I’m researching the construction of nineteenth century audiences by the magic lantern, mainly through Trove newspaper searches, and finding fun stuff, such as this from the Queensland Worker, ‘Dissolving views’ was another phrase for Magic Lantern Show. I don’t know enough about fin de siecle Queensland politics to get the joke though.
Here we are again, the government’s last Christmas feast.
I ambled down to my letterbox to find the latest issue of the Magic Lantern Society Newsletter waiting for me. Delighted that there was a report on Professor Ian Edwards and his wife Margery’s presentation to the 9th Magic Lantern Society Convention in Birmingham. (See below). Professor Edwards presented a lantern show at my symposium of last year the Projected Image Heritage of Australia and New Zealand, and he also presented a show at the Australasian Magic Lantern Society Convention. We are working on another event next year, so like our facebook page please.
Professor Ian Edwards at 9th Magic Lantern Society Convention
Looking for Christmas presents I discovered a new literary sub-genre of which I was previously unaware: the testimony of children who had been the victims of various kinds of child abuse, delivered through the dubious amanuenses of one or two authors who seem to have cornered the market. Each book-cover, like the covers of a sister sub-genre romance fiction, looked remarkably similar: pinks, blues and white (girls/boys/innocence); cursive script (first person testimony); and the downcast, pouty faces of blonde poppets of both sexes shot from a high camera angle. It made me think of the street urchin narratives of the nineteenth century, found in the journalism of W. T. Stead, or the life model lantern slides of Bamworth and Co, or the photography of Charles Dodgson for instance.
Shot in a Canberra book shop, a new sub genre: child abuse victim testimony packaged for the sentimental consumption of sympathetic readers
Shot in a Canberra book shop, a new sub genre: child abuse victim testimony packaged for the sentimental consumption of sympathetic readers
Shot in a Canberra book shop, a new sub genre: child abuse victim testimony packaged for the sentimental consumption of sympathetic readers
In my naiveté I was astounded by the way high school formals have become defined by celebrity culture. After dropping my daughter off to her friends before her end of year formal I found out that we were expected to follow her and her friends in their posh car all the way to the venue. Hundreds of parents and relations thronged the steps. The hired and borrowed cars queued up. As each one disgorged its sixteen-year old occupants a barrage of flashes went off and mums squealed at the kids who posed for the cameras.
Kids arrive at Old Parliament House, Canberra, for their year ten formal
New Canberra Museum and Gallery exhibition Lens Love explores the self, subject and environment
Sally Pryor
Canberra Times
November 30, 2013
Marzena Wasikowska’s Jess, Oskar, Kai and Mia.
It’s one of the most common complaints of modern life – the increasing tendency to photograph life when you should be living it instead. Snapping images of weddings and babies and parties and soon-to-be-devoured meals, as a way of affirming life’s existence when just being there isn’t enough. And why wouldn’t we, when cameras are constantly on hand, be moved to capture every single meaningful moment?
But when photography is more than just an impulsive social interaction, the process of living through images can be much more complicated. A new exhibition at Canberra Museum and Gallery shows how six local photographers have negotiated the porous boundaries between the self, the subject and the surrounding environment.
Gallery director Shane Breynard, who curated the show, says he set out from a cerebral standpoint – photographic film theory from the 1970s and ’80s that focuses on ”the gaze” as ”a concept for that period where the infant becomes aware of themselves”.
Lee Grant, from the series Belco pride.
”They get a shock that they’re an object in the world among other objects – they’re not just a flood of sensation. So I’ve had fun using that as a bit of a thread to select and group works together,” he says.
”Indeed, it’s something that is common among these photographers, that they all have a real sensitivity to the way today, in the modern world, we live half of our lives through an awareness of ourselves in images … we kind of live across time and in the relations of how we might be seen in an image.”
The six artists he chose have ta common anthropological vision of people and their place in the world as well as distinctive preoccupations.
Denise Ferris’s The long hot summer.
Polish-born artist Marzena Wasikowska has three series of photographs in the show, and all relate to her family, including large-scale montages showing her three adult children, and their friends, spouses or children.
The images are immediately striking, and not just because of the instantly recognisable face of her middle daughter, actor Mia Wasikowska, but because of their careful, painterly composition. These are people who have grown up under their mother’s watchful, artistic eye, and their resulting lack of self-consciousness is palpable.
She also presents a study of a recent trip to Poland, her third since leaving her homeland at the age of 11, with images presented in grids that are made all the more poignant through their disconnectedness from each other.
Detail from Martyn Jolly’s ACT Bushfire Memorial Images
Wasikowska’s husband, John Reid, also has works in the show, including his classic Fishman and Walking the Solar System series, both eccentric conceptual forays into the wilderness that immerse him as a subject at the mercy of the elements.
The youngest artist in the show, Lee Grant, is already known for her Belco Pride works – a series exploring her connection to the suburban Canberra of her childhood and adolescence. But her academic past as an anthropologist also shines through in the wary gaze of her subjects, from a group of teenage girls in a fast-food restaurant, to a well-dressed African family lined up in front of their house. Her Korea Project and Oriental Dinnerseries – Grant has a Korean mother – is also an examination of the refracted identity of Asians in Australia.
Head of the ANU school of art Denise Ferris presents works that are as inextricably bound up in the landscape as she is. From where she lives in the Perisher Valley, she has recorded the beauty and the fragility of the often harsh landscape of the mountains, in the midst of winter or the blaze of summer. Her images are sometimes populated with human figures, sometimes partially obscured by snow and thick clothing.
”This picks up on Lens Love, the title of the exhibition,” says Breynard. ”This is a place that Denise adores, and as she’s taking these photographs, there’s something there that she’s searching for and wants to grab and articulate. And it’s not just the landscape without people in it – there’s something about the connection and the way people use the landscape.”
Martyn Jolly has long been fascinated by archival images, and the effect created when he zeroes in on particular details, and removes the surrounding context. His series Faces of the Living Dead uses images from an archive at Cambridge University, images that are today known to be fakes – men and women caught up in the 1870s craze of ”communing” with dead relatives through photographs. The images, which include hazy presences floating around the faces of the grieving hopefuls, are cropped in for maximum and pathetic effect. Jolly also includes his series commissioned as part of the 2003 bushfire memorial – a reproduction of the columns of images he produced depicting the aftermath and recovery. He has used the same technique to crop the images close as a way of highlighting the drama and pathos.
Cathy Laudenbach is fascinated by how stories and experiences interact with particular places, leaving marks that aren’t always discernible to the naked eye.
In one series, The Beauty and the Terror, she has been inspired by the story of Daisy Bates, the Australian journalist who, in the early 1900s, retired to the Australian bush to devote herself to protecting Aboriginal people. Laudenbach includes no people in the images, but a presence is implied through shadows and objects.
”She’s divining, almost, a colonial inhabitation of this landscape,” says Breynard. ”There’s a sense in these photos of something that you can’t grasp – a story unfolding, or a mystery you can’t quite get, or a presence of a spirit.”
Like Jolly, she is also taken by notions of the supernatural, and in another series, The Familiars, she photographs rooms in which people have reported ghostly encounters.
”Today, it’s something characteristic of our time with our smartphones – we point at something and say, ‘That’s a good photo’, and we take it and file it away, and then we look at it again to connect with a time,” says Breynard. ”But these artists, I think, really slow down that time. There’s awkwardness in that, it’s their own searching … They slow you down, and they connect you with the mystery and ineffability of stuff you think you know.”
■ Lens Love, at Canberra Museum and Gallery, runs until February 23.
CMAG Show invite
I needed a plumber and found Duncan’s Plumbing on the web. I was particularly impressed by the amount of work he had put into the galleries on his website, particularly his Past Works gallery. He seemed to have uploaded more shots than were strictly necessary, but with an obvious pride in his team and an obvious commitment to conveying the realities of plumbing. Are these to the photgraphy of labour traditions of Sander, Salgado and Sekula, what the selfie is to portraiture?
From Duncan’s Plumbing Past Works gallery
My ‘Soldiers of the Cross’ article has been published in the Journal of Early Popular Visual Culture. Click on the link below to start ratcheting up my downloads!
Pagan Romans break up a Christian service
Title slide
Saul watches as St Stephen’s blood pools about his head after a stoning
Preparing for upcoming Canberra Museum and Gallery Show surveying those of us who have been around a while in ACT Photography. Curated by Shane Breynard, CMAG’s Director and ex student. Opens next Thursday. Here Marzena Wasikowska confers over test strips of her work with our gun printer Amy Macgregor in the ANU’s Inkjet Research Facility.
Marzena Wasikowska confers over test strips of her work with our gun printer Amy Macgregor in the ANU’s Inkjet Research Facility
For those that missed it. The performance of Larry Sitsky’s 1975 piece The Legions of Asmodeus, re-performed on four theremins including one by Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski on which the piece had been initially performed in front of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975, and which was restored by Alistair Riddell and Stephen Jones with a RSHA grant I got, is available at:
there’s a general link for the night at:
JS OStoja-Kotkowski, Wave, 1975
Theremin Performance, ANU School of Art, Charles Martin and Ensemble
Fogies iPading the back of the theremin
Stephen Jones recording the performance on his phone
Martyn Jolly 