Juno Gemes

Judy Juno Gemes (born 1944) is a Hungarian-born Australian photographer, who specialises in photographs of Aboriginal Australians.[1]

Gemes was born in Budapest, and moved to Australia with her family in 1949. She studied at the University of Sydney and the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), worked in theatre and film, and worked in London sporadically in the late 1960s and 1970s, where she wrote for the London-based underground newspaper International Times. In 1971, she became involved with the Yellow House Artist Collective in Potts Point, Sydney.[2]

She began exhibiting her photography in Australia in 1966, and held her first solo exhibition, "We Wait No More", in 1982. Under Another Sky, Juno Gemes Photography 1968–1988, a survey of Gemes work from over twenty years was exhibited in Budapest and Paris in the late 1980s.[1]

In 2018, Gemes told The Sydney Morning Herald her reason for taking up photography: "It was because I saw that Aboriginal people were invisible that I took up the camera." Much of her work has documented the Aboriginal rights and land rights movements, from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy to 2008 when she was one of ten photographers selected to officially document the Apology to Australia's Indigenous peoples.[3]

From 17 September until 29 September 2019 Gemes is exhibiting at Maunsel Wickes at Barry Stern Galleries in a group show entitled Three Women Artists In Country.

Her partner is the Australian poet Robert Adamson.[3]