The Pat Corrigan Collection of Australian Black and White Photography
Pat Corrigan AM
1. Corrigan.jpg
Patrick Corrigan AM
Photograph by Adam Knott, 2012
The life of Patrick Corrigan, now 88 years old, presents a rich and interwoven history engaging the worlds of business, art, music and philanthropy. Born in China in 1932, and departing in 1941, Corrigan and his mother spent four years in the Stanley Internment Camp, Hong Kong before the family migrated to Sydney and were reunited in 1946. In 1950 Corrigan joined the Royal Australian Naval reserve, serving three years and was granted Australian citizenship in 1960.
Forty years later in 2000 Corrigan was awarded the Member of the Order of Australia medal in the Queen's Birthday Honours List for "service to the visual arts, particularly as a philanthropist to regional galleries and through a grant scheme for artists."
A lifetime working in the freight and customs brokerage industry led to growing contacts and a passion for book, manuscript and art collecting. In 1970 Corrigan's Express Pty Ltd imported the largest ever painting to Australia – American Dream, a 2.4 x 22 metre work by Brett Whiteley, weighing 2.5 tons, for exhibition at the Bonython Gallery, Sydney. Close relationships developed with art dealer Kym Bonython and Kevin Weldon from Hamyln books, introducing Corrigan to the broader world of galleries, dealers, publishers and artists. Four decades of passionate collecting followed.
Pat Corrigan has enthusiastically shared his love of collecting with the public. In addition to loans of hundreds of works to public institutions and universities, he has donated more than one thousand works of art to over forty-five regional galleries, cultural institutions and charitable organisations across the country.
Since the year 2000 contemporary Indigenous art has become a major collecting interest, accompanied by the publication of several books. Corrigan has also assembled one of the largest collections of contemporary Australian photography, a new chapter which builds on his decades-long interest in and collecting of black and white photography.
Corrigan's love of jazz dates to the mid-1940s – the era of Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. Amassing a collection of seven thousand 78 records, he donated it to the National Film and Sound Archive in 1980. His support of emerging jazz musicians continues today with the Pat Corrigan Scholarship awarded through the Sydney-based Jazz Workshop Australia.
Corrigan’s long career in freight forwarding has often led to confusion with stevedore magnate Chris Corrigan, the former CEO of Patrick Corporation. They are unrelated, and when quizzed on this point Pat Corrigan is always keen to point out that he is the "poorer one".*
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Corrigan_(businessman)
The Collection
The Pat Corrigan Collection of Australian Black and White Photography records the vast shifts in Australian society from the first decade of the twentieth century through to the 1970s.
A pioneer of modern photography, Harold Cazneaux created some of the most memorable images of the early twentieth century. His celebrated photograph, The Spirit of Endurance, 1937 depicts a solitary river red gum with a Flinders Ranges backdrop. Significantly, the same tree still stands today, known as ‘The Cazneaux Tree’. Modern glamour and style of the 1920s and 30s was captured by Max Dupain and his early partner [and first wife] Olive Cotton,followed by a dramatic shift to documentation of the post war years with Meat Queue, 1946 - a stark reminder of prevailing social tensions and food shortages.
Iconic images punctuate the collection from Cazneaux’s Razzle Dazzle, 1910 and Dupain’s Silos through Windscreen, 1935, to Olive Cotton’s Glasses, 1937, and the photojournalist David Moore’s classics, Sisters of Charity, 1956 and Migrants Arriving in Sydney, 1966. International influences also appear in the work of German refugee, Wolfgang Sievers, and his powerful image Gears for Mining Industry…Melbourne, 1967. Heralding a shift in attitudes towards women’s liberation, Lewis Morley’s famous image of the twenty-one year old Christine Keeler posed naked astride a modern plywood chair in 1963, was shot at the height of the scandalous ‘Profumo Affair’. The image, together with his many previously unseen preparatory negatives for the shoot, featured prominently in Morley’s first museum retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1989. Similarly reflecting the rise of the feminist movement in the 1970s, Carol Jerrems’ Juliet Holding ‘Vale Street’,1976, encapsulates well the revolutionary spirit of subcultures and disaffected youth photographed in a St Kilda backyard.
Confirming their importance, most of the images in the Corrigan Collection have been included in major museum exhibitions and many are illustrated in the accompanying literature, as well as the classic Australian photography publications by Gail Newton and Helen Ennis.1 In particular, a large proportion of this collection was included in The Enduring Glance: 20th Century Australian Photography from the Corrigan Collection, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 22 June – 28 July 2002. A selection of other prominent public exhibitions to include images from the Corrigan Collection are:
The Photograph and Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 21 March – 8 June 2015, and touring
SOUL OF A CITY: Modernism and Sydney Photography 1930 to 1950, Delmar Gallery, Sydney, 17 May – 15 June 2014
Beach, Bush & Battlers: photographs by Jeff Carter, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney 4 January – 20 February 2011
Harold Cazneaux, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 5 June – 10 August 2008
Lewis Morley, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 6 July – 10 September 2006
David Moore: 100 Photographs, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 November 2005 – 5 March 2006
Australian postwar photodocumentary, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 June – 8 August 2004
Soft Shadows and Sharp Lines: Australian Photography from Cazneaux to Dupain, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 30 September – 17 November 2002
Federation: Australian Art and Society 1901 – 2001, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 8 December 2000 - 11 February 2001, and touring
What is This Thing Called Photography? Australian Photography 1975 –1985, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 5 June – 29 July 1999
We Are Family, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 October – 20 November 1994
Fine and mostly sunny: photographs from the collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 28 September – 1 December 1991
Seeing is Believing – The Art in Photography, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 13 December 1985 – 19 January 1986
Max Dupain Retrospective 1930-1980, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 August – 28 September 1980
1. Newton, G., Silver and Grey - Fifty Years of Australian Photography 1900-1950, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1980 and Ennis, H., Photography and Australia, Reaktion, London, 2007.