David Bailey: Bailey's Matilda

1980s Polaroids of small-town Australia: a rare take on the country's landscape and people from David Bailey

David Bailey's (born 1938) love letter to Australia, Bailey's Matilda is no rosy portrait of "the lucky country," but a gritty yet affectionate vision of rural and small-town Australia in the early 1980s: black-and-white images of a dead cockatoo, kangaroo and sheep, of painted advertising for Queensland's beloved XXXX beer, of a gravestone and dead tree trunks against a lead sky. His human subjects are the Indigenous people of Australia, not the descendants of its white colonists. Bailey embraces all the flaws and accidents of his prints--their blurrings, smudges and stains--and enhances them with his own scribbles and crops, creating painterly results. In his own words it's all about chance: "This book should have been washed up in a bottle on the sea shore."