Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (born July 1945) is an Indigenous Australian news and documentary photographer. Joining the Sydney Morning Herald as a cadet in 1963, he was the first Aboriginal Australian to work on a metropolitan daily newspaper and one of the first to become a professional photographer. In 1971, four years after completing his cadetship, he was named Australian Press Photographer of the Year. He has continued to work as a photographer and lecturer.

Early life and education Mervyn Bishop, a Murri man, in Brewarrina in north-west New South Wales. His father, "Minty" Bishop, had been a soldier and shearer, and was himself born to an Aboriginal mother and a Punjabi Indian father. In 1950, "Minty" gained an "official exemption certificate which permitted 'more advanced' Aborigines to live apart from mission blackfellas in post-war Australia". This enabled the family to live among "ordinary" people in Brewarrina. The catch to this certificate was that the exempt Aboriginal people were expected to "sever their ties with their old culture". or 1963, Bishop is a Kamilaroi man.

By high school he had started "chronicling the family with a camera – first his mother's Kodak 620, and then a 35mm Japanese camera he bought for £15". He moved to Dubbo when he was 14 to finish his high school at Dubbo High School.

He returned to study later, receiving an Associate Diploma in Adult Education at Sydney College of Advanced Education in 1989. In 2004, he remained the only indigenous photographer to have been employed by the paper. has been seen as capturing "the symbolic birth of landrights".

Bishop completed further studies and lectured in photography at Tranby Aboriginal College, the Eora College,

He produced a one-man performance piece, Flash Blak, in the vein of a William Yang slide show to music and written and directed by Yang, for the 2004 Message Sticks Festival at the Sydney Opera House.

A photographic portrait of Bishop hangs in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, created by Greg Lee.

A black and white photograph of Bishop taken by Dean Saffron was selected as a finalist in the 2026 National Photographic Portrait Prize . 2000: Red Ochre Award, worth , from the Australia Council's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board, "in recognition of his pioneering work and ongoing influence"

Collections and exhibitions

A number of Bishop's photographs are held in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), and the National Portrait Gallery.

Solo and group exhibitions include: 1991–2001: In Dreams: Mervyn Bishop Thirty Years of Photography 1960–1990, initially curated by Tracey Moffatt, at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney and touring for around 10 years 1992, Cultural exchange with the Chinese Photographic Society and Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 1992, Recent Acquisitions – Australian Photography, AGNSW 1993, Aratjara: Art of the First Australians, Touring: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Hayward Gallery, London; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek 1993, Urban Focus: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art from the Urban Areas of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 1993, Photographs from the collection, AGNSW 1994, Critic's choice, AGNSW 1994, We Are Family, AGNSW 1996, From the Street – Photographs From the Collection, AGNSW 1997, Discipline and beauty, Art Gallery of New South Wales 1998, Retake: Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Photography, National Gallery of Australia 2000, Another country, Art Gallery of New South Wales 2001, A Dubbo Day with Jimmy and other reconciliation images, Stills Gallery, Paddington 2003, New View: Indigenous Photographic Perspectives, Monash Gallery 2003, On the Beach: with Whiteley and fellow Australian artists, Brett Whiteley Studio, Surry Hills 2004, Australian postwar photodocumentary, AGNSW 2008, Half Light: Portraits from Black Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales 2010, Candid Camera: Australian Photography 1950s–1970s, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide 2012, Home: Aboriginal Art from NSW, AGNSW 2015, The photograph and Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales 2017, Mervyn Bishop (24 June – 8 October), a major retrospective at AGNSW and touring 2021, Mervyn Bishop: The Exhibition by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, drawn from the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection, the artist's private archive, and enriched by sound and moving image from the NFSA