Carol Joyce Jerrems (14 March 1949 – 21 February 1980) was an Australian photographer/filmmaker whose work emerged just as her medium was beginning to regain the acceptance as an art form that it had in the Pictorial era, and in which she newly synthesizes complicity performed, documentary and autobiographical image-making of the human subject, as exemplified in her Vale Street.

[9] Series of these images were published in the Melbourne University quarterly Circus amongst the increasing number of commissions and publications she secured through her widening networks in cinema, theatre, music and women's liberationist[10] and aboriginal communities.

They formed a collaboration so successful that when Australia's first stand-alone photography gallery Brummels was opened by Rennie Ellis and Robert Ashton above a cafe at 95 Toorak Road, South Yarra, the inaugural exhibition was Two Views of Erotica: Henry Talbot/Carol Jerrems (14 December 1972 – 21 January 1973).

(from closing title)The actors included Kate Grenville and Esben Storm, who shared a house with Jerrems at 19 Second Avenue, Willoughby, and was shot on 16 mm film by fellow tenant, Michael Edols.

Despite the painful condition, she worked on a photo-diary of her prolonged stay in Royal Hobart Hospital then traveled to Sydney that August to contribute to the Visual Arts Board photography assessment panel for the Australia Council with Bill Heimerman.

As Magdalene Keaney notes, "By gazing directly into the lens, hamming it up for the camera, or striking a pose, the subjects of Jerrems' portraits of the mid-70s reveal the collaborative nature of her working method.

"[20] Kathy Drayton, director of Girl in a Mirror, supports this notion of collaboration; "In the act of photographing, Jerrems challenged herself and her models to extend themselves in a mutual game of improvisation and exploration, facilitated by the presence of her camera.

The image has been identified as marking a shift from documentary realism to more subjective postmodern style of photography[2] She always used a 35mm Pentax Spotmatic single-lens reflex camera with a standard f1.4 50mm lens, eschewing wide or telephoto lenses, and used black and white film, usually Kodak Tri-X, which she processed and printed herself in a series of home and college darkrooms, and colour only rarely.

She was very meticulous technically so even her proof sheets were a work of art..."[3] Her unpublished note, "Teaching Philosophy" lists four elements that Jerrems identified as crucial to photography: "1.Subject Matter; 2.Composition; 3.Lighting; 4.The Decisive Moment.

"[3] Carol Jerrems' life and work has achieved wide recognition through exhibitions and screenings of her films; the touring 1990 Australian National Gallery posthumous retrospective, Living in the 70s: Photographs by Carol Jerrems, curated by Helen Ennis and Bob Jenyns; the documentary Girl in a Mirror (2005);[21] and the Heidi exhibition and accompanying book Up Close comparing her to autobiographical documentarians, the Americans Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, and Australian William Yang.