Seeing Humanity in Light - A Centennial Leica Dialogue in Sydney.

In a world where the default is digital, the aesthetic is algorithmic, and image-making often feels more like consumption than craft, Leica stands apart - not just as a brand, but as a cultural steward. For over a century, Leica has quietly revolutionised the way we see, equipping photographers not only with cameras, but with a kind of visual philosophy: one grounded in precision, restraint, and reverence for the human experience.

Now, to mark 100 years of Leica photography, Sydney’s Leica Gallery plays host to a compelling intergenerational dialogue between two artists who share a camera lineage but diverge beautifully in tone, terrain, and tempo: Steve McCurry, the renowned documentarian of global intensity, and Jessie Brinkman Evans, whose Arctic-infused lens captures the quieter calibrations of culture, identity, and place.

The Drama and the Whisper

McCurry’s photography borders on the legendary - drenched in vivid colour and charged with raw, unfiltered emotion. His portraits burn with colour and complexity, framing human experience in ways that feel both epic and intimate. A master of the decisive moment, McCurry’s photographs are less snapshots than symphonies - poised at the intersection of journalism and artistry.

By contrast, Brinkman Evans approaches the world with a quieter, slower cadence. Rooted in both Southern California and Australia, and now working between Melbourne and Newfoundland, her visual language is shaped by geography and introspection. Her recent work in Arctic communities offers a thoughtful meditation on how culture, environment, and identity intertwine - often rendered in an exquisite play of cool tones, open space, and quiet emotion. While McCurry’s palette leans into the lush and cinematic, Brinkman Evans evokes something distilled and contemplative - less theatre, more poetry.

The Tools Behind the Vision

While digital convenience has saturated modern photography with filters, shortcuts, and AI “enhancements,” Leica insists on slowness - on intention. The cameras used by Brinkman Evans - including the M11, M6 and Q2 - aren’t just instruments, but collaborators. In Greenland, where weather and rhythm dictate every interaction, this choice of equipment allows for the kind of stillness and spontaneity that more automated systems often strip away. Leica’s compact elegance, combined with optical precision, makes it ideal for artists who value adaptability without losing the depth and dignity of analogue-style craftsmanship.

And herein lies one of Leica’s great triumphs - creating tools that stay out of the way, so the moment can speak.

A Gallery as a Place of Pause

At the Leica Gallery Sydney, these two bodies of work are not presented in competition, but in conversation. Where McCurry offers intensity - portraits filled with immediacy and geopolitical charge - Brinkman Evans offers space - an invitation to reflect, absorb, and linger. This dialogue across time and technique highlights a shared curiosity about human connectedness: whether through the lens of tradition, migration, childhood, or environment, both photographers reveal how culture is not fixed but fluid, lived in and shaped by interaction.

In a world awash with images, galleries like Leica’s matter more than ever. They offer a counterweight to the digital deluge - a place where photographs are printed large, hung still, and encountered slowly. Where the viewer can take in not just what’s in the frame, but what’s just outside it: context, intention, and emotion.

What Comes Next?

As photography navigates a new era - one increasingly influenced by machine learning, synthetic content, and visual fatigue - the work of artists like Brinkman Evans and McCurry becomes more essential. They remind us that photography is not just about capturing what looks real, but revealing what feels true. And that emotional resonance, that recognisable humanity, is something no algorithm can conjure.

The rise of analogue revivalism and handcrafted processes isn’t just nostalgia - it’s a response. A return to tactility, imperfection, and intimacy. This exhibition subtly reinforces that tension: between speed and stillness, digital excess and material presence, noise and nuance.

A Quiet Celebration of Vision

Ultimately, this is not an exhibition about cameras. It’s about connection - between generations, between cultures, between the person behind the lens and the person in front of it. It’s about two very different artists working with the same equipment and arriving at radically distinct yet deeply human interpretations of the world.

The centenary of Leica photography is not simply a look back, but a quiet assertion that seeing - really seeing - still matters. And that, in an age obsessed with what’s next, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is look again.

Jessie Brinkman Evans | Steve McCurry: 100 Years of Leica Photography

Now on view at the Leica Gallery Sydney.

A century in focus - and still finding new ways to see.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of AW.