Younghusband x QUID PRO QUO
Curated by Tameka Cater
Kensington, Naarm/Melbourne
January 2026
In Quid Pro Quo, Ali McCann re-presents Songs and Pictures, a photographic series that interrogates photography’s historical entanglements with desire, pedagogy, and gendered ways of seeing. Originally developed through the appropriation of images of young, conventionally attractive women sourced from her late grandfather’s vintage amateur photography magazines, the works are re-photographed alongside kitsch decorative objects and presented in ornate, custom-made frames. The series foregrounds the tension between the male and female gaze, revealing how photographic desire is constructed, taught, circulated, and aestheticised.
Re-shown within the context of Quid Pro Quo, Songs and Pictures takes on renewed resonance through its alignment with the exhibition’s broader concern with exchange, return, and re-use. The series negotiates between personal inheritance and institutional history, drawing attention to the ways images, aesthetic values and modes of looking are repeatedly passed on, reframed and reactivated across time and place.
Central to this presentation is McCann’s long-standing relationship to the Younghusband site as an educator. The building’s former role as home to Fox Darkroom and Gallery - a space that hosted photographic workshops and exhibitions - forms a significant backdrop to the work. Fox Darkroom’s function as an educative site lingers within the building, resonating with McCann’s ongoing engagement with teaching and learning through photography. As McCann notes, her practice is 'concerned with the aesthetics of pedagogy,' and with how photographic knowledge is transmitted, circulated and absorbed over time.
Within Quid Pro Quo, Songs and Pictures reflects these overlapping histories of learning, labour and artistic production embedded in the site, functioning not only as a critique of photographic looking, but also as a meditation on how such ways of seeing are taught, inherited and perpetuated.
- Tameka Carter