The story of these black-and-white photographs is carefully bound in a single manila folder that landed on my desk at the NGV on a Tuesday afternoon. The pages are yellow with age, written in the jittery cadence of an unaligned typewriter, the odd letter jumping out of formation to rest just slightly higher or lower than its bedfellows.
The hand that typed these pages is the same one I imagine resting on a camera in St Mark’s Square, patiently waiting to press the shutter and immortalise these anonymous men and women in their quiet acts of devotion, their stolen moments of repose and daily errands performed beneath the architectural splendour and religious pageantry of the Vatican City.

As a first-generation Italian-Australian, I was drawn to these photographs because their subjects reminded me of my grandparents. In particular, my grandmother, a woman who looked remarkably like the nonna captured in Resting, number two, 1972, a newspaper draped across her lap, her head resting gently on her chest. This is the Italy of my ancestors and of the many Italians who left their homeland in the 1950s, 60s and 70s to make a life for themselves on the other side of the world. No matter the decades that passed, my grandparents would remember Italy like this, not as a place that embraced tourism and globalism, McDonald’s and baggy jeans, the music of Madonna and the delights of sushi trains and English slang. To my grandparents, Italy remained as if preserved in a snow globe, exactly as they had left it – a place where widows wore black and young women matched sensible shoes with knee-length skirts; where men wore hats with perfectly ironed slacks and spotless blazers every day. A place populated by i fedeli (the devout) – the very people so perfectly captured by Melbourne graphic designer turned professional photographer Leslie Robert Gray in 1972.

The photographs featured on these pages are a snapshot of a series called Assignment, Rome, 1972. They are available to view on the NGV Collection online, which is where I discovered them. Everything I know about Leslie Gray, better known as Les, comes from that one manila folder stored carefully in the NGV’s records department for more than five decades. From its typewritten pages, I learn that Gray was commissioned by the Gallery to travel to the Vatican City. His photographs, thirty in total, were part of an NGV exhibition called Sistine Chapel: a photographic exploration, held in 1973 to coincide with the Eucharistic Congress in Melbourne.

Gray taught himself photography as an extension of his graphic design training. The NGV commission comes just five years after he turns pro. Born in Melbourne in 1920, Gray is fifty-two when he travels to Rome. He’s the chairman of the NGV’s photography subcommittee and an ‘occasional lecturer at the Prahran College of Technology’. His photographs have been published in a handful of books, some of which he has designed, and he describes his fields of specialisation as ‘architectural, art and portraiture’.

In the folder, each photograph in the Assignment, Rome series has its own hand-typed record with title (Three Nuns, Looking Up, Carozza 1), date (November 1972) and process (Dektol 1:2). Typos are crossed out in a series of dark XXXXs in the typewriting equivalent of a backspace. Amendments are added in light blue pen. And at the very back of the folder, I find a short note from the inaugural NGV curator of photography Jennie Boddington, dated 1973. In it, Boddington describes Gray’s work as a ‘deeply personal response to human beings within the scene’, praising his juxtaposition of hands and faces with the stone of the colonnades and steps. Gray’s emphasis of scale, she writes, ‘arouses a vivid appreciation in the beholder’. In 2024, I am struck by her very last sentence. A line that stays with me long after I have returned the folder to the NGV’s fastidious records coordinator, Arthur Sliwinski:
[Gray’s] photographs render the devout in a moving chiaroscuro, which confirms in human beings, the timeless, the momentary and universal.
It’s a fitting summation of my own perception of Gray. I never met the artist. He passed away in 2013. This story is gleaned from a handful of pages gathered in a neatly bound folder in the mid-1970s. It is, like the people captured in Assignment, Rome, like my grandparents’ memories of Italy, momentary. The world outside continued to turn and change and adapt and evolve, but these photographs, those memories and this manila folder did not. It’s a story that is, without a doubt, incomplete but feels timeless, nonetheless. A story that captivated me and I hope will captivate you, as the latest beholders of Gray’s Assignment, Rome.

Elisa Scarton, Senior Editorial Coordinator, National Gallery of Victoria

NGV Italia is supported by the Italian Australian Foundation. Discover more stories from the NGV’s Italian Collection, as well as a list of upcoming events, workshops, tours and seminars in Italian and English at ngv.melbourne/ngv-italia.