Polly Borland

Los Angeles-based Australian artist Polly Borland lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Borland is one of Australia’s foremost photographic artists famed for her editorial work and portraiture beginning in the 1980s when she photographed the likes of Queen Elizabeth II, Nick Cave, Donald Trump, Susan Sontag, Monica Lewinsky and Cate Blanchett for a host of clients such as Dazed and Confused, The New York Times and The New Yorker. Having lived in London and Los Angeles, Borland’s formal art practice has led her to exhibit worldwide, especially in Australia, the UK, Europe and the United States, including the significant exhibition Polyverse at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne in 2018. Borland’s career as a photographer and visual artist has spanned over three decades, covering a myriad of subjects, and has shown internationally at institutions.

Borland is widely known for her portraits of prominent cultural figures and conversely, underground communities. Her decades-long photographic investigations of publicly and privately curated personas are built on the manipulation of body, power, sex and ego. Borland also has works that are often rearranged and disjointed. She points out the moments of metamorphosis in the images; her work at its best seems to reach inside human beings and turns them inside out, exposing viscera, quietly trespassing into inner worlds to access what usually remains hidden.