Author Archives: martynjolly

When in Venice…

‘When in Venice…’, review of Venice Biennale, Art Monthly Australia, July, pp24-26

Venice Biennale

‘I will not make any more boring art’ reads the giant banner slung across the front of one of the palaces on the Grand Canal. It’s there to greet the 300,000 visitors who are expected to visit the Venice Biennale this year. The text has been extracted and enlarged from a 1971 work by John Baldessari, who, along with Yoko Ono, won the Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement this year. Originally Baldessari had written it out multiple times for a video work as though he was a school child being punished. He was wittily commenting on the serial nature of art at the time, and pre-dating Bart Simpson’s nightly exercises by eighteen years. Now turned from a conceptual art piece into a single slogan for the Biennale it announces that we are entering the globalised, corporatised world of the international art fair, where scale, impact and the grand gesture define the moment.

The Biennale consists of a large curated exhibition, this year called Making Worlds and curated by Daniel Birnbaum; 77 national contributions, either within purpose-built pavilions or elsewhere; 44 collateral events and exhibitions; and other events which although not officially part of the Biennale are timed to ride its bow waves. (For instance the billionaire art collector and owner of Christie’s, Francois Pinault, timed the opening of his private museum in the newly restored Venice Customs House, the Punta della Dogana, to coincide with the Biennale.) The Biennale proper takes place over two main areas — the Arsenale, originally Venice’s Military precinct, and the Giardini, located in nearby parkland — as well as numerous other venues throughout Venice. All up it includes about 800 artists and runs until November 22 this year.

Daniel Birnbaum’s Making Worlds exhibition was dedicated to the notion that ‘the artist makes worlds, not objects’. In the Arsenale section of Making Worlds the show led the visitor for hundreds and hundreds of metres down a long cavernous space, then outside into the Arsenale’s gardens where more works were tucked away in overgrown nooks and tumbledown buildings. The exhibition continued in a more labyrinthine form in the old Italian Pavilion in the Giardini which has been enlarged and renamed the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. The spirit of Fluxus and the post war avant-gardes reigned over the show. As Birnbaum said: ‘not every artist who is new or who is doing something interesting is 27 years old’.  Of the over 90 artists in the show many were senior, such as Yoko Ono and John Baldessari, and thirteen were, in fact, dead  — such as the Brazillian artist Lygia Pape who died in 2004 (at the ripe age of 77). She opened the Arsenale arm of show with a breathtaking installation of delicate square columns of copper thread stretched between floor and ceiling which she completed just before she died; and she was also in the Palazzo with a work from the late 1950s consisting of elegantly cut and folded cardboard sheets telling a creation story in austere abstract geometry.

The show had plenty of familiar old stagers from the circuit, such as Joan Jonas (who was at last year’s Sydney Biennale) who restaged her Reading Dante project; as well as wonderful lesser known surprises from the older generation, such as Hans-Peter Feldmann, the German collector/artist who presented Shadow Play, a frieze of flickering shadows made by shining lights across his collection of dolls and toys as they rotated on turn-tables. His complete corpus of artist’s books was also on display in the Book Pavilion. Yoko Ono’s ‘instruction pieces’ were a simple pleasure, but so too was a display from Gutai, the Japanese avant-garde group formed in 1954, most of whom have either now died or are well into their eighties. They re-presented coloured water suspended from the ceiling in plastic tubes, wooden boxes you could listen to, constellations of light bulbs embedded in sand, torn paper walls, and other avant-garde delights which were as fresh today as they were fifty years ago.

This spirit was given a contemporary spin by plenty of the younger artists, such as the Chinese artist Chu Yun. His Constellation consisted of a darkened room that, when you first entered, appeared to be an Aladdin’s cave full of flashing jewels, which you soon realized were the LED lights from scores of ordinary household appliances, passively waiting without function.

A lot of the works Birnbaum selected for Making Worlds were shot through with the elemental constituents of the act of fabrication: primary colours; cuts and collages; stackings and scatters; drawn charts and maps. However post-colonial politics, a standard theme for the global art circuit for at least the last ten years, was also strongly present. For instance Pascale Marthine Tayou, born in Cameroon but based in Belgium, constructed an African village crammed with video projectors projecting scenes of everyday labour from around the world onto every available surface; while Haloba Anawana, born in Zambia but based in Norway, built The Greater G8 Advertising Marketing Stand, where tins of third world products could be opened so they played personal stories of pain and displacement from speakers hidden in their lids.

Engineered construction, reconstruction and architecture were other themes. A steel and glass sculpture by Palermo built for the 1976 Venice Biennale was reconstructed in the same room for this Biennale; Simon Starling designed an elaborate steel film-projector where the 35mm film snaked through a spiral of rollers at the end of a twisting column of stainless steel arms, and projected the images and sounds of its own construction in a factory. At the other end of this spectrum of fabrication the Barcelona artists Bestué/Vives constructed a hilariously kooky costume out of paper, cloth and string which allowed them to transform from man, to motorbike to horse and back again whilst running through some wasteland under a flight path.

The after-effects of relational aesthetics were also still present. Att Poomtangon from Thailand, but now based in New York, used Thai engineering to construct a hanging garden which was meant to be watered by visitors treadling on pumps. However the wooden treadles were already broken and the plants were dying. The Golden Lion for Best Artist went to Tobias Rehberger who painted out the cafeteria walls, floors, ceilings and furniture in a World War One vintage ‘razzle dazzle’ camouflage pattern, to subject the weary visitor to yet more shifts in perceptual orientation as they ate their lunch.

The show took great pleasure in deliberately slipping and sliding between mediums. The American artist Tony Conrad called his pleasant drippy-black painted rectangles from the 1970s ‘movies’ because their cheap paper and paint yellowed over time; while the Silver Lion for most promising young artist went to Nathalie Djurberg who made a nightmare dungeon out of large-scale wet-looking ceramic sculptures of cacti and succulent plants which crowded round video projections of her stop-frame animations in clay, where priests and cardinals committed unspeakable acts of perversion, degradation and cannibalism on naked and pinkly-frightened young women.

The national representations in the various pavilions in the Giardini and elsewhere were a far cry from being an ‘art olympics’. The German curator selected for the German pavilion the British artist Liam Gillick (who ended up making a pretty boring work consisting of an installation of kitchen benches and an audio track), while Denmark and the Nordic countries (Finland, Norway and Sweden) collaborated on what was the highlight of the pavilions. Their project, called The Collectors, was a collaboration between 25 artists curated by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset who installed works by each artist throughout the two pavilions, which are side by side. The various works from the artists — which were wall pieces, installations, sculptures and photographs — combined to construct two huge, comprehensive and integrated domestic scenarios of contemporary excess in wealth, consumption and taste — all the way from the kitchen, to the dining room, to the bedroom. The scenario in one pavilion, ‘A. Family’, told a story of marital break-up, while the scenario in the pavilion next door, ‘Mr B.’, told a story of homosexual murder, or perhaps suicide.

The themes established in Making Worlds seemed to find echoes in the national pavilions. There were more collections, for instance Jussi Kivi’s vast and orderless collection of everything and anything to do with fire for Finland, or Jef Geys’ scientific survey of medicinal plants found in urban situations for Belgium. There were lots of gardens and cultivations. The grain of the human voice was often heard, not only throughout Making Worlds in the work of artists like Joan Jonas for instance, where ordinary people read from Dante, or in Tamara Grcic’s bright-red life rafts floating in the Arsenale dock from which the overlapping voices of ordinary conversations could be heard; but also in Krzysztof Wodiczko’s video installation for Poland where migrant workers told their stories as we appeared to see them outside of the pavilion blurrily washing its windows, or in Katarina Zdjelar’s videos about language and identity, where for instance a Korean woman struggled again and again to pronounce the artist’s name.

The viewer’s ears were also fully engaged in the British Pavilion, which had been darkened into a cinema for scheduled screenings of Steve McQueen’s two-gun video work Giardini. The work, another highlight, was filmed in the Giardini during winter, the off-season between Biennales. Snails crawled over leaves, buds dripped cold water, and confetti leaked its dye into the icy gravel, while dogs nuzzled through rubbish and occasionally the distant roar of a crowd from the soccer stadium which is behind the Giardini, on the tip of Venice itself, penetrated the microcosmic aural world of drips and rustles. Then, slowly, two male figures emerge from the darkness, silently regard each other across the two screens, and disappear together into the bushes.

The other common sounds of the Biennale were loops of music propelling the various video and film animations, and the slowed-down bassy rumbles that accompanied the more stentorian of the videos. This was the sound in the Australian Pavilion as Shaun Gladwell’s helmeted road warrior figure climbed out of a reconstruction of Mad Max’s car in slow-mo and stood atop with arms partially outstretched as it drove down an endless, red, outback track towards an infinite horizon. The car itself had been shipped out to be parked outside the pavilion, giving it a bit of a trade show feeling, while a motorbike was slammed into its side. This was the motorbike on which, in Apology to Roadkill, the same helmeted figure collected dead kangaroos from the side of the road, cradling them Pieta-like, before carrying them off camera. Downstairs, in a more interesting piece, a skull slowly rotated around a mini video camera that had been inserted inside it so it could film the cranial cupola endlessly turning.

The other Australian presence was located in a prime piece of Biennale real estate, a former convent located between the Arsenale and the Giardini. Once Removed (so called because each artist has been displaced in one way or another) didn’t come across as an integrated show so much as three separate installations. Only the installation by Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, Life Span, really took command of the space. It was a huge basalty block of plastic that sat directly under the ceiling fresco of the chapel, almost obscuring the altar, and pushing the viewer back against the wall. The work was built from a total of 175,218 VHS video cassettes the collective running time of which is, apparently, 60.1 years, which was also, apparently, the average life span in 1976 when the VHS system, now a redundant technology consigned to the rubbish heap of history, was first released. Vernon Ah Kee’s installation, Cant Chant, perhaps suffered from too many indignant metaphors and references to Australian racism which ended up competing with each other. It centred on a three-gun video projection where cool and confident aboriginal surfers reclaimed a beach by riding, to the pound of a rock sound track, on surfboards decorated with indigenous designs and, on the underside, the faces of their ancestors. Elsewhere in the video other surfboards were lynched and massacred. Their corpses, wrapped in barbed wire, were hung in the convent’s courtyard. Ah Kee’s familiar text paintings also crowded the walls. In the final room Ken Yonetani’s comment on environmental degradation, Sweet Barrier Reef, previously installed at the Adelaide Biennale, was a boxed-in Zen-style garden made with raked sugar which surrounded the ceramic forms of bleached coral. The whole thing was lit with a wavy blue theatre light as though under water, which for me gave it an artificial, stagy feeling at odds with its elemental materiality.

Elsewhere, the Russians had a strong presence with a spectacular series of bravura agitprop sculptural works in their own pavilion called Victory Over the Future, and a collateral event from the Moscow Museum of Modern Art called Unconditional Love which featured a massively operatic nine-gun projection from the Russian group of artists AES+F. Called The Feast of Trimalchio it featured gangs of models performing languid tableaus of leisurely excess against the CGI background of a fantasy resort island.

The Middle-East also had a strong presence, with the long walk of the Arsenale leg of the Making Worlds exhibition finally disgorging into the United Arab Emirates pavilion which, perhaps wisely, had decided to perform a 1980s style deconstruction job on the whole machinery of Biennales, as well the UAI itself with its tightly controlled displays of wealth.

Martyn Jolly

Down Turn

‘Downturn’, book foreword to Downturn, 2009. edited by Lee Grant, unpaginated one page ISBN 978-0-646-51556-4

Documentary photography’s prime responsibility is to take the abstract and make it concrete, to put a ‘human face’ to broad historical events, and create from raw actuality something understandable and legible. Documentary photography came into its own and consolidated its central precepts during another global turn down, the Great Depression of the 1930s, when photographers such as Dorothea Lange shot the key icons of the style — emotionally charged images of hapless individuals caught up in global currents they could barely comprehend that tugged at the heartstrings of sympathetic viewers.

Our own global down turn is even more abstract than the Great Depression, which is its only comparator. It has no time for the plangent majesty of the phrase ‘the great depression’, instead it goes by a brisk acronym: the GFC. It started only last year when a chain reaction was suddenly triggered in the interlocking money markets, and it may be even be over by the end of this year. I have hardly felt it effects at all, I haven’t lost my job and in fact the cost of my mortgage has gone down while I have received two refreshing splashes of cash. Yet I know that it has been historically catastrophic in some way or other, because I have seen the jagged red lines plunging downwards again and again, on my TV screen and in my newspaper. And I’m vaguely aware that perhaps it has directly affected people I might know. Perhaps some of my students have found it harder to get shifts at wherever they have to work to pay their way through uni, perhaps the relatives of some of my friends might have lost their jobs, perhaps….

So there is a task here for documentary photography. And there is particularly a task for young documentary photographers. Young people are continually being accused of being disengaged from the world, insulated from social responsibility by the upholstered solipsism of youth. Yet, as they are also being constantly reminded, it is they who will inherit and have to solve the seemingly intractable problems we have created for them.

How then, do they respond to the assignment of documenting the GFC? Each in their own individual way, of course. But some themes do emerge. For instance there is a persistent concern with stuff — the end residue of that urgent impulse to consume that drives the modern economy. Why do we need all this stuff, what are we going to do with it, what does it look like? And notice how it hangs around even after we ourselves have gone and have no use for it. Another visual trope is the threshold, the spatial barrier of the gate or the fence that either separates people or forces them together. Fences, gates and walls define spaces, and many photographers in this book are sensitive to the nuances of space — both the social space of the street and the private space of the home. Those spaces are where people are forced to live together, and with economic down-turns edges get sharper and surfaces get rawer as people rub up against each other. So we have the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ studiously ignoring each other on the street an in other public spaces, while developers continue to push the suburbs out further and further by building individual houses separated from each other by darkness. Meanwhile within those houses people continue to just about manage their lives in congested and claustrophobic rooms.

Having seen these photographs I now feel I know just a little bit more about the great economic downturn of our time.

Martyn Jolly

Head, Photography and Media Arts

ANU School of Art

David Wills

Made up of over eight thousand photographs and seven hundred fragments of overheard conversations — all meshed together by nearly a thousand keywords — Turnstile is an extraordinary cultural archive. David Wills has spent the last four years trawling through our contemporary urban environment like a human drift-net. He has developed a finely attuned radar for cultural objects that are so marginal, so detrital, that they barely register as artefacts at all. He taxonomizes and cross-references this ‘cultural mulch’ using an acute historical sensibility that mixes irony with a passion for his world, as well as nostalgia with a love for the contemporary, in equal parts.  The interlacing of the threads of images and information forms an on-line network vast in scale and microscopic in detail, but unified in structure.

He has not only constructed his own world, but has also produced a thoroughly compelling document of our time, which depicts the early twenty-first century not so much pictorially as granularly.

The archive is a key motif of photography, from nineteenth century ethnographers, through twentieth century artists such as Gerhard Richter and Hans Peter-Feldman, to today’s sardonic flaneurs such as Martin Parr. And of course online archives such as Corbis or Flickr already allow us access to numbers of images at an astronomical scale. But only Turnstile combines the automatic logic of a search engine with the personal sensibility of a singular artist.

Collateral Damage – Denise Ferris and Martyn Jolly

‘Collateral Damage’ (with Denise Ferris), Art Monthly Australia, July, 2008, pp3—5

Now that the nightmare is finally over for Bill Henson, and the dust is settling, what will be the residual damage to Australian culture?

Photography plays a complex role in our culture, it produces direct evidence of reality, but at the same time it deals in social symbols and metaphors, and creates personal ideals and icons. The attack on Bill Henson cut through this complexity with a syllogism devastating in its fundamentalist simplicity: nakedness is always sexual, and photographers always exploit their subjects, therefore photographs of naked children are always exploitative child pornography. This equation efficiently short-circuited any other mechanisms of representation, or expression, or interpretation that until now were assumed to be intrinsic to photographing models posing for the camera. In her strident way Hetty Johnston from the lobby group Bravehearts put it best. When she heard that the DPP had finally dropped the charges she declared: ‘We are just handing our children on a bloody plate to paedophiles. This is a disgrace for this country, absolutely shameful.’

In this formulation, not only are all photographs of naked children always equivalent to paedophilia itself, but they also condemn the whole society. As the Sydney academic Ruth Barcan pointed out in Nudity a Cultural Anatomy, ‘Images of children and youth function as mirrors to an adult society eager to verify its own moral state. This might help explain why representations of children can be subject to idealization, but also why both the effect of images on youth and the representation of youth in images can become concentrated sites of social unease and regulation.’

Any attempt to resist an over-regulation of photography driven by such social unease is immediately met with the ultimate foreclosing reply: child protection. In supporting the initial raids of his police officers the NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said, ‘the most important thing here, the thing we cannot lose sight of, is we have to protect our children’. As more police started to raid art museums, rifling through their racks looking for thirty year old art works, Hetty Johnston agreed,  ‘Nobody is above the law, not artists, they just can’t be, children are suffering as a result.’

But how might actual children suffer as a result of Bill Henson’s photographs? Perhaps a paedophile might see one and be so erotically inflamed they may abuse a child. But there is plenty of real child pornography available on the net, and no proof that the mere existence of further images of naked children in artistic scenarios and artistic poses will exacerbate a paedophile’s behaviour. Perhaps a child might see one and become ‘sexualised’ too early in her emotional development. But an image of a normal pubescent child simply standing there is unlikely to provoke body-image confusion in other children, who must also be regularly seeing their own friends’ bodies. Perhaps his models may be traumatised by the experience of posing for him, even if they don’t yet realize it. But no Henson model has yet reported that they found posing for him anything other than enjoyable and creative experience. Or perhaps the ‘innocence’ of a child is ‘exploited’ by Henson making money from it. But child actors have long delighted us with their precocious presence in popular films and TV shows, so why should art be any different.

Whilst the DPP was considering whether or not to charge Henson, other police were spending their time more usefully by using actual child pornography to track down real paedophiles. The images they traced, which were downloaded at least 1500 times to Australia, were quite unlike Henson’s, being images of actual sex-acts. Although police operations like Operation Centurion have established that the circulation of pornographic images is an important part of paedophilic behaviour, no research conducted anywhere has been able to establish any causal links between images of the type produced by Henson and aberrant behaviour.

Nonetheless, we have arrived at a time when the naturalist’s slogan ‘nude ain’t rude’ seems historical and quaint, and when talking about nakedness as being just the way we were born sounds like old-fashioned hippy speak. The British sociologist Frank Furedi has described this as a ‘culture of fear’ where ideas of social change (including how we see ourselves represented) are experienced as risks, not opportunities for new orientations. This exaggerated sense of risk is driven by a powerful ‘cognitive illusion’. As the Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has argued, we estimate the probability of an event from how easy it is to recall examples. And examples of abuse are continually made forcefully present to us through the media. The incentive structure of activism and opinion markets adds to this — no one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep getting better.

Potential risks inevitably lead to potential victims. Every photographic act is now more readily viewable through the prism of victim and abuser, than artist and subject. And so Hetty Johnston is able to claim that, ‘the liberties the art world take … harm the whole cause of child protection.’ Even more authoritative commentators such as Clive Hamilton, the campaigner against ‘corporate paedophilia’, says that Bill Henson and Roslyn Oxley should have known better, and have only themselves to blame. They should have realized that they would suffer collateral damage from a society finally waking up to the fact that it has let its children become sexualised too early. But Henson isn’t the only artist to be sustaining collateral damage. For example in April 2007 Polixeni Papapetrou’s photograph Olympia Wearing Her Grandmother’s Jewels was withdrawn from the Gosford leg of the Australian Centre for Photography’s touring show Changeling: Childhood and the Uncanny after complaints from the public. And in 2005, just prior to the opening of Ella Dreyfus’s exhibition, two of her images of soccer players in her son’s team were withdrawn from display, four were withdrawn from sale, and two remain covered over in the catalogue.

Do these few examples really matter? Why bother with those who think they can definitively tell right from wrong, and who set themselves up as experts who know what’s good for all of us? Because these harmful helpers also wantonly mishandle exactly what adults are entrusted with — the social and cultural future of our young. Their self-indulgent disgust and uncorroborated fantasies of harmful art will have significant long-term effects on the world our children will inherit.

Their world would drop a visual veil over our children until the age of eighteen. The marvellous extended process of a child becoming an adult would take place in the dark. The transition period when children are most vulnerable to exploitation (from somebody they know and trust in 85% of cases) would take place largely unseen and unspoken about. The complexities, doubts, fears and dreams of puberty would be left to the tabloids, the television and the advertisers to articulate with their banal sexual dichotomies and overheated social scenarios. The psychologically supporting network of loving looks and mutual regard we want our children to grow up in would be ripped away. The complexity of children would become publicly invisible — except for the photographs that sell products to them.

Their world sees only two possible contracts between adult and child, either one of parental or pedagogical authority, or one of sexual exploitation. All other contracts based on mutuality, creativity, fun or play, are suspect. The chance these teenagers had, through symbolically representing ‘youth’ for Henson (with mum and dad’s permission and with their own free will) to briefly pretend to be someone different, and collaborate on producing something mysterious and beautiful and powerful, would exist no more. By all accounts Henson’s models down through the years still value the experience, some even hang the resulting photographs on their walls for their own children to admire.

The world of the over-anxious sees no social role for art, or creativity or expression. Hetty Johnston sees Henson’s art in only two lights, it is either to make him money by selling images of children, or for his ‘personal satisfaction’. For her, art seems to be a furtive personal activity closely allied to pornography in any case, and without wider social or cultural benefit. ‘If we keep allowing artists to do whatever their whim allows, whatever they want to do, what’s the next boundary that’s going to be challenged by the likes of Bill Henson’, she demands. In her view, and in the view of her cheer squad in our parliaments and in the media, art is a habit a small section of society has, a personal indulgence rather than part of a larger conversation.

Moral panics rise and fall. Eventually this one, too, will subside. But after it has there will have been a tectonic shift in the attitude of the public and the law to what we can and can’t see, what we can and can’t make. The deadening effect will hang like a pall over all of us.

Peace After War and Memories, 1918

‘Peace after war and memories’, catalogue essay in Harold Cazneaux: Artist in Photography, 2008, edited by Natasha Bulluck, Art Gallery of New South Wales. PP136-137 ISBN 978-1-74174-022-6

Cazneaux was a photographer of taste and restraint. His reputation was built on understated images with elegant compositions and carefully modulated lighting effects. Which is not to say that he didn’t tackle big topics, his central theme was the process of historical change itself, the gentle overlapping of one epoch with the next. However, a few images stand out as intriguingly different in Cazneaux’s work. One example is Peace After War and Memories, 1918, exhibited at the London Salon of 1920. Unlike most of Cazneaux’s pictorialist work it is not a generalised view of this or that backstreet of Sydney, or this or that picturesque by-way in the countryside. Its title and date refer to a specific historical event, the end of the Great War. The main figure is presumably a soldier settler, one of the thousands who were given small blocks to farm as a form of repatriation, and in order to build up the Australian nation by forging the returning diggers into a class of agrarian yeomanry. (Although, even in 1918 as a severe drought began to bite, it was becoming clear that the utopian dream of the soldier settler schemes was destined for failure.) The horse-drawn plough of the farm is a familiar enough Cazneaux trope — an anachronistic technology teetering on the edge of nostalgia — but it is the dusty smoky paddock it ploughs that is the most arresting. It is a strange, uncanny landscape, a doubled landscape, at once an image of a precarious attempt to make the harsh Australian land productive and a visual echo of the blasted landscape of the Front returning. The bare trees in the background would have reminded contemporary viewers of the skeletal trees of the Somme, stripped of their leaves by bomb blasts; and the drifting smoke from the burn-off would have reminded them of the newspaper pictures they had seen of the bombs themselves. The dispersing clouds are also a familiar pictorialist convention, but the shafts of light beneath which the soldier/farmer bows his head now seem to directly offer divine benediction to his reverie. Cazneaux has clearly felt compelled to lard all of these extra symbols into his image in order to express his personal reaction to the historical cataclysm that was the most epoch changing event of his time. Although he was a sentimentalist, this mannered symbolism was new terrain for him. However similar images were occurring regularly in lower-brow culture, and Cazneaux drew on this visual vocabulary for his own salon image. For instance in 1915 Melbourne’s Weekly Times Annual printed a montage of a digger on guard duty in a bare battle field, leaning over his rifle and dreaming, in a photographic thought bubble, of his mother waiting for him back home. And in 1919 Frank Hurley was to exhibit The Dawn of Passchendaele at Sydney’s Kodak Salon, in which he montaged a holy-card sky above a terrible battle scene. By the 1920s Cazneaux was back to making sleek images for classy magazines like The Home. It wasn’t until World War Two, when he rechristened his 1937 photograph of an ancient gum tree tenaciously clinging to a dry creek bed The Spirit of Endurance, that he made another of his images resonate in a similar way. That nationalist allegory was more enduring and remains popular to this day.

Weekly Times Annual, Melbourne 4 November 1915, The Mothers Daydream, The Son’s Lonely Vigil, pp12-13

Alex James’s Landscape Photographs of Time and History

‘Photographs of Time and History’, book foreword in The Twilight of Mr Kemp: Landscapes 1797-1897, by Alexander James, unpaginated two pages. ISBN 0-9532458-4-5

In that period after the sun sets below the horizon, but before the landscape sinks into complete darkness, Alex James works like a demon. With a view camera he urgently exposes sheet after sheet of large-format film. As the gloaming intensifies, his exposures lengthen, from several seconds to many minutes. Eventually he is focussing only on the beam of a torch, and the chemical phenomenon of reciprocity departure has curdled the colour of the last remaining glow of sky a sour yellow.

James is photographing sites where, perhaps, tragedies once occurred. As Europeans moved across the landscape they sowed the ground with such stories. There were not only the massacres and dispersals they perpetuated on the indigenous population, but also their own random mishaps and misadventures — their drownings, their shootings, their shipwrecks, their bungled escapes and their disappearances.

Not for James the antiseptic, suprahuman wildernesses of, say, a Peter Dombrovskis. Against those anodyne microcosmic or macrocosmic spectacles James counterposes a large-format landscape photography where places are entangled with stories, light seems to grow up and out from the ground, and the landscape is not there to be consumed by the viewer, but instead sometimes threatens to engulf the viewer themself.

James is born and bred in south eastern New South Wales and has a profound affection for the place. Since he was a child he has skied, bushwalked and surfed from the Snowy Mountains to the South Coast. [M1] He also loves the process of large-format photography, the muscular physical challenge of getting his camera to the spot, the forensic accumulation of detail, and the dilation of time during the exposure. Like many locals a starting point for establishing a deeper connection to his land and its uncomfortable past began with various local histories. As a genre, these popular local histories are often not much more than patchwork compilations of picturesque anecdotes from various sources which, their authors enthusiastically presuppose, have somehow combined to form the unique character of the region and its current inhabitants. However by re-attaching them to specific landscapes, James has used these local stories to produce a sophisticated visual experience.

In one such history he found an account of a twelve-year old boy who had drowned in the Molonglo River in 1843. This story, complete even with a spooky premonition by the boy’s mother, is typical of the hundreds of such stories from the nineteenth century which testify to the disquieting sense of unbelonging which underscored colonial expansion and settlement.

James returned to the site — now, probably, just below the dam that forms Lake Burley Griffin — to photograph a shallow watercourse choked with weeds and swallowed up by scrubby trees. The receding surface of the water is crawling with worm-like tree-flowers and striated with reflections from the trees, while the vertical plane of the photograph is criss-crossed by a latticework of falling branches which further repel the eye. The threads of light which do manage to penetrate this suffocating space are stained an eerie, indistinct colour — a colour which we know has not been dialled up in Photoshop, but is the chemical and optical result of the process of photography itself at this time of day.

Another oral-history story, which almost has the metaphorical resonances of a fable, concerns a horse which, in the 1890s, escaped a cruel owner on Montagu Island by swimming back to the mainland nearly nine kilometres away — not once, not twice, but three times. In James’s photographs of a low rock platform sloping away into the sea (the only place on the island where the horse could conceivably have entered the water to begin its epic swims) the waves have dissolved under his long exposure into an etheric vapour, and the horizon-line appears like the impossibly distant edge of the world.

Various views of South Coast beaches and headlands are gathered under the title Spring 1797. The date refers to the months when a group of shipwrecked sailors attempted to walk up the coast towards Sydney from Victoria. Despite considerable help from the local indigenous tribes the group progressively died of starvation until only three remained to be found, near death, a few miles south of Botany Bay. James’s crepuscular photographs of the regions they passed through turn what could have been pretty postcard views of holiday beaches, or pleasant pastoral scenes from tourist drives, into something like the ominous and brooding landscape the sailors must have experienced as they trudged through them.

An even more scary ambience is created in a series of rainforest views James titles Spring 1830, in reference to a letter sent at that time by a Batemans Bay resident to the Governor seeking his permission to murder a group of local Aborigines who had been spearing cattle. In James’s airless photographs his wide-angle lens appears to have spreadeagled the ground itself, and the serpentine forms of roots and branches writhe and twist away, plunging into the loam beneath the dense leaf-litter. Each of these shadowless scenes is steeped in an identical sanguineous light.

From these low chthonic reaches, James also took his camera higher, up into the airy tops of the High Country and even above the snow line. For instance Spring 1862 refers to Eugene von Guerard’s expedition to Mount Kosciusko accompanying a scientific survey led by the German scientist George Neumayer, where yet again the expedition’s work was interrupted by a member of the party who got himself lost for several days. But in rephotographing von Guerard’s original famous view from Mount Townsend one hundred and forty-six years later James found himself, like his predecessors, dangerously caught out by the rapidly changing weather, and barely able to make it back to the safety of his tent after darkness unexpectedly closed in.

In these images the scale opens out to approach the majestic, but the horizon line remains high and the colours remain cloying. In the summer of 1835 a mounted policeman shot an escaping bushranger who was desperately swimming across the Snowy River, and his body was never seen again. In James’s photographs of the river the surface of the water becomes skinned with a viscous and glaucous blur.

Towards the end of the book the images approach white-out and the spatial stability offered by a horizon line all but disappears. The series Autumn 1983 is based on the story of a settler who was thrown from his horse and drowned after being caught in a freak snow storm while running cattle in the Snowy Mountains. At this elevation stories such as these seem to have created their own small seismic events as they crack the collapsing crust of snow, revealing the basalt bones beneath. Up here, where the delicate balance of the weather defines the look of the landscape, these fracturing, brittle surfaces have an almost apocalyptic beauty.

All of James’s landscapes are entangled and layered. In his vision time is folded into space, and history is folded into geography. His love for his home, the south-eastern regions of New South Wales, has been deepened by his use of local histories and the bizarre range of stories they offer up. But his photographs do not celebrate the bravery and struggle of the white ‘pioneers’ who ‘opened’ up the land for us. Nor, on the other hand, do they dismissively condemn them for the dispossession of those that, some claim, still have the only authentic relationship to the land — the Aborigines.[M2]  Rather, the loose connections he makes between story and place mobilise the imagination of the audience to narrativize the scenes in a provisional, unsettled way. The viewer virtually enters the scenes and animates them by following along the tracks and lines of tree trunks with their eye, or by spreading their gaze out to suffuse them up to the horizon.

These sites are not monuments to Australian history, like Gallipoli Cove or the Burke and Wills ‘Dig Tree’. They are not sites for prescribed acts of historical memory as a form of national allegiance. The photographs are probably not even taken precisely where the event actually took place, even if, indeed, the event actually happened in precisely the dislocated, fragmentary way in which it has eventually come down to us. Nonetheless story and place adhere to each other like a vague haunting, intermixing and catalysing in the imagination of the viewer. These photographs are experiments in producing a new relationship between ourselves and the land we have inherited — for better or for worse, and along with all of its stories.

Martyn Jolly

October 2008

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

 [M1]I mainly ski these days so if you could put “skied” instead of snowboarded and “surfed” instead of swum.

[M2]Again use indigenous Australians or indigenous population, or finish sentance after ‘relationships with land’ – whatever you think.

International Documentary Photography

Of course every photograph is in some sense a document of something else. The very essence of the photography is its ability to make pictorial ‘documents’ of events, be they an abstracted photogram of glass objects arranged and exposed in a darkroom, or an image of a car running a red light recorded by an automatic traffic camera. Nonetheless, the word ‘documentary’ has become used to describe a very particular photographic practice within the medium, or perhaps more accurately, a very particular ethos subscribed to by some photographers. The word has become used not so much to describe a discrete photographic style, or even a particular historical movement, but a complex set of almost moral attitudes to the medium passionately adhered to by some photographers. To the documentary photographer the camera is a tool with which they can personally witness, and perhaps even change, the world.

During the American Civil War (1861-65) the photographer Matthew Brady hired a corps of other photographers to cover all of the major battles for him from their photographic vans, feeding a hungry market in the cities with over 8000 stereo views and cartes-de-visite, which were available for sale from his New York studio. Some were also hand-cut into wood engravings for illustrated magazines. Although the vast majority of the photographs were relatively mundane, the battle views, which because of long exposure times had to be taken after the event, quickly became the most famous. Even though some photographers re-arranged the corpse-strewn battlefields, dragging the corpses into more dramatic compositions and even getting assistants to pose as additional corpses, the visceral connection such photographs forged between the war and the viewer at home was overwhelming. In 1862 the New York Times commented: ‘If [Mr Brady] has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along the streets, he has done something very like it. […] These pictures have a terrible distinctness. By the aid of a magnifying-glass the very features of the slain may be distinguished.’ [1]

Towards the end of the 1800s the New York police reporter turned social reformer Jacob Riis began to use the flare of magnesium flash powder to penetrate the obscurity of the slums of the Lower East Side. Riis’s flash photographs captured his dishevelled subjects in raw oblivion to the camera’s presence. As the New York Sun reported the ‘night pictures were faithful and characteristic, being mostly snapshots and surprises. In the daytime [the photographers] could not always avoid having their object known, and struggle as they might against it, they could not altogether prevent the natural instinct of fixing up for a picture from being followed’[2] Riis showed his pictures as lantern slides with accompanying commentary, and published them, not as hand cut wood engravings, but as direct half-tone reproductions, in the seminal book How the Other Half Lives, 1890. As a result of his campaigning significant changes were made to the laws surrounding New York’s tenements.

The National Child Labour Committee also recognised the persuasive power of the photograph. Between 1908 and 1918 they hired the sociologist Lewis Hine to travel around the US taking photographs of child labourers in mines and factories. He used deliberate camera angles and framing to emphasise the small stature and pathetic isolation of the child workers, and recorded their names, ages, origins and circumstances. The resulting images, such as Dinnertime. Family of Mrs A. J. Young, Tifton G.A. 1909; Raymond Bykes, Western Union, Norfolk, Va. 1911 and Norman Hall, 210 Park Street, G.A. 1913, were published in the social reform magazine Survey, and used for lantern slide lectures and posters. In the posters the photographs were often laid out graphically to visually tell a story. In ‘Making Human Junk’ for instance, the ‘good material’ of healthy children is processed by a factory into the ‘junk’ of child labourers. To Hine the photograph was a ‘symbol that brings one immediately into close touch with reality […] it tells a story packed into the most condensed and vital form. […] it is more effective than the reality would have been because, in the picture, the non-essential and conflicting interests have been eliminated.’[3]

By the 1920s that the word ‘documentary’ was being used to describe this new genre of photography. In 1926 the British influential film theorist John Grierson coined the most commonly used definition of the word: the ‘creative treatment of actuality’. This phrase somewhat gnomically captured documentary’s double sense of the camera penetrating a raw social reality, supposedly unaffected by the photographer’s presence, while at the same time the photographer’s ‘vision’ selected, interpreted, symbologized and narrativised that reality in order for it to have maximum impact on the viewer.

This ethic reached its full flowering during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1935 the US Government under its New Deal policies set up the Farm Security Administration. Its Historical Section conducted a photographic survey of rural deprivation. The economist Roy Stryker hired a group of photographers, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, to travel across the continent, particularly in the poor South, and send back exposed film to him in Washington to be developed, edited, captioned and distributed to newspapers and magazines. By the end of its life the FSA had assembled an archive of 180 000 images.

Dorothea Lange had previously produced documentary photographs of depression poverty such as White angel breadline, San Francisco of 1932, which with its dynamic composition dramatically compressed the human tension in the scene. For the FSA she produced another image with a similarly compacted triangular composition — Migrant Mother 1936. It was reproduced immediately in the San Francisco News, leading to food being sent to the pea pickers camp where it had been taken, and was hung in the Museum of Modern Art in 1941, which led to it becoming a national icon of madonna-like forbearance in the face of suffering.

Walker Evans shot his subjects frontally with a large-format camera, describing, as in Untitled (street scene Southern city) c1936, the solidity of surfaces and forms in objective, rectilinear detail. In 1938 he exhibited his FSA photographs at the Museum of Modern Art and published them in the monograph American Photographs, where for the first, rather than being reproduced amongst columns of text in magazines and newspapers, they were reproduced as art in a careful sequence, one image at a time, and with minimal captioning. The introduction to the book described Evans’s work as ‘straight’ photography — ‘there has been no need for Evans to dramatize his material with photographic tricks, because the material is already, in itself, intensely dramatic. Even the inanimate things, bureau drawers, pots, tires, bricks, signs, seem waiting in their own patient dignity, posing for their picture.’[4]

In 1936 Evans had lived for a time in the shack of an Alabama sharecropper family. On assignment from Fortune magazine, he and the writer James Agee probed into the minutia of the their downtrodden lives as they shared their private space. When Evans’s fine-grained images of the dry, scrubbed surfaces of the house and the lined, weathered faces of the family were reproduced, together with Agee’s extended lyrical text, in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941, they served to not only dignify, but almost ennoble the family’s stoical poverty.

Many FSA-style photographs were reproduced in Life magazine, the most famous picture magazine of the period. Commencing publication in 1936, Life used new high-speed presses, coated paper-stock, and quick-drying inks to cheaply reproduce photographs in both quality and quantity. Featuring easy to digest ‘picture stories’ — photographs with short captions spread across several pages — Life reached a circulation of six million by 1960, before the alternative entertainment of television began erode it sales figures.

Life’s optimistic patriotism and belief in American values fed directly into a massive exhibition of 503 giant photographic enlargements selected from 273 photographers by the famous photographer and curator Edward Steichen. Called The Family Of Man, it was exhibited as a spectacular installation at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, and then toured the world in several versions as a form of Cold War propaganda, even reaching Moscow in 1959. It saw the human race as one big ‘family’, modelled on the supposed ideal the American nuclear family, and celebrated birth, love, marriage, and death as eternal humanist values. The exhibition was massively popular, but was not without its critics. When it reached Paris in 1956 the cultural theorist Roland Barthes excoriated it for cloaking continuing social inequalities across the world with supposed ‘universal’ values: ‘Whether or not the child is born with ease or difficulty, whether or not his birth causes suffering to his mother, whether or not he is threatened by a high mortality rate, whether or not such and such a type of future is open to him: this is what your Exhibitions should be telling people, instead of the eternal lyricism of birth. The same goes for death: must we really celebrate its essence once more, and thus risk forgetting that there is still so much we can do to fight it?’[5]

The advent of smaller cameras such as the Leica, designed around cinematographic film and introduced in 1925, had allowed photographer to work  in more difficult and different places. Picture agencies, such as Berlin’s Dephot agency founded in 1928, or New York’s Black star Agency founded in 1936, began to supply photographs from their networks of photographers to the new, cheap, mass circulation, flick-through, picture magazines such as Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (begun 1884), Britain’s Picture Post (begun 1938) and Paris’s Vu (begun 1928), who used skilled graphic designers to lay them out in visually exciting collages of image and text.

In 1936 Vu sent the Dephot agency photographer Robert Capa to cover the Spanish Civil War, where he photographed a falling republican soldier. When the photograph was republished by Life the following year it was captioned: ‘Robert Capa’s camera catches a Spanish soldier the instant he is dropped by a bullet through the head in front of Cordoba.’[6] Although recent scholarship has convincingly suggested that this famous photograph was staged, it is still a touchstone for twentieth century photo-journalism because it gave the viewer a strong sense of the intrepid bravery of the photographer risking his own life so the viewer could be vicariously immersed in the unfolding event itself.[7]

Henri Cartier-Bresson switched to the Leica in 1932 and began a caree photographing around the world selling his images through picture agencies. He photographed nimbly, moving quickly and unnoticed through events, seeking the instant where the three dimensions of the event, and the two dimensions of the photograph, would cohere into what he called the ‘decisive moment’. In his 1952 book The Decisive Moment he wrote: ‘In photography there is a new kind of plasticity, [a] product of the instantaneous lines made by movements of the subject. […] But inside movement there is one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance. Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.’[8] This famous philosophy, which is evident in various degrees in all of his photographs, including At the Opera 1950s, became a shorthand way to describe the visual power of the attuned photographer to apparently encapsulate an entire event in a single image.

In 1947 Cartier-Bresson, Capa, and other photographers, founded the photo agency Magnum, which became the most prestigious and famous face of the documentary ethos. In the 1950s Ernst Haas (Egyptian boys, 1955); Elliot Erwitt (New York City, 1953 and Moscow, 1959); and Willy Ronis (Le vigneron girondin, 1945), were members. Recent members have included Sebastiao Salgado and the art photographer Martin Parr. Salgado works on global projects with big humanitarian themes, such as his book Workers of 1993. Although grittily ‘real’, his photographs are also highly stylised, with compositions echoing old master paintings and endowed with a heightened sense of universal significance by dramatic high-contrast printing. Parr, on the other hand, who also works in book form, celebrated the cheap pleasure of the British working classes in bilious colour and with cruel irony in such books as The Last Resort, 1986.

As other forms of mass entertainment began to compete with the picture magazines, documentary photographers relied more and more on the art book and the gallery exhibition as a venue for their work. Weegee blasted New York’s late-night streets with a flash-gun and press camera to produce images such as Tramp 1940. But his shocking high-contrast crime scenes only became true pulp-opera when they were assembled into the inkily-black book New York, Naked City in 1945. In 1955 Robert Frank received a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel through America on a Beat-style road trip. Taking 28,000 photographs with his Leica, he sequenced 83 of them into the book The Americans, published in 1959. Although Frank was inspired by Evans’s American Photographs, his book subscribed to neither the desiccated nobility of the FSA, nor the cosy humanism of the Family of Man, rather it discovered isolated and lonely Americans caught within a worn-out, grainy America, which was in the process of fracturing into subcultures.

In the subsequent decades American photographers such as Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand  and William Eggleston  incessantly worked the sidewalks with their 35mm cameras, cramming the jumble of the street into their photographic frames. They edited the hundreds of thousands of photographs they took into thematic books and exhibitions with little or no text. An exception to this model of the street photographer was Diane Arbus, perhaps the most famous of the post war American documentary photographers, who was still working for magazines such as Harpers Bazaar when she was selected, along with Friedlander and Winnogrand, for the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal New Documents exhibition of 1967. Her portraits of eccentric, marginalised, vulnerable people undergoing ‘slow-motion private smashups’, to use Susan Sontag’s words, gained in universal power as they were removed from the narrative context of the picture stories for which they were taken, and exhibited in isolation on the gallery wall.[9]

Although it is now considerably more threadbare than in its glory days of the 1930s the genre of documentary photography still survives. The advent of digital photography has not changed the fundamentally ‘documentary’ nature of the photograph— we all still habitually believe that a photograph represents actuality. We are all still curious about ‘how the other half lives’, be they the desperately poor, the obscenely rich, or the distantly exotic. The decisive moment of the photograph retains its power to stop us in our tracks and momentarily mesmerise us, in a way a video grab still can’t.

Perhaps the aspect of documentary to have suffered the most damage is the idea of intrepid documentary photographers heroically seeking after the truth. Now they have to share space in the public’s imagination with less savoury types of photographers, such as sleazy paparazzi. In addition many of their icons have been revealed to be as theatrically staged as the rest of photography’s genres, and their motivations and effectiveness have also come into question. Once their photographs are out in the public domain can they protect their meanings from being hijacked by the many different contexts in which they are used, and the different captions they are given? Are they not just feeding our desire for short-term spectacle, our need to visually consume a momentary ‘hit’ of pity or disgust before we turn the page?

Photographers have responded to these questions in a variety of ways. For instance Larry Clark in Tulsa, 1971 or Nan Goldin in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1986 abandoned any sense of sociological objectivity or creative distance as they photographed from within their own lives, documenting the subcultures they were members of, and desperate events they actively took part in. Other photographers such as Laura Mulvey in The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, 1975 attempted to reveal the ‘constructed’ nature of photographic truth by treating their photographs not as self-sufficient and self-explanatory chunks of reality, but by embedding them in laborious structures of textual qualification which declared that photography too was just another language system. The Chilean photographer Alfredo Jaar photographed in Rwanda just after the massacres of 1994. He wanted to bear witness to the genocide, but refused to flood the world with yet more disposable images of horror and despair. Instead, in the work Real Pictures, 1995, he built funereal monuments out of 372 sealed black boxes, each one containing one of his colour photographs of the massacres, with a textual description of the unseen image on the top of the box. Recently the ‘other half’, once the mere passive subjects of the documentary photographer’s compassionate camera, have now become image-makers themselves. Examples include Britain’s Black Audio Film Collective set up by black photographers and filmmakers in Hackney in London in 1982 in the aftermath of inner-city protests against racism

Perhaps the enduring thing documentary photography has bequeathed to us is not so much the familiar historical icons it has produced over its history, but its vast repositories of millions of unknown images which are now collected in picture libraries and data banks around the world. Many of them, like the Corbis archive, founded by Bill Gates in 1989, are now online and instantly accessible. But even these mega documentary archives, which have consumed older picture libraries, photo agency and newspaper collections, are being rivalled by the smaller quirky personal collections and the diverse vernacular archives which are constantly being unearthed. Perhaps these personal snapshots and anonymous record photographs, which were taken not in order to advance a social cause or express a creative vision, will ultimately be just as valuable to us as those taken under the banner of the word ‘documentary’.

[1] Quoted in Michel Frizot. A new history of photography, Kèonemann, Kèoln 1998, p144

[2] ‘Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lightning Process, Some of the Results of a Journey through the City with an Instantaneous Camera —the Poor the Idle and the Vicious’, New York Sun, February 12, 1888, reprinted in Beaumont Newhall. Photography : essays & images : illustrated readings in the history of photography, Secker & Warburg, London 1981, p156)

[3] Lewis Hine, ‘Social Photography: How the Camera May Help in Social Uplift’, quoted in Alan Trachtenberg. Reading American photographs : images as history, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans, Hill and Wang, New York, NY 1989, p207

[4] Walker Evans and Lincoln Kirstein. American photographs, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y 1988 np

[5] Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Paladin Grafton, London 1973, p102

[6] Life, 12 July 1937, p19

[7] Alex Kershaw. Blood and champagne : the life and times of Robert Capa, Macmillan, London 2002; Caroline Brothers. War and photography : a cultural history, Routledge, London ; New York 1997

[8] Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘The Decisive Moment’, in Vicki Goldberg. Photography in print : writings from 1816 to the present, Simon and Schuster, New York 1981, p385

[9] Susan Sontag. On photography, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1979, p36

David Wills’ B3

Absolutely everybody in Australia, and many other people around the world, would recognise the Bananas in Pyjamas instantly.  To Australian children the lovable bananas in their blue and white striped pyjamas come from a phase they all went through in pre-school. They adore B1 and B2, as the characters call each other, as they rollick across their TV screens getting themselves into, and out of, all sorts of muddles with a delightfully light sense of humour. To Australian adults they are probably the least annoying of all the children’s TV characters. With their slightly camp relationship to each, and their absolutely unique shape — not a cuddly teddy bear or a twee fairy but a two metre tall banana — the identical odd couple of B1 and B2 are ripe for affectionate parody.

The Bananas in Pyjamas are part of the stable of children’s TV characters shown by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. A vast range of Banana merchandise, from plush toys to bed sheets, to backpacks, is available under licence for parents and grandparents to buy for their children’s presents. The ABC guards its copyright as jealously as any other corporation, but at the same time ordinary Australian people feel a sense of ownership and participation in the ABC that they don’t feel for other trans-national media organisations. Therefore, patterns from which you can knit your own Banana have been regularly published in popular magazines such as the Australian Women’s Weekly and in various home-craft magazines. Vernacular, home knitted Bananas regularly appear in children’s bedrooms, alongside the officially merchandised Banana clones which are produced in their thousands by factories in China.

You can’t just walk in and buy these lovingly knitted Bananas from toyshops or ABC franchises. You have to be attending a school fete or Saturday morning market, where you will stumble across them lying in anticipation on a lady’s trestle table, newly knitted in fresh wool and nestled amongst the piles of all of her other knitting — baby’s clothes and coat-hanger covers and beanies. Or you have to be browsing through a garage sale or Op Shop, where you might find one, with its wool smudged and fluffed after a lifetime’s use, amongst all of the other bruised and battered toys a child has grown out of, which they are now offering up for hopeful sale.

For several years David Wills has been rescuing Bananas from the lonely isolation of such places and assembling them into a collection. These ‘other’ Bananas aren’t stamped from the same factory template as the official plush toys, rather a different pair of hands has knitted each one from the same pattern. Each knitter has been more or less skillful in her stitching, each has chosen wool at a higher or lower level of virulence in the Bananas’ signature colours of yellow, blue and white, and each has stuffed the Bananas with more or less wadding, distending the stitches to different degrees in different shapes. Most importantly, each has applied in her own unique way those vital details: the stitching of the mouth and eyes and stalk — that last touch that finally animates the previously inert Banana with personality and life.

David Wills has taken each of these alternate Bananas — aberrant offshoots from an ideal root-stock — and made a series of respectful head and shoulder portraits of them. Toys and dolls have long been a favourite subject for photographers. But these images aren’t just microscopic still-lives of toys, or table-top tableaus of dolls and figurines enacting some socially parodic scenario. They are fully constituted portraits. Each Banana squarely faces the camera, and is allowed to present his own stitched-on face and his own acquired personality to the viewer. This is not a rogues gallery of mugshots. Photographed against a red background and framed in gold, the Bananas present an array of faces to be admired, like oil paintings in an ancestral hall, executive portraits in a boardroom, or graduand portraits in a yearbook. Bravely posing for their portraits in front of Wills’ camera, these knitted toys have none of the abjection of Mike Kelley’s hand knitted toys. They are not the pathetic tragic residue of an excess of cloying love, rather the individuality of that love, which is revealed by the careful repetition of Wills’s respectful portraiture, seems to have granted them an uncanny vitality, independence and autonomy.

Looking along the rows of faces the viewer can compare and contrast the ways in which the identical DNA of the original Banana knitting pattern has been nurtured into unique individuality. In general these Bananas, like their original models, exude generous bonhomie, they open their arms out to us and give us a great big goofy smile. Intelligence was never the original Bananas’ strong point. Part of B1 and B2’s charm, apart from the fact that they are only differentiated by the small ‘B1’ and ‘B2’ embroidered on their collars, is that as they are getting themselves into yet another muddle they are the are always the last to realize what their pre-school audience already, delightedly, knows. Most of the faces stitched onto the other knitted Banana have a similar naïve openness. Some even seem to open their pyjama jackets to us, showing us their generous woolly hearts like a cuddly Jesus. But not all of them. Once the core Banana DNA has bolted the stable of industrial replication it can genetically mutate into all kinds of new creatures. Some of the knitted Bananas seem to have changed gender, growing a well-padded maternal bosom between their outstretched arms. Others seemed to have even crossed over to the other side, with the blue stripes of their pyjamas darkening to black, and their wide grins being pinched into a Mephistophelian leer.

What allows these contrasts to take place, of course, is not only the unique love and care with which they were originally knitted, but the rigorous system of portraiture that allows us compare them. Evolution has trained us to interpret faces. We have to read the language of the face, no matter how crudely the eyes and mouth are delineated, just as we have to compare expressions when we see them presented in a clean grid, where the nuances of expressive inflection are amplified by their modulation of a serial pattern. In David Wills’ care these Bananas, who are mustered together after being scattered to the far corners of Australian vernacular culture, are now no longer alone, but re-united with their siblings. This family of ‘B3s’ are found to be just like each other on the one hand, but also utterly strange to each other on the other. And in that they are exactly like us.

Martyn Jolly

Digital versus Analogue Photography

‘Digital and Analogue Photography’, panel at Queensland Photography Festival Conference, Queensland University of Technology, 8 October 2006.

As I stared more, at images of people in business suits, on picnics, in a taxi, I became frightened. I looked at the people sitting across from me in the subway car for reassurance, but they too began to seem unreal, as if they were also figments of someone’s imagination. It became difficult to choose who or what was ‘real’, and why people could exist but people looking just like them in photographs never did. I became very anxious, nervous, not wanting to depend upon my sight, questioning it. It was as if I were in a waking dream with no escape, feeling dislocated, unable to turn elsewhere, even to close my eyes, because I knew when I opened them there would be nowhere to look and be reassured—Fred Ritchin, In Our Own Image: The coming revolution in photography. 1990.[1]

This apocalyptic prediction from 16 years ago never came to pass. The ‘threat’ of the digital is now a dead issue. Nobody cares. Photography is still real. For instance, an army of self-righteous bloggers stands poised to pounce on any photojournalist who dares to apply a Photoshop tool to a reportage image. As they did to a hapless Lebanese stringer for Reuters called Adnan Hajj, sprung for not resisting the temptation to add an extra dose of theatre to Israel’s attacks on Bierut with his clone tool.

The digital has become so familiarised that one can easily imagine a 21st century Roland Barthes stumbling on a long forgotten folder in the depths of his hard drive, idly double-clicking on a half-forgotten jpeg and involuntarily being plunged into a mnemonic reverie as the file opens up.

Of course the world hasn’t ended, because photography is a social convention as much as it is a technological invention, stupid! The last decade has established that the indexical is not an immutable technological connection embedded within the photo, it is a mutable effect produced by the photo. And within the current conventions of photography the analogue and the digital are functionally continuous with each other. So now for all intents and purposes there is no difference between the two. They are no longer disjunctive, but now conjunctive.

Nonetheless the whole digital vs analogue thing isn’t quite over yet. In an article “How to make Analogies in a Digital Age” from October 117, Summer 2006, Whitney Davis suggests that, in the work of photographers such as Andreas Gursky, the digital manipulation within the realistic photographs is a direct analogy of the bland, globalised, corporatised, commodified, replicated, conformist world of market capitalism they depict. The cookie-cutter tools of Photoshop are analogous to the cookie-cutter architectural production of today’s corporate spaces. Moreover, this analogy is stitched into the world depicted — something only photography, either digital or analogue, can do!

In Australia there are a bunch of photographers — Pat Brassington, Julie Rrap or Anne Zahalka for instance — who also deliberately embed evidence of digital manipulation more or less deeply into their realistic photographs of real things. These photographs also analogise how real things themselves are ‘manipulated’: the body is manipulated by social conventions, or formed by laws of desire; nature is defined by culture; and the real is produced by artifice.

In some senses this kind of work reminds me a bit of Pictorialism. Like Pictorialists these artists deliberately leave visual evidence of their own conceptual intention on the surface of the work. Both strategies arose during a period of transition in the medium. The impressionistic Pictorialists were leaving evidence of traditional hand-crafted art techniques in order to claim a new higher aesthetic status for the medium. The digital pictorialists cling to a digital look in order to retain a still central conceptual and theoretical status for the medium. One claims for photography the prestige of the aesthetic, the other the prestige of the theoretical. Also, both groups of artists make framed or prosceniumed pictures, which need to be institutionally stabilised for a certain kind of sophisticated connoisseurial scrutiny, in order to work. If Pat Brassington’s images weren’t printed in thick pigment on rag paper, or Anne Zahalka’s images weren’t giant glossy prints, they would quickly lose their conceptual focus as theoretical objects.

Interestingly, all of these artists are of a certain ‘generation’ (my generation), they can all remember 1990, and the apocalyptic hysteria of the period. There still needs to be an echo of Fred Ritchin’s 1990 paranoia, a residual shiver of the uncanny, for their digital analogies to work. But one wonders how much longer these frissons will continue to be generated as we become even more habituated to the digital

I think younger artists are less interested in all of this — in creating a disjunctive conjuncture between the digital and the analogue. They grew up with the digital, so there is nothing to compare it to, no disjunctive ontology with which to conjoin it. But they are seeing in inkjet printing technology the potential for a whole new mobility, plasticity and mutablity of the photograph. Just as the photograph is dematerialising into the Powerpoint slide show or email attachment, they are exploring a counter-strand. Ironically they are interested in materialising the digital image, in manifesting the ‘photographic’ not as a picture, but as an artefactual event. The indexical is used as a ‘value added’ quality to the sculptural. Some examples to end with come from the ANU’s inkjet research facility.

For instance Steven Holland scanned a real 30 foot python skin, then inkjetted the image onto a sheet of paper made by gluing together the cigarette-paper thin pages of a bible, this print was then sloughed around a plaster cast recreating a simulacra of the original snake.

Rachel Kingston has made a bone-porcelain slip using, as the bone in the porcelain, the cremated remains of her deceased grandmother. One of her grandmother’s own photographs, taken before she died, is then inkjetted onto the porcelain. In other experiments she is dusting the ash onto the wet ink before it dries.

In my own work on the ACT Bushfire Memorial I used a process that inkjetted a pigment derived from automotive paint on the membrane between two sheets of safety glass annealed together in a kiln. This allowed me to install five mosaic columns of 300 full colour, full resolution images derived from community snapshots in full sunlight

In conclusion I think that this might be one of the last conferences in which there is a session on the digital and the analogue. I think the discussion is reaching its use by date. For instance, I recently convened a conference roundtable session with other Photomedia departments, amongst the many things we discussed was the way many of us still valued darkrooms and darkroom processes in our departments. A colleague from a new media department, one of those annoying guys who is always the first to tell you of the latest paradigm shift, irritated us all by repeatedly labelling this as mere nostalgia. But he missed the point. We have gone past the point of nostalgia for the analogue. Darkroom processes for students are now a pedagogical opportunity, a chance for them to slow down for instance, or experience the process of image making in a new way. They are becoming a new alternative, not a nostalgic retreat.

[1]  F. Ritchin, In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography, New York, Aperture Foundation, 1990.

The Eight-Storey Flats

Artist’s statement Social Capital, group exhibition at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, curated by Lisa Byrne. , 9 March to 15 April. Catalogue, 32 pp,  ISBN 1 921 157 02X.

Martyn Jolly

The eight storey flats, 2006.

Eight inkjet prints on rag board

(Images sourced from National Archives of Australia)

900 x 1112 mm

Eight framed inkjet prints

200 x 250 mm

The Eight-Storey Flats

With the onset of the cold war in the 1950s the government’s attempts to transfer reluctant public servants to Canberra took on a new political urgency. The families of senior public servants uprooted from their lives in Sydney and Melbourne needed suburban bungalows, and flats for the younger transferees also needed to be built — quickly and in quantity. A model was provided by the new medium and high-density housing schemes of Britain. These modernist town plans featured groupings of walk-up flats that would hopefully create community environments, as well as tall apartment blocks spaced widely apart in park-like landscapes.

Unfortunately, the government’s lack of proper funding, lack of time, lack of understanding and lack of imagination meant that Canberra’s experiments with these modern developments were yet another opportunity wasted. To the architectural critic Phillip Jackson the pleasant sense of scale that could have been created by grouping the three-storey Allawah Flats north-east of Civic, was absolutely destroyed by the huge and completely unrelated eight-storeyed blocks of the Currong Flats right behind them.

Nonetheless, when they were completed in 1959, the two hundred or so small flats in what was then the tallest building in Canberra, with their views over the Molonglo River toward the Brindabella Ranges, as well as their central heating, delivery hatches and incinerator chutes, were highly sought after by Canberra’s newly transferred single workers. As Canberra matured during the 1960s, the flats formed a modern architectural backdrop to Civic, they became a kind of bachelor machine generating Canberra’s much needed urban life.

In the 1970s and 80s public housing policy in the nation’s capital shifted to become more in line with the rest of Australia — a service for low-income social welfare clients. By the 1990s the flats were tenanted by elderly people still ensconced from its halcyon days, along with short-term tenants who were often involved in the criminal justice or mental health systems, all toxically mixing within buildings that were themselves suffering the effects of long-term neglect. Although many support services and community activities were taking place within the complex, to the rest of Canberra the flats came to be regarded as a kind of a Dickensian eyrie hulking over the burgeoning shopping malls of Civic.

Today, a new wave of high-density housing has swept over Canberra, as every week newspaper ads for yet another fomecore development offer us the chance to invest in ‘stylish apartment living’. However the old Currong Flats stubbornly remain a Canberra landmark. They are still right behind Civic, and they are still eight storeys high. But at the end of their life the impetus of their vertical vector has pivoted. They no longer elevate their tenants to a pleasant prospect over a growing city, instead their high balconies provide a readily accessible spot from which to commit suicide — a final plummet no safety net can catch.

Martyn Jolly

Sources: Architecture in Australia, December 1959. Cornerstone of the Capital: A History of Public Housing in Canberra, Bruce Wright, 2000. If these walls could speak…, Mary Hutchison, 2005.