Untitled from the series "He never should have worn those shorts"

Community, aesthetics and politics mix in Ponch Hawkes's photographs. In a long career as a photographer, she has often documented the ways in which collective activities bind individuals, families and generations together. Whether her subject is marathon runners (1982), a water polo team (1998), a circus troupe (2004), or participants in the annual Brunswick Street waiters race (1995), Hawkes has consistently focused on the essential qualities of partnership, trust and unity. Beneath the apparent spontaneity of her compositions is a careful formal structure that draws attention to patterns of physical interaction. Athletes jostle, performers grasp, racers elbow their way to the front of the pack; their actions are forceful but also generous and human. The interest in marginalised and undervalued sporting communities comes to the fore in Hawkes's photographs of netballers. Netball Australia notes that the sport has the highest women's participation of any sport in the country. The national team has dominated international competition for decades, with a consistency and scale of achievement unmatched by men's sport. And yet, as Hawkes observes, netballers receive nothing like the media attention, public adulation or financial reward accorded to male athletes. He never should have worn those shorts (2010) is a series of staged photographs that takes the idea of difference and turns it on its head. Women's sport is different; it isn't mired in the violence, the binge drinking and sex scandals that are the regular feature of elite men's competition. The affronting element in the photographs is not the way in which women act these out but rather in the realisation that we're only shocked to see women doing it: boys, we will allow to be boys. In a culture where the shameful exploits of male athletes are front-page news and the positive achievements of women are invisible, the series is a dark counterpoint to Hawkes's earlier photographs of sporting communities.