Grant Hancock

It was Grant Hancock’s love of outback travel and bush walking, when he was a science undergraduate at the University of Adelaide that initially triggered his interest in photography. Having specialised for a decade in performing arts photography for the Australian Dance Theatre, State Theatre Company, State Opera and the Adelaide Festival Centre, Hancock began to undertake commissions from prominent advertising agencies to photograph campaigns for national companies, such as Boral Energy, ETSA, Grosset Wines, Jurlique, Mitsubishi Motors Australia, National Rail Australia, Network Ten, Orlando Wyndham Wines, SAFCOL, Taronga Park Zoo and WOMADelaide. In the course of pursuing this ongoing strand of his professional practice, he has worked with many multi-award winning creative directors and graphic designers.

Fittingly, since Hancock is renowned for his impeccable and sensitive photography of artworks – a specialisation that now constitutes the major component of his commissioned work – Hancock’s first photographic commission (from the Aboriginal Arts Board) was for the documentation of a large exhibition of Indigenous art from the Western Desert.

However, he is also committed to maintaining and extending his own art photography practice. Current projects include the Who Are We? series of photographic images that explores the challenges of sustainability in ‘a crowded and finite world’, as well as the Concrete Paintings documentation of otherwise unnoticed inscriptions, typically discovered in the everyday, concreted surfaces of the urban environment.