Author Archives: martynjolly

Spirit Photography and Passing

‘Full-Body Spirit Materializations: Mediums, Spirits, Séances and Believers in the Nineteenth Century’, paper at Passing Symposium, Research School of Humanities, ANU, February 29, 2008.

INTRODUCTION

In 1878 an enthusiastic Spiritualist from Melbourne assembled a carte-de-visite album, which is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Spiritualists believed that the human personality survived beyond death, and that departed spirits were seeking to communicate with the living via specially endowed people called mediums.

The album included photos of celebrity mediums, including the most famous medium of all, Kate Fox, who as a girl was the first to apparently hear raps from the Beyond in New York State in 1848. It included cartes of the British trance medium J. J. Morse, as well as his spirit guide, Yun Sen Lie, who is present in the form of a photographic reproduction of a portrait-drawing based on the detailed self-description of the spirit, who ‘controlled’ and spoke through the medium while he was entranced.

It also included a spirit photograph of the Melbourne Spiritualist, Dr Walter Richardson, the first president of the Victorian Association of Progressive Spiritualists (and, incidentally, the basis of the character Richard Mahony in the novel by his daughter Henry Handel Richardson.)  The photograph was taken during a visit to London in 1873, when Richardson visited the spirit photographer Frederick Hudson for a photographic séance. Hudson captured the transparent spirit of Richardson’s departed sister on the plate, perhaps by previously coating the plate with another layer of collodion and exposing it with an accomplice before Richardson arrived, or perhaps by double printing two negatives in the darkroom as Richardson waited for his carte-de-visite.

FLORENCE COOK

Hudson also made a voluptuous photograph of the young London medium Florence Cook swooning in a trance whilst a solid spirit-figure rose above her. Cook was a ‘materialization medium’, she was supposedly able to physically materialize spirits themselves. Cook had been operating as a medium since 1871, when she was fifteen. At her séances sitters would usually gather round, ‘like a party of grown-up children waiting for the magic lantern’ according to one visitor, while Cook supposedly sat entranced in her cabinet, a curtained off section of the room which supposedly concentrated the psychic energy. Eventually, after some hymn singing, the curtains of the cabinet would part, and a fully materialized spirit called Katie King would step out, swathed in orientalist drapery. Katie was supposedly the daughter of John King, a sixteenth-century pirate. John King was Spiritualism’s most glamorous celebrity spirit. He was materialized by many different mediums, including Charles Williams, who had mentored Cook. In the Melbourne album there are two Frederick Hudson cartes, one a portrait of the Spirit of John King, another of Charles Williams and another Spiritualist with a shrouded spirit-form superimposed on the plate.

In December 1873, Cook’s mediumship became a popular scandal. At a séance, when the supposed spirit of Katie was moving amongst the sitters proffering her hand to be kissed, one of the sitters suddenly grabbed her around the waist, and exclaimed: ‘It’s the medium!’ The low gaslight that lit the séance was immediately extinguished. Cook’s fiancée leapt up and wrestled the spirit free of the sitter’s grasp and back into the medium’s cabinet. When the gaslight came on again it was found that the spirit had somehow managed to tear off some of the sitter’s beard and scratch his face. Some moments elapsed before the cabinet was opened. Cook was found moaning and unconscious, still apparently bound to her chair with knots sealed with wax, and still in her own black dress and boots. She was searched, but no trace of voluminous white drapery could be found.

After this incident, Cook made the bold step of throwing herself at the mercy of the chemist and physicist William Crookes. Crookes was part of an emerging group of psychic investigators who used the experimental methods of modern science, with their basis in accuracy and observation. A significant number of experimental scientists from the 187os through to the 1920s were also Spiritualist believers and psychic researchers. Perhaps this is because in their research physicists and electricians such as Crookes were routinely thinking across different dimensions of space and time, where electrical impulses were transmitted thousands of miles instantaneously through the telegraph machine; and they were also thinking across different states of matter, where energy became matter through such processes as electrolysis. This made the supposed psychic phenomena they were also researching appear relatively familiar to them. Testifying in front of an 1871 Dialectical Society investigation into Spiritualism, one of Crookes’ colleagues perfectly united his physics and his psychics by using a startling image drawn from practical nineteenth-century technology. Trying to explain how previously unknown psychic forces could penetrate our world from the other side via a medium, he used the scientific analogy: ‘An iron wire is to an electrician simply a hole bored through a solid rock of air so that the electricity may pass freely’.

Florence Cook invited William Crookes to establish the facts for himself. At his home he strung a curtain between his laboratory and his library, turning his library into an improvised cabinet. Like all sympathetic investigators Crookes agreed to the usual seanceconditions that spirit and medium should not be touched without permission. However he established ‘test conditions’ to his own satisfaction by sealing the doors and windows with wax and thread, and binding the medium’s hands and feet.

Crookes constructed a lamp out of a jar of phosphorized oil, which gave him a source of light which was faint, but amenable to the spirit. At one séance the spirit Katie invited Crookes into the cabinet itself so that he could establish that  she and her medium were two separate entities. Kneeling, Crookes held one of the medium Cook’s hands and passed the lamp along her entranced body as it lay in the cabinet, and then he turned and passed the lamp up and down the standing spirit’s whole figure. He declared himself thoroughly satisfied that it was the veritable Katie King who stood before him, and not a phantasm of a disordered brain. Eventually the desire to touch the spirit became too much for Crookes and he respectfully asked her if he could clasp her in his arms. She agreed, and Crookes was able to establish that, at least temporarily, she had become a material entity, and in addition was not wearing corsets. In subsequent physical examinations of both spirit and medium he established that the spirit materialization was taller and fairer, and had smoother skin and longer fingers than her medium, her ears were unpierced, her luxuriant tresses auburn not black, her pulse a rhythmic 75 not a skitting 90, and her lungs sound, not afflicted with a cough, as were the medium’s.

Crookes had begun the test séances with a professed commitment to the objective scientific recording of observable phenomena. But within the crepuscular hush of the séance he was as beguiled by the spirit’s ethereal, yet palpable, beauty as everyone else. It was clear that a strong current of seduction had begun to flow through the seances:

[P]hotography is as inadequate to depict the perfect beauty of Katie’s face as words are powerless to describe her charms of manner. Photography may, indeed, give a map of her countenance; but how can it reproduce the brilliant purity of her complexion, or the ever-varying expression of her mobile features…

Rumours started to flow that Crookes, whose wife was expecting their tenth child, was having an affair with Cook — described at the time as a ‘trim little lady of sweet sixteen’. Sitters also continued to remark on the dissimilarity between Katie and her medium at some séances, and their similarity at others. Some started to ask why simpler and more explicit methods couldn’t be used to establish that Katie was really a separate entity to Cook, such as marking Cook’s forehead with indian ink. Others remarked that it would indeed be easy for the medium to smuggle a long white muslin veil into the cabinet secreted in her underwear, and under cover of the hymn singing remove her outer garments and arrange them over some cushions to look like a supine form, then drop the veil over her white underclothes ready to emerge from between the curtains.

Amidst all this damaging speculation the spirit Katie suddenly let it be known that she only had energy to manifest on the material plane for three years, due to expire on 21 May 1874. After Katie’s last farewell Crookes’ experiments with Cook petered out, but he publicly acknowledged his debt to her:

I do not believe she could carry on a deception if she were to try, and if she did she would certainly be found out very quickly, for such a line of action is altogether foreign to her nature. And to imagine that an innocent school-girl of fifteen should be able to conceive and then successfully carry out for three years so gigantic an imposture as this, and in that time should submit to any test which might be imposed upon her [and] should bear the strictest scrutiny … to imagine, I say, the Katie King of the last three years to be the result of imposture does more violence to one’s reason and common sense than to believe her to be what she herself affirms.

Crookes now channelled his energies into more orthodox researches. He began to experiment with the cathode-ray tube, a vacuum tube with an electrical terminal at one end. If an electrical current was run into the terminal a faintly luminous ethereal glow resulted. In another experiment a wheel suspended inside the tube slowly turned, although nothing visible touched it. Crookes concluded that these uncanny effects were produced by the cathode terminal emitting rays of electrified ‘radiant matter’, a fourth state of matter, neither solid, liquid or gaseous. It was up to later physicists to establish that the rays were not of material particles as Crookes had supposed, but of electrons ionising residual gas in the tube. But nonetheless his work eventually directly led to the discovery and use of x-rays, television picture-tubes and fluorescent lighting. In his report on these electrical experiments to the science journal Nature in 1879 he made claims that could just as easily be applied to his psychic research of 1873 when he said, ‘we have actually touched the borderland where matter and force seem to merge into one another, the shadowy realm between the Known and the Unknown which for me has always had peculiar temptations.’

MRS MELON

The carte-de-visite album also includes a carte of two other materializing mediums Miss Wood and Annie Fairlamb, who came from Newcastle in the north of England. Hudson has photographed them with the spirit of the Indian, Syna. The pair did automatic writing, trance speaking, and materializations. By  1890 the two had quarrelled and Miss Fairlamb was working alone. The Edinburgh photographer J. Stewart Smith photographed her with the partially materialised Cissie, the spirit of a little African girl who was one of her spirit guides. Shortly afterwards, after several embarrassing exposures, Fairlamb left on a tour of New Zealand and Australia, married a J. B. Mellon in Sydney, and set up as a professional medium, charging ten shillings a sitting.

Now working under the name of Mrs Mellon, she not only materialized Cissie, but also Josephine, a beautiful young woman, and Geordie, a gruff Scotsman. On her visit to Sydney the prominent Theosophist Annie Bessant was impressed by one of Mellon’s séances at which, Sydney’s Sunday Times reported, she exchanged flowers with Cissie and conversed with Geordie. The Sunday Times participated in a series of experiments with Mellon, which attempted to establish the truth of her materializations by clearly capturing both a spirit and the medium at the same time and on the same photographic plate. The séances were held at the home of the prominent Sydney spiritualist Dr Charles MacCarthy, who had already photographed Josephine by herself in 1894. They were conducted under test conditions, which meant Mellon’s clothing was searched by two lady Spiritualists beforehand; and, rather than wearing white underclothing, she wore coloured flannels which would remain recognisable under a thin drapery of muslin.

Rather than the near-darkness usually required, the séances were conducted in daylight for the camera. Daylight may have been necessary because artificial light was still expensive and experimental in Sydney at the time.

Normally spirit materializations took place in very dim light. The mediums conveniently claimed that anything other than a very brief ruby light damaged the sensitive spirit materializations, and caused them great pain. But because Mellon’s photographic séances for the Sunday Times had to be conducted in daylight for the camera, rather than darkness, the sitters were requested to sit with their back to the cabinet because, Mellon claimed, in the daylight their direct gaze would bore holes into the spirits. Although the first test was photographically inconclusive, two sitters managed to obtain a clear view of the materialization by surreptitiously using hand mirrors to look over their shoulders. At the second test-séance all the sitters came equipped with mirrors. As a result, two whole hours of hymn singing failed to produce a single spirit, and only the gift of some valuable jewellery mollified the offended medium afterwards. Four days later, on 9 August 1894, while the sitters sat with their eyes tight shut, the camera which had been pre-focussed on the curtains of her cabinet, photographed her standing beside the partially materialized, flat, form of Geordie.

Mellon reported that during materializations she felt a chilling and benumbing sensation as the psychoplasm came out of her left side and from her fingertips. The vapoury mass first fell at her feet in waves and clouds and then slowly assumed a distinct human shape. She became weaker, and as the form reached completion it staggered as though it would fall.

The telepathist, clairvoyant and mesmerist Thomas Shekleton Henry had been working with the editor of the Sunday Times in the photographic tests. He was initially a devotee of Mellon’s, writing an ode to Josephine’s beauty and becoming possessed himself by Geordie’s spirit as he held the spirit’s photograph in his hand. He said he was planning to write a pamphlet about Mellon’s abilities to be called Mysteries in our Midst. However he began to become suspicious of the constrained movements the spirits made, the doll-like appearance of their faces, the sewn hems visible in their psychoplasmic drapery, and the fact that they could not leave footprints on the sooted slates he placed under them. At a séance in Mellon’s own house, after the singing of hymns, a form appeared and nodded when it was asked if it was the deceased niece of Mrs Gale, one of the sitters. Sobbing with great emotion Mrs Gale came forward and kissed the spirit on its forehead. Later, after more singing and more apparitions, the form of the child-spirit Cissie appeared between the curtains of the cabinet. Henry suddenly got up and seized Cissie, crying: “light up!” An accomplice immediately struck three matches. Henry had hold of Mellon who was on her knees with muslin over her head and shoulders, black material over her face, and her skirt turned up over her stockingless legs. The matches were blown out. The accomplice struck another, which was also blown out. Finally, struggling against several male Spiritualists, Henry managed to light the gas jets above his head. Henry was set upon by several other spiritualists in the audience, and Mellon’s husband, who at all of her séances was always at the back of the room regulating the gaslight, rushed forward and grabbed him by the throat. Mellon hid what she could under her petticoats, though some more muslin, a false beard, and a flat black bag with tapes attached to it was glimpsed insider her cabinet. She scrambled back into the cabinet and squatted on top of her properties. Surrounded by three female Spiritualists who drew the cabinet’s curtains, she pushed the beard down between her breasts and pinned something up between her legs, under her petticoats.

In a subsequent interview with the Sunday Times Mellon explained the confusing scene thus: she said that as the delicate spirit form had been interfered with, the science of materialization dictated that either the spirit form must be reabsorbed back into the medium, or the medium be absorbed by the form. Because the form was held fast by Henry, her remaining matter had to be pulled forward off her chair and had shot into the spirit form. The spirit drapery then rapidly dissolved in a steam off her. Since the psychoplasmic matter had initially been drawn from the lower part of her body her legs had shrunk, which had caused her shoes and stockings to fall off. The black bag was a duster for her music box.

Henry’s planned paean to Mellon became the triumphal record of his exposure, the pamphlet: Spookland ! A record of research and experiment in a much-talked-of realm of mystery, with a review and criticism of so called Spirit Materialisation, and hints and illustrations as to the possibility of artificiality producing the same.

The Spiritualists quickly replied with A Counterblast to Spookland, or Glimpses of the Marvellous which ridiculed the erratic and volatile nature of his Henry’s own mediumship, lampooned him as a snake in the grass, and produced voluminous counter-testimony from Spiritualist adherents.

CONCLUSION

The theory of spirit photography, like the Spiritualist imagination generally, was very much part of contemporary developments in technology and science, particularly physics and biology. What force was it that was able to form the inchoate yolk of an egg into the claws, feathers and beak of a chicken? Could an analogous force to this ‘life force’, a ‘psychic force’, pass through the labile body of the medium and form it into a spirit entity. Simiarly, it was proposed that spirits who normally have a kind of etheric or radiant body could, like molluscs that extract the material for their shells from water, be able to temporarily utilize the terrestrial molecules that surround them for the purpose of building up a material body capable of manifesting itself to our senses.

To other scientific Spiritualists this combination of biology and chemistry even provided a possible scientific explanation for the elaborate classical drapery the spirits wore, to augment the usual eschatological explanation. Alfred Russell Wallace, the prominent Spiritualist, naturalist, and co-developer, along with Charles Darwin, of the theory of evolution, mused that drapery must be easierand more economical to materialize than the complete human form. The copious drapery in which spirits were almost always enveloped was there to show only just what was necessary for the recognition of the spirit’s face and figure. ‘The conventional ‘white-sheeted ghost’ was not then all fancy’, Wallace said, ‘but had a foundation in fact— a fact, too, of deep significance, dependent on the laws of yet unknown chemistry.’

At the cusp of the twentieth century, nobody could predict what was going to be a scientific dead-end and what wasn’t. For Crookes and Wallace it was impossible to disentangle their physical and psychical research. Identical analogies and metaphors structured their thought in both areas. And identical passions and lusts, for prestige, power and discovery, drove them. During this period of radical change in the fundamental underpinnings of physics, a certain amount of credulity was necessary for every scientist, to loosen the bounds of his pre-suppositions. And the inevitable incredulity of the public and their colleagues was to be expected, and had to be overcome, before any new idea was accepted, in either psychics or physics. The only clue to the future was that physics was progressing but psychics, which subscribed to the same modern ideology of progress, wasn’t — although it did continue to pile up mountains of tantalizing evidence.

The circuit of desire in Spiritualist investigation— to see, to know, to believe — was closed when the young ingénue medium gave the eminent investigator the phenomena he craved. This generated an intense emotional energy that suspended conventional scepticism, propriety and objectivity, and induced all kinds of extraordinary visions to appear. These visions shifted and slipped between the hermetic theatre of the darkened séance room and the minds and imaginations of the excited sitters. And, in a scientific period where entirely new and extraordinary physical phenomena seemed to be manifesting themselves everywhere, some of those visions even appeared to be able to slip themselves onto the photographic plates of the spirit photographer.

Prizes! Prizes! Prizes!

‘Prizes, Prizes, Prizes’, Photofile 83, Australian Centre for Photography, pp 56 — 59, 2008

This year there will be well over $100,000 up for grabs in the fifteen or so photography prizes running across the country. It seems everybody loves a good competition, and as the most democratic of art forms photography readily lends itself to the format. Entries can be submitted digitally for easy short-listing, and artists and amateurs can both have a go on roughly equivalent terms. No matter what you think of the judge’s final, painfully arrived at decision, a bit of controversy never hurt anyone, and anyway, there’ll be a different judge next time. For the lucky photographer who does eventually come up trumps there is the professional recognition of the prize, plus the thrill of actually winning something — cash or just a camera — and the opportunity to have their image and name reproduced in newspapers and journals around the country. For those that only get short-listed, there is still the extra line on their CV. And for those that hopefully sent off their jpegs along with their entry fee and didn’t even get a guernsey, well, there’s always next time.

Some photographers make the conscious decision to spend a lot of time and money entering as many art awards as they are eligible for, in the hope of eventually striking it lucky. The stats can be discouraging though. Almost 1500 people paid 25 dollars to enter one of the country’s most recent and richest prizes, the National Portrait Gallery’s National Photographic Portrait Prize, but only about 1 in 20 could get short-listed, and of course only one photographer could win the $25,000. For its part the gallery got a feisty show that’s sure to be popular, where unknown amateur photographers cheerfully rubbed shoulders with the big names, and serendipitous happy snaps added zest to monumentally posed portraits.

Some photographers make the conscious decision to spend a lot of time and money entering as many art awards as they are eligible for, in the hope of eventually striking it lucky. The stats can be discouraging though. Almost 1500 people paid 25 dollars to enter one of the country’s most recent and richest prizes, the National Portrait Gallery’s National Photographic Portrait Prize, but only about 1 in 20 could get short-listed, and of course only one photographer could win the $25,000. For its part the gallery got a feisty show that’s sure to be popular, where unknown amateur photographers cheerfully rubbed shoulders with the big names, and serendipitous happy snaps added zest to monumentally posed portraits.

(And if you want this punter’s opinion on the judging committee’s decision to choose Robert Scott-Mitchell’s portrait of his wife, Lindy Lee — Birth and Death as the winner, well, I can understand why they would have eventually plumped on this portrait because it safely covered so many bases: it included other family portraits in the frame, it was collaborative, it was intercultural, it was spiritual, it was about conjugal love, and it was of a glamorous art world figure. But in plumping for this merely competent image they passed over many, much more visually compelling and interesting photographs, such as George Fetting’s David Gulpilil {although he had already won the Tweed River Regional Art Gallery’s Olive Cotton Award}, Ruby Davies’ Water as Life: The Town of Wilcannia and the Darling/Baaka, Petrina Hicks’ Rosemary, or even as a roughie Vasili Vasiliaskis’s, Peter Robinson, Lingerie Importer. Still, there’s always next time.)

Prizes can make a lot of sense for smaller galleries and museums too. Regional galleries with limited resources but big ambitions can use a prize to efficiently sample the national scene. For 25 years the Albury City Regional Art Gallery has been running its biennial National Photography Purchase Award (won last year by Anne Zahalka) with a $10,000 acquisition fund, and has built up a formidable collection of contemporary Australian photography. The Gold Coast City Art Gallery has been using the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award (won last year by Paul Ferman) to similar effect, and it was been joined in 2005 by the Tweed River Regional Art Gallery with the Olive Cotton Award (won last year by George Fetting), and in 2006 by the Monash Gallery of Art (which already had a substantial photography collection) with the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize (won last year by Ray Cook).

Prizes are also a good option for galleries to negotiate with philanthropists, particularly in a straitened cultural climate, because what the philanthropist is being asked to sponsor is not this or that particular photographer or image, but on ongoing process based on access and merit. The sport-like fun of the competition provides an entertaining show for the local community, and the announcement of the winner gives the gallery a national presence. Prizes are always great shows to visit. There is always the judge to disagree with, and even though curators work hard to corral the entries — each one clamouring for individual attention — into a coherent hang, inevitably some of the scandalous geo-politics of the nineteenth-century salon remains. For example, which image, which looked good as a jpeg but disappointed when it was unpacked, ends up next to the fire extinguisher? Or which image, which arrived bombastically enlarged and in a tacky frame, ends up in an under-lit corner?

Although no individual institution should be begrudged its photography prize, the fact that they are increasingly dominating the photography scene is unprecedented. By their very nature photography prizes have to be superficial. In most, though not all, cases only one image is selected from each short-listed photographer, despite the fact that the photograph’s natural home is as part of a group or a series. Photographs usually need proper contextualization, but many prizes hang photographs with no supporting material at all to explain the work. Others include short artists statements, which in their naivety sometimes do a disservice to the photographer. Some prizes are specifically designed to encourage particular genres such as landscape, portraiture, or documentary. But, probably because they are all organised along similar lines, the open prizes seem to be taking similar snapshots of the photographic scene. For instance last year the Bowness Prize, which I saw at the Monash Gallery of Art, wasn’t substantially different in terms of entrants, styles and themes, to the show I had selected and judged at the Gold Coast City Gallery for the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award.

Sometimes I wonder what the opportunity costs are for the worthy efforts photographers, galleries, and sponsors put into prizes. Everybody would agree that they are no substitute for a curated, researched and contextualized show, or a strategic collection policy, and of course from the point of view of individual institutions their prizes are thought of as complementing, rather than replacing, their other stirling curatorial work.  But perhaps the looming presence of prizes in the consciousness of photographers and viewers alike is beginning to cast a corrosively aleatory temper over the whole scene?

Martyn Jolly

Dr Martyn Jolly is Head of Photomedia at the Australian National University School of Art.  He judged the National Photography Purchase Award at the  Albury City Regional Art Gallery in 1985 and the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award at the Gold Coast City Gallery in 2007.

Pixelation of People’s Faces

People’s faces are being pixelated more often in newspapers and on TV. It used to be that only the suspects of serious crime had their eyes obscured by the familiar black bar, but now lots of people we see on the news have their faces obscured by a circle of enlarged pixels. Even in Google Map’s new ‘Street View’ application the faces of people on the street are automatically blurred to protect their privacy. Privacy itself has also become an increasingly debated term recently, with more and more people claiming that they have a ‘right to privacy’, even when they are in public. In thinking about these issues I decided to experiment with a picture I had clipped from a newspaper. It was a school class portrait in which the newspaper had decided to pixelate the face of each student. I ‘deconstructed’ the conventional composition of this photograph by scanning small portions of the image, of only a few millimetres across, and then re-arranging them in various kinds of grids. With the original news context of the image stripped away, and each face isolated for comparison, I wondered if the viewer might experience the act of pixelation itself differently. What does it do to its subjects, besides preserving their privacy, does it turn them into criminals or victims?

Haunted Australia

‘Haunted Australia’, catalogue essay in Trace Elements: Spirit and Memory in Japanese and Australian Photomedia, 2008, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery and Performance space edited by Bec Dean. English version, pp 52 – 57 of 142 page catalogue, ISBN 978-4-925204-22-4 C 0070

Every country has its ghosts, every country is haunted by spirits and memories. Even countries who once thought of themselves as being young, but are now realizing that they are in fact old, are finding themselves to be as haunted as anybody else. Thirty or so years ago if you had asked an Australian if there were many ghosts here they would have laughed — compared to England or Japan, no way! Sure, there was a ghost in our most popular national song, Waltzing Matilda — the ghost of a poor, sheep-stealing swagman who committed suicide rather than be caught by the colonial police — but that was about it. Recently, however, we have begun to see a persistent tradition of Australian ghosts emerging.

The swagman’s ghost stayed around the billabong in which he had drowned himself, mournfully repeating the refrain from his once cheerful song to warn and remind passers by of the injustice which had been done to him. And this pattern of repetition, mourning, warning and reminding conforms to many other ghost stories from the nineteenth century. On 16 June 1826 an ex-convict and successful farmer named Frederick Fisher suddenly disappeared, a few days later his ghost was seen sitting on a fence rail and pointing to a spot on the ground.  When the spot was dug up his body was found, leading to the arrest and hanging of his neighbour for murder. Fisher’s ghost survived in colonial society as an urban myth until 1859 when John Lang published an elaborated form of the story as The Ghost Upon the Rail. In 1924 Australia’s pioneer filmmaker Raymond Longford made a silent film of the story, and in 1960 Douglas Stewart wrote a play. Ken Gelder discusses Fisher’s ghost and others like him in The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories.

Fisher’s ghost appeared at the disjunction between the new convict-based settler society of Australia, the old established home of Britain from which the convicts had been cast out, and the prior possession of the land by Aborigines. In Lang’s version, in order to cover up his crime and get his hands on Fisher’s wealth, the murderous neighbour, an ex convict equally as successful in his new life as Fisher, used forgery and impersonation to create the elaborate ruse that Fisher had granted him power of attorney before disappearing home to England. To expose this delusion the spectre does not simply point to his own grave, as in the urban myth. Rather, he is seen sitting on the fence-rail with a gash on his forehead. But the light appears to shine straight  through him, and he is as impalpable to the touch as empty air.  An aboriginal tracker from the local tribe identifies ‘white man’s blood’ on the rail, then follows some faint tracks for nearly a mile to a dark pond scummed with ‘white man’s fat’. At the bottom of the pond is found a bag of bones, the rotting remains of Fisher’s body kept together only by his clothing. He wasn’t a world away in old England after all, but still here in new Australia all the time, demanding that justice be done. In addition, the ancient knowledge of the land held by the radically dispossessed Aborigines is needed to track his rotting body down. As Gelder says, ghost stories are one way ‘in which white settlement in this country is shown to be, in fact, fundamentally unsettled.’ [1] Ghosts are able to bring into conjunction times and spaces which are conventionally separated. They can reveal what was previously hidden, or dormant, or ignored.

In the early twentieth century Australian ghosts took on a greater role in bridging vast distances of time and memory. After 60,000 Australian Soldiers died and were buried on the distant battle fields of World War One an extraordinary cult of the dead grew up amongst those that were left to mourn them, but who had no grave to grieve at. This collective grief became focussed on the Anzac memorials being built in each town, and in the annual ritual of the Anzac Day Dawn Service and Commemorative March. Just before Anzac Day 1925 Melbourne Punch described Anzac Day as ‘that solemn day, on which … the spirits of the nation’s gallant dead come back again for a space, on ‘Home Leave’.’[2] Two years later the famous war artist and cartoonist Will Dyson published his best-known cartoon in the Melbourne Herald. In A Voice from Anzac two ghostly Australia soldiers left behind on the beachhead of Gallipoli draw solace from hearing the feet of the Returned Men marching in Australia. One of them says to the other: ‘Funny thing, Bill—I keep thinking I hear men marching!’.

By far the most popular painting of the period was Will Longstaff’s Menin Gates at Midnight, 1927, which depicted a psychic vision Longstaff had experienced during a midnight walk after the unveiling of the Menin Gate Memorial at Ypres, when he saw soldier spirits rising from the cornfields around him. When the painting toured Australia in 1928 and 1929 it was seen by perhaps half a million people, who filed reverently past it to the accompaniment of sombre organ music.[3] To this day the spooky painting still hangs in its own darkened grotto in the Australia War Memorial.

The emotional power of Dyson’s and Longstaff’s  spectral imagery derived at least some of its legibility from Spiritualist photography. Spiritualist ideas were pervasive after the war. The period’s most famous proselytiser of Spiritualism was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the famous detective and arch rationalist Sherlock Holmes. Doyle had been a jingoistic propagandist during World War One, during which he lost his son and his brother. After that war, when virtually every other family was experiencing similar grief, the ‘sight of a world which was distraught with sorrow and eagerly asking for help and knowledge’, had compelled him to use his fame and personal wealth to proselytise the Spiritualist cause in lectures delivered from platforms across the world.[4] In 1920 and 1921 he travelled throughout Australia, eventually speaking to a total of 50,000 people. His most popular lecture was on spirit photography, where he showed lantern-slides of photographs taken by mediumistic photographers at photographic séances. In these images the faces of the dead where captured floating above the living, they seemed to have finally returned to join their loved ones once more within the photographic emulsion. When projected onto the lantern-slide screens of packed meeting halls these photographic ‘proofs’ of the ‘truth’ of spirit return provided implicit comfort to the bereaved families in Australia, whose sons had died thousand of miles away. The Melbourne Age reported:

Unquestionably the so-called ‘dead’ lived. That was his message to the mothers of Australian lads who died so grandly in the War, and with the help of God he and Lady Doyle would ‘get it across’ to Australia.[5]

Since that time the Anzac tradition has developed radically. It has changed from being a collective cult of memory for the dead intensely focussed on the physical absence of fallen soldiers, to being a more generalised set of nationalistic and quasi-religious rituals through which every Australian is meant to feel bonded to their country.

At the same time the mechanisms through which ghosts are conjured has developed and widened. Images of people from the past increasingly pervade the present through the power of photography. In the photographic archive the past lies hidden and buried, whilst always containing the potential for exploration and retrieval. The archive has increasingly become a terrain in which some artists feel as though they can meet people from the past and even, in some sense,  bring them back to the present.

For example in 2003 two Sydney artists, Kate Richards and Ross Gibson, presented Life after Wartime at the Sydney Opera House. The work was an interactive  ‘performance’ of an archive of crime-scene photographs that had been assembled by Sydney’s police force in the decades following the Second World War. The artists sat at laptops and midi keyboards and brought up strings of images which, combined with evocative haikus, were projected onto two large screens. Beneath the screens, The Necks, a jazz trio well known for its ominous movie music, improvised a live soundtrack of brooding ambience. Although not directly picturing spectres, the texts and images generated open-ended non-specific narratives around a set of semi-fictionalized characters and locations in Sydney. These characters became invisible presences occupying the creepy emptiness of the crime scenes. The element of automation, in the way the story engine generated the loose narratives, preserved the integrity, the historical artefactuality, of the original archive. Ross Gibson wrote:

Whenever I work with historical fragments, I try to develop an aesthetic response appropriate to the form and mood of the source material. This is one way to know what the evidence is trying to tell the future. I must not impose some pre-determined genre on these fragments. I need to remember that the evidence was created by people and systems of reality independent of myself. The archive holds knowledge in excess of my own predispositions. … Stepping off from this intuition, I have to trust that the archive has occulted in it a logic, a coherent pattern which can be ghosted up from its disparate details so that I can gain a new, systematic understanding of the culture that has left behind such spooky detritus. In this respect I am looking to be a medium for the archive. I want to ‘séance up’ the spirit of the evidence. [6]

In seeking to be a voodoo spiritualist ‘medium’ for the archive, the work was not trying to quote from it, or mine it for retro titbits ripe for appropriation, so much as to make contact with it as an autonomous netherworld of images. This sense of the palpability of other times preserved in the archive also informs the work of the Sydney photographer Anne Ferran. In 1997 she made a ‘metaphorical x-ray’ of a nineteenth-century historic house. She carefully removed items of the colonial family’s clothing from its drawers and cupboards and, in a darkened room, laid them gently onto photographic paper before exposing it to light. In the photograms the luminous baby dresses and night-gowns floated ethereally against numinous blackness. To Ferran, the photogram process made them look ‘three-dimensional, life-like, as if it has breathed air into them in the shape of a body … With no context to secure these images, it’s left up to an audience to deal with visual effects that seem to have arisen of their own accord, that are visually striking but in an odd, hermetic way.’[7]

Other Australia artists have gone beyond the generalised, enigmatic, uncanny ambience of the photographic archive, and have used archival photographs to directly create ghostly images. But these contemporary spectres — photographically produced apparitions from the past superimposed on the present — are not being invoked in order to console the living, as in the Anzac spectral tradition, but to cajole them, beseech them, or imprecate them, just as Fisher’s ghost did in the nineteenth century.

In 1980 Australia’s most eminent art historian, Bernard Smith, gave a series of lectures under the title ‘The Spectre of Truganini.’ In the nineteenth century, Truganini had been a much-photographed colonial celebrity as the ‘last’ of the ‘full-blood’ Tasmanian Aborigines. Smith’s argument was that, despite white Australia’s attempt to blot out and forget the history of its own brutal displacement of Australia’s aboriginal population, the repressed would continue to return and haunt contemporary Australia until proper amends were made.[8]

As aboriginal activism grew in intensity and sophistication during the 1980s and 1990s, anthropological portraits such as those of Truganini, began to be conceived of not only as the theoretical paradigm for colonial attempts at genocide but also as acts of violence in themselves, technically akin to, and instrumentally part of, that very process of attempted genocide. They began to be used by young aboriginal artists to ‘occult up’ their ancestors. Their reuse attempted to capture a feeling of active dialogue with the past, a two-way corridor through time, or a sense of New Age channelling. In a meditation on nineteenth-century anthropological photographs, the aboriginal photographer and curator Brenda L. Croft retroactively invested the agency of political resistance in the 140-year-old portraits.

Images like these have haunted me since I was a small child … [and] were instrumental in guiding me to use the tools of photography in my work … The haunted faces of our ancestors challenge and remind us to commemorate them and acknowledge their existence, to help lay them, finally, to rest.[9]

But aboriginal ghosts face a lot of work to do yet before they can finally rest. Aboriginal ghosts are needed to remind Australia that there is unfinished business, that the process of reconciliation with the past is not complete. Rather than laying their ancestors to rest, many aboriginal artists have photographically raised them from the dead to enrol them in various contemporary campaigns of resistance. One of the first Australian aboriginal photographers to receive international attention was Leah King-Smith. Her 1992 exhibition Patterns of Connection travelled throughout Australia as well as internationally. To make her large, deeply coloured photo[compositions she copied anthropological photographs from the State Library of Victoria, liberating them from the archive to be superimposed as spectral presences on top of hand-coloured landscapes. For her, this process allowed Aboriginal people to flow back into their land, into a virtual space reclaimed for them by the photographer. In the words of the exhibition’s catalogue: ‘From the flaring of velvety colours and forms, translucent ghosts appear within a numinous world.’[10]

King-Smith holds spiritualist beliefs of her own. She concluded her artist’s statement by asking that ‘people activate their inner sight to view Aboriginal people.’[11] Her work animistically gave the museum photographs she reused a spiritualist function. Some of her fellow aboriginal artists thought the work too generalist. It lacked specific knowledge of the stories of the people whose photographs were reused, and it didn’t have explicit permission from the traditional owners of the land they were made to haunt. But the critic Anne Marsh described that as a ‘strategic essentialism.’

There is little doubt, in my mind, that Leah King-Smith is a kind of New Age evangelist and many serious critics will dismiss her work on these grounds …But I am interested in why the images are so popular and how they tap into a kind of cultural imaginary [in order] to conjure the ineffable … Leah King-Smith’s figures resonate with a constructed aura: [they are] given an enhanced ethereal quality through the use of mirrors and projections. The ‘mirror with a memory’ comes alive as these ancestral ghosts … seem to drift through the landscape as a seamless version of nineteenth century spirit photography.[12]

While not buying into such direct visual spirituality, other aboriginal artists have also attempted to use the power of old photographs to make the contemporary viewer the subject of a defiant, politically updated gaze returned from the past. In a series of works from the late 1990s, Brook Andrew invested his nineteenth-century subjects, copied from various state archives, with a libidinous body image inscribed within the terms of contemporary queer masculinity, and emblazoned them with defiant Barbara Krugeresque slogans such as Sexy and Dangerous (1996), I Split Your Gaze (1997), and Ngajuu Ngaay Nginduugirr [I See You] (1998). Andrew exploits the auratic power of the original Aboriginal subjects to re-project the historically objectifying gaze straight back to the present, to be immediately reinscribed in a contemporary politico-sexual discourse. Although Andrew was also criticized for using the powerful portraits of the aboriginal subjects without appropriate consideration for their original tribal and geographical identity, these works have since become almost iconic in contemporary Australian art.

Since 1999 the photographer Darren Siwes, of aboriginal and Dutch heritage, has performed a series of spectral self portraits in Australia and the United Kingdom. By ghosting himself standing implacably in front of various buildings, he refers to an aboriginal haunting, certainly; but because he is ghosted standing to attention while wearing a generic suit, he also evokes the feeling of being surveilled by a generalized, accusatory masculinity – exactly the same feeling that a memorial Anzac statue gives. Like much other contemporary aboriginal photography in Australia, Siwes’s photographs are mannered, stiff, and visually dull, but they have proved to be extraordinarily popular with curators in Australia and internationally. It is not the intrinsic quality of the art that is so persuasive, but the rhetorical force of the spectres. As overwrought and histrionic as they are, ghosts are still able to directly address historical and cultural issues of broad contemporary concern.

In their book Uncanny Australia Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs use Australian ghost stories to describe the uncanniness of Australia’s relationship to aboriginal spirituality. Although it is supposedly a settler country, in many ways Australia remains ‘unsettled’. In Australia both aboriginal and non-aboriginal relationships to the land have to co-exist, while its often violent history of possession, displacement and oppression underscore both relationships in different ways. For over two hundred years generations of non-aboriginal, settler Australians have forged strong spiritual bonds to the land, but aboriginal claims for the full recognition of their prior occupation of the continent, and for the precedence of their sacred relationship to the land, often give non-aboriginal Australians the uncanny feeling they are ‘foreigners at home’. In these postcolonial terms Gelder and Jacobs see hauntings as a productive occurrence, a means of acknowledging the inherent postcolonial contradictions in modern day Australia:

‘Ghosts’ simply could not function in a climate of sameness, in a country which fantasises about itself as ‘one nation’ or which imagines a utopian future of ‘reconciliation’ in which … all the ghosts have been laid to rest. But neither can they function in a climate of nothing but difference, where the one can never resemble the other, as in a ‘divided’ nation. A structure in which sameness and difference solicit each other, spilling over each other’s boundaries only to return again to their respective places, moving back and forward in an unpredictable, even unruly manner—a structure in which sameness and difference embrace and refuse each other simultaneously: this is where the ‘ghosts’ which may cause us to ‘smile’ or to ‘worry’ continue to flourish.[13]

Ghosts have re-emerged because both white and black Australians are now spiritually immersed in their country in a way which goes beyond the mutually exclusive binary of possession versus dispossession.

The haunting experiences of everyday Australians are explored by the historian Peter Read in his book Haunted Earth. He uses oral history interviews with over forty non-aboriginal and aboriginal Australians to explore their relationship to what he calls ‘inspirited places’. These are places defined by the nexus of place and history, time and spirit. For Read ‘inspiriting’ is a reciprocal process between the Earth and humans, where both old and new Australians bring inspiriting mythologies, rites and beliefs with them to the land they inhabit, just as particular landscapes are experienced by the humans who inhabit them as ‘haunted’ with a kind of soul or essence. Like many contemporary cultural historians Read is trying to go beyond hackneyed ‘paranormal’ explanations for some people’s intense experience of spiritual presence. He wants to understand these uncanny feelings as something more interesting and complex than the self-limiting notion that they are just the ‘epiphenomena of an excited or deluded brain’.

He recounts the vivid experience of people living in the suburbs built on the sandstone ridges north of Sydney which were once intensively occupied by Aboriginal people. He meets three separate families who believe they have either seen or felt the direct presence of Aboriginal spirits. ‘To the haunted families, the land itself, and the memories that the land holds independent of humans, carry profound meanings clearly related to invasion, dispossession and violence.’ However this haunting is not something to be banally expiated. If all the ghosts were ever to be exorcised then something would be lost to our contemporary experience. As he comments, ‘Those untroubled, those unhaunted, by the ghosts of the past have missed something profound.’ [14]

Australia has a long and persistent history of haunting. And its ghosts are a long way from being laid to rest, indeed more seem to be accumulating. The means through which we make these ghosts appear might have changed — from the genre of storytelling, to drawing and painting, to photographic superimposition. And the uncanny, unsettled worlds between which the ghosts communicated may have changed — from distant countries sundered by space, to not-so-distant pasts sundered by historical forgetting. But in all their over the top kitschiness, in all their histrionic posturing, ghosts have always continued to contribute to our sense of ourselves.

[1] The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories, selected by K. Gelder, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. xi.

[2]  R. McMullin, Will Dyson: Cartoonist, Etcher and Australia’s First War Artist, London, Angus & Robertson, 1984, p226.

[3]  A. Gray, Will Longstaff’s Menin Gates at Midnight, Canberra, Australian War Memorial, nd, np.

[4] N. Fodor, Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science, London, Arthurs Press, 1933, p106.

[5] ‘Conan Doyle in Australia’, Light, December 18, 1920, np.

[6] R. Gibson, ‘Negative Truth: A new approach to photographic storytelling’, Photofile 58, 1999, p30.

[7] A. Ferran, ‘Longer Than Life’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 1, 1, 2000, pp166 -70.

[8] B. Smith, The Spectre of Truganini: 1980 Boyer Lectures, Sydney, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980.

[9] B. L. Croft, ‘Laying ghosts to rest’, in Portraits of Oceania, ed. by J. Annear, Sydney, 1997, p9, p14.

[10] J. Phipps, ‘Elegy, Meditation and Retribution’, in Patterns Of Connection, Melbourne, Victorian Centre for Photography, 1992, np.

[11] L. King-Smith, ‘Statement’, in Patterns of Connection, Melbourne, Victorian Centre for Photography, 1992, np.

[12] A. Marsh, ‘Leah King-Smith and the Nineteenth Century Archive’, History of Photography, 23, 2, 1999, p117.

[13]. K. Gelder and J. M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Melbourne University Press, 1998, p42.

[14] P. Read, Haunted Earth, Sydney, University of New South Wales, 2003, p59.

Bill Henson

Op ed, Canberra Times, 2008

You can call Bill Henson’s photographs many things: melodramatic, perhaps; overwrought, perhaps; repetitive, perhaps (he’s been shooting the same kind of brooding, heavy-lidded adolescents for decades). But one thing you can’t call them is pornographic. Contrary to the claims of the activist, Hetty Johnston, whose single complaint led to the police raid on the Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery and the subsequent charges, a photograph of a naked teenager is not automatically pornography. And I’ve got news for Kevin Rudd, who finally fully revealed his own narrow-minded prudery by joining in with the baying of the pack, photographs of naked teenagers are not automatically disgusting. If they are not sexually titillating for viewers, as is the case with Henson’s images, and if, as in this work, they are covered in a heavy cloak of metaphorical significance produced by the model’s faraway expressions and the scene’s stygian lighting, they are not pornography they are art. Good enough art to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale, the cultural equivalent of the Olympic Games. Good enough art to pull 65,000 people to the Art Gallery of New South Wales without a single complaint, and good enough art to have been on the high school syllabus for years. Judging by their blog entries the high school students who visited Henson’s many previous exhibitions responded to his work with far more intelligence and thoughtfulness than our politicians.

Commentators such as Clive Hamilton, formerly of the Australia Institute, have recognised this, but have nonetheless accused Henson and his gallery of naivety. In the current cultural climate where corporations are sexualising children of younger and younger ages to sell them clothes or pop music, and where paedophiles are finding more and more images to feed their lusts by trawling the internet, how could Henson not expect there to be a backlash, Hamilton asks. Henson should have known better, he says. But why should artists pre-emptively buckle to pressure groups and media-manufactured witch-hunts? Maybe they have something important to say, which needs to be said. Maybe we should even respect artists and the international reputations they have built up over decades of hard work and hard thinking.

Girls don’t become women, and boys don’t become men, overnight. It is a time of magic, beauty, confusion, and yes, vulnerability. This simple cultural and biological fact has been the subject of art and poetry for millennia. But by now prohibiting the picturing of this period in life, when innocence mixes with knowing, who in fact is being protected? As has been proved time and time again, when things aren’t talked about, celebrated and discussed, that is the time when they become most vulnerable to exploitation. “This photographic exhibition violates the things for which we stand as Australians and indeed as parents”, Brendan Nelson brayed . Speaking as a parent, I refuse to be conscripted into a supposed army of the outraged. “I’d like to see the parents [of the models] well looked into”, demands the self-appointed guardian of our children, Hetty Johnston, “what parent in their right mind would allow their 12- or 13-year-old to strip off and display themselves all over the internet?” Well, if a photographer of Henson’s calibre and integrity approached me as a father, I just might.

Dr Martyn Jolly

Dr Martyn Jolly is Head of Photography and Media Arts at the Australian National University School of Art

Wolfgang Sievers’ Photographs: From the Future to the Past

‘Wolfgang Sievers’ Photographs: From the Future to the Past’, catalogue essay for Wolfgang Sievers 1913 — 2007: Work, curated by Stuart Bailey, pp 5 — 14, Glen Eira City Gallery, 2007.

One night in 1983 Wolfgang Sievers steadied himself on a tug as it heaved on the waves of Bass Strait and with a long hand-held exposure photographed an oil rig belching a giant tongue of flame and spouting a curtain of water. The experience was the high point of his career as a professional photographer. It was, in his own words, like the grand finale to a fantastic, dramatic opera. When Sievers saw the diabolical Wagnerian result, Inferno, Nymphea Oil Rig, Bass Strait, he thought that he couldn’t have done any better, and decided there and then that it was to be almost his last professional photograph[i]. But in making the decision to ‘stop whilst he was on top’ there was also an element of sourness and disappointment about the progress, or lack of progress, in Australian society, industry and architecture during the half-century his professional career had covered.  As a bombastic vision of industrial power and excess the oil rig photograph was a long way from Sievers’ first industrial photographs. For instance it contrasts strongly with one of his favourite photographs taken in 1939 at the very beginning of his career in Australia, of the dipping of match heads at Bryant & May, in Richmond, Victoria. Although also of a toxic industrial process, this image had a delicate clarity that for him encapsulated the ideas of simplicity and functional beauty which he thought should underpin all of his work.

For Sievers, as for many of the other European artists, designers, photographers and architects who also fled to Melbourne to escape the rise of Nazism, the ideas of pure functional beauty they brought with them were inextricably linked to wider ideas of social progress. The political foment of 1920s Weimar Germany had given rise to the famous Bauhaus, which taught not only the importance of truth to function in design; but also the importance of unifying the artist and the designer, the machine and the worker, to forge a new future society. In the post-war period these ideas were to pervade the entire world through the global rise Modernism, but Sievers also had a direct connection to them through his years in the late 30s at Berlin’s Contempora School of Applied Arts, which was a small private school that had taken up the Bauhaus project after it was closed by the Nazis in 1933.

As a young man in Germany during the 1930s Sievers was inevitably caught up in, and forever formed by, the political events of the time. He moved to Portugal in 1934 to try to make a career as a photographer, but then became briefly involved in the Spanish Civil War against Franco, for which he was arrested by the Gestapo on his return to Germany in 1936. He was not Jewish, though his mother was a Jewish descent, but in 1937 he decided to arrange his emigration to Australia, using as one of his guarantors the documentary photographer Axel Poignant who himself had emigrated to Australia ten years before. He was forced to dramatically expedite his plans when the Luftwaffe called him up for two years service as an aerial photographer. He was given one day’s grace and immediately escaped to England.

He left Germany at the age of 25 steeped in the ‘New Objectivity’ style of photography: he had taken front-on, clear-eyed photographs of poverty in Portugal; he had taken deep-focussed architectural views of nineteenth-century palaces on behalf of his art-historian father; he had been commissioned by the contemporary expressionist architect and family friend Erich Mendelsohn to photograph the last of his buildings in Germany before he himself had fled for Britain in 1933; he had made advertisements for modern products such as sheer stockings, dramatically lit in the latest studio style; and he had made low-angled sunlit portraits of his fellow Contempora School students heroically looking into the future.

He arrived in Melbourne in 1938 and set up a studio in South Yarra with the latest photographic equipment which he had sent on ahead. But he found pre-war Melbourne to be very different to Berlin, and opportunities severely limited. He decided to specialise in industrial and architectural photography, where he could immediately apply what he had learnt about the purity of design and the essential honesty of the machine. He rapidly found several large clients, but from 1942 volunteered to assist in the Australian war effort. After the war Sievers’ career took off again, buoyed by Australia’s building and industrial boom. For his industrial clients Sievers provided shots for their annual reports, publicity brochures and advertising.

One of his biggest clients was the heavy engineers Charles Ruwolt, which were taken over by the British based company Vickers in 1948. A problem many industrial photographers faced was the visual mess and distraction of any factory floor. (This can still be seen in some of Sievers’ shots, such as the grim Sweatshop, Melbourne, 1958). The graphic designers of annual reports generally got around this problem by simply cutting the distracting background out of the photographs, often leaving a heavily airbrushed image of an odd-shaped piece of machinery floating isolated on the page with no sense of scale or drama. Sievers solved the problem photographically by either raising his camera  to look down on the machinery, or lowering the camera to shoot upwards against the roof, and using his own lights to light the machinery whilst leaving the distracting background in darkness. For example in reality the Nordberg Crusher he photographed in 1969 was hemmed around with factory paraphernalia, but Sievers organised a thorough clean up of the area around the crusher and built a platform to elevate his camera, he then descended into the crusher with ladders to light its interior, emphasising its circular shape and its depth. As a bonus he wedged a dramatically lit lab-coated operator into the lower right hand corner for the final shot. The image then created its own graphic force and internal visual drama that could be used in any publicity situation. (According to Seivers himself the subsequent publication of the image in the financial press resulted in a multi-million contract for the company.)

Man and machine were Sievers’ quintessential subjects. To Sievers the essence of a good factory was not labour by itself, nor the technical process in isolation, but that ‘everything is as it should be’, with men directing machines efficiently, and each augmenting the other.[ii] In Sievers’ photographs the operators are functionally connected to the machine by their hands and their eyes — they peer through loupes, or pull levers, or intently measure the details of gigantic pieces of machinery with finely calibrated instruments. The image of a technician establishing the accurate positioning of a hydraulic pump crankshaft with a micro-alignment telescope, Quality Control at Vickers-Ruwolt, 1960, was published in a Vickers Ruwolt brochure. Running across the pages of the brochure in a kind of staccato modernist poem to industry were the words: “From a concentration of trained minds — emerges mechanical excellence … experience is combined with intelligence and work proceeds …from molten metal … to tools of high precision and great power …precision created out of precision … born in the toolroom … the climax—assembly and testing …”. [iii]

These sentiments of corporate pride were given an almost nationalistic resonance a few years later in another, even more constructed, shot for Vickers Ruwolt. In Gears for Mining Industry, 1967, an engineer, like an operatic hero ascending a stage mountain, climbs the teeth of a giant gear which has been especially raised upright by a crane, to steady with one hand and measure with the other the second half of the gear whose several tons has been suspended upside down above him.

During the 1970s and 1980s photographs such as these began their migration from the pages of company reports to the walls of art museums. In 1991 this image was one of four chosen by Australia Post to become a stamp to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Australian photography. It had become a fully fledged icon of Australia as an industrial nation, complementing other national icons such as Harold Cazneaux’s mighty gum tree The Spirit of Endurance, 1937, or Max Dupain’ Sunbaker, 1937, which encapsulated other aspects of the national myth — it’s land and its lifestyle.

However throughout his career there is a continuing visual tension in the respective role of worker and machine. His vision was clearly centred around the trained technician rather than the knockabout aussie manual worker, though he did love to photograph traditional workers who seem to have a heritage of noble labour going back centuries. For example in his 1962 image of a worker in the Miller Rope factory hefting the rough rope in his firm hands Sievers saw ‘the dignity of man … staring you straight in the face’.  In other images, in contrast, such as Finishing of Hitachi Brand Valves for the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, 1967 or Coal Mining Dredges, Yallourn, Victoria, 1956, the  technicians of the modern industrial age are squashed uncomfortably into tight corners by the looming bulk of the machine.

Workers by themselves, however, unconnected to any machine, rarely figure in Sievers photographs. He admits that his poor English initially made him scared of the human element, although later his bilingualism could be an advantage with Australia’s ethnically diversifying workforce. One of his rare photographs of workers by themselves and with their own autonomous personalities, is the crowd shot taken from an aerial point of view of the Shift Change at Kelly and Lewis, Springvale, 1949, where friendly workers smile and squint up at Sievers’ camera. Nowadays the idea of the dignity of manual labour has been grossly devalued, and corporations are unlikely anymore to be interested in commissioning photographs of their workers as a collective force. In this light the image now has an elegiac character, and reminds me of another Sievers’ aerial view with receding perspective, Old Frankfurt before its total destruction in World War 11, Germany, 1937 — both are photographs taken on the verge of destruction.

The metaphors of theatre or opera are the ones most commonly applied to Seivers’ industrial work. But other genres sometimes come to mind as well. For instance the dramatic side lighting used to apply strong shadows and bright sheens to the equipment in Lathe operator at Marweight, Burnley, Melbourne, 1968, not only isolates the lathe against a black background, but also gives the scene a B Grade Frankenstein appearance. Other shots, such as Sulphuric Acid Plant at Electrolytic Zinc, Hobart, 1959, could almost be described as industrial pornography as the gleaming steel tubes turn and curve in on themselves. (When it was reproduced full page and in full colour in the BHP book The Fabulous Hill, its caption was much more prosaic: ‘This new acid plant will bring Risdon’s capacity for the production of sulphuric acid to 170,000 tons a year.’)[iv]

As his career progressed the symbiotic relationship between his own ideals, forged in the Europe of the 1930s, and the reality of Australian industry swept up in the resources boom of the 1970s and 80s, began to pull apart. Sievers was always a political animal and proud of his past. In 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, he placed a photograph of a GI holding up the severed head of a Vietnamese in his studio showcase window at the Collins Street entrance of the Australia Arcade. He accompanied the image, which had been taken from LIFE magazine, with the following sign: ‘I Wolfgang Sievers: victim of Nazi persecution — prisoner of the Gestapo —volunteer of the AIF and RAAF 1939 — volunteer Australian Army 1942- 1945 PROTEST against the undeclared war — against conscription by lottery — against imprisonment of conscientious objectors whose just stand has been laid down at the Nuremberg trials to be the duty of all men.’ As a result of this protest Sievers estimates he lost 60% of his industrial clients.[v]

Although they are certainly full of drama, Sievers’ photographs are devoid of any sense of noise, smell, dirt or toxicity. Floors have been cleaned, workers’ hands washed, and their chins shaved. Clean lab coats have been put on and 500-watt lights carefully positioned to obscure the ugly backgrounds. As Sievers himself admitted ‘industrial photography is lying most of the time.’ Increasingly, Sievers became concerned with the pollution that was produced by the industries that his photographs pictured as being pollution free, with ‘everything clean and wonderful.’ The worse it got, he said, the nearer he got to the end of his days as a photographer.[vi] He was also concerned with the foreign ownership of Australian resources.[vii] During the 1980s he concentrated more and more on retrospectives of his own career, as well as other historical and political interests.

Sievers was much more than just an industrial photographer, however. The artists, designers, architects and photographers who fled to Melbourne to escape Nazism made enormous contributions to Melbourne’s growth as a cosmopolitan city, and Sievers photographed much of it. For instance he made advertisements for the Prestige company which produced textiles designed by Gerhard Herbst who, like Sievers had trained in Germany and fled to Melbourne in 1939.[viii] Herbst also designed the striking poster advertising New Visions in Photography, a 1953 exhibition Sievers and another émigré photographer, Helmut Newton, held promoting their work as commercial photographers. A boldly designed sign in the exhibition announced:  ‘the aim of this exhibition, the first of its kind in Melbourne, to demonstrate, through actual work done, the potential of industrial and fashion photography as a means of better promotion and bigger sales in business today.’[ix]

He also photographed the cutting edge modernist architecture of fellow émigrés Frederick Romberg, who arrived in Melbourne from Germany via Zurich in 1939 and also knew the influential expressionist architect Erich Mendelsohn; and Ernest Fooks who arrived in Melbourne in 1939 from Vienna where he was a progressive town planner and architect.[x] Like Sievers, both these architects saw their work as directly affecting the development of a socially progressive, technologically modern society. He photographed their work in the international architectural style, with dynamically receding horizontal lines, sternly orthogonal vertical lines, and cleanly isotropic spaces. These deeply-focused sharply-defined views of ideal modernist architecture could have been made at any time in any metropolis modernism had spread too— Europe, Japan, Canada, Brazil or Australia. Today they all seem uncannily empty and devoid of atmosphere, as though they are waiting for the future to happen

In the 1950s émigré architects designed many houses and modernist flats around the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Sievers photographed the house Fooks designed and built for himself in Caulfield in 1966. His photographs beautifully capture the sense of the house experienced as a procession of enclosed and semi-enclosed spaces and courtyards from street frontage through to the garden, all modulated by Japanese inspired timber screens, an undulating timber ceiling, and detailed joinery — a testimony to Fooks’ Viennese heritage.[xi]

But, just as he had parted company with industry, Sievers also found himself parting ways from the mainstream of Australian architecture and design, where the ideal, designed future he envisaged appeared increasingly derailed by thoughtless and crass developments, which could be just as effectively photographed quickly with small format cameras. In 1988 he was invited out of his semi-retirement to photograph the new Parliament House in Canberra, but he refused because he did not approve of the design by the US architects Mitchell/Giurgola. Increasingly looking to the past, Sievers travelled to Berlin and Paris in 1989 to research war criminals who had also emigrated to Australia. Whilst there he briefly rediscovered his excitement in architecture as he photographed I. M. Pei’s newly opened pyramid entrance to the Louvre, with its spectacular and explicitly engineered glass walls.

Sievers’ work is now firmly ensconced in the nation’s image of its past. Art museums and libraries had consistently purchased his key images from the early 1970s onwards, and the National Gallery of Australia toured a major retrospective nationally in 1991 and 1992. In 2004 the National Library of Australia completed the purchase of his complete archive of 51,700 negatives and transparencies and 13,700 prints, which they are now in the process of digitising.[xii] His images, which were once about creating an ideal modern future for Australia, are now subsiding into the nation’s official past. The irony is that the future his photographs so keenly anticipated never actually happened. The wealth and prosperity they predicted certainly came, but the sense of social balance, equality and honesty, where ‘everything is as it should be’, which they were attempting to create, never really did. We can see that clearly now, but Sievers himself could feel it, twenty-five years ago.

Martyn Jolly

[i] Wolfgang Sievers, Wolfgang Sievers: Contemporary Photographers Australia, Writelight, 1998, np.

[ii] Photographers of Australia: Dupain, Sievers, Moore, Film Australia, 1992.

[iii] Vickers Ruwolt Proprietary Limited, Melbourne, Australia, nd, np.

[iv] Alfred Heintz, The Fabulous Hill, BHP, 1960, np.

[v] Daniel Palmer, ‘Wolfgang Sievers’, Flash, Centre for Contemporary Photography Newsletter, June-Spetmeber 2004, pp10-11.

[vi] Photographers of Australia

[vii] Helen Ennis, ‘Wolfgang Sievers’, Photographers of Australia: Dupain, Sievers, Moore, Film Australia, 1992, np.

[viii] Anne Brennan, ‘A Philosophical Approach to Design: Gerhard Herbst and Fritz Janeba’, in The Europeans : emigré artists in Australia, 1930-1960, (ed) Roger Butler, National Gallery of Australia, 1997.

[ix] Helen Ennis, ‘Blue Hydrangeas: Four Emigré Photographers’, in The Europeans : emigré artists in Australia, 1930-1960, p105.

[x] Conrad Hamann, ‘Frederick Romberg and the Problem of European Authenticity’, in The Europeans : emigré artists in Australia, 1930-1960.

[xi] Harriet Edquist, Ernest Fooks: Architect, RMIT, 2001, p20.

[xii] Linda Groom, ‘the Dignity of Man as a Worker; The Sievers Archive’, National Library of Australia News, January 2003, np.

Ten Series/106 Photographs

Mathew Sleeth, ‘Ten Series/106 Photographs’, review in Photofile 82, 2007, p76

Matthew Sleeth Aperture 2007

Maybe there are two ways to present groups of pictures: either as stories or as series. Matthew Sleeth’s picture book Tour of Duty from 2002 told the story of Australia’s mission to East Timor in wonderfully ironic pictures with powerfully centrifugal compositions — and became an instant classic. Since then, however, Sleeth has increasingly used simple ideas to assemble series of deadpan pictures, which he has either published as limited edition artists books, or exhibited as large scale installations.  Ten of these series are gathered together for this handsome and rewarding book, under a title that doffs its hat to the patron saint of conceptual photography Ed Ruscha.

In most contemporary photobooks shots such as a red fire extinguisher wedged between two blue seats on a train, or an indoor plant’s drooping leaves illuminated by the same grimy sun that also picks out the smoke drifting from an unextinguished cigarette, would be used as occasional cutaways to add a psychological ambience of claustrophobia or ennui to the photographer’s unfolding drama. But in this book we find them in the two series 10 Fire Extinguishers and 13 Houseplants, where they can be nothing other than themselves.

Like countless photographers before him Sleeth is a traveller, a voyeuristic cruiser thorough the globalised world of Japan, China, Europe and Australia. His subject is the everyday, and everything about this book is understated, cool and downplayed. But his conceptual series are not as formally objective or archivally rigorous as in the ‘Düsseldorf school’ inspired by Bernd and Hilla Becher — Sleeth’s series are idiosyncratic, provisional and incomplete, and his compositions fractured and fleeting. Nor is his vision of our contemporary corporate reality as dystopian as other photographers — it is not as overheated as Wolfgang Tillmans, say, or as sardonic as Martin Parr. This is not only a humanistic book, it is also a happy book.

It opens with a short series Women in Uniform. These portraits, the only direct ones in the whole book, are not of your usual exotic Japanese cyborgs, but real people who just happen to be wearing uniforms, some of them endearingly scruffy. It ends with a series Feet shot on a Tokyo subway. Similarly these images of dislocated shoes and knees and vinyl are full of personality and warmth.

Sometimes Sleeth’s conceptual conceits for his series work very effectively. For instance his series Red China is linked together by a political pun on the colour red — the colour of communism but also the colour of capitalistic triumph used by corporations such as coco-cola. At other times his conceits can’t sustain the series. Photographing all the signs in the Louvre pointing tourists to the Mona Lisa might have seemed like a cute idea on the day, but it makes for a low point in the book.

The high point of the book is the series Kawaii Baby, in which a cavalcade of Japanese smile and laugh and coo at Sleeth’s toddler daughter, who only ever appears as a puff of golden hair at the bottom of some of the frames. Many individual photographs are tour de forces of compositional complexity combined with restrained emotion. For instance in Pictured #36 a window reflection overlays a network of Christmas lights over a private scene between two people, all superimposed onto a lonely railway platform.

Martyn Jolly

Panic and paranoia? The law and photography in Australia

‘Panic and Paranoia: Photography and the Law’, (with Katherine Giles), Photofile 80, 2007, pp22—25.

Martyn Jolly and Katherine Giles

Every day photographers are experiencing the effects of one of the great contemporary paradoxes of the medium. Never before have photographs been so easy to make and distribute, as millions of digital files are created with mobile phones or digital cameras and uploaded onto the web or distributed electronically. Yet never before have individual photographers felt themselves so inhibited in what they can photograph, where they can photograph and the messages they can put into their photographs. Whether these inhibitions are internalised as a vague feeling that certain types of photography may now be ‘inappropriate’, or whether they come directly from people telling them that photography is ‘not allowed here’, they are all underpinned by an ill-defined sense that the law has somehow changed in relation to photography. Photographers’ blogs are tangled with long threads of discussion about what may or may not be allowed, and are bulging with stories of police, security and members of the public stopping them from taking photographs. As the Sydney photographer, Andrew Nemeth, says on his excellent photographers’ rights website: “Photography is not a crime. Many photographers are fed up with being treated as if they were creeps”.[1]

But how much has the law actually changed? And how much else is now under threat in this current climate of panic and paranoia over morality and security?

PRIVACY

In Australia, there is not yet any legal cause of action for a ‘breach of privacy’. Existing privacy laws only refer to the use of personal data by organisations and governments. Nor is the taking of a photograph for the purposes of art, social documentation or as a hobby a commercial use, even if the photograph is later sold. So their subjects are not ‘models’ with the right to ‘release’ their image to the photographer for a particular use. Instead many other laws regulate the area, including: passing-off laws; trespass laws; confidentiality agreements; nuisance and harassment laws; obscenity laws; stalking laws and laws dealing with filming for an indecent purpose.

Denise O’Rourke is currently being sued by two girls under trade practice laws over their portrayal in his documentary Cunnamulla because, they are claiming, he entered into a misleading agreement with them about the subject of the interviews he wanted to do with them. The celebrity model Lara Bingle is using defamation laws to sue the men’s magazine Zoo Weekly for publishing bikini shots of her from earlier on in her career, with the addition of smutty captions.[2] Several men have been charged under offensive behavior laws with using their mobile phones to photograph topless bathers on beaches.

All of these existing laws should be enough to regulate irresponsible photographers, so that the situation in Australia can remain as it currently stands, where, in words of Justice Dowd, “a person … does not have a right not to be photographed”.[3] But nonetheless there is clearly a trend towards a general restriction on the right of photographers to document their world and the people in it. For instance Justice Michael Kirby has argued that extending the law in Australia to protect the ‘honour, reputation and personal privacy of individuals’ would be consistent with international developments in human rights law: “In recent years, stimulated in part by invasions of individual privacy, including by the media, deemed unacceptable to society, several jurisdictions have looked again at the availability under the common law of an actionable wrong of invasion of privacy.”[4]

Since 2002 the technological combination of mobile phone cameras and the internet has become a socially potent combination. This, mixed with publicity about the use of cameras as an integral tool to the sexual assaults on Diane Brimble aboard a cruise ship and a teenager at Werribee,  has led to widespread public concern about photography and pedophilia, pornography, immorality and misogyny. This is having an effect on photographers at large.

In early 2005 the Brisbane Courier Mail found a website with non-pornographic, non-offensive photographs of children playing at Southbank on it, they created an unsubstantiated panic that international child pornography rings had linked to the site. They hadn’t, and ultimately no action was taken. In Victoria, a site with close-ups of schoolboy rowers, which had been linked to by other pornographic sites, was also found.[5] Subsequently, several urban councils attempted, unsuccessfully, to use their municipal powers to stop parents photographing on their sports fields and council beaches. [6] Shortly after, Surf Life Saving Australia called for a complete ban on pictures of its 40,000 young members without the written permission of parents. Although they subsequently backed down, they initially claimed that their young members should be able to “reasonably expect” privacy, even if they were in public areas. Presumably unaware of any irony, they went on to say that they intended to advise their staff to record the appearance, attire and car registration numbers of anybody they spotted breaking this rule.[7]

But the Summary Offences Act 1988 (NSW) already bans photographing a person in a state of undress or engaged in a private act for the purposes of sexual gratification without their consent. Other jurisdictions prohibit taking photographs of private intimate activities in private personal places such as toilets or change rooms. And specific laws to prevent the new lewd uses suggested by camera phones, such as upskirting, are being bought in by various states, which the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General have now agreed to review and regularize. [8]

Of course, taking lewd pictures of people who might reasonably expect to be unobserved is indefensible, but the tenor of the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General’s discussion paper of August 2005, Unauthorised Photographs on the Internet and Ancillary Privacy Issues, implied a wider drift towards a general right for people to control their image, even when they are taken in public and are not offensive. The discussion paper suggested:

Publishing images of a person without their consent removes their freedom to choose how to present themselves to the world. Some may argue that consent is implicit because the activity is in a public place in full view of people. On the other hand, filming results in a permanent record that can be used in many ways. It is natural that where people are aware they are being filmed, they can adjust their behaviour accordingly. If a person has no knowledge they are being filmed they have no way of reducing the intrusion.[9]

In the new environment of hyperdistribution, this argument runs, the lack of control a subject has over the subsequent use of their image has changed the unposed photograph from simply being a candid image, to being an intrusive act. Arguments such as this are a threat to photographers. For instance one of the medium’s most celebrated genres is street photography, which has produced many masterpieces that have illuminated our sense of ourselves as citizens sharing urban space. In Susan Sontag’s words the street photographer is “an armed version of the solitary walker, reconnoitring, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.” Is this time-honoured romantic alienation about to become criminalized? Possibly. For instance, whilst shooting a couple of bathers sleeping on the sands of Bondi Beach, in implicit homage to his father’s iconic Sunbaker (1937), Rex Dupain suddenly found himself surrounded by four police officers who questioned him for 25 minutes. “Lifeguards and the police are taking the law into their own hands” he complained, “they regard anyone with a camera as a potential pervert. We sit at home and watch close-ups of people lives on disturbing television reality shows but someone taking pictures at the beach is seen as a threat. Our days as a free society are over.” [10]

Police and security guards are not the only ones taking it upon themselves to constrain photographers, irrespective of any law, concerned parents are also getting jittery. In preparing for her exhibition of portraits of her son’s soccer team, Under Twelves, at the Ground Floor gallery in Balmain in late 2005, Ella Dreyfus was scrupulous in making sure all parents knew what she was doing. She showed them a sample of the style of her shots, and all agreed to her project enthusiastically. “Young boys are beautiful; their mothers know this, but does society allow us to acknowledge their beauty?” asked Dreyfus. But a few days before the show some parents apparently got nervous at the prospect of her portraits inadvertently inciting pedophilia, and Dreyfus suddenly found herself requested to withdraw two images from the exhibition, and mark six not for sale.

In September 2006 an amateur photographer called Jodie snapped a young man sitting on the steps at Flinders Street Station. He got up and demanded five dollars from her. When she said she didn’t have five dollars he demanded the film, when she told him it was a digital camera things got ugly, and she finally deleted one photograph in front of him before walking away, with him hurling abuse at her. The other shot she kept and uploaded to Flickr, but with his face blacked out. She asked her friends from the Flickr community: ‘Did I do the wrong thing? Should I have uploaded at all? Should I have left the original photo?’[11]

She had attempted to resolve all these dilemmas by erasing her subject’s face in a half guilty, half defiant, compromise to his supposedly violated ‘right to privacy’, while maintaining her own right to photograph the people with who she shares public space. This botched economic transaction between subject and photographer, and its clumsy resolution as the publication of a faceless figure, follows the rising logic of our contemporary visual culture — the logic of the celebrity image.

The celebrity’s commercial capital is their desirable lifestyle, and their enviable body, all encapsulated in their instantly recognizable face. So it is in their interest to regulate and control the production, interpretation and distribution of their image as closely as possible. There are now at least 30 paparazzi in Sydney, and they are at war with celebrities.[12] The frequent incidents between them, such as paparrazi squirting Heath Ledger with water pistols on the red carpet of the Brokeback Mountain premiere, after he allegedly spat at them during the shooting of Candy, are more than crass paparazzi ‘overstepping the mark’, they are symptoms of a fight for the control of a valuable commodity — the celebrity’s face. As one of the paparazzi succinctly put it, “It’s the price of fame, my son. If we stop taking his picture, his price goes down. This is give-and-take. It’s fame. It’s the name of the game. You give us some of your private life because you earn so much money. That’s the way it works”.[13]

Celebrities are applying pressure for a ‘right of privacy’ in Australia for their own purposes. By invoking such a spurious ‘right’ they hope to garner public sympathy for the control and regulation of the supply of their image, but it is harassment and defamation laws that they actually use against photographers. The most famous altercations are between Jamie Fawcett and Nicole Kidman. In early 2005 Kidman took out an interim restraining order against him, claiming he had harassed her and endangered her life by chasing her across Sydney at high speeds.[14] For her wedding, however, she established a temporary truce with the paparazzi, while preemptively devaluing any of their pictures by distributing an official wedding photograph world-wide a few seconds after the ceremony was over. But this New Year holiday season Fawcett and Kidman were at it again, with Kidman complaining of harassment to the Bateman’s Bay police and leaving the country early after he, and a Channel Ten news crew, followed her convoy to the South Coast.[15]

These days everybody is potentially a celebrity, however briefly, and everybody’s face has, at least potentially, a value. Fantasies of instant celebrity are regularly enacted in reality TV shows, and the world of the celebrity can suddenly open to those who have unexpectedly found themselves heroes in the public eye. For instance, the trapped Beaconsfield miners reportedly discussed who should play themselves in the inevitable movie of their rescue (Russell Crowe and Heath Ledger), and the settlement of their deal with Eddie McGuire was delayed while they were locked in negotiation with mine management and the coroner over who would own the rights to video footage the pair took to aide the rescuers during their confinement.

As a result of the pervasiveness of celebrity culture, if we are photographed in public we instinctively tend to think slightly less like citizens mingling in the town square, and slightly more like celebrities caught out on the town. We now carry our faces into public more as our commodity, something we own, something we have carefully grown, groomed and cultivated, something we can always potentially make money from. Within this logic the face is less an interface, and more a logo, a stamped unchangeable rebus of the self, a trademark always potentially on the verge of infringement.

Although there is no automatic right of privacy in Australia, the controllers of any commercial or government premises can make any rules they like as a condition of entry into their property. As the town square becomes the shopping mall, more and more public space is becoming privatised. Pedestrians are no longer citizens experiencing democratic interactions, but consumers having regulated retail experiences. Shopping centre owners want to keep their malls feeling lively and exciting, but they also know that shoppers want, above all else, to feel comfortable and protected, and this falls to automated surveillance systems and private security guards, who can make any rules they like. While the majority of people welcome blanket CCTV coverage because it makes them feel protected[16], self-expressive photography by ordinary individuals is treated with suspicion because its motivations and destinations are not obvious, and it can’t immediately be recuperated into the shopping experience.

For instance in July this year the Southgate shopping centre in Melbourne erected warning signs featuring a camera crossed out with a bright red slash. In one incident a Chubb security guard stopped the grandmother Val Moss from taking photographs from the public footpath “because”, he said, “of the terrorism overseas”. In response her camera club, the Knox Photographic Society staged a demonstration with over 100 photographers. A spokesperson for the shopping centre said; “There are safety, security, privacy and copyright issues which need to be considered with all photography and filming within the centre, and we reserve the right to ask people to stop filming or photographing if it is deemed inappropriate.” [17] No, no, no and no. Safety is not compromised by raising a camera to your eye, nor will security be breached by hand held snaps. There is no right of privacy in public space, so why should there be a right of privacy in the ‘new’ public space of the mall, and copyright is not infringed by taking photographs that will only include goods on display or advertising signs as incidental parts of a general scene.

The real reason for these kinds of blanket bans is to restrict the behavior of people using the mall. They attempt to focus the possible behaviors of customers to a narrow spectrum around the core function of shopping – buying, look into shop windows, recharging on coffee and cake, and feeling protected. This narrow band of profitable behavior excludes all other non-corporate behavior previously acceptable in public, such as self-expression.

SEDITION

Towards the end of 2005 the Federal Government introduced the Anti-Terrorism Act (No 2) 2005 (Cth) containing new sedition laws. To date the laws have not been used to prevent artists from expressing their views. But they could be, and in other countries they have been. The new laws go beyond the traditional definition of sedition as crime of intending to overthrow the government or interfere with elections. They broaden it so that it is an offence to simply urge violence in the community, urge interference in parliamentary elections, urge overthrow of the Government or Constitution or urge someone to assist the enemy or assist those engage in armed hostilities.

This shift of focus towards urging other people to commit seditious acts comes without a clear definition of what urging actually is. The courts will have to define what urging actually means when a case comes before them. In advice to Peter Garrett MP, Peter Gray SC stated that the term urging may, “cover indirect ‘urging’, by way of analogy, or dramatisation, or imagery, or metaphor, or allegory, or allusion, or any of the myriad devices and techniques available to a creative artist.”[18] The work of many artists would already fit within this definition, and the vague language creates an uncertain environment that questions the very nature of freedom of expression in Australia. Until a case comes before the courts, the practical effect of these laws on photographers remains unknown, but the chilling effect is already clear. The ability of photographers to create art that has a direct political message is at the cornerstone of a democratic society. Can art that mimics or comments on terrorism or questions the decisions of Government really be terrorism or sedition?

In 2005 the Australian Law Reform Commission examined the new laws and released a Discussion Paper and recommendations which explicitly recognised the concerns of the Australian arts community and the potential chilling effect on artists. The problem is that the sedition laws do not create a clear distinction between legitimate dissent, including the expression of dissent through of works of art, and actions which should be of concern to national security. This all adds to a climate of fear where the actions of a photographer in simply taking photographs, of, say, a public building or an industrial landscape, immediately becomes suspicious. The eventual implications of the new sedition laws on the Australian arts community are unclear, but the chilling effect is already upon us, and is flowing on to the wider social environment. When a photographer is stopped from taking photographs in a public place by a police officer or a security guard ‘because of the terrorism overseas’, this not only affects all other photographers, it also affects the way every one of us experiences our public places and shared spaces.

CONCLUSION

We live in a world where more is happening on camera, from everyday trips to the shops to orchestrated sexual assaults, yet more is happening off camera as well, from remote detention facilities to intensive industrial farming practices. However this polarisation of visibility is not really being defined by either the freedom of speech or the right to privacy, but by rules of access made by governments and corporations for their own purposes. In this context we need more photographs taken by thoughtful, curious, inquisitive, dallying, dilettantish photographers, armed with nothing more than an ordinary desire to represent their world, not less. But in order to be an effective mode of public speech photographers need to free themselves from the insidious inhibitions, vaguely wrapped up in concerns about intrusion and sedition, that are currently constraining them every time they lift the camera to their eye.

Martyn Jolly is Head of Photomedia at the Australian National University

Katherine Giles is a solicitor with the Arts Law Centre of Australia

[2] ‘Men’s Magazine Is Smutty: Judge’ The Canberra Times 9 December 2006 p12

[3] R v Sotheren [2001] NSWSC 204 (26 March 2001) paragraph 25 http://wwwaustliieduau/au/cases/nsw/supreme_ct/2001/204html [date accessed?]

[4] The Australian 10 July 2003 pB01

[5] ‘Unauthorised Photographs On The Internet And Ancillary Privacy Issues’ Discussion Paper Standing Committee of Attorneys-General August 2005 paragraphs 7–12

[6] Amanda Hodge ‘Fear Kills Joy Of Watching Children Play’ The Weekend Australian 26–27 February 2005 p8

[7] ‘Surf Body Call For Photo Ban’ Sydney Morning Herald 5 November 2005

[8] ‘Upskirting To Become A Crime’ Sydney Morning Herald 28 July 2006 np

[9] ‘Unauthorised Photographs On The Internet And Ancillary Privacy Issues’ Discussion Paper Standing Committee of Attorneys-General August 2005 paragraph 40

[10] ‘Dupain’s Beach Snaps Draw Police Focus’ DD McNicoll Weekend Australian 9–10 December 2006 p10

[12] ‘Snap Pack’ Dominic Cadden Sun Herald 13 February 2005 p14

[13] Quoted in the Australian Law Reform Commission issues paper number 31 Review of Privacy cited in ‘Shooting Star’ Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend 1 July 2006 p26

[14] ‘Best starring role goes to the beak in Kidman’s paparazzi drama’ Justin Norrie Sydney Morning Herald 12 February 2005Sydney Morning Herald p13

[15] ‘Nicole cuts her hols short’ The Daily Telegraph 2 January 2007 np

[16] Wells Helene A Allard Troy Wilson Paul Crime and CCTV in Australia: Understanding the Relationship Centre for Applied Psychology and Criminology Bond University Australia (2006)

[17] ‘Picture this — if you’re allowed: city puts photo ban in the frame’ Carmel Egan The Sunday Age 30 July 2006 p3

Passion for Research

In order to respond to the two words in Gael’s title for today, ‘passion’ and ‘research’, I have decided on an experiment: to discuss a series of photographs which I have encountered in various archives. Most of these photographs are insignificant in themselves, not great works of art, but they have had something in them that I have found interesting, and which has sent me off on a tangent in my research. Because of these tangents, my research trajectory since I started my career at the NGA has followed a somewhat unexpected path, and has covered a lot of ground. To show you just how unexpected I will start my talk with some photographs I found myself getting excited about several months ago in the State Library of New Wales.

Margery Ectoplasm

Margery Seance

These are some photographs reproduced in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. The photographs are of some animal lung. This lung has been cut into the shape of a hand, with the animal’s trachea serving as a wrist, and the spongey lung tissue cut into fingers. This crude hand had recently been compressed into a woman’s vagina, and then expelled during a Spiritualist séance. It has been flash photographed in the dark by a psychic investigator, a person called Eric Dingwall, who was trying to establish whether or not the woman, called Margery Crandon, had the power to produce ectoplasm, a psychic matter extruded from the other side; and whether this wasn’t the hand of a psychic entity, a spirit manifesting itself to us from the other side of the veil of death.

As I eagerly looked at this photograph I had one of those moments, I thought ‘how did I get here’. I am an atheist, a rationalist, a sceptic, and a materialist. I have a house in the suburbs and a good job teaching photography at a respectable university. What am I doing getting excited about this photograph? I hoped that none of my colleagues would ever find out what I got up to on my research trips.

It was a bunch of photographs that led me down this trail.

When I first started at the NGA I was a callow graduate of an art school, rather than an art history department in a university. I had been trained to think of myself as a contemporary art photographer, though I had also developed a passionate, intimate and, I thought at the time, privileged, love for the history of photography, thanks to my practical art school training. I think what interested me mostly about photography at the time was it’s power as a historical medium, its power to palpably contain history.

What I realized when I began to work here was that this power was articulated by a machinery, mechanisms of memory and forgetting that operated every day through the processes of selection, accessioning, curating, cataloguing, researching, categorising, displaying, and publishing. And as a kid curator I was a small cog in this vast machinery producing the past.

For the next decade or so my research as an artist was all about the relationship between personal, micro moments of time and memory which were residual in individual photographs, and the public, macro uses of photography for master narratives of nation, history or ideology. It was also about how photography had been used to bind personal affect into collective ideology.

In the Australian War Memorial

In The Australian War Memorial

Whilst working at the gallery I made one series of art photographs, which were curated into a touring show by Geoffrey Batchen after I had left the gallery and returned to Sydney. They were called In The Australia War Memorial, and I was able to print them because a friend let me sneak into the Canberra School of Art after hours without the staff knowing. These are simple snaps of the displays at the war memorial. But I was interested in catching threads or shards of experience, seen here in the eyes of the soldiers in the photographs.

Wonderful Pictures

Installation

Wonderful Pictures

Installation

This led me, after a few other series of photographs, to a large series called Wonderful Pictures, which were copied from the pages of Australiana picture books. I skimmed over the curved pages of the opened books with a view camera and adjusted the camera movements so the images dilated out. Some of the prints were purchased by the National Gallery and are now in their collection.

Australia a Camera Study

Australia a Camera Study

By this time I was specifically interested in Australian propaganda, and the construction of Australian identities. Many of the books I photographed were produced by a publisher called Oswald Ziegler. He used the designers Gert Sellheim and Douglas Annand, whose poster work is in this collection. Other books were by Frank Hurley who published vast quantities of Australiana in the 1950s. And it was whilst looking at a book by Frank Hurley, Australia a Camera Study in the NGA research library that I had a little epiphany. The NGA library had brought the book second hand, and it had obviously originally been brought as a gift, probably by an English migrant to send back home. Still between its pages, and still probably there now upstairs in the library, were two pieces of toilet paper. On the toilet paper the original purchaser had traced his, or her, own personal, chthonic, quotidian routes and history of inhabitation. They have written: ‘Arthur, Marjorie’s brother lives just off the picture…This is where Jim Miller has his block of land — where we nearly built a Duplex….I pass along this road every time I go to White’s.” and “My Ferry Run”. Hurley photographs were banal, rhetorical, yet another iteration of his nationalist jingoism, yet two pieces of toilet paper can turn them into personal expressions of reconnection, whilst they remain, of course, essentially propaganda images.

Whilst I had been at the NGA I had been involved with the acquisition of some albums of WW11 propaganda photographs by Edward Cranstone, which I had exhaustively researched for an article in Photofile. So this interest in Hurley, and war propaganda, and Australian identity, and masculinity naturally led me to the First World War. I began to be very interested in propaganda photography, because propaganda is all about eliciting intense personal emotion, but in a collective context.

School Children at an Exhibition

I began to research a series of enormous propaganda exhibitions that were held in Britain in the last years of WW1. I was particularly fascinated by a series of composite murals which were produced by a company called Raines and Co.

Canadian Vimy Ridge in Paris

Vimy ridge straight

Vimy ridge component

British Dreadnoughts of the Battlefield

Australian ‘The Raid’ at Raines & Co.

These photographs were montages, and thus in one sense fake, but they were also spectacular, and some of their components were certainly at least taken on the battlefield, so they also had a real affective power for viewers desperate for images of the Front. In my PhD I wrote about how propagandists managed these competing terms of ‘the fake’ and ‘the spectacular’ in the context of an emerging mass media. I discovered that in terms of an individual’s response to the photograph, the two ideas — the true and the fake — were very labile indeed. A certain kind of affective truth can be orchestrated by a photograph.

You don’t have to spend too long amongst the visual culture of WW1 before you begin to get a bit disturbed. It is shot through with the uncanny. There is a real fascination with strange new industrial forms, particularly bomb blasts, by all the war photographers.

The Canadians ‘snapped’ bomb blasts like exotic butterflies. And Frank Hurley gave them allegorical meaning.

Canada in Khaki

Hurley Death’s Head

I had another mini epiphany in the storeroom of National Museum of Film Photography and Television in Bradford, England. I was there with my colleague Denise Ferris. She was researching an obscure nineteenth century printing technique, and I was looking through two official presentation albums of Australian War Photographs. Then I came across this page taken in the Middle East, probably by Hurley. The caption is “A wonderful cloud-like face hanging above the ancient town like a beautiful guardian angel”.

I knew Hurley liked his clouds, adding them as a kitsch benediction to his scenes. Since I had spent so much time rephotographing his books for Wonderful Pictures I also knew that in his later years he often used the same cloud twice. I also knew that the composite allegorical kitsch of the propagandists had been so pervasive that it had even influenced the high faluting Pictorialists. At the end of the War Harold Cazneaux, for instance, made this patriotic picture Peace after war, and memories, which brings all the tropes of the European battlefield composites back home to Australia. This picture is in the collection of the National Gallery.

Passchaendael

Cloud

Morning After the Battle of Passchendael

Australia a Camera Study

Australia a Camera Study

Harold Cazneaux, peace After War, and Memories

Presentation album

But I had never before seen a cloud so spiritually allegorised in such an official context as an expensive presentation album. My interest was piqued because the cloud wasn’t your usual piece of Hurley flummery, but a quite ordinary, innocent everyday cloud that just happened to be in the right spot at the right time. My interest in what was obviously a pervasive Spiritualism was further piqued when I read about Mrs Ada Deane in a book by Jay Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning: the Great war in European cultural history. Deane was a spirit photographer who in 1922 supposedly photographed the spirits of fallen soldiers above the crowds at London’s Cenotaph during the two minutes silence. From him I learnt that Spiritualism, and communication with the dead through séances, enjoyed a huge revival after WW1 as a kind of mass mourning ritual.

Ada Deane, Two Minute’s Silence

I had to think of something to do whilst I was in London for three months at the Australia Council studio, so I decided to see if I could find any spirit photography. I began a  research relationship with that wily old lady, Mrs Ada Emma Deane. In London I went to the Society for Psychical Research, and from there to their archives in the Cambridge University Library. Calling up all the Deane files I was rewarded with four huge albums containing over 3000 spirit photographs.

Deane album page

Deane photograph

Deane photograph

I found turning these pages a moving experience, not because of the fake cottonwool spirits, but for the genuine looks of yearning on the faces of the sitters.

From these album pages I produced a body of work called Faces of the Living Dead, where I paid Cambridge to make slides for me and I scanned the slide and burrowed into them in Photoshop.

Faces of the Living Dead

Faces of the Living Dead

Faces of the Living Dead

Faces of the Living Dead (Deane self-portrait)

In doing this work of re-visualizing the archive I continually came up against Mrs Deane herself. Most of the other archives I had worked with had been anonymous or institutional, but Mrs Deane’s personality still inhabited this one. I had to come to an agreement with her ghost by writing her biography, which I published in the form of an artist’s book

Deane and Barlow family.

This is an image of Deane and her daughter and their two spirit guides, along with one of her early patrons, Fred Barlow and his wife. When he died Barlow left his huge collection of spirit photographs to the British Library. They were annotated by Eric Dingwall, the person who had photographed the animal-lung ectoplasm of Margery in the early 1930s. When the British Library decided to publish a book on this collection they asked me to do it, so I re-immersed myself in the bizarre world of the Spiritualists.

I went all the way back to 1848, to the beginnings of spirit photography in the US, and track it all the way forward to the 1930s, to the forensic documentation of ectoplasm which I showed at the beginning of this talk. Along the way my colleague Helen Ennis told me about an Australian album of spiritualist carte-de-visites from the 1870s, and I’m delighted to say that this album is now in the collection of the NGA. It features many of the Spiritualist celebrities and some of the classic spirit photographs of the nineteenth century. It also illustrates the global trade in carte-de-visites that existed at the time.

Mrs Slater

Mr Guppy, Mr Williams and spirit

Miss Fairlamb (Mrs Melon)

Miss Georgina Houghton

Whilst always remaining a materialist and a sceptic I felt I understood the Spiritualist’s relationship to photography. Their use of the process of photography was just a heightened, exaggerated version of our own private uses of personal snapshots. They helped me understand that belief was something which could be invested in the photograph, as much as received from it. When they went through the ritual of posing for their spirit photographs, which was often accompanied by a laying on of hands onto the photographic plate and a saying of prayers over the camera, they entered into a kind of thaumaturgic contract with the photographer, and through them with the medium itself. As the spirit photograph was taken, and the film supposedly exposed to impressions from both the invisible spectrum and the psychic spectrum, the sitters engaged their own processes of memory as they tried to contact their loved ones with their minds. When they entered the alchemical cave of the darkroom and saw their own face well-up from the emulsion, to be joined by another face which, as often as not, they recognised, their belief was sealed by this thud of recognition they felt in their chests.

Spirit photography brings to the fore the performative, transactional nature of the photographic act, it also links the photographic image very close to the presence of the body. In the bizarre spiritualist imagination ectoplasm was closely related to photographic emulsion, it was a kind of bio/techno membrane between two worlds that was either able to form itself into proto limbs of spirit beings, or take the impressions of images projected from the other side. Although bizarre I can also see these séances as a kind of overheated performance about the power of the photograph, and its ability to directly connect us with bodies from the past.

In one sense these mediums are just tricksters, but in another sense they are conducting a kind of cathartic performance art, producing indexical photographic evidence that the dead are still present in the form a ectoplasmic images. But isn’t that what all photographs are, ectoplasmic images of the dead?  I’m not the first person to say that incidentally, the first person to say that was Roland Barthes.

The Spiritualists chose to believe in fake photographs, but isn’t the truth of all photographs a much a communal consensus as anything else? We only have to think of digital images, that ten years ago were feared as threatening photographic truth, which today have unproblematically created their own digital truth and are blithely consumed every day.

So I think all my research has been in one way or another about the palpable existence of the past in the present through the materiality of the photograph. It’s been about photographic truth as a collective act, rather than an inherent ontological trait. And it’s been about how individuals make private meaning through collective rituals.

My art and my writing have always fed each other. Initially I printed Faces of the Living Dead digitally on gloss photo paper, but I was never really happy with them. But since getting into ectoplasm with all it phlegmy materiality, which historically, besides being offal was also lengths of chiffon, I have decided to reprint some images onto silk-satin. This will happen in a few weeks. So on it goes.

I am also now working on the ACT Bushfire Memorial, which involves making some very public glass columns, out of some very private and precious family snapshots which I scanned during two extraordinary days of collective memory for Canberra’s bushfire victims, so my concerns are continuing.

Out of Time: Essays Between Photography & Art

‘Out of Time: essays between photography and art’ by Blair French, review in Photofile 81, 2007, p76.

Out of Time: Essays Between Photography & Art
Blair French
Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, 2006
$25, 120 pp B/W  illustrations

In the 1990s Blair French was a curator at the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP) and managing editor of Photofile, before completing a PhD at Sydney University on the photograph’s central role within contemporary art. These sixteen short essays were mostly written following on from that PhD. Some were originally introductory catalogue essays, some were reviews, and a sequence of five, which are the most substantial in the collection, were commissioned by the CACSA for its Broadsheet. French not only analyses the key tendencies currently defining art photography, but also urges a continuing criticality on behalf of us, the viewers. He does not mean the ability to identify ‘good’ and ‘bad’ photographic genres, but a self-reflexive discrimination towards each specific photograph within its historical moment.

And this is a historical moment of posts: post postmodern simulacra and appropriation, post poststructuralist theories of representation, post the supposed threats of the digital revolution, and post the easy comforts of naïve humanism. But what we are not post, as this collection makes clear, is the reality of social experience, and the privileged indexical connection photography maintains to the real. At the same time, more than ever photography has become a heaving mass of imagery merged and flattened into a representational homogeneity which tends to commodify the image into banal spectacle. It is against this background that French tries to throw into critical relief the practices of a variety of contemporary  Australian and New Zealand photographers.

The essays concentrate on two groups of photographers. Initially he looks at those, such as Selina Ou, Darren Sylvester and Anne Zahalka, who work in the familiar style which has dominated art photography recently — the large, singular, seamless, hermetic, constructed pictorial scene. Later, he expands his attention to those who, in various ways, reprocess the direct presence of history, memory and death in the photograph, such as Lyndell Brown & Charles Green, Silvia Velez, or the New Zealand street-photographer Peter Black.

He writes in intelligent support of many of these photographers, but has thoughtful criticisms to make of others. For instance, although Deborah Paauwe’s photographs of sexualised adolescent girls knowingly mobilize a potent set of photographic conventions and social histories, for French they fail to connect with any tangible experience, so they ultimately don’t make any real trouble for the viewer, as they should. In another nicely nuanced reading of Selina Ou, French is worried by the stultifyingly conventional sense of detachment the photographs relentlessly give to their subjects. He occasionally widens his focus to encompass photography’s institutions. For instance he is critical of the installation of Trente Parke’s show Minutes to Midnight  at the ACP, where he finds the artist’s tendency to ‘optical hyperbole’ exacerbated by the overbearing theatricality of the hang which overcooked it into mere visual distraction.

Although I thought his rather forced discussions of artists like Derek Kreckler and Geoff Kleem needn’t have been reprinted, with perhaps more space spent on reproductions, this collection establishes Fernch as a serious thinker and an astute reader of the contemporary Australian photography.

Martyn Jolly

Martyn Jolly is Head of Photomedia at the Australian National University School of Art