Moffatt, Tracey (b. 1960), Australian photographer and film-maker. Her work reflects her views on aboriginality and the misconceptions about and representations of her people in art and cinema. Her earliest photographic work was a series of black-and-white portraits of members of the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Company, Some Lads (1986), a subtly subversive take on the 19th-century ethnographic photograph. Using a documentary style, Moffatt often draws on images from film and television made during her youth in the 1960s and 1970s as an adopted half-Aboriginal child in a white family. She carefully stages images to reflect familiar tableaux, but with a twist. For example, the series Scarred for Life (1994) seems to comprise familiar snapshots of childhood, but with disturbing captions. Thus the image of a girl washing a car has the text ‘Her father's nickname for her was useless’. Later works such as Artist, a series of collages of Hollywood images, explored the impact of television on popular culture and everyday life.

— Lisa Ann Lavender

Bibliography

• Hentschel M., and Matt, G. (eds.), Tracey Moffatt (1998)

The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Copyright © 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.