[2] A newspaper report of the time numbered the members at 140 and new recruits were invited, but the core group remained around 8–10, initially all men though one woman who joined was Zillah Lee who handled submissions for their exhibitions.
[3] They issued a newsletter The Last Shot thrice yearly in which they promoted 'creative freedom',[4] rather than the adherence to outmoded 1930s pictorialism then perpetuated by the Melbourne Camera Club.
It had a lasting influence on the group and other photographers who saw it in Australia, including John Cato,[8] Paul Cox,[9] and Robert McFarlane[10] as well as Graham McCarter who, seeing the show, was motivated to take up photojournalism.
Their annual exhibitions moved to John Reed's and Georges Mora's Melbourne Museum of Modern Art in Tavistock Place off Flinders Street.
Other influences cited by Crook included photographs of Hiroshima, the grimly apocalyptic 1959 movie On the Beach filmed in Melbourne, and local contemporaries; the painters of urban estrangement, John Brack and Arthur Boyd.
They were printed to form an exhibition of 85 photographs "reflecting war, revolution, technical achievements and human life in the 100 years from 1842 to 1942," selected and sequenced chronologically by Allan Martin, Professor of History at La Trobe University.
Funds of their own and sponsors covered the cost of printing the negatives and designer Derrick Watson's lay-out of this their last exhibition, at the Argus Gallery in Latrobe Street in November 1966.
[18] Though Group M was short-lived and its exhibitions rarely reviewed and merely tolerated by, but not embraced into the art world of John Reed, its reach into the Australian photographic community was considerable.
Exhibitors included Nigel Buesst (Newsreel cameraman and industrial photographer), Keast Burke (Sydney professional and writer on photography, Gordon De Lisle (High-ranking member of the Melbourne Camera Club), Max Dupain, Margaret ‘Maggie’ Fraser (American advertising photographer), Laurence Le Guay, Zillah Lee, David Moore who was selector and advisor for their shows, Wolfgang Sievers, Marc Strizic, Bob Whitaker, and Brian McArdle, editor of Walkabout.
That this effort at advancing serious photography in Australia was so soon forgotten is due to a number of factors; the practical problems the group faced in putting on their exhibitions, especially the demands and costs of making large prints meant that publicity was a further expensive inconvenience .