Ponch Hawkes

Ponch Hawkes (born 1946) is an Australian photographic artist, whose works have been featured in the Australian National Gallery and have hung in the National Gallery of Victoria and the State Library Victoria and written about in the "Sydney Morning Herald". Hawkes is considered an influential part of the Australian Feminist art Movement, which was centred predominately in Melbourne during the mid 1970s. Hawkes' work is broad in its scope, including artists, feminists, sportspeople, public figures and candid street-photographs. She is especially noted for her 1976 photo essay Our Mums and Us, which featured her coterie of female friends and their mothers, among them the writer Helen Garner, in a typological style.
Early life and education.
Hawkes was born in Abbotsford, Victoria, in 1946 and educated at University High School. She is self-taught, having never formally studied photography. Upon returning to Australia from the United States in the early 1970s, Hawkes, who was working as a journalist for the magazine The Digger took up photography to enhance her journalistic work.