The Australian Women's Register

Born in 1945 in Melbourne, Victoria, Ruth Maddison grew up in a politically intense household. Her father, Sam Goldbloom, a communist and anti-nuclear and anti-war activist, was monitored by ASIO for over 30 years, shaping her awareness of politics and privacy. Her mother, Rosa, provided stability in a home often focused on activism. This environment fostered Maddison’s feminist and anti-nuclear views, which later informed her photography.

In her 20s, Maddison worked as Victoria’s first female builder’s labourer in the 1970s. At 30, in 1975, she transitioned to photography, self-taught and mentored by housemate Ponch Hawkes in a creative North Carlton household. Hawkes introduced her to darkroom techniques, sparking a passion for the medium. As a single mother of three, Maddison balanced family and career, always building darkrooms at home. Her early freelance photojournalism for newspapers and magazines followed work as a driver for Crawford’s TV production.

In 1979, Maddison’s solo exhibition Christmas Holidays with Bob’s Family, Mermaid Beach, Queensland at the Ewing Gallery showcased 30 hand-coloured snapshots of family life, acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria and National Gallery of Australia. That year, her Miss Universe series also debuted. In 1980, When a Girl Marries, a 32-image series shown at the Australian Centre for Photography, was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia. These works, rooted in feminism, explored women’s domestic and professional roles during the women’s liberation movement.

During the 1980s, Maddison captured Melbourne’s cultural and countercultural scenes, photographing figures like Helen Garner and Circus Oz founders. Her photojournalism documented political rallies, equal pay protests, gay liberation, anti-Vietnam actions, and environmental causes from 1975 to 2015. Her 1996 series The Beginning of Absence comprised 10 polaroid photographs shot staying at her parents’ home, while both were in hospital.

In 1996, Maddison moved to Eden, a working-class port town in New South Wales, drawn by affordability and family proximity. She immersed herself in the community, documenting its timber and fishing industries amid economic decline.  She was commissioned by the NSW Department of Planning and Environment for a project they were running on sustainable development in Eden and created wide-ranging documentation of people and place.  Maddison also received Visual Art Board Grants (now Creative Australia) for Now a River Went out of Eden (2002), focusing on local teenagers; and Girt by Sea (2005), on Eden’s commercial fishermen. Combining images with text, these works captured cannery closures, fishing license buybacks, and unemployment, while celebrating resilience. Acquired by the State Library of New South Wales, her Eden archive also documents bushfires in 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Between 2002-2006, crossing over from darkroom to digital, Maddison’s last analogue works are a series of photograms and lumen prints, old cameraless techniques.  They appear in Girt by Sea –the Algae Series, Girt by Gum and Light Touches (2004), a series of lumen self-portraits.

In 2014, Maddison produced another-large scale project using image and text about the timber industry, Can’t see the Forest for the trees, a selection of which were acquired by the National Library of Australia and the complete set by the State Library of New South Wales.   In 2020, her installation The Fellow Traveller, part of the 2021 survey It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography, explored her father’s ASIO files and family archives, weaving imagined historical encounters. Her 2024 exhibition An Abundance of Caution at the Southeast Centre for Contemporary Art introduced drawings and embroidered doilies, reflecting on COVID-19 and women’s labour.

Maddison’s awards include the Josephine Ulrick National Photography Prize (2002), City of Hobart Art Prize (2007), and a finalist position in the Olive Cotton Portrait Award (2013). Her work is held by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Gallery of Modern Art Queensland, and National Library of Australia. Describing herself as a ‘quasi-sociologist and voyeur with a camera,’ she advises aspiring photographers to “just shoot more.”