Matthew Abbott is a documentary photographer based in Sydney, Australia. He is widely recognised for covering social and political issues that define Australia. He studied International Photojournalism at the Danish School of Journalism and completed a Masters of Studio Arts at Sydney University. He is a current member of the Oculi collective, Australia’s leading cooperative of photographic artists.
Abbott’s photographs have been exhibited extensively internationally and throughout Australia, including the Centre of Contemporary Photography, Perth Centre of Contemporary Photography and the MAMA Gallery. His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the National Library of Australia.
Works by Abbott have been selected for The National Portrait Prize in 2012, 2015 and 2016. He won the Sydney Morning Herald Documentary Photographer Award and the Melbourne Leica Photojournalism Award. In 2016, he won the judges commendation award at both the CLIPP landscape prize and IRIS portrait prize at the PCP, and again the IRIS prize in 2017. Abbott's photographs documenting Australia’s offshore detention centres on Manus Island for Der Spiegel was nominated for and exhibited at the Reporterpreis in Berlin, Germany.
In 2016, Abbott held his first solo exhibition featuring his longterm-project ‘The Land Where the Crow Flies Backwards’ at the Fox Gallery, Melbourne. A year later he showed this work at ‘La Nuit des images’ at the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland organised by the Australian Centre of Photography. A selection of the work was then exhibited at the Red Hook Gallery, New York.
Abbott’s editorial clients include The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Der Spiegel and La Repubblica. He also does commercial advertising, including for Uber, Mont Blanc and Menzies. Abbott works regularly for global and national NGO's and non-profit organisations. He also teaches on a regular basis at institutions and universities around the country.
Abbott is continuing his series ‘The Land Where the Crow Flies Backwards’, documenting the impact of global warming and the decline of communities along the Murray Darling basin in Central-Eastern Australia. His two latest projects are due to be published in 2017: ‘When They Sing of Australia They Never Mention the Flies’ follows Australia’s Highway 1, the worlds longest continues road. The second project, ‘In the Rust Belt’, documents the once booming American area, that is now being considered a deciding factor in the rise of Donald Trump.
Email: mabbott@oculi.com.au
Insta: mattabbottphoto
www.oculi.com.au
+61 411 083 223