In 1966 Grenville Turner joined BBC TV News as a film assistant. On arrival in Australia from the UK in 1969 he joined the ABC as a film assistant and spent a year with them until deciding to become a photographer.

 

His background in photography extends back to 1970 when he started out as an advertising photographer in Sydney. For more than 25 years that was his profession along with part time teaching of photography and a minor connection with the film industry.  During the mid 70's when he first started to teach he became involved in documentary  photography and has enthusiastically pursued this important genre throughout his career. It allowed him to expand his interests to editorial photography and to be a founding member of the photo agency ‘Wildlight’. By the mid 80’s he was contributing to many of the major magazines around the world and had also started to work on his first book “Akubra is Australian for Hat’ which was published in 1988. It was during this period that he became heavily involved in panoramic landscape photography. In pursuit of landscapes he was fortunate to become involved with the western desert aboriginals, however he was based in Sydney and could not maintain a constant relationship with these people and had to rely on irregular field trips to gather material. Aboriginal Australia was very difficult to access and to a great extent hidden from the rest of Australia. Landscape photography dominated his career throughout the 90’s but always with his interest in documentary photography.

 

By 2003 his partner Gail Liston and he, had established the ‘Australian Geographic Grenville Turner Gallery’ located in Sydney Arcade in the middle of the city. The Right Image Pty Ltd was incorporated as the parent company. This was not only a gallery for him to exhibit his work it was the home of the Australian Geographic Photography Workshops. By 2006 he had contributed to many different ‘coffee table’ books and had expanded his part time teaching to a private university where he rewrote the curriculum for the change-over to digital photography and also to Sydney University’s Continuing Education program which involved short courses and study tours. He has continued his interests in teaching to date.

 

In late 2006 he resolved to remake the Akubra book and decided to move to Darwin for this purpose. It was whilst there that he reconnected with his original interests in film/video by freelancing to AAP on a casual basis whilst still maintaining an active roll in commercial photography. A six day shoot in central Australia opened the way to pursue a number of different personal projects in addition to commercial work. Since 2008 he has become more involved in making documentaries. In 2014 he started freelancing as a 'stringer' for ABC TV News in Alice Springs and by late 2014 took on a full time one year contract as an ABC Cameraman. Since late 2015 he has returned to his main business of documentary making and photography.