Bill Henson is one of Australia's most distinguished artists. His first solo exhibition, held at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne in 1975 when he was 19 years old, heralded the beginnings of a unique photographic vision of the Australian landscape. The NGV has now acquired over 100 of his works. Henson represented Australia at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995. His photographic works have been exhibited extensively both locally and internationally over a 45-year career and are held in every major public collection in Australia and numerous important museum collections worldwide, including the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA; Denver Art Museum, USA; Houston Museum of Fine Art, USA; Sammlung Volpinum, Vienna; Museum Moderner Kunst (MUMOK), Stifting Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada; Tate Collection, London; and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Susan van Wyk was a Curator in the Photography Department at the NGV from 1989 to 2024 and Senior Curator of Photography from 2013. Over the course of her 35-year career at the Gallery she worked on more than sixty exhibitions of Australian and international photography including Olympia: Photographs by Polixeni Papapetrou (2019) and Photography: Real & Imagined (2023) and was a member of the curatorial team for NGV Triennials in 2017, 2020 and 2023. Susan has also written widely on photography in books, exhibition catalogues, essays, and articles.