Centre for Contemporary Photography

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Centre for Contemporary Photography

The Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) is one of Australia’s premier organisations for the promotion and celebration of contemporary photo-based arts.

The Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) is one of Australia’s premier venues for the exhibition of contemporary photo-based arts, providing a context for the enjoyment, education, understanding and appraisal of contemporary practice. CCP acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional owners of the land on which Centre for Contemporary Photography stands, and we respectfully recognise Elders past, present and future.

01/06/2026

Opening this Saturday June 6th 2pm
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Peta Duncan’s ‘We Built A House Out Of Water’ at
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👏
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A collaborative & presentation, supported by

13/05/2026

Forthcoming exhibition!
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Presented in partnership with , is delighted to announce our next exhibition!
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‘We Built a House Out of Water’ by Peta Duncan is a deeply personal body of work that draws on memory, family, and culture – while understanding healing as an ongoing process.

Featured in this exhibition are multiple works that explore catharsis and expression through photography, stop-motion animation and alternative printing techniques.

Developed at the intersection of religion and culture; these works address the conflicting relationship of two complex belief systems and how they both simultaneously impact the identity of the Artist, her Family and wider community in Zenadth Kes (Torres Straits).

This exhibition is presented in partnership with Blak Dot Gallery, and is supported by Spicers, Hahnemuhle, HCPro and Colour Factory.
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Opening event Saturday June 6th 2pm , 33 Saxon St, Brunswick .

12/05/2026

This weekend head to the Melbourne Art Book Fair at - we will be joining our friends and collaborators at on Sunday 12 noon for a signing event for all of our CCP.PE.ZINES!

✍️📚
Come get a copy of zines by & .xyn, and you’ll get to meet the artists!
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No bookings necessary
Perimeter Books table
Art Book Fair
Great Hall, NGV International
12 o’clock.
❤️👏

09/05/2026

Ten years this month we presented the exhibition ‘CCP Declares: On the Social Contract’ - featuring artists , Tom Nicholson, .charlie68 .richardson
- curated by the brilliant 👏
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‘CCP Declares: On the Social Contract’ drew together emerging and mid-career artists working at the forefront of Australian photography and video in its expanded field. The subtitle to this second iteration of our CCP Declares series acknowledged that these works examine or extend the idea of social contract theory; the idea that moral and political obligations and rights are bound upon an intrinsic agreement amongst the various constituents of a society.
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Amazing to see how these artists’ work have grown and to see their amazing achievements both in Australia and internationally since 2016 👏👏👏

#2016

03/05/2026

CCP Director Daniel Boetker-Smith, and the CCP Board chaired by Dr Patrick Pound, are delighted to announce the appointment of our new Board Member Dr. Jody Haines.

Dr. Jody Haines (palawa) is a photo-media artist who works at the intersections of memory, body, and Country. Their practice is built on relationships – with people, with place, with the materials that hold stories - and thinking deeply about what it means to collaborate, to resist, to make images that matter.

Jody brings twenty years of experience working and taking on leadership roles in the arts. Her PhD research, completed at RMIT in 2025 and awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence, grew from a simple question: what if we reclaimed materialism from the colonial gaze? What emerged was “known materialism” – a framework that insists Indigenous peoples have always understood relationships between matter, memory, and meaning.

Jody is currently a Lecturer in the School of Art, at RMIT; and has received public art commissions for Metro Tunnel Creative Program, ACMI, and councils across Victoria. Additionally, she spent seven years at Brisbane Powerhouse curating over 100 exhibitions, learning from renowned photographers from across the globe and countless emerging artists. Jody has also produced festivals with YIRRAMBOI and Arts House, coordinated projects across Queensland and Victoria, and managed events that brought thousands of people together.

We are excited to have Jody join us to advise and help steer CCP in the coming years, and we look forward to working alongside her to secure CCP’s long-term future, and to continue to support photographers (as we have done for 40 years) across Victoria and Australia to tell their stories, particularly in the areas of public art and activations, collaborations, and community projects.

01/05/2026

Join us tomorrow Saturday 2nd May for the final day of ‘Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits’ at Frankston Arts Centre
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11am Meet the Curator Catlin Langford, and the people behind Metro-Auto-Photo, Jess Norman and Chris Sutherland for an informal walk-through and Q&A. .auto.photo
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Free event, no bookings necessary
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Supported bu HCPro

22/04/2026

Last week to see ‘Familial’ - ’s exhibition at .

Featuring artists

10/04/2026

Abigail Varney’s ‘WILJUL’ - constructs a vivid, shifting portrait of her mother, combining her own contemporary images with archival photographs made by her father. Varney’s visual language is deeply shaped by the photographic practice of her father, William Varney. Here his images operate not only as source material, but as an active presence, a visual inheritance that complicates authorship and teases out layers of emotion. Varney’s practice unfolds through layering, return and reconstruction; her images acting, as writer Moyra Davey might suggest, akin to vessels through which meaning accrues slowly. In an intoxicating and vibrant mix of images Varney reassembles the memory of her mother through a process of looking and re-looking, shaped as much by absence as by what remains. It is clear to see in Varney’s work the healing potential of photography, where it can function through the careful handling of inherited images and via the creation of new ones. This is a project replete with attention and care, and with an acknowledgement that grief and love are tied to one another. The fractured and disconnected manner in which Varney’s images occupy the gallery wall talk of memories, moments and feelings constantly resurfacing. Collectively ‘WILJUL’ a portmanteau of her parent’s first names, is both homage and inquiry, a means of sustaining memory, celebrating life, and making sense of loss through the act of looking.

04/04/2026

’s ‘Moises’ uses photography as a means to process the experience of loss and grief. In this incredibly personal and layered work Sancari creates a typology of sorts, of men dressed in her deceased father’s clothing. This series of formal, studio-lit portraits, of men embodying her father allowed her to slowly and methodically work through the grief she had carried with her for many years. Through the physical act of overlapping, combining, repetition and similarity we see Sancari play with the truth to take back control of this heartaching narrative that had defined her.

Extract of catalogue essay by

Part of the FAMILIAL exhibition presented by in partnership with & .

Open Mon-Fri 9-5, & Sat 12-4. Until April 24th.

Mariela’s work is printed on Hahnemühle Photo Paper, Spicers Screenboard and Paper. Printing and Mounting provided courtesy of HCPro

30/03/2026

Annie Wang’s, ‘My Son and I at the Same Height’ (2002-), gives us a set of images that builds an archive, in retrospect, that allows for a process of reflection, and allows us to look forwards and backwards simultaneously.

With the simple and playful gesture of positioning her and her son at the same height in each image, Wang opens up conversations around masculinity, motherhood, equality and traditional roles and expectations imposed on women. It teaches us that family is also a constantly evolving and unfolding experience; we must acknowledge that confronted with these linear and temporally organised snapshot images we all grow and age, and that our familial roles morph and adapt over time.

In Wang’s work we can see the relationality and the interconnectedness that defines a mother and a son, and it is clear that it ebbs and flows from one day to the next.

The repetition and playfulness of the images, the idea that ‘anyone could do these’, invites us to consider our own family album, and our own ways of visually documenting our lives. Wang combines her images with matter-of-fact captions that add an accessible and diaristic quality to the series.”

Extract from catalogue essay by

Part of the FAMILIAL exhibition presented by in partnership with & .

Open Mon-Fri 9-5, & Sat 12-4. Until April 24th.

Annie’s work is printed on Spicers Screenboard. Paper provided courtesy of Spicers Australia. Printing and mounting provided courtesy of HCPro.

Address

Melbourne, VIC

Telephone

+61394171549

Website

http://www.ccp.org.au/

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