The aim of the Picture Collection is to record our social history through the work of professional and amateur artists and photographers. Photography is important to our collection as a documentary medium. Our collection includes images of Victorian people, the built environment and historical events, and we estimate that 80 to 90% percent of the collection is in a variety of photographic formats.

Photography is often perceived as an objective, and therefore unbiased, medium for documenting and preserving historic moments and world histories, and for visualising and narrating stories.

The choices made by a photographer – such as how the image is composed, how it is framed, and how it may be cropped, edited, or manipulated after it is taken – introduces a subjective perspective into the photograph, and impacts how we receive and understand images. This raises questions about how willingly we accept any one photograph as a reflection of definitive truth.

The collection covers 19th- and 20th-century photography, from the daguerreotype through to digital media. We collect vintage prints, mass-produced commercial photographs and all types of photographic negatives on glass and film.

The library has digitized many of the photographic items in our collection and these can be seen in our library catalogue.

The Library’s Fellowships program provides artists and researchers with a unique and supportive environment in which to immerse themselves in our collections. We invite recipients to be inspired by, repurpose, transform or imaginatively respond to published or original sources, such as photographs, manuscripts, maps, music, newspapers, oral histories and rare printed material, in any way they choose.