Tracey Moffatt: 'First jobs' series
July 2010
Tracey Moffatt is one of the country's best-known contemporary artists. The 'First jobs' series is a visual catalogue of her earliest paid employment during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Moffatt has selected images from period sources and substituted a face in each photograph with her own smiling one. The money she earned from these often gruelling or tedious jobs enabled her to travel overseas in 1979 and supported her through subsequent studies at the Queensland College of Art.
Moffatt is now internationally successful, having realised dreams she held while she peeled pineapples, waited on tables or packed meat. Looking back, however, the gap between those idealistic aspirations and the reality of solitary struggles as an artist has the same acuteness as the high-key colours she has used in these photographs.
