, the photographs, your photographs for which we on the organising committee thank you: photographs that may be described as documents or as artworks, or both at once, made in the street or in the studio, for a multitude of personal reasons or for someone else.

They are eyewitness reports, often of things we either ignore, or are prevented from seeing. They evoke the full gamut of emotion; love, joy, curiosity, empathy, laughter and even revenge. They may be of beautiful people or things, or they may make the dull, the drab, the everyday, magnificent. Some are meant to puzzle you, or are surreal.

We share a history, because we discovered we could make such photographs at Prahran College which though it was called Victoria College from 1981, was still fondly known as ‘Prahran.’

To get in, we had to present a sufficiently good folio, so we were already photographers. Most of us were mature age students, so we were experienced adults. But as alumni we might acknowledge its meaning; in Roman law an alumnus was a foundling, an orphan, a child abandoned by its mother, fostered by a family as a slave, a servant, or an adopted child of the family. At Prahran, our ‘alma mater’, we were no longer ‘orphan’ photographers, we had found a home. For me and many others, it actually saved our lives.

The lecturers of Prahran: Ian McKenzie, Derrick Lee, Paul Cox, Gordon De’Lisle, Athol Shmith, John Cato, Bryan Gracey, Norbert Loeffler in the seventies, and in the eighties, John with an array of guest lecturers, including past students. All were practitioners, though not trained teachers. They were our inspiring elders.

But what is left? Look at these walls, at work made when Prahran is long gone and its building demolished; it is this variety—the diversity—that is what is most striking. There is no ‘house style’, no ‘Prahran brand’!

That is the essence of Prahran and what those lecturers gave us: a proud individualism, the means to reinvent photography for ourselves, to apply critical thinking to its making and a common language that draws us together today.

When asked what I would speak about, I mentioned that I wanted to stress the longevity of those in this show. The response was that it would be ‘ageist’ to do so.

I can understand that as a response from someone in the eighties cohort. At 60 we fear being thought ‘old’, we fear being ‘washed up’.

At 75, I’ll stand by my right to be ‘ageist’ in the same spirit as I stand up as a socialist, a humanist, an environmentalist, an artist, because for photography to have lasted throughout our lives to the point where we each can still present recently made work, that is a matter of pride, a feat to celebrate!

Long live longevity! Long live photography!

Let us thank our marvellous curator Merle Hathaway who is responsible for The Basement, and Beyond the Basement and upcoming exhibitions coming to fruition.

Let’s thank Phil Quirk, Peter Liess, Graham Howe and Jon Conte for finding past students and gathering us together with the idea of exhibiting like this.

Let’s thank Colin Abbott and Suzanne and Micheal Silver for ‘Prahran 40’ eleven years ago, which launched the interest in the Prahran Legacy, for their hosting this show today, and Colin also for his sponsorship.

Thank you to all of you for writing your life stories for us, and to those who appear in video interviews with Peter Leiss and Nicholas Nedelcopoulous, for the extended stories on our blog site, and Mimmo Cozzolino for his magnificent design.

Our ambition is to continue and expand those biographies in a book as a durable record that will outlive us all.

Thank you