Michael Riley (1960–2004), a Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi photographer, filmmaker and video-artist, was one of Australia's most influential Aboriginal contemporary artists. Born in Dubbo, Riley moved to Sydney in the late 1970s, setting aside his carpentry apprenticeship in 1982 and taking photography courses at Sydney University's Tin Sheds Gallery and the Sydney College of the Arts. Riley and his work became integral to the emerging movement of Indigenous artists working in photography and new media. He was one of the co-founders of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in 1987 and exhibited in the groundbreaking Indigenous art exhibitions Koori Art '84 at Artspace and NADOC '86 Exhibition of Aboriginal and Islander Photographers at the Aboriginal Artists Gallery. He also worked at Film Australia, where he wrote and directed his first film Boomalli: Five Artists (1988). His first solo exhibition, Portraits by a Window, was held at Hogarth Galleries in 1990. In 1991, he achieved international success with his photographs of his mother's Kamilaroi family in Moree, where he grew up. These were echoed in his 1999 series, which centred on his father's Wiradjuri family in Dubbo. His last photographic series, Cloud (2000), was included in the Fourth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane and the 2003 Festival of Sydney. His achievements were celebrated in the National Gallery of Australia's 2006 retrospective, Michael Riley: Sights Unseen, which toured around Australia. In 2014, the National Portrait Gallery displayed fifteen of Riley's black-and-white photographic portraits, made between 1984 and 1990, representing the vibrant urban-based Indigenous arts community in Sydney.
