Ricky Maynard
Ricky Maynard. Portrait of a Distant Land 2007. Image courtesy of artist and Stills Gallery.
Whether it’s portraits of Wik elders, images showing the isolation of Aboriginal men in South Australian prisons or the mutton birding traditions of the community where he grew up Ricky Maynard’s unique documentary photography helps keep culture alive and bring attention to Aboriginal social and political realities.
Ricky Maynard has been selected as one of the 31 artists in Australia's first Indigenous art Triennial.
Born in Launceston, Tasmania in 1953, Ricky Maynard was already interested in photography at sixteen when he moved to Melbourne to play football. He began his work in the industry as a darkroom technician.
In 1988 Ricky was selected to participate in the Indigenous photographers After 200 years project, where he returned to Tasmania to photograph Moonbird People, his essay on the resilience of his community’s mutton bird farming among the windswept landscape.
In 1990 Ricky was the recipient of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts board grant which assisted him to undertake a year’s full time study as part of the degree program in Documentary Photography at the International Centre of Photography, New York.
In 1994 his series No More Than What You See probed Indigenous deaths in custody in South Australian prisons and was awarded the 1994 Mother Jones International Prize for Documentary Photography and the 1996 Human Rights Commission Photography Award. Ricky said of the work “These pictures will live on in history, showing the moment to itself, showing what needs to be changed and hoping some day we can look back and see how far we have progressed as a society”.
In 2003 Ricky received the Kate Challis RAKA Ward for Indigenous Contemporary Creative Arts for his portrait Arthur, from his series Returning to Places that Name Us; six stirring black and white portraits of the struggles of the Wik elders those who had toiled forso long for native title.
In 2004 Ricky was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts board fellowship.