Annie Leibovitz + Zumbo

If you're in Sydney and have the chance, you should definitely check out the Annie Leibovitz - A Photographer's Life 1990 - 2005 exhibition at the MCA (incidentally, one of my fave places in Sydney). I went to have a look around on a beautiful Sunday a few weeks back and it was brilliant spending some time enjoying the harbour surrounds before Summer ended.

Anyway, about the exhibition itself - it was a lot larger than I had expected and it was fantastic to see a wide cross section of her work presented there. The breadth of her work is just amazing - from her personal snaps of her family, to fashion photography, photo-journalism and portraits. My favourite had to be the photo collage which, while cramped and all thumbnail sized pics, I loved the overflowing abundance of visual stimulation and being able to look at all the photos in one 'corridor'. I also loved the mural sized landscape type photos which I could've spent hours just staring at for their sheer beauty.

Even if you're not interested in her work or if you know nothing about her, it's still a great exhibition to just take it all in and enjoy some fantastic and beautiful shots.

A tip for anyone planning to go - download the curator's talks from the MCA website and upload them to your ipod as a podcast. Armed with my iPhone, I made my way round the exhibition listening to two of the curator's talks as background. Even though I couldn't quite follow which photos they were talking about, it was nice to have some background anyway.

So after the exhibition, I had planned to grab a macaron from baroque but they were unfortunately closing. So instead we took the short drive to Balmain for some Zumbo! We've been regularly going to Zumbo for several years now - way before the Masterchef hype. His macarons are certainly the best in Sydney (after all, he learnt from the one-and-only Mr. Pierre Herme) and I have hundreds and hundreds of photos of all the cakes, desserts and macs I've bought from there over the years.

Stay tuned for more Zumbo photos, but here's some of the tasty treats I've eaten from there over the last few months.

Eucalyptus and Peach Tea

That close-up above is of a chocolate coated macaron aptly named 'Lucky Dip' because it's a surprise which macaron flavour you're getting until you take the first bite. Perhaps it's a little too close up because you can even see the fingerprint on the melted chocolate! But it was so tasty...

 And finally, some cakes from a while ago with some of the favourites (especially the Passionfruit tart front left...one of my ultimate favourites because it's so simple, but completely party-in-your-mouth worthy!)

Annie Leibovitz - A Photographer's Life 1990 - 2005 closes on 26 April 2011. See http://mca.com.au/ for more details.