THE AUSTRALIAN artist Tracey Moffatt (born Brisbane, 1960) does not take photographs but creates them. Her work incorporates a host of cinematic elements from designing sets and lighting, to placing actors and instructing technicians, in order to produce single images which - although isolated - are always part of a 'story', fragments of a whole narrative.
Moffatt was an aboriginal child raised by a white family and this complex basis for an adult identity has informed her work throughout. Her images are often translated into allegories of racial integration and colonialism, which remain big issues in modern Australia. Moffatt anticipated the current vogue for the manipulated image as early as 1989, in the series Something More, and has since achieved international prominence.
