Polly Borland

For the solo exhibition “Nudie” Australian photographer Polly Borland has, after a long career, turned the lens on herself for the very first time. Using an iPhone camera, she challenges ‘selfie’ tropes and social media culture of self-worship and self-image through contorted, grotesque oversized nudes. These confrontational photographic prints amplify her aging body with tightly cropped frames that seem sculptural and surreal in their abstraction. The artist twists, kneads, flips and folds her body, handling her flesh like a malleable material while also steering her iPhone camera with a selfie stick. 

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Most photographers love having the ability to hide behind the camera, relishing the agency it affords them. Melbourne-born, Los Angeles-based Polly Borland isn’t immune to these pleasures. “I like photography because it’s about control,” Borland says on a Zoom call from her native Australia, where she’s spent the entirety of the pandemic. Though Borland devoted the first three decades of her career to crafting decadent, erotic, and uncannily hypnotic images of others, she’s rarely trained her lens on herself. For her breakout series, The Babies, she documented a group of infantilist fetishists. 

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She counts Nick Cave as a close friend, has photographed Queen Elizabeth and Cate Blanchett and is married to Australian filmmaker John Hillcoat, who is best known for his film The Proposition. For all her black book high-fives, Polly Borland is a force in her own right, and now, in a career first, the NGV will honour the Australian artist with a retrospective, Polyverse.

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Photographer Polly Borland is not sure where her dark imagery comes from, but she suspects her home town played a part. "Maybe it had something to do with growing up in my household and the suburbs of Melbourne," she says. Speaking on the eve of her latest exhibition, she says that "Melbourne is infected by a darkness, maybe to do with its own history and the treatment of the Indigenous people of Australia ... I feel there's a stain on Australia right up to present day, seen with its treatment of adults and children seeking asylum on Nauru. It's horrifying how official policy can be so cruel and against all human rights".

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The first time Australian photographer Polly Borland heard about the Babies, she thought, "No, that couldn't exist." Her friend assured her it did. There were secretive clubs in England where adult men spent weekends dressing up as babies, napping in cribs, wearing and soiling diapers and sometimes even suckling a surrogate mother's teat. 

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It’s been 16 years since Australian-born, Los Angeles-based photographer Polly Borland released The Babies, a book visually chronicling her extensive time spent over the course of five years with various communities of adult men who like to dress up as and act like babies. Yes, it’s a thing. And yes, when it was released, The Babies was subject to a range of reactions from the public, most of which hovered somewhere in the neighborhood of ‘totally freaked out.’ 

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