About

 

Dr Marcus Bunyan

A.R.C.M (Associate of the Royal College of Music, London); BA (Honours) Fine Art Photography (RMIT University, Melbourne); MA Fine Art Photography (RMIT University, Melbourne); Doctor of Philosophy Multimedia (RMIT University, Melbourne); MA Art Curatorship (University of Melbourne)

Marcus Bunyan is an artist who works with all forms of image making. His artistic practice investigates the boundaries between identity, space and environment. He trained as a classical black and white photographer, then moving through colour, installation and found images in his art practice. Recently he has returned to classical work which continues early explorations of spaces and places, using digital cameras to record glances, meditations and movement through different environments. In 2026 he celebrates 35 years of art practice with this website.

Marcus curates the art and cultural memory archive Art Blart (November 2008 onwards) which posts mainly photography based exhibitions from around the world, with insightful research and commentary. With over 1,600 posts in its archive, the 17 year old website is a research tool and a form of cultural memory. It has a readership of 4,000 people a day and over 7,600 likes on Facebook. The site is being archived by Pandora from the National Library of Australia.

In late 2018 Marcus published an 8,000 word paper on Death the image which investigates how the act of photography visually writes trauma and through analysis ponders how the camera captures human beings ante-mortem, at the death point, post-mortem and vita ad mortem.

His doctoral thesis ‘Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male’ at RMIT University (2001) investigated the link between self-esteem and body image and traced the development of male body image within photographic practice and gym culture. The thesis has four chapters online which include research on photographs held at The Kinsey Institute and The Minor White Archive (see chapters, Historical Pressings which examines the history of photographic images of the male body; Bench Press which investigates the development of gym culture; In-Press which investigates the photographic representation of the muscular male body in the media and gay male pornography; and Re-pressentation which investigates alternative ways of imag(in)ing the male body).

In late 2019 Marcus undertook a two month photographic research tour of Europe studying some of the great masters of European and American photography such as Brassaï, Berenice Abbott, André Kertesz, Robert Frank, Ara Güler, Robert Capa, Henri Lartigue, Josef Sudek, and August Sander.

Early black and white (1991-1997) Mamiya RZ67 medium format work investigated personal narratives: shifting interfaces of identity, sexuality, space, time and environment. View the images…

Transformations (1996-2008) – colour and digital work – explored personal narratives as more universal themes: the fracturing of identity, the binaries of light and dark, absence/presence, pattern/randomness in spatio-temporal environments. View the images…

War dreams (2007-2017) proposes an understanding of the paradoxes of contemporary life: the fracturing of the image plane, the ethics and morals of humans, the choices human beings make in environments, the hidden threat, the faint cloudiness in the cornea of things seen, unclearly. View the images…

Recent work (2017-2026) continues early investigations of spaces and places, using digital cameras and found images to explore glances, meditations and movement through different environments. View the images…