The Glasshouse Gallery in Port Macquarie presents a major survey of photographic works by documentary photographer Ricky Maynard, encompassing more than two decades of the artist’s practice.

Portrait of a Distant Land features more than 60 evocative and captivating photographic works, drawn from six bodies of work, which document the lives and culture of Maynard’s people, the Ben Lomond and Cape Portland peoples of Tasmania.

The exhibition is curated by Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Programs Keith Munro and is presented at the Glasshouse from 19 November until 24 January 2010. The exhibition has toured around the world, including stops in Paris, South Korea, New Zealand, Sydney, Hobart and Cairns.

Born in Launceston, Tasmania in 1953 Maynard is a self taught documentary photographer now based on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait between Tasmania and mainland Australia. Maynard first came to prominence in the late 1980s with a photographic essay about Aboriginal mutton bird farmers and he has continued to document physical and social landscapes which form a visual record and representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia.

Maynard today opened the exhibition at the Glasshouse. “It’s a privilege to be able to bring this type of work into a regional centre and to connect with regional audiences, especially in such a fantastic gallery,” he says.

The works presented in Portrait of a Distant Land survey a broad range of themes and issues facing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people today. It includes photographs which document sites significant to Maynard’s people: ranging from serenely beautiful landscapes which follow the song lines, tribal movements and historical displacement routes of his ancestors, to the confrontational and emotionally-charged images of Indigenous people incarcerated in the South Australian prison system.

“My work is about Aboriginal culture, social issues and history,” says Mr. Maynard. “The purpose of the latest series is to denounce and demystifying untrue recordings of history, to have ownership of our own history, tell our own stories.” He described that Aboriginal elders and community leaders have called his work vitally important to preserving and documenting Aboriginal cultural practices and identity.

“I want to provide generations ahead with preserving identity and culture, which they can experience through the landscape and people that I document.” Maynard describes that he still shoots on film and doesn’t digitally manipulate his images. “I have a sense of responsibility to be honest and authentic in my images.”

The six photographic series by Maynard which are featured in the exhibition are The Moonbird People (1985-88), No More Than What You See (1993), Urban Diary (1997), In The Footsteps of Others (2003), Returning To Places That Name Us (2000) and Portrait of a Distant Land (2005- ). Together these works create a form of visual diary of multiple landscapes derived from collective oral histories of Maynard’s people.

Maynard continues to win countless awards and accolades around Australia and the globe including the 1994 Mother Jones International Prize, 1996 Human Rights Commission Photography Award and in 2003 the Kate Challis RAKA Award for Indigenous Contemporary Creative Arts. Maynard’s work was featured at the Australian Embassy as part of the inaugural Paris Photoquai Biennale in 2007, organised by the Musée du quai Branly.