Short posts

Staging Australia - Essay from: Focus: Australian Government Photographers. National Archives of Australia, 2023. ISBN 978-1-922209-32-0 Can official photography be interesting? This might seem an odd question to ask, since clearly the National Archives of Australia thinks it can be – hence their exhibition Focus: Australian government photographers. But this exhibition is swimming against the current of most […]
Now online: ‘When it’s Moonlight on the Prairie’ and other songs and chromatropes - A magic lantern show with Crank Williams and Patsy Decline for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, 26 August 2023. The magic lantern slides: six mechanical chromatropes c. 1880s – 1890s; The Lights of London Town, York & Son, 1892; Won’t You Buy My Pretty Flowers, Bamforth & Co., 1897; The Gin Fiend, c. 1885; When […]
Powerhouse Late Magic Lantern Show online -
Astronomy Domine (apologies to Syd Barrett) - Powerhouse Late Harris Street Ultimo Sydney 3 August 2023, 6.30 and 7.30 pm. Developing our Powerhouse Late magic lantern show with Charles Martin @cpmpercussion and Anna Raupach @anna_madeleine. We’ll be showing lots of old favourites like this one of a Newtonian solar system, equivalent to the mechanical slides used at the Sydney Observatory for science […]
Review of ‘Empire Early Photography and Spectacle’ - Thank you Anne Maxwell for your intelligent and engaged review of Empire Early Photography and Spectacle: The Global Career of Showman Daguerreotypist J. W. Newland, co-authored with Elisa deCourcy and out now in paperback, for The History of Photography journal.
Magic Lantern Show - Documentation of our latest show, with Jess Green, Jamie Cameron, Brendan Clark and Ellen Breynard in the art deco, mirrored, Kings Cinema at the Powerhouse Museum, is now up on YouTube
Wes Stacey Memorial Words - Thank you Gerrit Fokkema and Lisa Moore for giving me the privilege of attempting to sum up Wes Stacey’s contribution to Australian photography for the diverse audience who came to his Memorial at Powerhouse on 30 March. And thank you to the other organisers and participants of the event. This is what I said: Wes […]
Wes Stacey 1941-2023 - Gael Newton’s reflections on Wes Stacey are spot on. There were so many wildly different aspects to his extraordinarily energising presence in Australian photography, it’s hard to encompass them all. I have recently been admiring his early work for popular Australian illustrated magazines, when he was still in his twenties. (See my post below). And […]
Girls Galore! - Girls Galore!: Photography in Australian Men’s Magazines in the 1960s Journal of Australian Studies Figure 9 : Darl magazine, Sydney, c1966. Collection: author. ABSTRACT Men’s magazines have formed a significant part of Australian illustrated magazine publishing since 1936. In this article, I broadly survey the field up until 1971, concentrating particularly on bikini and nude […]
YouTube Channel - The Out of the Ordinary: On Poetry and the World conference asked us to do two magic lantern shows for their delegates at the University of Canberra. Videos of Rachael Thoms reciting, Alexander Hunter and Charles Martin composing and playing, and myself, performing the poems The Last Shilling and Jane Conquest are now on YouTube, […]
Australian Centre for the Moving Image Magic Lantern shows - ACMI Magic Lantern Shows 9-11 September, 2022 In association with the exhibition Light: Works from Tate’s Collection
Not Extinct - Apoplectic that to illustrate a story about de-extincting the thylacine the NFSA today supplied The Guardian with a frame from a film shot in 1933 which had been colourised for them a few years ago by the French company Composite Films. Colourisation is a blight. The idea that history originally shot in black and white […]
Video documentation of ‘I would not, if I could, forget’ - A magic lantern show for the Lumiere Festival, Mount Victoria, April 2022. ‘I would not, if I could, forget.’
Blue Mountains Magic Lantern Show - 5.30 pm, Sunday 24 April, 2022. ‘I would not, if I could, forget’, original collodion glass magic lantern slides from the 1880s; and ‘Chromatropes’, hand painted mechanical slides. Music: Alexander Hunter. Magic lanternists: Martyn Jolly and Elisa deCourcy. Lumiere Festival, Mount Victoria, Blue Mountains. Tickets. Preceded by an artists’s talk, 4.00 pm Sunday 24 April, […]
‘Why do it again’ - Catalogue essay for Elisa deCourcy’s daguerreotype exhibition Archive Apparitions at PhotoAccess, Canberra, until 21 May, 2022. Why do it again? Every student of photographic history has seen at least one daguerreotype, as a slide in a lecture or an illustration in a book, perhaps accompanied by one of those phrases such as ‘mirror with a […]
Going to see an Artificial Human Skeleton adopt 36 different Attitudes, and an automaton snake crawl around a roaring automaton lion, was just another night out in Launceston in 1844. - Read about it in my chapter ‘“Attractive Novelties”: Spectacular Innovation and the Making of a New Kind of Audience within Colonial Modernity’, in the newly published book, edited by Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand, Circus and the Avant-Gardes: History, Imaginary, Innovation. I also discuss waxworks and spectral illusions. The whole book’s good. You can rent it from […]
Melbourne Launch of ‘Installation View’ - Join Judy Annear, Daniel Palmer and Martyn Jolly at 2pm, Sunday, 27 March at Perimeter Books, 748 High Street Thornbury, Victoria. Part of the Melbourne Art Book Fair. Details.
This weekend, a magic lantern show out of the rain - As part of Dynamo Hub, one of Local Jinni’s contributions to the Surface Urban Art Festival, a performance of magic lantern slides and Pathé’s wonderful 1906 film Toto Exploité la Curiosite, beautifully restored by the NFSA. With Alexander Hunter, Rachael Thoms and Charles Martin. In Gorman Arts Centre, out of the rain. Tickets.
“ … this overlooked visual technology takes on new meaning in Elisa De Courcy and Martyn Jolly’s provocative and exciting book.” - Thank you Dr Felicity Barnes for you generous review in the Australian Historical Studies journal of Elisa deCourcy and myself’s book Empire Early Photography and Spectacle: The Global Career of Showman Daguerreotypist J. W. Newland
“At every turn, this book complicates our expectations of both Australian photography and its exhibition history.” - Thank you Professor Geoffrey Batchen for your rigorous review in the History of Photography journal of Daniel Palmer and myself’s book Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia 1848-2020.
Postponed: Installation View Launch Upcoming at Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne. - Postponed: Perimeter and CCP are thrilled to present a panel discussion to celebrate the publication of Daniel Palmer and Martyn Jolly’s major book Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia (1848-2020), the result of an extensive research project. Hosted here at CCP the panel will feature Palmer and Jolly in conversation with Judy Annear, writer and Honorary Fellow […]
Seven Sydney Dystopias, 1993. - Pages 68 — 71 of west 6/7, 1993, ‘out of the intermix’, edited by Colin Hood (University of Western Sydney). I can’t remember why Colin and I didn’t call it ‘Seven Sydney Heterotopias’, since it’s obviously inspired by Foucault. It was shot on my Linhof 6×9.
An ‘Australian art from archives’ article from 2014. - ‘Big Archives and Small Collections: Remarks on the Archival Mode in Contemporary Australian Art and Visual Culture’, Public History Review, Vol 21 (2014), pp60-80.
Review of ‘Installation View’ in the ‘Canberra Times’, 16 October 2021. - “… their substantial new book, Installation View – enriches our understanding of the diversity of Australian photography”. Review by Brian Rope, Illustrated with the exhibitions of Micky Allan, Expo ’67, and the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition.
- Listen to us in Conversation with Helen Ennis at PhotoAccess. Buy the book.
‘Installation View’ in The Conversation - https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-10-photography-exhibitions-that-defined-australia-166755 https://perimetereditions.com/INSTALLATION-VIEW
On ‘Hey Hey It’s Saturday’ -
(re)create art and the activation of heritage - One-day symposium, Wednesday 21 April 2021, 8:45am-5pm Ann Harding Conference Centre, University of Canberra re)create is a one-day symposium exploring the role of creative art practice in the activation of heritage places, practices and projects. Artists are adept at generating new perspectives on seeing, feeling and thinking. In doing so they play an important role […]
The publican and the daguerreotypist - Dr Elisa deCourcy and Dr Martyn Jolly, with Dr Donna West BrettThursday 11 March, 6.30pm In the mid-19th century, daguerreotype portraiture was taking the world by storm. Join historians Dr Elisa deCourcy and Dr Martyn Jolly, in conversation with Dr Donna West Brett, for a discussion on this portrait of Sydney publican Edward McDonald. Edward McDonald, the […]
Daguerreotypes and Chromatropes - We’ve just received a few advanced copies of our book Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle: The Global Career of Showman Photographer J. W. Newland in the post. It was wonderful writing it with Elisa deCourcy. And now we’ve got it, it is so great seeing the daguerreotypes and magic lantern shows we discuss reproduced side […]
2020: The Year That Changed Us - The essay Elisa deCourcy and myself wrote for The Conversation, PORTRAIT OF HEMI POMARA AS A YOUNG MAN: HOW WE UNCOVERED THE OLDEST SURVIVING PHOTOGRAPH OF A MĀORI, has been collected into this publication. The other writers are excellent, and the book is very reasonably priced.
Won’t You Buy My Pretty Flowers - This video was made for Fiona Hooton to project on the walls of Verity Lane Canberra, as part of Localjinni’s AlleyHart video walk for Contour 556 2020, Canberra’s public art biennial, and the Design Canberra 2020 festival. The song was arranged and sung by Jacqui Bradley and Krista Schmeling. In a video studio they stood either side of the screen as I […]
Free Download! ‘Frontier and Metropole, Science and Colonisation: The Systematic Exhibitions of Richard Daintree’ - Figure 21. Detail from Centennial Photographic Company, Philadelphia International Exhibition, ‘Queensland Court, Philadelphia ’76, Evening Before Opening’, 1876. Abstract Richard Daintree is well known as an Australian colonial photographer and geologist. I look at six international exhibitions he created from 1872 to 1879 that promoted the colony of Queensland by systematically integrating spectacular grids of […]
Portrait of Hemi Pomara as a young man: how we uncovered the oldest surviving photograph of a Māori - Portrait of Hemi Pomara as a young man: how we uncovered the oldest surviving photograph of a Māori Elisa deCourcy, Australian National University and Martyn Jolly, Australian National University It is little wonder the life of Hemi Pomara has attracted the attention of writers and film makers. Kidnapped in the early 1840s, passed from person […]
Edward Colston - As Percy Shelley knew when he wrote Ozymandias, the iconic is defined by the iconoclastic. In its brazen or marmoreal defiance of mortality every civic statue to this or that ‘King of Kings’ already has encoded into it its own death as a negative potentiality waiting to be fulfilled. Those who made history through destruction […]
Thanks to all those who came to ‘Suburban Apparitions’ just before the shut down. - Here’s a short video of the night, made by Amr Tawfik. There’s a complete performance video here, on the Heritage in the Limelight site.
Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 1916. My review of Ann Elias’s excellent Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity is in the Journal of Australian Historical Studies, volume 51, issue 1, 2020.
Suburban Apparitions: Magic Lanterns at Calthorpes House, Friday 13 March, Canberra - Waratah Lahy is painting up a storm; Alec Hunter and Charles Martin are composing up a storm; Jenny Gall and our special guest vocalists are limbering up; and Elisa deCourcy and myself are working on new ways of dissolving even weirder slides, some of which would be getting on to 150 years old. Buy your […]
Our book ‘The Magic Lantern at Work’ has been published. - ‘The Tri-Unial lantern illuminated with the Oxy-Hydrogen Light, in the Hall of the Balmain School of Arts’, frontispiece, Catalogue of Optical Lanterns and Transparent Views, with the newest forms of Bi-unial and Tri-unial Dissolving View Apparatus (Sydney: William MacDonnell, 1882). Our book The Magic Lantern at Work: Witnessing, Persuading, Experiencing and Connecting has been published, […]
Magic Lantern show inspired by Rouse Hill House in the Cell Block Theatre, National Art School, Sydney - A magic lantern show with chromatropes, Pussy’s Road to Ruin, comic slides & dissolving views In the early 1860s the wealthy family of Rouse Hill House and Farm, situated to the north west of Sydney, New South Wales, acquired a phantasmagoria lantern, several sets of hand-painted glass slides and a music box. This show is inspired by their use of the […]
The Light of the World: transport and transmission in colonial modernity - Early Popular Visual Culture, Volume 19, 2019 Taking a photograph from the 1906 Australian tour of William Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World as my starting point, I explore the special relationship colonial audiences had with magic lantern shows and related entertainments. I examine the sense of ‘transport’ that audiences felt at collectively witnessing images […]
Women in Vogue at the National Portrait Gallery - The curators of the National Portrait Gallery are thoroughly professional. Vogue Australia has been a vibrant part of our visual culture for sixty years. That’s why it’s disappointing that this show never really gets off the ground. By the time we get to Julie Bishop’s shoes it seems to be over. Is it because, as […]
Why is an archive when it is lost? - Can we ever forgive the hapless Fairfax beancounter who, in 2013, thought he had solved at least one of the troubled news organisation’s many financial problems? Their massive archive of deteriorating photographic negatives and prints was costing a motza to house and maintain, and without a rapid program of digitisation it was going to be […]
I admit it took a while for the penny to drop - I admit it took a while for the penny to drop. Most daguerreotypes we see are reversed because the lens forms an image directly on the metal plate. This wasn’t such a problem for portraits, but it became an issue with views, where potential purchasers would immediately see that the buildings were the wrong way […]
You are probably breaking the law when you film your child performing - Amidst all the current discussion over the threats of facial recognition software and message encryption to personal privacy and online discourse, other more longstanding contractions of our everyday public space continue their creep. Thus the ABC can publish an online article today quoting legal advice that parents should not video their kiddies at school concerts because […]
Oh what a lovely war - I started to complain about Peter Jackson’s commission from the Imperial War Museum to colourise their archival war footage when I first heard about it earlier this year, and now I’ve actually seen the result, ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’, I’ve decided to keep on complaining. This, despite two moments in his feature length film […]
Dear Dr Nelson, - I reject utterly your statement today that the Australian War Memorial is the ‘one national institution in this country that reveals more than anything else our character as a people, our soul.’ Our national soul is embodied in more than just our experience of war, it is just as fundamentally rooted in our environment, our […]
Torch light on the Opera House - Heritage Council chair Stephen Davies is unable to issue a stop work order against the Opera House advertising projections of Racing NSW because light does not cause physical harm. Instead The Chaser projected Alan Jones’s phone number on the Supreme Court and NSW parliament from a moving car, while citizens disrupted the racing ads with […]
Five Scenes for a Modern Prometheus - A video of the magic lantern performance I devised in collaboration with Elisa deCourcy, Alexander Hunter and Karen Vickery is now available for viewing online. We performed it at the ANU twice during September 2018, once in the Sir Roland Wilson Building at the Magic Lantern in Australia and the World conference, and once a […]
Heritage in the Limelight: A Collection in Progress - An article by myself and Elisa deCourcy on Uncovering, Connecting, Researching and Animating Australia’s Magic Lantern Past has just been published on the Open Library of the Humanities, thanks to Geoff Hinchcliffe and Mitchell Whitelaw. In it we discuss the fabulous Collection Explorer interface, developed with Mitchell Whitelaw.
Chromatrope at Mt Stromlo - On 20 April we performed this 130 year old chromatrope under the stars at Mt Stromlo Observatory. We projected it through a 130 year old magic lantern onto the scarred wall of the shell of the dome which was built to house the 26 inch Yale-Columbia refractor telescope in 1955, and destroyed by the ACT […]
Corrosive Colourisation - Three years ago, so the media release goes, the Imperial War Museum approached Peter Jackson, famous director of The Lord of the Rings, ‘to see what could be done’ with their archival film footage of the Great War. Jackson’s answer was to slow the footage to the frame rate at which it had […]
Save Australia’s precious kitsch heritage before it is too late! - The Rolfoclasts with their attempts at Rolfoclasm are at it again! Somebody stop them! In 1986 Rolf Harris painted for Warrnambool’s Lighthouse Theatre a lovely mural in vivid tones of ‘outback red’ and ‘charcoal black’, presumably supplied by British Paints. The mural, with its artful paint drips and edge-of-the-brush paradiddles, has roots reaching deep down through […]
Tintype of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid - What a magnificent concoction of hocus pocus was mixed in today’s piece about a newly discovered tintype which may be, perhaps, of Billy the Kid. All the tropes are there: bought at a flea market for ten dollars; photographic experts supposedly dating the object to just a two year window of 1879 to 1880 (how […]
Charge! And Charge again! And again! And again! - No other Australian battle has been reenacted as often as the Battle of Beersheba. Although the America Civil War is the most reenacted war in history, something about the 1917 charge of the Light Horse on the Turkish foothold in Palestine has the same elements of attraction for Australian reenactors. It’s probably the comforting links back […]
Justine Varga ‘Maternal Line’ - Look I don’t want to add to the beat up, but jeez some ridiculous things are being said about Justine Varga’s winning photograph for the Olive Cotton Portrait prize. Now a professor of Law at the University of Sydney is saying the chemical and light produced image of Justine Varga’s grandmother’s pen marks and spittle […]
Surface Glitter and Underground Guts - I’m enjoying preparing for a discussion I’m having about Rennie Ellis with Mandy Sayer and Manuela Furci at Surface Glitter and Underground Guts as part of the Kings Bloody Cross weekend. I was till going to primary school in Brisbane when Rennie (along with Wes Stacey) was cruising Macleay Street. But I loved finding […]
Imagine my surprise when they told me he was a she - Take a look at this carte de visite. Looks pretty ordinary doesn’t it. This carte of of the spirit medium Dr Henry Slade is from an album of spiritualist photographs compiled in Melbourne in the 1870s and acquired by the National Gallery of Australia about ten years ago. To my knowledge the NGA has never exhibited […]
Bill Henson’s digital Pictorialism - I was intrigued when I noticed at the National Gallery of Victoria that each landscape-oriented image in Bill Henson’s latest installation of pigment prints from digital scanned negatives had the same slightly rough edge around the black border. Was this a digital simulation of the effect you would get at the edge of a negative […]
Vintage ‘William Eggleston Portraits’ at the NGV - Try as I might I just can’t get myself worked up into a rage about the ‘William Eggleston Portraits’ hang at the NGV. In fact I quite liked it. The show which was shipped out to Australia from London’s portrait gallery contained two new large scale digital enlargements from scans of his 1970s negatives to […]
Historical Harpic - Thank you Bec Cody. Thank you for showing us the way to deal with fifty-year-old racist imagery. When her husband Bruce returned from the men’s toilets at the Sussex Inlet RSL and told her that he had seen four bathroom tiles, originally installed in the 1960s, bearing kitsch images of kangaroos, emus and Aboriginal men, […]
ACT Bushfire Memorial eleven years on - It’s been eleven years since Tess Horwitz, Tony Steel and myself designed and built the ACT Bushfire Memorial. Tess’s plantings look great, Tony’s stream gurgles beautifully. My five ‘digiglass’ columns of 600 photographs have faded, but not as much as I feared eleven years ago. There’s a general loss of density, but not a severe […]
Interview with Katrina Sluis, London Photographers Gallery (Digital Programme) - An interview I did with Katrina Sluis from the Digital Programme of the Photographers Gallery, London, is now up at Daniel Palmer and myself’s Photocurating site. Check it out. There’s one there Daniel did with Ian North too. While you’re there have a look at our Timeline and see if you can spot anything we’ve left […]
Nicholas Nixon’s magisterial, monumental, canonical, epic, large-format, Brown Sisters project turned into click bait!! - Hard to know where to begin with the clash of temporalities that is evoked when you stumble across a click bait link that uses one of museum photography’s most canonical projects. As has been celebrated for decades, Nicholas Nixon’s Brown Sisters project — shot on 8 x 10 film and contacted printed into luminous prints once a […]
David Hamilton - When I was a teenager in the mid seventies and just getting interested in photography David Hamilton was everywhere, on every magazine rack and in every bookstore, even in Brisbane. Barely out of puberty myself I admit I was attracted to the impossibility of his adolescent art-house eroticism. Later, at art schooI in Sydney in […]
shouting at the radio about Getty images - I find myself shouting at the radio more and more, and this morning I found myself shouting at the gross hypocrisy of Dawn Airey, CEO of the Getty Stock Images, who is in Australia. Getty scrapes public domain images and then re-offers them for use with its own ‘licence’ fee. Using public domain images for […]
Fatal algorithms - ‘Fatal Algorithms’ I’m saddened by the prospect that the fatal algorithms of this app might actually being used by some hapless people on their snapshots. Photographic contingency, the precious flame worshiped by generations of photographic theorists, is extinguished by the cold blast of these automatic operations. Time, memory, and place are all sucked into their […]
Tragic Drowning Fatality - Some images taken by Alex Hobba of the magic lantern performance ‘Tragic Drowning Fatality’ performed by Martyn Jolly and Alexander Hunter at Siteworks 2016, Bundanon, with: thirty original magic lantern slides from the 1880s to the 1920s; two JW Steward magic lanterns from the 1880s dissolving one slide projection into another; members of the ANU […]
New links for Australian magic lantern research - Instagram: @heritageinthelimelight Facebook: @heritageinthelimelight WWW: Heritage in the Limelight: The Magic Lantern in Australia and the World
‘We apologise for the inconvenience’ - “We understand that these limitations will sometimes affect content shared for legitimate reasons, including awareness campaigns or artistic projects, and we apologise for the inconvenience.” Facebook on the removal of the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph The Terror of War by Nick Ut. ‘We apologise for the inconvenience’ is a curious turn of phrase for Facebook […]
Mark Zuckerberg accused of abusing power after row over ‘napalm girl’ photo - Mark Zuckerberg accused of abusing power after row over ‘napalm girl’ photo
“O.K. So it’s banal, but ‘The Family of Man’ set me off and I’ve been trying ever since.” - “O.K. So it’s banal, but ‘The Family of Man’ set me off and I’ve been trying ever since. Trying to become a photographer and not just someone who takes photographs. I became a diarist with a camera. I tried to simply record the things which interested me from day to day. I taught myself enough […]
In the Footsteps of Others at AAANZ - My colleague from the University of Canberra, Louise Curham, and myself are convening a session on reenactment at the conference of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, ‘The Work of Art’, to be held in Canberra 1-3 December. Check out the call for papers. Proposals are due to Louise by 26 August. Here is our session […]
Reconfiguring of camera technologies and camera/subject relationships - The camera is being reconfigured, so we have to rethink camera/subject relations. Not only is the thing itself disappearing, with production of one of the most emblematic objects of modernity halving in one year (thanks to Jason O’Brien from the ANU for that tip-off), but there are more and more signs that the shuttling back and forth […]
Catoptrics literally and figuratively - In 212BC Archimedes supposedly used a parabolic ‘burning mirror’ to set the attacking Roman ships on fire. In 1646 Anthanasius Kircher, in his book The Great Art of Light and Shadow speculated that Archimedes would have had more success if he had used multiple mirrors each focusing the sun in a giant parabolic shape. Kircher’s […]
Magic Lantern Horror Show Video - A video of my Magic Lantern Horror Show, performed at the National Portrait Gallery with members of the Gallery and the ANU School of Music, is now on line.
Exeperimental magic lantern projection at Bundanon Homestead - I did a late afternoon experimental magic lantern projection in the front room of Arthur Boyd’s homestead in the last days of my Bundanon residency . I enjoyed anamorphizing the popular Biblical iconography of nineteenth century melodrama against Boyd’s expressionistic elongations and agonistic Biblical references. (Thanks to Jennifer Thompson and John Baylis) I’m doing something (along with […]
Photos of my magic lantern show at Canberra Obscura - The estimable Andrew Sikorski has posted some shots of my magic lantern performance (along with Andromeda is Coming) amongst his documentation of the Canberra Obscura Art Party on his site Life in Canberra. You can see me using my own latest technological innovation in projection which I call ‘a bit of cardboard with a hole in […]
#standupstripdown - The hashtag #standupstripdown has been invented to be used by people like Heather Whitten who want to post family photographs with naked children. In the latest of a string of such incidents her image of her naked husband cradling her sick and naked son in a shower has been taken down several times by Facebook […]
In Bangkok triangulating Francis Chit and being reminded of Charles Bayliss - When we were recently in Bangkok we had a lovely afternoon with the super gracious Gun Susangkarakan who we had met when I was giving some seminars at Chiang Mai University Faculty of Fine Arts Department of Media Arts. Gun is an ace temple photographer (hard-core old-school, 8×10 selenium-toned contact prints). He took us to […]
My review of ‘The Photograph and Australia’ - In The Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art, Vol 15, No 2, 2015 The Photograph and Australia, curated by Judy Annear, Art Gallery of New South Wales 21 March — 8 June, 2015; Queensland Art Gallery 4 July — 11 October, 2015 There haven’t been enough books or exhibitions about photography and Australia, given […]
Breasts - In the last week Facebook has banned the aged breasts in the background a photograph from 1999 posted by Ella Dreyfus, and the indigenous breasts from a traditional Aboriginal ceremony posted by Celeste Liddle. Both bans are of course absurd and offensive. But Facebook’s explanations are revealing. On the one hand it claims that ‘diversity […]
Won’t You Buy My Pretty Flowers? - Here is a new set of life model magic lantern slides I have just acquired. I love the twin perspectival vanishing points of the first painted backdrop, the photogrammed snow flurries in slide two, and the weirdly frozen Beckettian choreography of the passers-by in the final slide. They were made by Bamforth and Co after […]
The difficulties of producing a nineteenth century spirit photograph revealed with the help of Craig Tuffin and Lisa Clunie! - Last year I was enjoying watching the participants of the Alchemists Workshop make tintypes and salt prints at the ANU School of Art, which they were doing after having their minds blown by the early photography collection of the National Gallery of Australia. The highly knowledgable and highly generous Craig Tuffin, and the intelligent and […]
Man to Eat Rats once more - By far the most popular magic lantern slide of the nineteenth century was ‘Man Eating Rats’. Lanternists would even specifically promise it in their newspaper advertisements, so audiences knew they could go along and enjoy themselves making the requisite snoring and chomping and lip-smacking noises. I’ve had a copy of the slide for a while. But […]
History of Photography, The - The estimable Belinda Hungerford is doing a fabulous job researching and organising the archives of the Australian Centre for Photography. Her research led me to find, in the back of a cupboard, copies of a small booklet I produced with my students in 1990 (!). It was to accompany a show we put on at […]
Australian Research Council funding for Heritage in the limelight: the magic lantern in Australia and the world - The ARC has funded a three year Discovery Project I will lead. The project aims to discover and analyse the large number of glass magic lantern slides that remain under-used in our public collections. International scholarship has recently begun to show that lantern slide shows were a ubiquitous, globalised and formative cultural experience. The project aims […]
The Alchemists opens this Friday at the Australian Centre for Photography - The Alchemists, which I co-curated, opens this Friday at the Australian Centre for Photography, 257 Oxford Street, Paddington. It’s the last show in that building, the threshold of which I first crossed many many years ago. Exhibition Launch – ACP cycle 5 draft 2
Holy City and Jack the Ripper - Holy City was the million-seller song of 1892. A little while ago, accompanied by a singer and pianist, I projected my set of magic lantern slides, complete with double exposures and hand colouring, which were made to illustrate the song. Imagine my surprise this weekend when I read that its composer, the singer Michael Maybrick, […]
London Road film - It was wonderful to see the film London Road the other day at the movies. It’s musical shot in the dourest of colours — even the flowers that finally bloomed at the end, after the neighbourhood serial killer had been banged up to rights, seemed to have the colours on their petals rationed as though […]
The Gin-Fiend - I’ve just brought these magic lantern slides manufactured by York & Son, UK, just before1888 to a temperance text by Charles Mackay. I’m trying to think why the faces might be obscured in slides two and three, the most beautiful and dramatic slides of the set. The Gin-Fiend cast his eyes abroad And looked o’er […]
Camera Obscuras and Brisbane at Cloud Land show - For Robyn Stacey’s upcoming show Cloud Land at the Museum of Brisbane I have written an essay about the history of camera obscuras, Brisbane and Robyn. It was great to get the opportunity to spend a little more Trove-time looking into Brisbane’s own Whites Hill Camera Obscura, to the remains of which which I had previously made a pilgrimage. Thanks to […]
Two suns at Tianjin - Thanks to my Hong Kong friends for pointing this out to me. They joke that when the Chinese leadership visited the site of Tianjin’s ‘Big Bang’, they commanded two suns to appear in the sky (check out the arm shadows). However Reuters still seems to be using the image without comment.
Paparazzi could be mistaken for terrorists and SHOT - So, the British Royal family has managed to avoid the real possibility of a slump, precipitated by Charles’s behaviour, back into a Georgian paradigm of mad kings and their mistresses. But the price of their successful reboot into Royal Family 2.0 has been that the new Royals must now be celebrities. Uber celebrities certainly, but celebrities […]
The Lights of London Town - I am continually failing at controlling my addiction to buying magic lantern slides on ebay. I have just received in the post two remaining life-model slides out of what had originally been a set of four made, Richard Crangle’s estimable Lucerna magic lantern web resource tells me, by York & Son in 1892 to illustrate […]
Google Photos app tags black couple as gorillas - As discussed in my chapter ‘The Face in Digital Space‘ in the book The Culture of Photography in Public Space, the human face first entered abstract matrices of comparison in the late eighteenth century with the pioneering physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavatar. He placed the face in a psychological hierarchy using either zoological analogies or biometric algorithms. […]
Ghost of Gallipoli formed on Wall at Australian War Memorial - I’m Canberra’s ‘ghost guy’, so when staff from the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Canberra wanted somebody to open their exhibition Traces and Hauntings at Belconnen Arts Centre who were they going to call? I was delighted to, of course. When thinking about which angle on their work I could take I […]
Iconoclasm at the National Portrait Gallery - Why are the medieval forces of iconoclasm gaining strength in a visual environment which is reportedly becoming increasingly virtual and digital? After the spate of Rolfoclasm, previously reported on twice in this blog, comes Angus Trumble’s decision to remove Widodo’s portrait from the National Portrait Prize even though they don’t own it, and against the […]
Should art museums think of themselves as ‘collections’ or ‘archives’? - Should art museums think of themselves as ‘collections’ or ‘archives’? Martyn Jolly Photography has always been a numbers game, and the bigger the number the better. In the context where words like ‘exponential’ or ‘ballooning’ barely begin to describe the current state of the medium, is the notion of a photographic ‘collection’ relevant any more? […]
Rolfoclasm Continues - Rolfoclasm continues. Not only has he now been stripped of his Australian Honours, but he’s been painted out of the Variety mural at Victoria Markets and replaced with Stuart Wagstaff! But, hang on a minute, wasn’t Wagstaff the face of Benson and Hedges for decades? Didn’t the 116 ciggie ads — ‘when only the best will […]