[1] Candid Camera had its roots in Six Photographers, a groundbreaking exhibition held in Sydney in May 1955, which concentrated on what was still a relatively new development in Australian photography and featured the work of Max Dupain, David Potts, Axel Poignant, Gordon Andrews, Kerry Dundas and Hal Missingham.
[6] Candid Camera, while about half the size of the 1955 Sydney exhibition, covered a significantly wider range of artists and looked not just at the foundations of Australian social documentary photography but at the era that curator Julie Robinson clearly regards as its golden age – the fifties, sixties and seventies.
[2][3][8][9] Subjects included youth subcultures, newly arrived migrants, nuns, a number of prime ministers (not all of whom were in office when photographed), musicians such as Bon Scott of AC/DC, and ordinary people in everyday settings: at work, at the beach and at bus stops.
In this last regard, Candid Camera was very different to Century in Focus, an earlier large-scale photographic survey curated by Robinson, which dealt only with images taken in South Australia.
"[11] Candid Camera was accompanied by a series of talks, a program of Australian films from the same era, and screenings of Girl in a Mirror, a Rose d'Or–winning documentary about Carol Jerrems, who died in 1980 at the age of 30.