Robert McFarlane (photographer)

In 2017 he won the Jim Bettison and Helen James Award, awarded by the Adelaide Film Festival in collaboration with the Bettison and James Foundation.

McFarlane's work is held in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery (Canberra), the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Library of Australia. His most prominent recent exhibition is Received Moments, a 48-year career retrospective, which began touring Australia in December 2009 and concluded in Adelaide in late 2011. McFarlane was a significant contributor to Candid Camera: Australian Photography 1950s–1970s at the Art Gallery of South Australia (May to August 2010) which also featured the work of key Australian photographers Max Dupain, David Moore, Jeff Carter, Mervyn Bishop, Rennie Ellis, Carol Jerrems and Roger Scott.

In 1985, in the lead up to the 1988 bicentenary of Australia's European settlement, McFarlane was among 21 photographers chosen to live and work in remote Aboriginal communities in a project that became known as After 200 Years: Photographic Essays of Aboriginal And Islander Australia Today. It remains the largest single photographic project in Australian history, and was published both as a touring exhibition and a book.

In 1963, McFarlane moved to Sydney, working for The Bulletin and Australian Vogue. With the artist Kate Burness, who became his first wife, he travelled to London in 1969, where he freelanced for The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times Magazine, and NOVA magazine. He returned to Sydney in 1973 and eventually to Adelaide in 2007. McFarlane later remarried to the theatre director Mary-Ann Vale and has two children, Morgan (1974–1994, born to Kate Burness) and Billy (born 1990, to Mary-Ann Vale).

Though talented in English and History, McFarlane was an undistinguished student and left school at 16, finding work as a trainee electric welder. He was deeply influenced, however, by the traveling documentary photography exhibition The Family of Man, which reached Adelaide in 1959.

Robert McFarlane (born 1942) is an Australian photographer and photographic critic.

Born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1942, he was given a Kodak Box Brownie at the age of 9 by his parents, Bill and Poppy McFarlane. Five years later, while at Brighton High School (today known as Brighton Secondary School) in Adelaide's southern suburbs, he used a recently purchased Durst medium format rangefinder camera to capture an image of a teacher striking a pupil at the school assembly.