Photographer and social justice activist Juno Gemes (b. 1944) has spent much of her long career documenting the lives and struggles of First Nations people. Born in Budapest, Gemes moved to Australia with her family in 1949. She studied at Sydney University, worked in theatre and wrote for the International Times in London on and off until 1971. In the 1970s she became involved in the Yellow House at Potts Point, Sydney and worked in Central Australia on the film Uluru (1978). She held her first solo exhibition, We Wait No More, in 1982; the same year she exhibited photographs in the group shows After the Tent Embassy and Apmira: Artists for Aboriginal Land Rights. In 1984 she set up the Camera Future Photographers Cooperative Studio in Kings Cross and became a member of the Australian Journalists' Association Freelance committee. Two years later she established Paper Bark Press (1986–2010) with her partner, poet Robert Adamson; they live on the Hawkesbury River where she has a photography studio. Her 1997 series The Language of Oysters documents the lives of oyster farmers on the Hawkesbury, raising questions of sustainability. In 2003 the National Portrait Gallery exhibited her portraits of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander reconciliation activists and personalities, Proof: Portraits from the Movement 1978–2003, and has since acquired many of her photographs. Gemes was one of ten photographers invited to document that National Apology in Canberra in 2008. The Macquarie University Art Gallery held a survey exhibition of her work, The Quiet Activist: Juno Gemes, in 2019.
