Documentary photography offers one way of looking, but this type of looking is also about feeling. It is a style of making photographs designed to draw people into the world and activate their interest in something beyond themselves.

Australian documentary photography was at its height from the 1950s to 1970s. A time of great flux – social, political and cultural – was reflected in the photographs of Max Dupain, Carol Jerrems, William Yang, Rennie Ellis, David Moore, Mervyn Bishop, Sue Ford and others. A time when the gritty documentary photography that emerged in the US after World War II, hand-held film cameras, instamatic colour film, Polaroid cameras and the arrival of television all pushed photography in a revolutionary new direction. Imagining a Real Australia is a stunning testament to a time when photographers turned their lenses on real people living real lives.