Max Pam

Max Pam (born Melbourne, 1949) is an Australian photographer.

Pam's first survey exhibition was held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1986, followed by a mid-career retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1991, his largest solo show to date at the Sogo Nara Museum of Art in Japan and was the subject of a major exhibition at the Comptoir de la Photographie in Paris in 1990, which covered the work of three decades.

He has published several photographic monographs and 'carnets de voyage'.

As a teenager Pam found post-war suburban Melbourne grim, oppressive and culturally isolated. He found refuge in the counter-culture of surfing and the imagery of National Geographic and Surfer Magazine and became determined to travel overseas.

Pam left Australia at 20, after accepting a job as a photographer assisting an astrophysicist. Together, the pair drove a Volkswagen from Calcutta to London. This journey proved inspirational, and Pam has continued to travel, and travel be a theme in his work. As Gary Dufour noted in his essay in Indian Ocean Journals (Steidl, 2000): "Each photograph is shaped by incidents experienced as a traveller. His photographs extend upon the tradition of the gazetteer; each photograph a record of an experience, a personal account of an encounter somewhere in the world. Each glimpse is part of an unfolding story rather than simply a record of a place observed. While travel underscores his production Pam’s photographs are not the accidental evidence of a tourist."

Pam has worked in Asian counties, Europe, Australia, and the Indian Ocean Rim cultures including India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Yemen, The Republic of Tanzania, Mauritius, Madagascar, the Cocos and Christmas Islands. The images leave the viewer, as Tim Winton said in Going East (Marval 1992), "grateful for having been taken so mysteriously by surprise and so far and sweetly abroad."

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