B. 1949

Anne Ferran is a Sydney-based photographer who has worked in photo media since the 1980s. She studied humanities and teaching before training in photography at the Sydney College of Arts. Ferran has a particular interest in examining Australia’s colonial past, centering on the women and children who were incarcerated and forgotten by society. She draws inspiration from museum collections and photography archives to produce haunting images of garments, creating life size photograms.

Ferran began exhibiting her work in the mid 1980s, where she presented her landmark series ‘Scenes on the Death of Nature’ at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 1987. In 2003, her series ‘Wedding Gowns’ cleverly captured an illuminating life-size image of an archival wedding dress. She invites viewers to sit with the discomfort and imagine the women who once wore the garments and what treatment they may have endured in prisons, asylums and nurseries.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales describes her work as ‘seeking to image the unknowable.’ As a photographer, Ferran is as interested in what’s inside the frame as what remains invisible and untold. Her works are held in the collections of significant public institutions including National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria and National Museum of Australia

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