Once in a generation an artist captures the mood of the times. In the Summer issue of Uniken, we talk to one of Australia’s greatest storytellers, UNSW Visiting Fellow William Yang, who spent the 1970s and ’80s photographing Sydney’s cultural and artistic life.

Many of his images are iconic: intimate dinner party portraits of the rarely photographed Nobel-prize-winning author Patrick White; Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson’s first flamboyant Flamingo Park fashion parades; and the dark, drunken hours of parties at Brett Whiteley’s Surry Hills studio.

The Camera Man, our cover story, plots Yang’s efforts, together with UNSW’s Creative Practice Research Unit, to package his photos on DVD, combining them with personal and honest accounts of a politically, artistically and sexually charged era.

Also in the Summer issue we look at a new approach to helping the homeless that is, quite literally, paying off; we ask why Australians seem so reluctant to engage in public intellectual life; and we rifle through the back of the wardrobe, pull on our bell-bottoms and look at how a group of style-savvy Australian designers in the 1970s took the fashion world by storm. 

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Media contact: Steve Offner, Uniken Editor, 02 9385 1583