Photography and an Australian indigenous spirituality

‘Contemporary Australian Indigenous Photography’, lecture at the Kluge-Ruhe Collection, University of Virginia, USA, 2004.

Recently there has been a flowering of Australian indigenous photography, mostly by urban Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Before the 1980s there were very few active indigenous photographers—Mervyn Bishop is virtually the only example. During the course of the eighties, as Bishop’s own career came to be recognised[1], a few other indigenous photographers also came to prominence: most spectacularly Tracey Moffatt, but also Michael Riley, Brenda Croft and Ricky Maynard.[2] But in the 1990s there was a veritable explosion.[3] There was also a general change in the style of indigenous art photography: away from a relatively straightforward documentary style, and towards a more postmodern, theoretically savvy, ‘art school’ style.[4]

This explosion parallels similar explosions of urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander creativity in painting, film and theatre. But more importantly it also parallels a growth in indigenous history telling, much of which relied on archival photographs.[5] As well, this explosion accompanied a ratcheting up of the pitch of popular debate about indigenous issues that happened in the late eighties and early nineties about our ethical responsibility to the history and memory of race relations in Australia. Media debates and court cases about land rights, the British legal doctrine of terra nullius and the stolen generation planted a specific array of images in our collective visual consciousness: barefooted kids in orphanages, Aboriginal ‘murderers’ in chains, and anthropological portraits.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, given the legal framework in which the debates took place and the media imagery which accompanied it, that contemporary urban indigenous photography is characterised by two things: a wordiness, a play or struggle with the weight of words — both English and indigenous; and the re-use of old photographs — both historical documents and family snapshots.

Virtually all indigenous photographers have, at some time or other, re-used old photographs: Leah King-Smith, Brook Andrew, Rea[6], Julie Gough, Fiona Foley and the painter Gordon Bennett have all directly copied and re-used archival museum and gallery photographs; Fiona Foley, the early Tracey Moffatt[7] and Darren Siwes have renegotiated their relationship to these ‘received’ images by some kind of performative response in the present; Brenda Croft, Destiny Deacon and Gordon Bennett have directly re-used family snapshots in their work; and received styles or retro atmospheres have also been evoked latterly by Tracey Moffatt, Destiny Deacon and Brenda Croft.

This is not unique to indigenous photography. Old photographs, both personal and historic, and retro atmospheres, both oppressive and kitsch, haunt contemporary photography globally. In particular migrant artists have used old photographs to talk about their dislocation from the past and their, at least partial, alienation from a present which still marginalises their heritage. Many settled white artists also re-use old photographs in the 1980s to talk about general issues of post colonialism in Australia and elsewhere. But then, today everybody is dislocated from their past. It is part of our general millennial condition in which we have been cast adrift by the multitude of twentieth century geopolitical diasporas, and muffled by mediating technologies which make historical consciousness and collective memory vicarious experiences.[8]

Indigenous photography is a more politically intense instance of this general phenomenon. Certainly few peoples have been so brutally dislocated from their past as Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. And they have long used photography both symbolically and forensically to find their past. Many indigenous narratives of historical discovery start with family snapshots. And several Australian museums now take a proactive role in using their collections to re-forge individual historical connections. For instance the South Australian Museum’s Aboriginal Community and Family History Unit helps Aboriginal people learn more about their families and communities using photographs originally taken by Norman Tindale and Joseph Birdsell and held in the Museum’s Anthropology Archives. [9]

Coming to terms with history: Lorraine Hunter catalogues photographs at the Berendt Museum, Picture Megan Lewis, The Australian, 14/7/99 p44.

However the irony is that unlike a white person using family snaps as aide memoires at a family reunion, or historical images as forensic genealogical clues, indigenous seekers after their family history are often using anthropological photographs that were not made to document individuals, but to identify anthropological types; and not as systematic social records, but as fragmented scientific specimens. They were originally taken not to confirm historical presence, but to file away an archival record in order to posthumously confirm the historical extinction of the original. It is this bitter irony that makes the symbolic use of old photographs in urban indigenous art, and the forensic use of old photographs by Aboriginal people of the stolen generation, more prevalent than migrant or mainstream uses of old photographs.

In the late eighties and early nineties Gordon Bennett was making paintings such as Tryptych, 1989, one section of which, titled Requiem, superimposed the geometric lines of three perspectival pyramids ‘shooting’ towards an image of Trucanini derived from the well know C.A. Woolley photograph of 1866. The image was made spectral and degraded by a process which looks like multiple photocopying. But to Gordon Bennett even perspective itself is political

[P]erspective may be seen as symbolic of a certain kind of power structure relating to a particular European world view … Aborigines caught in this system of representation remain ‘frozen’ as objects within the mapped territory of a European perceptual grid.[10]

Lately anthropological portraits has been held up by indigenous artists as not only the theoretical paradigm of colonial attempts at genocide, but also as acts of violence technically akin to, and instrumentally part of, that very process of that attempted genocide.

Thus Rea used archival photographs of aboriginal domestic servants to talk about her own grandmother’s life. And Fiona Gough domesticates and passifies the residual power of archival photographs by engulfing them in granny’s fluffy slippers.

The photographs used by urban indigenous photographers are not monuments, because they do not commemorate a historical closure on the past. In a way they are anti-monuments, images of unquiet ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves. Their re-use attempts to capture a feeling of active dialogue with the past, a two way corridor through time, almost a voodoo quality, or a sense of New Age channelling. Brenda Croft in her Barthesian meditation on nineteenth century colonial Aboriginal photographs “Laying Ghosts To Rest”, comes closest to articulating this feeling. She allows herself the indulgence of retroactively investing the agency of political resistance in the portraits when she says:

Images like these have haunted me since I was a small child and … [and] were instrumental in guiding me to use the tools of photography in my work. … The haunted faces of our ancestors challenge and remind us to commemorate them and acknowledge their existence, to help lay them, finally, to rest. [11]

Leah King-Smith. Untitled (4/17), Cibachrome photograph, 1.2m x 1.2m. 1991

One of the first indigenous photographers to receive unexpected international success with a series that re-used old photographs was Leah King-Smith. Her exhibition Patterns of Connection, 1992, travelled nationally and internationally. In her large deeply coloured ‘photo-compositions’ anthropological photographs were liberated from the State Library of Victoria to be superimposed as spectral presences on indigenous landscapes. In the catalogue the process was described as allowing:

Aboriginal people [to] flow into the land, into space reclaimed for them by the photographer … From the flaring of velvety colours and forms, translucent ghosts appear within a numinous world.[12]

Clare Williamson describes how King-Smith pictorially, rather than rhetorically, invests her original images with the same ability Brenda Croft feels to project the past into the present.

It is instructive to examine King-Smith’s imagery alongside the historical images which are her sources. These small black and white photograph’s ‘contain’ their aboriginal subjects as objects which can be held in the hand, collected, stored and viewed at will. Their placement of the figure within a fabricated European (or a constructed ‘native’ one), and set well back from the picture plane, creates a gulf between viewer and subject, and an inequitable relationship in favour of the viewer. King-Smith reverses the order. Large colour saturated images ‘impress’ the viewer. The figures are brought right to the picture plane, seemingly extending beyond the frame and checking our gaze with theirs.[13]

Brook Andrew invests the bodies of his nineteenth century subjects—who he releases from the closet of the past by copying their images from the archive of the nineteenth century postcard photographer Charles Kerry—not only with a libidinous body image inscribed within the terms of a contemporary ‘queer’ masculinity, but also with defiant Barbara Krugeresque slogans such as Sexy and Dangerous, 1996, I Split Your Gaze, 1997 and Ngajuu Ngaay Nginduugirr, [I see you], 1998. These works attempt to reverse the relationship of subject and object in the nineteenth century colonial portrait around the axis of the trajectory of the gaze, and to make the contemporary viewer the subject of a defiant, politically updated gaze returned from history itself.

Brook Andrew, Sexy and dangerous, digital phootgraph, 1996

Charles Kerry, sheet of copied photographs, 1880s-1890s, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Even when the contemporary Aboriginal artist’s body ritualistically and purgatorially takes on colonial subjugation, the historic photograph and, more significantly, the alignment of gazes, is still the vitalising channel of connection. In the work of Brook Andrew the trans-historical objectifying gaze is simply reflected straight back to the present contingent moment to be immediately re-inscribed in a contemporary politico-sexual discourse. However, in contrast, in Fiona Foley’s re-enactments of the colonial photographs of her Badtjala ancestors, Native Blood, 1994, the gaze is stopped dead in its tracks by Foley’s own obdurate, physical body. To the post-colonial theorist Olu Oguibe:

In Foley’s photographs the Other makes herself available, exposes herself, invites our gaze if only to re-enact the original gaze, the original violence perpetrated on her. She does not disrupt this gaze nor does she return it. She recognises that it is impossible to return the invasive gaze, that what purports to be a returned gaze is only a mimicry. Instead Foley forces the gaze to blink, exposes it to itself.[14]

Fiona Foley, Native blood, 1994.

Tosca Studios, Candelo, West Queensland Aboriginal, c1900, Queensland Museum.

In all of these contemporary uses of the colonial photograph the intention of the original historic photographer is evacuated. We find ourselves in his empty shoes, shuttling back and forth along a two way channel formed along the alignment of the two interlocking gazes of sitter and viewer, object and subject, past and present. Certainly, to at least some extent, this sense of channelling pervades all the contemporary uses of old photographs. But the indigenous use of old photographs gives this channeling a different political valency to equivalent uses of old photographs by migrant or long-term settler photographers.

In their book Uncanny Australia Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs use Australian ghost stories to describe the uncanniness of Australia’s relationship to indigenous spirituality. In postcolonial terms they see hauntings as a productive occurrence:

‘Ghosts’ simply could not function in a climate of sameness, in a country which fantasises about itself as ‘one nation’ or which imagines a utopian future of ‘reconciliation’ in which … all the ghosts have been laid to rest. But neither can they function in a climate of nothing but difference, where the one can never resemble the other, as in a ‘divided’ nation. A structure in which sameness and difference solicit each other, spilling over each other’s boundaries only to return again to their respective places, moving back and forward in an unpredictable, even unruly manner—a structure in which sameness and difference embrace and refuse each other simultaneously. : this is where the ‘ghosts’ which may cause us to ‘smile’ or to ‘worry’ continue to flourish.[15]

Aboriginal ghosts remind Australia that there is unfinished business. Gelder and Jacobs quote Raymond Williams who has made a distinction between the archaic and the residual in the contemporary experience of the past, the ‘residual’ is “still active in the political process”. Anthropological indigenous photographs cannot yet be monuments because they are still left over from the past, residual to history.[16]

The idea of ghosts soliciting the fickle memory of a too self-absorbed, too quickly forgetful later generation also scans across to the role of Anzac ghosts in Australian collective memory. This cross-scan to a twentieth century settler spectral tradition of the Anzac myth is implicitly referred to a series of photographs by Aboriginal photographer Darren Siwes taken from 1999 to 2002, which have also proved to be extraordinarily popular with curators nationally and internationally. By ghosting himself standing implacably in front of various buildings in a series of night photographs taken around Adelaide, he refers to an indigenous haunting, certainly; but in many images he is ghosted standing to attention whilst wearing a generic suit, so he also evokes the feeling of being surveilled by a generalised, truculent Australian masculinity — exactly the same feeling that an Anzac memorial statue gives.

Darren Siwes, Church 1, 2000.

New Agers have often appropriated Aboriginal spirituality for use in their own impromptu spiritual systems, and at the same time contemporary Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and New Agers are occasionally fellow travellers.[17] Leah King-Smith is perhaps the most explicitly New Age of contemporary Aboriginal artists. She concludes her artist’s statement by asking that: “… people activate their inner sight to view Aboriginal people.”[18] Her work animistically gives the museum photographs she re-uses a spiritualist function. Many of her fellow Indigenous artists have criticised her for being too generalist, for not knowing the stories of the people whose photographs she used, and not asking the permission of the traditional owners of the land she makes them haunt. But, by referring to Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Anne Marsh describes this as a ‘strategic essentialism’. She says:

There is little doubt, in my mind, that Leah King-Smith is a kind of New Age evangelist and many serious critics will dismiss her work on these grounds. Others will point to the artist’s misplaced desire to represent Aboriginal Australia: to talk for the subaltern, as it were. But I am interested in why the images are so popular and how they tap into a kind of cultural imaginary and use the mythology of photography’s syntax … to conjure the ineffable. … Leah King-Smith’s figures resonate with a constructed aura: the skin which is shed onto the photographic plate is given an enhanced ethereal quality through the use of mirrors and projections. The ‘mirror with a memory’ comes alive as these ancestral ghosts, already simulacra in their Anglo costumes, seem to drift through the landscape as a seamless version of nineteenth century spirit photography.[19]

This sense of Aboriginal ancestors, re-born as spiritually replete by the demands of their descendents, and liberated by contemporary Aboriginal artists to drift through a numinous landscape, is also present in the work of Michael Riley. In the photographic series Sacrifice, 1993, and Flyblown, 1998, Riley used objects like crucifixes as both literal and allegorical symbols of mission-life oppression. But in a later series, Cloud, 2000, these symbols have taken on a more autonomous spirituality. They have lost some of their grounding in past historical circumstances, but gained access to a New Age style symbolic bricolage. In Brenda Croft’s words:

[The have] shifted from terra firma to other-worldly locations, including the paranormal.[20]

The role of performance is also important to these photographs. In discussing the Bringing Them Home report on the Stolen Generation of 1997, John Frow comments that the report supplements the standard historiographic citation of the past with collaged-in fragments of first-person testimony. He quotes De Certeau who contrasts collage with historiographic citation. Citation allows the past to lend an effect of reality that validates historical knowledge in the present, through citation the present makes the past intelligible, but also separates past from present. Collage on the other hand gives the past direct affectivity and answerability within the present. In the Stolen Generations inquiry the unmediated, cathartic, performed testimony of witnesses allows the past to report on the present, just as the present is supposedly meant to be soberly reporting on the past.[21] In the debate between the so-called ‘black armband’ and ‘white blindfold’ view of the history of white Australia’s contact with indigenous Australians the ‘admissibility’ of evidence which is not forensically factual, but based in oral history, myth and even the numinous, is one major point of contention. For instance a revisionist article disparagingly quotes the experience of an anthropologist Dr Bruce Shaw, called as an expert witness in a Native title case: “I … experienced a shift of awareness when reading some of the longer passages [to the court]. At times I felt like those men were speaking through me. That is not to suggest that I have the abilities of a spiritualist medium; it means that I was experiencing the same sort of responses as some of my listeners … when such narratives are recited in court the subjective, which includes the metaphysical and at times the numinous, slips into proceedings.” Quoted in Rod Moran, “Was there a massacre at Bedford Downs?”, Quadrant, November 2002.

Similarly, in their re-use of old photographs, indigenous photographers do not see themselves as citing them, or ‘appropriating’ them in the standard ironic mode of postmodernist quotation, so much as collaging them into the present, using them to demand an answer from the present. They are trying not to so much appropriate them across culture, as collage them across time. They ‘re-perform’ the old photograph in the present in order to generate this sense of temporal collage.

It might be this urgently felt need to re-perform the historic photograph in the present which, for me, gives many of these photographs their overwrought feeling. They seem histrionic, melodramatic, and pictorially overproduced — as though urban aboriginal photographers have to try very hard to ritualistically get in touch with their ancestors. They use an excessive bricolage of special effects verging on the banal to generate a sense of connection. Brenda Croft, for instance, in In My Father’s House, and In My Mother’s Garden, 1998, overlays family snaps of her father, mother and grandmother with repeatedly floating words like ‘bereft’ and ‘weeping’, in multiple layers of Photoshop, in cursive fonts, at different colours, sizes and levels of transparency. Certainly these literally over-wrought surfaces were partially a result of the acute personal grief these works deal with,[22] but this quality also characterizes her later work such as Irrisistable/irresistible, 2000, as well as the work of many other indigenous artists with a more intergenerational yearning for the lost ancestors they never knew.

Brenda L. Croft, Don’t go kissing at the garden gate (Love is blind but the neighbours aint), 1998.

Brenda L. Croft, My mother recognised the man in the little boy, 1998.

In the context of Australia’s fraught race politics, an important aspect of the affectivity of these works for white viewers is the supplementation of the viewer’s own sense of shame—our desire (or otherwise) to say ‘sorry’ for the crimes of our ancestors, which we bring to the image. The imprecatory tone of many of the works I have discussed is best understood in that context. For instance shortly after being elected to office Australia’s new conservative Prime Minister, John Howard, discussed Aboriginal reconciliation and native land tenure with the populist magazine Who Weekly.

Most Australians—now don’t misunderstand this—most Australians grow up not having any contact with Aboriginal people. Now, that’s not their fault but equally they shouldn’t sort of be blamed for something in which they played no part. Aborigines were terribly treated in the nineteenth century, I understand that, and in many cases into the twentieth century. I accept that completely and it ought to be taught in schools and understood. I understand all that, but if you grow up in a neighbourhood where you didn’t have any contact with Aborigines—and that was the lot of most Australians, I mean I didn’t have any contact with Aboriginal kids when I grew up because there weren’t any living in my suburb. In some country areas and a few urban areas there were. And that was it. Now to say to me and to say to my kids and to say of my parents, who never treated them poorly, to say you’re all to blame and you should apologise, it’s something people just can’t get a handle on and they think it’s odd.[23]

This kind of thinking allocated to the indigenous community a deracinated sense of history and an experiential forgetting which inevitably weakened the indigenous stake in Australia’s future. If Howard’s view—that any historical processes affecting the Aboriginal community which were not personally experienced may be discounted in favour of a synchronic assessment of social need—were applied across the board, then all of the structures he holds dear would collapse. The bonds of nationhood, the Westminster system, and the common law all rely on the diachronic transmission of a sense of ownership and responsibility not only directly, person to person, but also indirectly through collective assumptions and investments which are shared and transmitted experientially—narratively and imagistically.

Indeed the Prime Minister’s sense of his own statesmanship is closely interwoven with his mission to keep Anzac memory alive.[24] This also requires an affective remembering where those who come from the past are seemingly brought up to witness the present. For instance Anzac rituals such as the Minute’s Silence or the Dawn Service encourage us to homeopathically re-experience long past historical moments. The sacred phrase ‘Lest We Forget’ warns us against letting the experience of war slip away.

In Australia there has not only not been a social and historical reconciliation between black and white, there has also not been a reconciliation between the two mnemonic traditions. Will they co-exist? Will they merge? Will one extinguish the other? These questions remain stalled in history. This background of fraught race politics and conflicting mnemonic traditions goes at least part way to explaining the over-wrought, imprecatory tone of much contemporary urban Aboriginal art, as well as the curatorial success which has greeted the ghosts it has called forth.

Both the well established Anzac mnemonic tradition, and the emergent indigenous mnemonic tradition, seem to be developing along very similar structural and iconographic lines, both incorporating at various times spectral photographic imagery. In both photography’s special effects, its power to not just reproduce the real, but to conjure apparitions and laminate them to the present, are called upon.

Contemporary indigenous artists have politically deployed the spiritual, spectral magic of photographs of their ancestors on a wide scale. This strategic deployment has a higher valency than standard appropriation because the photographs are being reactivated to call the present to account. But are these precious old photographs, whilst being made politically active in the present, kept in a dialectical relationship to it? After all, photographs of long dead Aborigines are, in fact, merely insubstantial ghosts, they are not the Aborigines themselves. Are contemporary indigenous photographers, such as for instance the sassy and savvy Brook Andrew with his ‘sexy and dangerous’ nineteenth century aboriginal men, hijacking the past for their own strategic politico/aesthetic ends? In their attempts to break through the historical impasse that tragically freezes contemporary Australian political discourse, are they, not unlike a supplicant to a spirit photographer, attempting to collapse time itself, by co-opting the past into a fantasy of presentness that risks being banally synchronic?

Lately the spectral Aborigine has become part of mainstream iconography. For instance a popular book summarising the result of the Royal Commission into the stolen generation superimposes the face of an aboriginal child over the ruins of a mission. And Aborigines are regularly photographed by press photographers holding anthropological portraits as defiant talismans. A recent memorial to Reconciliation was controversial because it asked us to remember aboriginal children removed to missions primarily as happy, cricket playing youngsters. So recently some Indigenous artist have upped the ante and have complicated this convenient trope of haunting.

Fiona Foley, for instance, has recently photographed herself with native Americans not, I think, to promote some banal idea of a pan-global ‘nation’ of First Peoples, but more to overtly and cheekily experiment with a kind of post-colonial drag, to lay authoritative claim to a bricolage not stalled in a perpetual relationship to nineteenth century ancestors and mired historical processes.

Brenda Croft, too, in simply reproducing Kodachrome slides from the 1950s of her father in the series Man About Town, allows them to maintain their ineffable distance from us in the present. There is plenty of space left for us to fantasise and speculate about his life when he was a young single man, before he met the artist’s mother, before he knew that he had a twin sister, and before he found his mother from whom he had been taken as a baby.

[1] In Dreams: Mervyn Bishop Thirty Years Photography 1969-1990, curated by Tracey Moffatt, Australian Centre for Photography, 1991.

[2] The first group exhibition of Aboriginal photographers, Naidoc Week Aboriginal and Islander Phototgraphers Exhibition, was held in Sydney in 1986. See an exhibition review by Tracey Moffatt, Photofile, Summer 1986.

[3] National Gallery of Australia, Re-take: Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Phootgraphy, 1998-1999.

[4] [Gellatly, 1999 #397]

[5].[Langton, 1983 #333] Catherine De Lorenzo, ‘Delayed Exposure: Contemporary Aboriginal Photography’, Brenda Croft ‘Blak Lik Mi’, Art In Australia, 1997, 35, 1,

[6] Look Who’s calling the Kettle Black, 1992.

[7] Some Lads. 1986

[8]. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking time in a culture of amnesia, New York and London, Routledge, 1995, , Introduction pp3-9

[9]See also the Berndt Collection in the Western Australian Museum, and the exhibition Portraits of our Elders by the Queensland Museum. Michael Aird, Portraits of our Elders, Brisbane, Queensland Museum, 1993. And[Poignant, 1996 #51]

[10]. Gordon Bennett, ‘Aesthetics and Iconography: an artist’s approach’, Aratjara: Art of the First Australians, Dusseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 1993,

[11]. Brenda L. Croft, ‘Laying ghosts to rest’, Portraits of Oceania, Judy Annear, Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997, p9, 14

[12] [Phipps, 1992 #401]

[13]. Clare Williamson, ‘Leah King-Smith: Patterns of Connection’, Colonial Post Colonial, Melbourne, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, 1996, p46

[14]. Olu Oguibe, ‘Medium and Memory in the Art of Fiona Foley’, Third Text, 1995-96, Winter 1995-96, , pp58-59

[15]. Ken Gelder and Jane M.Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Melbourne University Press, 1998, p42

[16] Raymond Williams “Dominant, Residual and Emergent”, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1977. Quoted in. Ken Gelder and Jane M.Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Melbourne University Press, 1998, p18

[17]. L. R. Hiatt, ‘A New Age for an Old People’, Quadrant, 1997, 16, 337,

[18]. Leah King-Smith, ‘Statement’, Patterns of Connection, Melbourne, Victorian Centre for Photography, 1992,

[19]. Anne Marsh, ‘Leah King-Smith and the Nineteenth century Archive’, History of Photography, 1999, 23, 2, p117

[20] [Croft, 2002 #402]

[21]. John Frow, ‘The Politics of Stolen Time’, Meanjin, 1998, 57,2,

[22] “For the artists … photography and family histories entwine as the act of making art becomes a way of dealing with grief.” [Gellatly, 1998 #403]

[23] [John Howard, 1996 #404]

[24] See for instance: “Keep the Anzac fire alight”, The Australian , 26 April, 2000, p1 and “Statesmanship forged on a fatal shore”, The Weekend Australian , 29 April-2000 , Pp3.

Soldiers of the Cross and the Quo Vadis connection

Soldiers of the Cross and the Quo Vadis connection, blog entry, National Film and Sound Archive

One of the highlights of my CSAR Fellowship a couple of years ago was the chance to see the two hundred or so glass magic lantern slides from Soldiers of the Cross on the light-table out at Mitchell. I’m really interested in magic lantern slides and the history of the magic lantern in Australia. I kind of suspected that maybe these slides hadn’t yet received the attention they deserved because Soldiers of the Cross, an evangelical lecture produced by the Salvation Army in Melbourne in 1900, had been thought about by historians primarily interested in finding the origins of Australia’s cinema industry, and of course the cinematic part of the original presentation, the thirteen or so kinematographic films, had been lost. The slides, however, far from being just the remnants of a primarily movie-related event, are fascinating in their own right.

There is a lot visual information recorded on the 9 cm by 9cm glass slides, not to mention their extravagant handcolouring, or their careful and inventive narrative sequencing. One of people responsible for the production, Herbert Booth, the youngest son of the founder of the Salvation Army, left the Army in 1902 and took the slides with him overseas as an independent evangelist. He died in 1926, and the slides he had used for all those years didn’t return to Australia until the fifties. When I got access to some of the high resolution digital copies the NFSA’s Darren Weinert had made, in order to show them as part of Arc’s ‘Autumn Silents’ program, it was wonderful to be able to dive in to the detail in the slides, particularly the faces of the members of the Salvation Army who had dressed up as Romans or Christian martyrs to reenact the stories of the persecution of the early Christians. By showing the slides in sequence I hope I established that there were several distinct modes of temporality in the production, including what I dubbed the ‘iterative’, ‘expository’ and ‘action’ modes.

We had always known that some of the slides in the set that came back to Australia had been made a long time after the original production — the tableaus were more complex and the costumes and sets more elaborate. So I became intrigued to know where exactly the later slides had come from. At the Salvation Army Heritage Centre in Melbourne I had been shown a page from the Illustrated London News of 1907 where Booth was featured with his ‘evangelisation by tableaux vivants’ and ‘bioscope lecture’, so Booth was ‘on the road’ with slides and film for quite a long time. He was still touring when his first wife died in 1920.

I showed some of the later slides to colleagues in the lantern-slide researcher community, as well as the cinema historian community, and dropped them in to Google Image Search. I found that some were production stills from the 1913 Italian blockbuster Quo Vadis. Quentin Turnour had also cunningly programmed Quo Vadis into the NFSA’s season of ‘Autumn Silents’, and when I saw the film at Arc I identified twelve slides from the NFSA’s Soldiers of the Cross set as having their origin in Quo Vadis. They were most probably a set made by a commercial slide manufacturer in association with the exhibition of the blockbuster, purchased by Booth, and interleaved amongst the existing Soldier of the Cross set.

Back in 1900 the Salvation Army had incorporated slides of many famous nineteenth century paintings directly in their production, as well as using them as inspiration for their painted backdrops. Two of the paintings they had used, Thumbs Down and Last Prayers of the Christian Martyrs featured scenes in the coliseum and were by the popular French academic painter Jean Léon Gérome, also know for his soft-core porn harem scenes. The same paintings were clearly also the inspiration for the sets and costumes of the 1913 Italian Quo Vadis. My ANU colleague Gino Moliterno put me on to an article by Ivo Blom about the relationship of Gerome’s paintings to the Quo Vadis film where, as in Soldiers of the Cross, several scenes are directly modeled on the paintings. Blom’s article also discussed the relationship between the tableau vivant and early European cinema, as well as the general interest in ‘sword and sandal’ (or what I prefer to call ‘blood on the toga’) themes from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century, and indeed right up to the present day, including the Quo Vadis novel about early Christian martyrs published in 1895.

Clearly much work remains to be done. But I think we now have a richer, more international and more intermedial context for the Archive’s Soldiers of the Cross slides.

In thinking about the narrative and temporal sequencing of these slides I had relied on the numbers painted on the edge of each slide. But the numbering system incorporates the Quo Vadis slides, so these numbers were added after 1913, at least 13 years after the first slides were produced back in Melbourne. What was going through Booth’s head, I wondered, as he interleaved, amongst the slides he himself had produced a decade and a half earlier, the new slides from a mega commercial blockbuster which drew on the same literary and visual sources he had drawn on. But I think Lindsay Cox from the Salvation Army Heritage Centre gets it right when he says:

“First and foremost the prime motivation in Herbert Booth’s life was the spreading of the Gospel of Jesus Christ! It consumed him in his Salvation Army service and then as ‘Ambassador’ Booth the travelling evangelist. His creativeness and entrepreneurial skills were in their entirety for his work for God. The production achievements of Herbert were entirely a means to an end. If Herbert could not see a direct connection between using the technology and the saving of souls, he would have discarded it. Herbert Booth was adamant that his lecture was ‘not an entertainment.’ As commander of the Australasian Territory he was able to draw upon resources he never could have after leaving the Army. He was not a wealthy man, although no doubt, comfortable. Nor was his family wealthy, or able to, or perhaps desiring to support him. So, I do not feel that he had the resources to make the slides himself. There is also no evidence that he had anything other than artistic involvement in the productions. All the technical and processing stuff was Perry’s domain. I’m comfortable with the thought he just used whatever commercially available slides were available.”

Soldiers of the Cross – NFSA

‘Herbert Booth and Joseph Perry’s Soldiers of the Cross of 1900’, National Film and Sound Archive, Arc Cinema, 1 March, 2013

I’d like to thank Quentin for the opportunity, and Clare, Darren and Brooke for the yummy files.

I want to go back to the turn of last century and try to re-imagine the experience that audience members might have had at the Salvation Army evangelist lecture Soldiers of the Cross. This massive production, the most elaborate of the Army’s many technologically cutting-edge productions, was seen by large numbers of people around Australia, and was particularly aimed at recruiting young men.

What other media experiences would the excited crowds we see milling about Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne or the Sydney Town hall have had, before the went inside to take their seats? They would certainly have seen many dissolving view magic lantern shows, featuring hand painted slides in series such as Jane Conquest, or life model slides of actors in tableau vivant photographed against backdrops, such as Daddy. These slide shows used a dissolving mechanism to produce special effects by, for instance, dissolving an angel over a scene with a separate magic lantern, or creating a montage on the slide itself. They would have experienced stereo views, where they clamped a viewer onto their face and immersed themselves in virtual three dimensional space as they took a trip through a sequence of twelve scenes, usually of exotic locations they had no hope of visiting in real life. They might have visited one of the new kinetoscope parlours — there was one across the road from the Army headquarters — where they could bend their heads to eyepieces and crank through sixty seconds of animated pictures. They may even have seen animated pictures projected onto a screen from an adaptor placed at the front of a magic lantern. They might have gone to the Melbourne cyclorama building, where they could immerse themselves bodily in a panorama of the Siege of Paris. And they would have been aware of the great celebrity paintings of the day which they would have mainly know from numerous lantern slide reproductions or prints, but even perhaps by experiencing the aura of the paintings themselves. Some celebrity paintings such as Holman Hunt’s 1850s Light of the World, after being familiar for decades through slide and reproduction, physically toured the world like aging rock stars. And finally they would have experienced the hurly burly of the cosmopolitan streets themselves.

All this can be summed up in three buzz words from the period: thrills, animated photographs and colour. So all that was in their heads as they took their seats, but what had been going on behind the scenes? Soldiers of the Cross was produced in the Salvation Army’s Limelight Studios, headed by Joseph Perry, which combined gramophones, magic lanterns and the kinematograph in a ‘triple alliance’. However the key piece of equipment was the most unglamorous, and the most overlooked — it was the copy camera, which could take virtually any flat image, and turn it into a glass slide that could them be hand-coloured before projection. For this production Perry, along with the Commandant of the Army in Australia Herbert Booth and his wife Cornelie produced about 250 glass lantern-slides and approximately fifteen sixty-second strips of Lumiere film. Of the slides about thirty were copied from other sources, and of the films about two were produced by the Lumiere company. The rest were produced in Melbourne, and the whole lot was integrated together by the Booths and Perry. The script has been lost, as well as the films the Army shot. But a large proportion of the slides, and two Lumiere films, survive.

The best way of thinking about the logic of Soldiers of the Cross is to imagine it as a turn of the twentieth century Powerpoint. Like Powerpoint it brought together disparate sources into a singly formatted lecture. Like Powerpoint every time it was performed it was slightly different. And like Powerpoint it was the lecturer who made the show. The Booths wrote the script and read it, while Perry and his team dissolved the slides one into the other and projected the cinematographs. A band also played well-known hymns from the period, and led the congregation is singing. Although it included narratives, these were chapters embedded in an overarching structure which was liturgical and sermonic.

THE ST STEPHEN SEQUENCE

The production began with general scenes of the Life of Christ derived from reproductions of prints and painting, as well as two commercial kinematographs which were each one-minute reels, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem and the Crucifixion, from the thirteen one-minute-reels of the Lumiere production The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ made in 1898. It is important to look carefully at these Lumiere films. Although they weren’t shot in Melbourne they give an indication of what the Melbourne footage may have looked like. In these films it is the micro-movements, the swish of the palm fronds, the pounding of the Roman hammer, and the movement of the sponge through the air, these unmistakable markers of living animation, which would have most excited the audience.

After this introduction the first chapter of the lecture was the Martyrdom of St Stephen. This is based on the biblical story of the first Martyr. It opens with St Stephen before the Jewish court. Why, one wonders, does this first chapter open with five very repetitive slides where not much is happening, where the narrative isn’t moving? This is because in Chapter 7 of the Acts of the Apostles St Stephen spends 53 Biblical verses defending himself against the Jewish court by recounting the story of Moses’ persecution. So it appears as though these slides would be dissolved, one in to another, perhaps quite slowly, as Booth recounted those 53 biblical verses.

After that, the Biblical narrative suddenly picks up. Stephen looks up and Heaven opens up to him. There he sees God with Jesus on his right hand. The Bible says:

But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, and said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. Then they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord, and cast him out of the city, and stoned him: and the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man’s feet, whose name was Saul. And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down, and cried out in a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep.’ Acts 7 55-60

Booth and Perry have superimposed a commercial slide of Jesus and angels for the effect of Heaven opening up.

The way the slides in this sequence have been made differ. We begin with slides shot with live models standing in front of a painted backdrop. But the slide of St Stephen being removed from the city is assembled in a different way. It is a collage of cut-out photographs pasted onto a painted background, and re-shot onto a glass-slide before being hand-coloured. Both quite different techniques are used throughout the Army’s productions.

The slides only follow the Biblical text loosely, but the general narrative would have been familiar enough to the audience. The account of this chapter in the Salvation Army magazine the War Cry closely follows the slides we have:

The events that lead to the martyrdom of Stephen passed in review. The [Sanhedrim, the] trial, Stephen’s impeachment by the rulers and the stoning of the first martyr. The kinematograph was employed in this latter scene. The effect on the audience, as they beheld in a moving picture the innocent Stephen cruelly beaten to the earth, and killed by fiendish fanaticism of the formal religionists of his day cannot be described. The kinematograph give place to a picture of Stephen lying dead upon the roadside, while Paul (sic) the persecutor stands over him in an attitude of painful contemplation.’ (MWC 22/9/00 p9)

The backdrop painting for the exteriors has clearly been inspired by a Gustave Doré engraving. There are three slides numbered in sequence for the stoning, two are shot against a backdrop, the third is a collage. The kinematograph would have come after this sequence of slides, which may have been dissolved more quickly, perhaps, than the earlier court slides. So the audience would have seen the same action again, repeated, but this time in moving picture.

We can get an indication perhaps of how this might have worked by looking at the script of a later set of life model slides called Lazarus, produced by the Army in 1902. This is a set of eight slides. The script for the later and shorter slide set tells the story of the raising of Lazurus with the usual cues for slide changes. At the end of the story the cue changes to ‘Kino’. Unfortunately the corner of the script has been torn off, but the lecturer says something like:

We shall now show you … (missing) … actually took place … (missing) … this remarkable miracle, most impressive and realistic. WE WILL SHOW YOU IN LIVING FORM WHERE MARTHA MEETS CHRIST, and tells him Lazurus is dead,…….’

The script then runs on as a commentary on the kinematograph, with prompts for the reader of the script for when the kinematograph scenes will change.

To return to the earlier, longer, Soldiers of the Cross production, as the War Cry says, the kinematograph then gives way to a slide of Stephen lying dead, with Jesus receiving his spirit. Then we see a hand-coloured copy of a lithographic reproduction of a Pre-Raphaelite Millais painting of St Stephen, before cutting back to two slides of Salvation Army Officer Colonel James Annetts, who played St Stephen, lying on the ground. Between the final two slides we see his crimson blood poo, as though a few moments of time have elapsed, and a crucial character for the next chapter, Saul, appear to look over him.

So in this chapter, even though viewers are experiencing a synthesized production, it is not built on anything like a unified visual syntax. Instead they are experiencing at least five different modalities of affect, and four different expressions of time:

A strophic, verse-like, iterative mode of slowly dissolving lantern slides, familiar from previous commercial slide sets
An expository mode of tableaus taking us through key narrative points
A faster, time-based, action mode, often in couplets or triplets, and perhaps linked to an accelerated lantern dissolve, which is an innovation of the commercial slide format
The real-time animation and realistic living-picture mode of the kinematograph, giving a visceral feeling of natural movement
The contemplative mode of a familiar work of ‘great art’ which is embedded in some kind of universal historical/symbolic/aesthetic time

These five different modalities I have identified are reflected in the contemporaneous comments on the production. For instance often the micro-movements magically captured by the kinematograph are mentioned, such as the splash of water as a martyr is thrown in a river, the rising of smoke, or the falling of stones. But also the beautiful colour of the slides is frequently mentioned. All of these modes, although not syntactically unified in any way we would recognize from subsequent cinema history, nonetheless worked together to directly involve the audience with the story through shared sight. This sense of collective witnessing, which this opening sequence sets up, is caught well by the War Cry:

We saw the great stones falling thick and fast upon the white robbed figure on the ground, till it grew strangely still. Then the ‘witnesses’ left the scene, and Saul of Tarsus stood alone looking down upon the dead young man. (MWC 29/9/00 p14)

SAUL

The next slide, after we have shared with Saul our contemplation of the dead St Stephen, is a shot of contemporary Damascus extracted from a stereograph. But this clever segue still follows the Bible pretty closely, because after being transported to contemporary Damascus as it was in 1900, the next slide whooshes us back to Biblical times for Saul’s conversion. We then see a tight sequence of three slides, shot outside rather than in a studio, which is a time-based triplet shows us St Paul’s escape by basket from the walls of Damascus to continue his preaching.

These time-based ‘runs’ of slides often seem to pick up momentum towards a kinematographic climax. For instance at slide number 72 there is a sequence of Romans raiding an outdoor service by Christians who are then forced to flee underground to continue their worship clandestinely in the catacombs. In 1901 this sequence was added to with a kinematograph of the Romans chasing the Christians across a plank over a stream, augmented with the much commented on comic relief of a Roman boinging off the springy plank and into the stream.

CATACOMBS

A later sequence focuses on life in the catacombs, perhaps to parallel life for Salvationists in the midst of pagan Melbourne. Like an establishing shot from a movie of twenty years later, it begins with an aerial map of the catacombs, and then swoops us down through the contemporary underground stone passages using stereo views from a commercial stereograph set. We then see daily life— worship, marriage, birth, sickness and eventual death — carried on in what I have called the ‘iterative’ mode through a mixture of Army collages and copies of prints and engravings. As the War Cry put it:

All these scenes, painted and reproduced to sight and sound by word and art pictures, simply enchain the mind, and carry one in thought 1800 years back through the ages. The listener sups, prays, praises, adores worships, suffers and dies with these saints of apostolic times.

The mode switches from ‘iterative’ to ‘time-based’ for a detailed and strangely beautiful, even today, funeral sequence of four monochrome slides. Once more there is kinematographic climax, before a final extended contemplation of souls ascending into heaven painted in brilliant supersaturated colour, which may perhaps have been accompanied by music or singing.

LIME KILNS

COLISUEM

Fourteen slides later another run of five slides introduces an extended piece of action. Christians wait at the gate of the Coliseum, while a stuffed tiger with a virulent red tongue threatens them from a cage. Then the gates inch open in the final three slides, before a kinematograph shows the Christians entering the Coliseum and being approached by lions, after which individual slides show their martyrdom.

PERPETUA SEQUENCE:

The final sequence of the two and half hour show was for many people the most affecting, in Hobart for instance, it caused ‘general sobbing’ in the audience. (MWC 26/1/01 p9)

Perpetua, played by the young, attractive Army member, Cadet Mabel Tolley was a young wealthy Roman woman who chose to give up her baby and be martyred in the coliseum rather than renounce Christ. A script with slide and music cues exists, probably for a stand-alone version made shortly after Soldiers of the Cross. The surviving script is also punctuated with nine popular hymns requiring audience participation, with a hymn supplementing the narrative about every four slides. However in Soldier of the Cross itself there were most probably far fewer hymns because of the whole production’s larger scale.

The script is ekphrastic, that is, it describes what the audience is seeing with their own eyes, and rhetorically explains what they should be feeling. For instance, during a dissolve between two opening slides the script says:

We may picture the surprise of this Christian lady when sitting in one of her well furnished rooms. The stillness of the occasion was broken by the intrusion of two armed men. On learning the object of their sudden appearance, Perpetua showed neither fear nor alarm.

This was immediately followed by a hymn. Later, when she is cast into prison, the script tells the audience:

Glory filled her soul amidst the gloom of her surroundings.

Later on, a tight sequences of slides showed the visual evidence of interpersonal conflict, while the script provided the ekphrasis. After her father leaves, disappointed that he has not been able to convince her to drop the whole Jesus thing, the script says:

This was to her a dark and trying moment. The grey beard, the fatherly face, the agitated frame, the loving entreaties, and the stern rebuke; as well as the somber environment of the place, all spoke to her heart with a weird-like eloquence. Still she faltered not. An invisible power supported her even now.

As we have seen in the St Stephen sequence at the beginning of the production, the script is often self-referential, making direct links between Perpetua’s experience and the experience of the audience seeing the projected slides in Melbourne eighteen hundred years later. After Perpetua has finally handed over her baby to her mother the script says:

But when the mother had gone a dreary lull set in. The baby’s prattle had given way to a deep silence. The past rose in vivid pictures, and strong as she was in the grace of God, her poor heart was grief stricken. But there is always solace in prayer, and even in this dark dungeon Perpetua might well prove the unfailing words, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee’.’

The script then calls for the hymn What a friend we have in Jesus.

In a second courtroom sequence more tight time-based, rather than expository, action is shown. She is offered pagan incense to burn and her mother and father show her the baby which will be returned to her if only she renounce Jesus. She refuses. Her father remonstrates with her once more, and is struck to the round by a guard.

After Perpetua has been martyred and before the final hymn the script ends with:

But the end was near, for soon Perpetua lay bruised and bleeding upon the floor of that slaughter house on iniquity still praying to Him she loved. The excited crowd yelled that her misery and pain might end with a thrust of the gladiator’s sword. A moment later the soul of Perpetua had gone to be with God, gone to hear her master say, “Now that thou hast been faithful unto death, I will give thee a Crown of Life”.

THE VOICE

Now we have looked in as much detail as possible at a few of the many sequences in this production, what general conclusions can be drawn? The unifying force in the piece was the voice, the live human voice reciting that sermon. That voice was provided first by the charismatic Herbert Booth, youngest son of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army movement. Herbert spoke in ‘short and harmonious’ sentences, ‘constructed with due regard to the balance and equilibrium of the whole’ (MWC 22/9/00). After he got sick the lecture was conducted by his equally charismatic wife. The War Cry reported:

The lights went down, and the audience were hushed into breathless silence as the immense pictures were thrown upon the canvas. The Commandant’s voice alone broke the stillness thrilling the enthralled audience with burning words fitted in compact sentences, forming an eloquent and beautiful tribute to the heroic deeds and unflinching endurance of the saints whose pictorial reproduction riveted every eye. (MWC 22/9/00 p9)

Other connecting forces were musical, the familiar hymns and masses played by the orchestra and sung by the audience. But the dominant force which distinguished the limelight lecture from others was the lanternist himself, who was always present in the audience’s consciousness as his lanterns hissed and spluttered and projected their beam above their heads. As the War Cry noted:

Carefully watching the screen as the lecture progressed, and noting the rapid changes from one slide to another, from slide to kinematograph film, and then again from kinematograph film to slide, each appearing exactly at the right time, one could not help but admire the consummate skill with which Major Perry manipulated his elaborate and complicated apparatus. (MWV13/10/00 p8)

RETINAL POWER

The presence of the lanternist signaled the radical shift in focus of the site of principle address which the Salvation Army made in their evangelism: from the body, or the ear, or the mind, or the voice — although these were of course still present — to the eye and to the retina; from the phenomenological architecture of the church to the dominating address of the projection sheet; from the magical ritual of the service to the narrative power of the projected image.

The magic lantern shifted the locus of the spiritual to the limelight itself, and turned the lanternist into a kind of thaumaturge. For instance, before the third presentation of Soldiers of the Cross at South Melbourne Town Hall Brigadier Unsworth prayed with the congregation:

that the pictures might be luminous with Divine light, [instilled] with divine power, and fruitful in bringing about more of that spirit of heroism that dominated the lives of the Christian martyrs of old. (MWC 13/10/00 p8)

The Army’s spiritual bellicosity was evoked in another comment by the War Cry:

The lecture is a double-barreled weapon, which captivates both sense of sight and enchains the mind, while indelible impressions are made upon it. (MWC 22/9/00 )

THE DISSOLVE

The Army’s slides, like all slides of the period, were propelled forward by the retinal frisson of the dissolve, as one image appeared to materialize itself within the very optical substance of the image it was replacing. The rhetoric of the Army frequently equates the light of the lantern with the light of salvation, and the magical transformation of the dissolve with the transformative power of Jesus.

INNOVATION

The Army’s main innovation was to use lantern slides to describe tight time-based actions, rather than expository narrative elements or iterative strophic elements. This I think is globally significant at the time.

The Army’s second innovation was to scale up the traditional lantern lecture into a complete evening’s production, and to give it a thematic unity. As the War Cry reported:

Although the audience was taken through a great variety of scene and incident, the intervals were cleverly bridged or, to change the metaphor, the stories, instead of being scattered gems were strung on an elocutionary necklace and, in their semblance or contrast made into a beautiful and complete circlet. (MWC 29/09/00 p8)

A third innovation was to work the kinematograph into the slides more closely. In Booth’s words:

I saw at a glance that living pictures, worked in conjunction with life-model slides, would provide a combination unfailing in its power of connecting narrative.’ (Citation)

THRILLS

These three innovations were all in search of thrills — Army thrills to compete with all of the other thrills young people, particularly young men, had to divert them in 1900. In its pre-publicity for Soldiers of the Cross, the War Cry described it as a ‘new sensation’. It was the power of the thrill which led Booth to chose as his subject the martyrdom of the early Christians, because the bloody and violent martyrdoms provided opportunity for spectacle and action. If the thrill was one key concept, the other was realistic action. The intention was to create a retinal connection between the audience and the Christian martyrs. The ultimate objective was for people, particularly men, to pledge their souls to Christ and their lives to the Army at the end of the lecture. Realism was one conduit of empathy, the other was the contemporary travel shots of the Holy Land and the copies of the great and familiar paintings which introduced each chapter.

As the War Cry predicted before opening night:

The thrilling scenes in the arena, the cruel tests, the thrilling presentiments of Christians under torture, the sustaining power of the presence of the invisible Christ should bring forth all that is best in the nature of the observers, while the graphic and eloquent word-pictures of our leader should tinge with colour, as with the hands of an artist in studies of human nature, these pictures, which all but speak their own story. May God’s spirit be poured upon lecturer, operator and audience alike!’ (MWC 15/9/00) p8)

TRANSPORT

Part of this thrill was also a sense of transport, to take the audience out of their seats in Melbourne, and into another spatio-temporal realm. As Booth promised:

I have sought to make everything absolutely correct. From the plumes on the Roman helmet and the imperial robe of Nero to the rough garments of the pagan slave, everything will be exact. You only have to follow the screen and you will be as much in Rome as if you had been there – now in the palace of Caesar, then in the open square – now in the residence of the patrician, then in the den of the libertine — now in the coliseum then in the Catacombs, where the early Christians concealed themselves for safety — all will be absolutely exact’ (MWC 18/8/00 p9)

This is very similar to the promises which had been made by stereograph manufacturers since the 1850s. By the 1900s sellers like Underwood and Underwood were marketing complete ‘Travel Systems’ incorporating, stereographs, guidebooks and maps, to give a similar, touristic sense of optical and retinal transport.

But to the Army audience this transport was more than just virtual tourism, it was transport of a more profound kind. A later report on a limelight meeting said:

the meeting almost becomes as a séance, and our spirits seem to blend with the spirits of these just ones.’(MWC 9/2/01 p9)

AFFECT

Was Soldiers of the Cross effective? The War Cry frequently reported on the ‘involuntary interjections, moans of pity, sighs of relief’ coming from the audience. (MWC 29/09/00 p8) All the Army reports are ecstatic, but they would be, wouldn’t they. However even the hard-bitten seen-it-all mainstream press confirmed the affective power of the production. The premiere scored a review from two out of the three of Melbourne papers, and both used the word ‘thrilling’.

The Age said:

To have some of the most tragic episodes of Christian history carried out in all savage but ?should? destroying realism is an accomplishment essentially of today. It was done by the aid of the kinematograph, when Commandant Booth delivered his thrilling lecture last night.

The Argus said:

Opening with the last days of the life of Christ, Commandant Booth dealt with the lives of the disciples [… ] and the thrilling scenes that were enacted in the arena of the Coliseum. Bold as the lecture was in conception, the illustration were even more daring. (MWC 22/9/09)

CONCLUSION

Soldiers of the Cross is extremely important because it was Australia’s first large scale multimedia production. On at least several occasions it kept close to 2000 people simultaneously enthralled by a production that was experientially integrated over an entire two and a half hour period. It innovated on narrative formats from the nineteenth century, and incorporated technology that would come to dominate the twentieth century. It created an entirely new experience by weaving familiar visual forms and technological experiences in with established viewing protocols and ritualized behaviours that had been developed and inculcated into Australian audiences during the previous five decades. The scale and the complexity of the integration of these experiences looked forward to twentieth century media forms. One of those media forms was certainly the cinema, but others include the history of the lantern itself which continued in parallel to cinema for another five decades, as well as much later media forms such as broadcast radio and television, and even, at a stretch, contemporary digital media platforms. For these reasons it is an extraordinarily important event in Australian history. Much more important than we first realized.

Martyn Jolly

Mark Strizic

‘Mark Strizic’, National Library of Australia Magazine, 2013

Mark Strizic, who died in December last year, was the last of his generation. He was the last of an important group of European émigré photographers, which also included Wolfgang Sievers and Henry Talbot, who immeasurably enriched Australian photography. These photographers were, in their turn, part of a larger group of émigré artists, craftspeople, designers and architects who immeasurably enriched Australia as a whole. But Strizic was a bit different. After arriving in Melbourne from Zagreb in 1950, and taking up photography in the mid fifties, Strizic’s subsequent fifty-year career was much more complex, diverse and manifold than any of the other émigré photographers. He not only worked in many different photographic styles, but he was also interested in new and experimental photographic techniques, as well as book design and production, architectural murals and tertiary teaching.

Artistic collaboration was fundamental to Strizic’s career, and the two major groups of his photographs in the National Library of Australia come from collaborative projects. In 1960 Strizic worked with the architectural critic, historian and lecturer David Saunders on producing a picture book about Melbourne. Although modestly scaled, the book, Melbourne: A Portrait, is still a charming object even today. Unusually for a book of the period the entire publication is printed using the new offset printing process, rather than the photographs being printed from plates separately engraved to the letterpress text. However Strizic’s softly sunlit, cleanly composed, almost Pictorialist photographs translated well to the pages via offset. As the book’s designer, Strizic was able to freely move the rectangular photographs up and down or across the square pages so that the composition of one visually interlocked with the composition of the next, while expansive fields of blank paper, which sometimes also included floating lines of text, brought each consecutive double-page spread together into a different graphic composition visually relating to the subject matter of the photographs.

Although modestly scaled, and priced, the book didn’t lack ambition, Saunders’ text was repeated in Italian and German, envisaging a global market for images of cosmopolitan Melbourne. Strizic himself acknowledged that the inspiration for the book came from a book called Light and Shade. which his father, an architect, had published on his home town of Zagreb in 1955. It was clearly to this more contemplative, ambling, European style of the ‘city book’ that Strizic aspired, rather than the strident, commercial boosterism of other Australian photo books of the time, although both kinds of book cast Melbourne in a very positive light. The Book of The Year award which Melbourne: A Portrait won in 1961 duly recognised the integrated design of the complete book package, including a bright and chirpy cover design by Leonard French, that the offset printing, carried out by Adelaide’s Griffin Press, Australia’s premier printer of the period, had allowed.

An architecturally transforming Melbourne continued as one of Strizic’s main themes for the next two decades, and he developed a distinctive style, often shooting straight into the light to produce extreme contrast, with blown-out highlights silhouetting black shadows. The old is often juxtaposed with the new, and hot gritty sunlight often shears across cliff-like facades. The people of Melbourne, caught in a headlong rush hour or in exhausted repose, also feature; but Strizic’s photographs were recording the radical expansion and verticalisation of Melbourne during this period, as skyscrapers pushed upwards and car-choked roads pushed outwards, so Melbournians are often left behind or pushed out of the way, squashed down at the bottom of his shots, or squeezed in by his constricting framing. By the late 1970s Strizic’s Melbourne had changed radically from his gentle1960s vision, it had become thoroughly dystopian, an inhuman place of ugly pavements and tangled wires. Using a process he called ‘photochrome’ he even began to print his black and white negatives on colour paper, as well as experimenting with duplicating them onto colour film with high-contrast lithographic film, electrifying Melbourne with intense, sometimes even psychedelic colours that gave his cityscapes a psychological, even hallucinatory, edge.

In 1967 and 1968 Strizic worked on two other important projects with Sun Books, a start-up publishing company which was experimenting with different ways of taking advantage of the boom in paperback publishing that was bringing book prices down and increasing the popular market for a diverse range of formats and subjects. For one project Strizic worked as a stills photographer on Tim Burstall’s pioneering film 2000 Weeks, and turned the stills into a complete, cheap, paperback-novel sized, photo-roman tie-in for the film, with each page tightly packed with his photographs and dialogue from the film. 2000 Weeks was made in a self-consciously European art-house style, and told the existential story of a young artistic man torn between his allegiance to a still provincial Australia and the lure of bigger career opportunities of Britain. It bombed at the box office, so presumably Strizic’s book bombed at the bookstore as well. As a filmmaker Burstall changed tack entirely and eventually found success with cheeky sex comedies unashamedly celebrating crass Australia.

As a photographer Strizic worked with Sun Books again on a posh, self-consciously arty, limited edition book called Involvement, edited by the philanthropist Andrew Grimwade. The idea was that Strizic would collaborate with the painter Clifton Pugh and take photographs of the same sitters Pugh had painted over the years, and painting and photograph would be shown side by side. However the book was not designed by Strizic himself, as had been the case with Melbourne: A Portrait and 2000 Weeks, but by the designer Les Gray, who was incapable of graphically handling the juxtaposition of the tipped-in colour plates of Pugh’s paintings with Strizic’s black and white photographs, so each spread had an out of balance, cluttered feel. This, combined with the book’s pretentious leather binding and grandiose text by Geoffrey Dutton, makes for a curiously unsatisfying package. In his portraits, which he took in Australia, the US, the UK and Europe, Strizic answered the angular, chromatic fondue of Pugh’s paintings by developing his own extremely idiosyncratic photographic style. He doubled the speed of his 35mm film with extended development, which increased the contrast and graininess of the images, and shot his sitters against dominating backgrounds, and with intruding out-of-focus foreground elements. This had the effect of amplifying the sitter’s personalities, who appear to be strongly asserting themselves against their environment. The head of the ABC, Sir Charles Moses, is photographed through a curtain of cigar smoke, while Barry Humphries is captured amongst the eccentric antiques of his London flat, leering at us from behind his flop of hair. In 1968 this set of photographs was exhibited, as Some Australian Personalities, at the National Gallery of Victoria, in that institution’s first one-person photography show.

Strizic’s involvement with other artists, architects and designers was significant on many other levels. In 1988 he was commissioned to comprehensively document the works of the sculptor John Davis and the furniture designer Schulim Krimper for their Australia Council funded monographs. Strizic’s relationship with Krimper furniture went all the way back to 1959, when he first documented his work for a National Gallery of Victoria retrospective on Krimper’s work. Strizic was also at home with the technological avant-garde. He knew the abstract artist Asher Bilu, and in 1967 made the only surviving record of Bilu’s pioneering interactive electronic artwork, Sculptron. In this photograph Strizic was able to handle with aesthetic sympathy and technical aplomb the tricky task of lighting and simultaneously exposing for the glowing oscillating patterns on the work’s eight cathode ray tubes, as well as its Perspex flowers, chrome spheres, and electronic control box. (Jones 2011)

Strizic also had a significant career as a muralist, he built his own photographic mural processor to print architecturally scaled murals for numerous corporate headquarters and government offices, which often combined his ‘photochromes’ with his paintings. In 1970 he even collaborated with the important electronic artist Stanislav Ostoja-Kotkowski on a twelve-metre long mural for the architect Gerd Block’s Ciba-Geigy building in Preston. Ostoja-Kotkowski’s colour infra-red photography was combined with Strizic’s ‘photochromes’ in a swirling abstraction of amoeboid forms and laser light refraction. Later, in the mid1980s, he became deeply involved with the industrial ‘Superscan’ process which made large photographic prints on canvas, an analogue forerunner of today’s digitally produced giant inkjet prints. (Do any of Strizic’s architectural murals still exist I wonder, or have they, like Sculptron, also been lost?)

A final important collaboration was with the architect and cultural critic Robin Boyd. In 1970 Strizic photographed and designed Boyd’s book Living in Australia, in which Boyd put forward his own design philosophy to counter the ugliness which both he and Strizic saw as enveloping Australia. Strizic’s graphically compelling photography, in which the exposed wooden beams and large picture windows of Boyd’s domestic architecture are shot in deeply penetrating diagonal focus, reinforces the larger social message of the book. The book has recently been repackaged and republished with additional photography by John Gollings.

Unlike many of his fellow photographers who established their careers in the sixties, Strizic also sustained a busy career as an exhibiting artist, either solo or in collaboration, at key commercial galleries such as Gallery A Melbourne, and Holdsworth Galleries Sydney. In 1988, after a long period teaching in the new photography departments which were starting up in Melbourne art schools and technical colleges as part of the 1970s photography boom, he returned to his early negatives of Melbourne streets for an exhibition at Christine Abrahams Gallery. Since then he has gradually became most well known as a nostalgic photographer of ‘old Melbourne’, or ‘disappearing Melbourne’ or ‘marvelous Melbourne’. But, seen in its entirety, his career is much more complex than that. Through his constant experimentation, and his long-term engagement on many different levels with many different artists and designers, he played an important if under-the-radar role, in much that was new, innovative, and important in Australian culture.

Martyn Jolly

Sources:

NLA Photographers Files

NLA Clippings Files

Stephen Jones, Synthetics: Aspects of Art and Technology in Australia, 1956-1975, MIT Press, 2011, p145

The Disinfected City in Australia

‘The Disinfected City in Australia’, Eugene Atget Symposium, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 25 August, 2012

Disinfected Sydney
The Panoramic, the Evidential and the Picturesque
The idea of Atget and archival delirium in Australian photography

Of course there is no antipodean Atget. The very idea is ridiculous. Any relationship drawn between a singularly exceptional photographer working in early twentieth-century Paris, the city which as the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ was central to global shifts in urban culture, and any other photographer working far away in the colonial settler society of Australia, at the dusty extremity of a European empire, must be attenuated in the extreme.

Yet nonetheless Atget is here, and perhaps the mystique that surrounds him can be used as a lens to look afresh at some aspects of Australian photography.

The idea of Atget

Firstly what have been the reactions to Atget? The surrealists saw Atget’s photographs as suspended between fact and dream, between the prosaic and the poetic. Subsequent interpretations, particularly in the US, emphasised the prosaic, factual pole of this tension. Atget’s commercial imperatives were seen to have produced an archive of empirically authentic documents.

Walter Benjamin was attracted to Atget because his photographs thematised the spatially and temporarily liminal. Both were interested in contested and transformed spaces; and in the outmoded, which has the capacity to erupt into the present at the very moment it is consigned to history, challenging the linear distinctions between past, present and future.

In 1931 Benjamin said of Atget:

‘ … he disinfected the sticky atmosphere spread by conventional portrait photography … He cleansed this atmosphere, he cleared it; … He sought the forgotten and the neglected, … such pictures turn reality against the exotic, romantic, show-offish resonance of the city name; they suck the aura from reality like water from a sinking ship. … Atget almost always passed by the ‘great sights and so-called landmarks’ … the city in these pictures is swept clean like a house which has not yet found a new tenant. These are the sort of effects with which surrealist photography established a healthy alienation between environment and man, opening the field for a politically educated sight, in the face of which all intimacies fall in favour of the illumination of details.’

Five years later Benjamin praised Atget once again for eschewing the nineteenth century portrait ritual and the romance of the human face:

To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget … It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed [the streets] like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way.’

What I take from all of that is that Atget’s photographs are dreamlike, but also authentic documents. They create a ‘disinfected’ city cleansed of the cloying atmospheres of myth, and cleared of the ideology of romantic humanism. They are made up of details that need to be read with a ‘healthy alienation’, rather than contemplated within a comfortable aesthetic familiarity. They document liminal temporalities where the smooth flow of history is folded back on itself; and liminal spaces where the seamless ideologies of civic space are unpicked to reveal urban gaps and layerings.

Urban photography in Australia

During roughly the same period in which Atget was working there were three dominant modes in the picturing of Australian cities, and each I think resonates in different ways with Benjamin’s comments on Atget. The three modes are the panoramic, the evidential, and the picturesque.

The Panoramic

Colonial audiences loved panoramas, and photographers took every opportunity to take them. Charles Bayliss used Holtermann’s North Sydney Tower in 1875, the roof of the Garden Palace Exhibition Buildings in 1879, and the GPO Tower in the 1890s, as vantage points for his panoramas of the growing city. Even some of his terrestrial views were panoramic, working to extend the viewer’s eye across long and deep diagonals that led all the way to infinity down long vanishing streets which are completely delineated by the sun. In the twentieth century the American adventurer Melvin Vaniman also took a panorama of Sydney from a tethered balloon, as well as from the mast of a ship.

The Evidential

Tucked away on the far right of Vaniman’s ship-mast panorama is The Rocks area, which is the first site of the second mode of photography I want to discuss, the evidential. In 1900 the Department of Public Works assembled 300 ‘Views Taken During Cleansing Operations, Quarantine Areas’. They were taken by John Degotardi, under the supervision of the engineer George McCredie. They documented the cleansing of The Rocks area following the outbreak of the Bubonic Plague in January 1900 from which 103 people died. The photographs were commissioned as evidence of dereliction to forestall possible litigation from slum landlords whose properties were to be either demolished or cleansed. The quarantined residents, unable to leave, were employed to cleanse their own streets, and to finish with whitewashing their own walls. Whitewashing had no sanitary value, but was purely a signifier of cleanliness. Degotardi himself often wore white, and often his photographs capture a face-off between cleansing official and hapless denizen of the quarantined area. Indeed the scale of the project gives it now, in retrospect, something of the same moral force that Jacob Riis’s much more famous flash-lit reportage of New York’s slums had. Some of the basements and toilets are lit by flashlight, as Riis’s was, but Degotardi’s usual illuminant was the purifying sun angled into the backyards.

The actual identity of the photographer was only established in about 1980 by the sharp-eyed historian Max Kelly who recognized, eighty years after they were first taken, that Degotardi had exceeded his initial brief.

… he offers us a way to know this previously unknown world rather more intimately than a literary or statistical account could provide. Here people are as they were. There is no artifice. Some are caught unawares, some are apprehensive. Others are just as interested in the photographer as he is in them. Most have only rarely, if ever, had their photographs taken. The same is true for the buildings — the terraces, shacks, doss-houses, warehouses and make-do shelters.’

In 1977 he published some of the archive in the important book A Certain Sydney which went into three printings. It began with the epigraph:

‘Most of the people pictured here are dead. Nearly all of the houses have been demolished and a number of the streets no longer exist. The book tries to resurrect an aspect of Sydney’s life which, even in its time, was largely forgotten.’

Thirty years after this statement, this period of The Rocks is now permanently remembered as part of the tourist’s heritage experience. If Max Kelly saw the collection as documents of city life, the cultural critic and artist Helen Grace saw them as documents of city politics. In a 1991 article she noted that the buildings themselves became suspects under interrogation. She claimed that many of the photographs are like mug shots, ‘portraits’ of the front of the buildings. But the buildings’ facades initially resist penetration by the official gaze. ‘This is the age of the façade’ Grace asserts, ‘a building which does not have a noble visage, a building which is hidden away from other buildings, in a side lane, for example, must have something to hide’. Therefore the official desire to see the building beyond the façade, as though unclothed, becomes almost pornographic. For Grace this penetration beyond the façade brings into view an ‘invisible city’:

[T]hat space which must be brought into existence so that the mechanisms of the modern city can begin to operate. Public health is the focal point around which revolves the impetus for discovery of the invisible city of unspeakable horrors and sanitary evils. Once the official has tentatively ventured down a side lane there is no stopping him; his curiosity is excited; he loses his fears of the inhabitants of these forbidden places. He is ready to enter the other side, the reversal of the facade.

But in Grace’s narrative the pleasure which the European bourgeoisie traditionally took in their own revulsion at the Dickensian squalor of the Other is complicated because such familiar and comfortable old-world squalor is not even supposed to exist in the modern cities of the new world. The threat posed to the optimism of the new world by the unexpected irruption of the old world put additional pressure on the photograph to be proof of a social evil. Therefore, in an emerging evidentiary paradigm, the photograph combined with writing so that they reinforced each other, the photograph adopted an anti-aesthetic, style-free visual rhetoric, while the accompanying text adopted the status of legal eye-witness testimony. The image was able to prove the meaning of the words, and this new authority was put to immediate use by the government.

In Grace’s analysis the outbreak of the plague, and the commissioning of the photographs, was a convenient excuse for the state to not only rid the city of the disease itself, but also of certain sections of the population, in particular the Chinese, and to reclaim land from the people through an ad hoc slum reclamation program.

Shortly after her political analysis of the plague photographs Grace herself made an art series that also used photographs and legal deeds to create a polyvalent archive that documented the politics and psycho-geography of land use in inner-city Sydney. In Secret Archives of the Recent Past she counterposed spookily radiant infra-red photographs of buildings which had been the sites of now mostly forgotten political activism, with a suspended parchment palimpsest of the official property deeds and changing ownerships of the same building. To quote from this Gallery’s guide to the collection: ‘In the space between image and manuscript lie the unrecorded activities of the site — ‘the ghosts which redevelopment attempts to exorcise but can’t’, writes Grace. (p296)

If, with her ‘politically educated sight’ Helen Grace was, like Atget, more focused on the activities of a site rather than the people per se, then Max Kelly, as an historian, was more interested in the people themselves who were caught in the emulsion. A few years after the success of A Certain Sydney he produced another important book, Faces of the Street, based on another set of albums that were also taken for evidential purposes by another photographer ,Milton Kent, under the official authorship of the City Building Surveyor, Robert Brodrick. These were the ‘Demolition Books’, compiled by the council to record condemned properties about to be demolished.

Kelly’s new book concentrated on photographs taken over a period of just one week, in 1916, of the building to be demolished for a widening of William Street inspired by Haussman’s improvements in Paris. Milton Kent’s photographs are not only a one-week snapshot of the south side of the street, but they could be extracted from the archive and re-assembled to form a new kind of terrestrial panorama of the lost street façade, a sort of proto Google Street View.

By entering this systematic space and enlarging sections from the evidentiary photos, Kelly performs a kind of retro street photography within the archive. Writing in Photfile in 1983 he argued for photographs as a new kind of historical document, a human document which objectively recorded things other forms of record couldn’t, importantly, intimate, contingent, human things. He noted:

[I]n an endeavor to tune the reader’s eye, and to motivate his and her mind, I included enlarged details from a number of the original photographs. It is interesting to note that it has been these details, thus isolated, that readers have remembered best.’ P10

Something of the sort had been done previously within Australian photographic historiography. In Keast Burke’s 1973 book Gold And Silver, based on the 1951 discovery of a cache of Bayliss and Merlin gold-field negatives, most of the reproductions were severely cropped, while Burke also occasionally selected extreme details for enlargement — ‘emphasizing elements of human or sociological appeal’ he said. (p57). (Of course this technique had been used in documentary filmmaking since the late 1950s. Ken Burns used it heavily throughout the 1990s, and his name is now irrevocably attached to the technique.)

But back in 1983 Kelly’s book took this technique a few steps further than even Keast Burke had. Like a documentary filmmaker he used literary texts and newspaper reports to add contextual ambience to the demolition photographs which he mined for as much evocative detail as possible. For instance, even though no working prostitutes were captured in the demolition photos, there was still a section of his book about the prostitutes of William Street. It used reports from The Truth newspaper, plus poems by Henry Lawson, Mary Gilmore and Kenneth Slessor, and was illustrated, not with images of real women, but with a tiny detail of shop window dummies the ever-vigilant Kelly had spotted in one facade.

While Max Kelly was concerned with the direct resurrection of the historical past, and Grace with our political education, other more contemporary artists are concerned with a more acknowledged fictionalized and poeticized evocation of history, but one with foundations still sunk deeply into the bedrock of evidential fact found in the photographic archive nonetheless. For instance Kate Richards and Ross Gibson have quarantined 3000 photographs off from the much larger collection at the Justice and Police Museum. They regard this data base of Sydney crime scene photographs from the 1940s, 50s and 60s as a self-contained ‘world’ which, under the title Life After War Time, they have iterated into various versions by introducing new poetic texts and various algorithmic sequencing techniques. Writing in 1999 Gibson described the uncanny relationship between artist and evidentiary archive.

The archive holds knowledge in excess of my own predispositions. This is why I was attracted to the material in the first instance — because it appeared peculiar, had secrets to divulge and promised to take me somewhere past my own limitations. Stepping off from this intuition, I have to trust that the archive has occulted in it a logic, a coherent pattern which can be ghosted up from its disparate details so that I can gain a new, systematic understanding of the culture that has left behind such spooky detritus. In this respect I am looking to be a medium for the archive. I want to ‘séance up’ the spirit of the evidence….

The Picturesque — Harold Cazneaux

My third mode is the picturesque. At about the same time as Degotardi and Kent, the artistic photographer Harold Cazneaux trod the very same streets of Sydney. In 1910 he wrote an article called In and about the City with a Hand Camera. Although ostensibly a guide for other aspiring Pictorialists, it is really a very personal record of his own engagement with the streets which, he said, ‘have all the humour and pathos of life’. However, unlike the evidentiary photographers, Cazneaux did not shoot with the cleansing sun over his shoulder, rather he shot into the sun, as well as into the mist, into the haze, into the steam and into the rain. In Cazneaux’s words this ‘[cut] down insistent detail, so that the masses and tones become more picturesque’, but it also immediately re-infected the city with an anachronistic yearning for the free-floating contemplation of a city built to a European blueprint. The article also took the reader along Cazneaux’s personal itinerary through the various areas of the city, each with its own pungent atmosphere, from the brisk CBD streets, to the smoky docks, to the bustling markets, to the steamy railway, and to finally to the secret alleys of the The Rocks. The article makes clear that while the streets do contain picturesque subject matter and artistic lighting effects waiting to be discovered by the intrepid Pictorialist, they are also resistant to the his gaze; and without the official authority of a engineer or a surveyor to back him up, the mute stand-off we have seen in the evidentiary pictures could quickly become an outright hostility that destroys the Pictorialist’s personal old world fantasy. As Cazneaux warned:

Hand and eye must work together, and to hesitate is sometimes to lose. If you are once caught in the act of presenting the camera, your work is almost invariably spoilt as expressions are not pleasant when the subjects are aware that the camera is pointing their way. It is much better to move about calmly, and knowing your camera, study any little group or street scenes. Whilst moving past, decide upon the best view point, mentally calculate the exposure and distance, adjust the shutter, stop the focusing scale. Then, returning to the chosen viewpoint, turn and bring the camera up, locate the image quickly on the finder and expose at once, with perhaps no one but yourself aware that an exposure has been made. … A trip down to the Rocks Area and Argyle Cut will convince any worker with Pictorial imagination of what is to be had, but photography is difficult in this neighborhood. To be successful the worker should have had some experience, as any nervousness of manner and lack of tact whilst working here would only end up by being ridiculed. However go by all means and get broken in. Tact and expert manipulation of one’s camera is necessary if you wish to deal successfully with side street work in this locality. Still, the chances are that you may not like to return again.

Despite these dangers Cazneaux’s photography was part a larger genre of ‘Old Sydney’, and pretty soon a plague of artists like Sydney Ure Smith, Julian Ashton and Lionel Lindsay were congesting the streets and alleyways with their quaint and charming views.

In the 1910s and 20s Cazneaux had turned many of the negatives he exposed into pictorial gems, such as the wee little gum-bichromate print of North Sydney, which is positively putrid with old world atmospheres. However in 1948 the young photographer Laurie Le Guay, editor of Contemporary Photography magazine, saw some of these prints in Cazneauz ‘s studio. He suggested Cazneaux make new prints for a special of the magazine. In the subsequent article Cazneaux relegates the Old Sydney of his youth to a past now decisively brushed aside by Modernism, rather than still caught in a bubble of the outmoded, and the ‘old worlded’, as it had been in 1910:

The old Sydney is changing. The March of Time with modern ideas and progress is surely brushing aside much of the old — the picturesque and romantic character of Sydney’s highways, byways and old buildings. Some still remain, hemmed in and shadowed by towering modern structures. ….

Cazneaux goes on to describe how he restored his 250, forty year-old negatives, and made new prints on modern, smooth contrastier bromide papers. Le Guay now saw the collection in documentary, historical and nationalistic terms. Once Cazneaux himself had willingly disinfected them of their Pictorialism, they became for le Guay, as Atget’s images were for others at the same time, exemplars for the Documentary movement that le Guay was promoting in Australia. He said:

[These prints] must assume the same importance as Atget’s photographs of Paris. As a document of early Sydney, they are undoubtedly the finest prints of the period, and would be a valuable acquisition for the Mitchell Library or Australian Historical Societies. Photographically, they are remarkable for their quality. With slow plates, relatively unprotected from halation, the against the light effects have exploited the range of film and paper with maximum efficiency, while Bromoil and rough textured prints have been dispensed with entirely. It is hoped that this collection may furnish an incentive for a more direct and accurate approach to photographing Australia today.

Kid Stakes

If, in the tasteful aesthetics of the Old Sydney school of the 1910s and 20s, Cazneaux, Ure Smith, Lindsay and Ashton had re-infected the slums of Sydney with the sticky atmosphere of old world anachronism, it was left to popular culture to disinfect old Sydney again. The popular children’s film Kid Stakes, made in 1927 by Tal Ordell contains an astonishing sequence that perfectly, elegantly and poetically, captures the spatial politics of Sydney in the 1920s. Based on a comic strip, the film centres on the slum kids of Woolloomooloo who play cricket and live their lives freely in front of the wharves and ships of Woolloomooloo Bay. Above them lies Potts Point, full of its posh mansions and restrictive mores. Suddenly, out of the rows of grand houses at the bottom of Victoria Street, emerges Algie Snoops, an upper class boy who yearns for the freedoms of the Wolloomooloo kids. Through the bars of his suburban prison he performs a panoramic sweep of the city across the bay, including St Mary’s cathedral. But this panorama is not a projection into the future, as Bayliss’s and Vaniman’s had been, instead Algernon is assaying a potential itinerary, just as the nervous and highly strung Harold Cazneux who, a bit like Algie, lived on the salubrious North Shore had his favourite itinerary through the city. Algie sees the kids playing, and the camera irises in. The Woolloomooloo steps dwarf him as he descends down them like a latter-day Dante, but the steps are leading him towards the salvation of the slums. Initially the slum kids taunt him, but when he proves he can fight he joins their gang, and, his velvet clothes now torn and put on backwards by the girls in the gang, he is free. He is able to lead the kids back up the steps, past a sleeping policeman on guard between the two elevations, the two classes, of Sydney, and into the wilds of Potts Point for further adventures.

Conclusion

By applying the lens of Atget, that is the tension between the prosaic and poetic, the descriptive and the uncanny, to what I have identified as the three modes of urban photography during the same period — the panoramic, evidentiary and picturesque — I think I have been able to identify the archive, and not the single photograph, as the key object of both photography and photographic historiography. Some photographers have re-invented their own archives within their own lifetimes; while historians have produced others, who were one anonymous functionaries, into significance. Some historians have gone into archives as resurrectionists, seeking to bring back the lives of the dead (something Atget never did); while other artists (perhaps a bit closer to Atget’s mystique) have attempted to use the residual power of archives to pick at the seams of the city and expose the spatially and temporally liminal nature of so much of Sydney. Yet all, and in this sense alone they are exactly like Atget, have been infected with the delirium of the archive.

Martyn Jolly

Dana MacFarlane , Photography at the Threshold: Atget, Benjamin and Surrealism, History of Photography 34:1, 17-28)

Short History of Photography 1931

Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936Continuum, Photogenic Papers Vol6, No 2 1991

Photofile, Winter 1983 p10.

Harold Cazneaux: ‘In and about the City with a Hand Camera’ The Australasian Photo-Review August 22, 1910:

Photofile 58, December 1999

Soldiers of the Cross: Time, Narrative and Affect

‘Herbert Booth and Joseph Perry’s Soldiers of the Cross of 1900’, Magic Lantern Convention, Australasian Magic Lantern Society, Melbourne, 27-28 October 2012.

INTRODUCTION

The Salvation Army lecture of 1900, Soldiers of the Cross, was an extremely important event in the history of Australian media. It is reasonably well known, but because it included fifteen sections of kinematographic film along with its 200 lantern slides, until now it has largely been seen through the lens of subsequent Australian cinema history. Although it does have a place in that narrow teleology, it is much more important to a larger archaeology of media experience in Australia. So I would like to discuss it on its own terms, and in particular try to think about it from the point of view of its audience’s experience. I would like to tease out two related aspects of that experience: the sense of realistic action it gave its audience, and the emotional affect it generated in them. In doing so I am building on the previous work of Chris Long, who discussed the production in the 1990s from the point of view of cinema, Elizabeth Hartrick who discussed it recently from the much more relevant point of view of broader Australian lantern slide culture, and Lindsay Cox who has discussed it from the point of view of the heritage of the Salvation Army. I’d also like to thank the National Film and Sound Archive who gave me access to the Soldiers of the Cross slides during my Collection Scholars and Artist Residency fellowship.

THE MYTH

Soldiers of the Cross has acquired a mythic status as Australia’s first film. It was not. Furthermore, a fixation on its an some kind of lost originary text has worked to obscure the complex multimedia work of the Salvation Army at the time, as well as the complex multimedia landscape of Australia as a whole. So one must return to it with circumspection. In addition, large parts of the production have been lost — the fifteen or so kinematographic films, and the script itself. All that remains are about 250 slides in the collection of the National Film and Sound Archive, which have not even all been scanned. In addition, this collection may have been modified after the initial production. Nonetheless, through looking carefully at the slide which are available, and putting them in their projection sequence by following the numbering system written on their edges, and then correlating that with published accounts of the production as well as scripts from other related productions, I think it is possible to make some general speculations about how it would have been experienced at the time. Further, I want to argue that seen on its own terms, stripped of its myth, it is an even more important and precious part of Australia’s history than we first thought

THE LIMELIGHT DEPARTMENT

Soldiers of the Cross was made in the middle of an extraordinary period of Australian media, from 1891 to 1909, when the Salvation Army were using advanced technologies to do two things: to convert souls to Christ, and to recruit new members to the Army. During this period the Army saw themselves as competing for attention with all of the other fantastic, thrilling, colourful attractions of the nineteenth century: the panoramas, the cycloramas, the dioramas, the pantomimes, the illuminated transparencies, the kinetoscope parlours, and the moving cavalcade of the streets themselves.

For instance in 1894 Joseph Perry of the Army’s Limelight Department used a limelight magic lantern to stage an outdoor meeting in a vacant lot on a cold and wet night in the middle of winter in the middle of Melbourne to divert the people who were aimlessly drifting along Little Collins street. The illustration in the Army’s magazine War Cry of this somewhat dismal event dramatized how the lantern not only obliterated with a blast of light the Schnapps ad on the side of the pub across which they had stretched their projection sheet, it also literally shouldered aside the attractions offered by Melbourne’s Cyclorama building. Other War Cry illustrations visually dramatized the ways the Army directly pitted their limelight lectures against the tired old productions of the theatre.

During this early period Perry used a variety of commercially produced and distributed media. From later in the 1890s they began to use commercial kinematographic films, as well as the gramophone recordings. But right from the early 1890s they extensively used many different types of lantern slide, these included: dissolving mechanical slides and chromatropes, which had been shown in Australia for over forty years; painted slides and life-model slides, that is hand-coloured photographed slides of models enacting a sequence of tableaus in front of painted backdrops to accompany the verses of a song, poem or short narrative, which had been popular for several years; ‘social’ slides, photographs of slum life and charitable works; song slides which projected the words of hymns for audience participation; and finally hand-coloured copies of famous paintings and engravings, such as Millais’s Light of the World or Doré’s bible engravings.

The commercial slides the Army used before Soldiers of the Cross tell their stories in an iterative way, like visual verses. Some, such as Jane Conquest, which the Army used, are entirely painted, so they are able to move their narratives through a series of diverse scenes, though they are nonetheless locked into the repetitive verse structure of the accompanying poem that will be read by the lecturer. Other, such as the life-model set Daddy, are photographic, so they repeat exactly the same scene with only slight variation, in a strophic way. Many of these slides also feature additional special effects, usually angels, projected over another slide by a skilled lanternist, or collaged onto a slide by a skilled slide maker. Many commercial slide manufacturers copied each other in the competition for market share, so there is not much innovation during the 1890s.

From 1894 the Limelight Department began to produce its own life model slides, social slides and, from 1897, kinematographs of both ‘life model’ and ‘social’ topics. And they began to innovate on commercial formats.

When Herbert Booth took over as Commandant of the Salvation Army in 1896 he moved this production to the centre of the Army’s proselytizing, and began to work closely with Joseph Perry. They produced a major slide and kinematograph lecture in the ‘social’ genre called Social Salvation in 1899, and then embarked on another lecture in 1900 in the ‘life-model’ genre to be called Soldiers of the Cross. Even after the departure of Herbert Booth, who quit the Army in 1901 and took Soldiers of the Cross with him to the US, the Army continued to make slide and kinematograph lectures for a further eight years, as well as becoming an independent and active production company, before being precipitously closed down in 1909.

THE PRODUCTION

So what of Soldier of the Cross itself? What was it? It was a lecture. Although it included narratives, these were chapters embedded in an overarching structure which was liturgical and sermonic. What did the lanterns project? Occasionally, during the two and a half hours of the performance, about fifteen 90 second Lumiere kinomatographs were shown, but primarily the audience experienced about 250 slides dissolving one into another. These slides were a bricolage from various sources: copies of paintings and Gustav Doré bible engravings; copies of one half of stereo view photographs, which had been previously sold in sets of twelve as travel views for viewing in a home stereoscope; and commercially produced life model slides. But, predominantly, the production featured Army produced life model slides.

THE ST STEPHEN SEQUENCE

The production began with general scenes of the Life of Christ, as well as two commercial kinematographs which were each one-minute reels, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem and the Crucifixion, from the thirteen one-minute-reels of the Lumiere production The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ made in 1898.

After this introduction the first chapter was the Maryrdom of St Stephen. This is based on the biblical story of the first Martyr. It opens with St Stephen before the Jewish court. Why, one wonders, does this first chapter open with five very repetitive slides where not much is happening, where the narrative isn’t moving? This is because in Chapter 7 of the Acts of the Apostles St Stephen spends a whole 53 verses defending himself against the Jewish court by recounting the story of Moses’ persecution. So it appears as though these slides would be dissolved, one in to another, perhaps quite slowly, as Booth recounted these 53 biblical verses.

After that, the Biblical narrative suddenly picks up. Stephen looks up and Heaven opens up to him. There he sees God with Jesus on his right hand. The Bible says:

But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, and said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. Then they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord, and cast him out of the city, and stoned him: and the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man’s feet, whose name was Saul. And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down, and cried out in a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep.’ Acts 7 55-60

Booth and Perry have superimposed a commercial slide of Jesus and angels for the effect of Heaven opening up. (This effect could have been dissolved as a superimposition on top of the slide if they had been using a triurnial lantern, but they reportedly used a biurnial lantern, so to give the animated effect of the heavens opening, only a dissolve from one slide to another double-exposed version of the same slide was possible.) The backdrop painting for the exteriors has clearly been inspired by a Doré engraving, but the way the slides in this sequence have been made seems to differ. We begin with slides shot with models standing in front of a painted backdrop. But the slide of St Stephen being removed from the city seems to be assembled in a different way. I think it is a collage of cut-out photographs pasted onto a painted background, and re-shot onto a glass-slide before being hand-coloured. Both quite different techniques are used throughout Soldiers of the Cross.

The slides only follow the Biblical text loosely, but the general narrative would have been familiar enough to the audience. In the effect generated by the montage with the commercial slide we see Jesus and angels, not Jesus on the right hand of God. We don’t see the court stopping their ears, or other details. However the account of this chapter in the War Cry closely follows the slides we have:

The events that lead to the martyrdom of Stephen passed in review. The Sanhedrim, the trial, Stephen’s impeachment by the rulers and the stoning of the first martyr. The kinematograph was employed in this latter scene. The effect on the audience, as they beheld in a moving picture the innocent Stephen cruelly beaten to the earth, and killed by fiendish fanaticism of the formal religionists of his day cannot be described. The kinematograph give place to a picture of Stephen lying dead upon the roadside, while Paul (sic) the persecutor stands over him in an attitude of painful contemplation.’ (MWC 22/9/00 p9)

There are three slides numbered in sequence for the stoning, two are produced in one method, the third in the other method. The kinematograph would have come after this sequence of slides, which may have been dissolved more quickly, perhaps, than the earlier court slides. So the audience would have seen the same action again, repeated, but this time in moving picture.

The script then runs on as a commentary on the kinematograph, with prompts for the reader of the script for when the kinematograph scenes will change.

To return to the earlier, longer Soldiers of the Cross production, as the War Cry says, the kinematograph then gives way to a slide of Stephen lying dead, with Jesus receiving his spirit. Then we see a handcoloured copy of a lithographic reproduction of a Pre-Raphaelite Millais painting of St Stephen, before cutting back to two slides of Salvation Army Officer Colonel James Annetts, who played St Stephen, lying on the ground. Between the final two slides we see his crimson blood pool, and a crucial character for the next chapter, Saul, appear to look over him.

So in this chapter, even though viewers are experiencing a synthesized production, it is not built on anything like a unified visual syntax. Instead they are experiencing at least four different modalities of affect, and four different expressions of time:

A strophic, verse-like, iterative mode of slowly dissolving lantern slides, familiar from previous commercial slide sets
A faster, more expository mode of action-tableaus, often in couplets, perhaps linked to an accelerated biurnial dissolve, which is an innovation of the commercial slide format
The real-time animation and realistic living-picture mode of the kinematograph, giving a visceral feeling of natural movement
The contemplative mode of a familiar work of ‘great art’ which is embedded in some kind of universal historico/aesthetic time

These different modalities I have identified are reflected in the contemporaneous comments on the production. For instance often the micro-movements magically captured by the kinematograph are mentioned, such as the splash of water as a martyr is thrown in a river, the rising of smoke, or the falling of stones. But also the beautiful colour of the slides is frequently mentioned. All of these modes, although not syntactically unified in any way we would recognize from subsequent cinema history, nonetheless worked together to directly involve the audience with the story through shared sight. This sense of collective witnessing, which this opening sequence sets up, is caught well by the War Cry:

SAUL

The next slide, after we have shared with Saul our contemplation of the dead St Stephen, is a shot of contemporary Damascus extracted from a stereograph. But we are still following the Bible pretty closely, because after being transported to contemporary Damascus as it was in 1900, the next slide whooshes us back to Biblical times for Saul’s conversion. We then see Saul’s own persecution, and a tight sequence of three slides which in an expository triplet show us his escape by basket from the walls of Damascus to continue his preaching.

These expository ‘runs’ of slides often seem to pick up momentum towards a kinematographic climax. For instance at slide number 72 there is a sequence of Romans raiding an outdoor service by Christians who are then forced to flee underground to continue their worship clandestinely in the catacombs, or by the cover of night. In 1901 this sequence was added to with a kinematograph of the Romans chasing the Christians across a plank over a stream, augmented with the much commented on comic relief of a Roman boinging off the springy plank and into the stream.

CATACOMBS

A later sequence focuses on life in the catacombs, perhaps to parallel life for Salvationists in the midst of pagan Melbourne. Like an establishing shot from a movie of twenty years later, it begins with an aerial map of the catacombs, and then swoops us down through the underground stone passages using stereo views from a commercial stereograph set. We then see daily life— worship, marriage, birth, sickness and eventual death — carried on in what I have called the ‘iterative’ mode through a mixture of Army collages and copies of prints and engravings. As the War Cry put it:

The mode switches from ‘iterative’ to ‘expository’ for a detailed and strangely beautiful, even today, funeral sequence of four monochrome slides. Once more there is kinematographic climax, before a final extended contemplation of souls ascending into heaven painted in brilliant supersaturated colour, which may perhaps have been accompanied by music or singing.

About twenty slides later another quartet of slides appears which encapsulates a tight action. A Christian woman is about to be burnt to death in a lime-kiln. Will she offer just one grain of incense to the Pagan Gods and save herself? No! After pointing upwards to the one true god she disappears into the kiln. This again may have been followed by a kinematograph, with the added bonus of smoke effects. We have quite good scans of these slides and we can burrow into their details to appreciate the fine brushwork of the Army’s colouring studio applying swathes of colour on the robes and dabs of optical accents. These scans also bring us extraordinarily close to the ordinary Australian faces of the Army members who have consented to Booth’s request that they pose for his production.

Fourteen slides later, after another contemporary view of the coliseum, another run of five slides introduces an extended piece of action. Christians wait at the gate of the Coliseum, while a stuffed tiger with a virulent red tongue threatens them from a cage. Then the gates inch open in the final three slides, before a kinematograph shows the Christians entering the Coliseum (check), after which individual slides show their martyrdom. In the publicity for the production much is made of the violence of the scenes, but often the extreme action is not in the Army slides but in the copied prints. It seems unlikely to me that the kinematographs would have been any more violent than the slides.

PERPETUA SEQUENCE:

The final sequence of the two and half hour show was for many people the most affecting, in Hobart for instance, it caused ‘general sobbing’ in the audience. (MWC 26/1/01 p9)

Perpetua, played by the young, attractive Army member, Cadet Mabel Tolley was a young wealthy Roman woman who chose to give up her baby and be martyred in the coliseum rather than renounce Christ. This sequence of twenty slides perhaps only used the kinematograph at the very end. (CHECK) The sequence was remade at least two times again after Booth took Soldiers of the Cross away with him, and a script with slide and music cues exists, probably for a stand-alone version made shortly after Soldiers of the Cross. Although the slide cues of this script do not correspond exactly with the slides in Soldiers of the Cross they are pretty close and still, I think, give us a good sense of how the voice of the lecturer would have unified the experience for the audience. The surviving script is also punctuated with nine popular hymns requiring audience participation, with a hymn supplementing the narrative about every four slides. However in Soldier of the Cross itself there were most probably far fewer hymns because of the whole production’s larger scale, and they may have been sung for the audience.

This was immediately followed by a hymn. Later, when she is cast into prison, the script tells the audience:

Glory filled her soul amidst the gloom of her surroundings.

But when the mother had gone a dreary lull set in. The baby’s prattle had given way to a deep silence. The past rose in vivid pictures, and strong as she was in the grace of God, her poor heart was grief stricken. But there is always solace in prayer, and even in this dark dungeon Pepretua might well prove the unfailing words, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee’.’

The script then calls for the hymn What a friend we have in Jesus.

After Perpetua has been martyred and before the final hymn the script ends with:

THE VOICE

Now we have looked in as much detail as possible at a few of the many sequences in this production, what general conclusions can be drawn? The unifying force in the piece was the voice, the live human voice reciting that sermon. That voice was provided first by the charismatic Herbert Booth, who spoke in ‘short and harmonious’ sentences, ‘constructed with due regard to the balance and equilibrium of the whole’ (MWC 22/9/00) then after he got sick by his equally charismatic wife. The War Cry reported:

RETINAL POWER

The presence of the lanternist signaled the radical shift in the site of principle address which the Salvation Army made in their evangelism: from the body, or the ear, or the mind, or the voice — although these were of course still present — to the eye and to the retina; from the phenomenological architecture of the church to the dominating address of the projection sheet; from the magical ritual of the service to the retinal power of the projected image. This separation of the Army lecture from convention religious experiences was signaled as early as 1891. For instance in reporting on a 1891 limelight lecture by the Army’s founder, General William Booth, at the Melbourne Exhibition Buildings the War Cry reported:

A dim religious light pervades the building, which was, however, relieved at one end by a huge white sheet, behind which a mysterious manufacturing of light and shade seemed to be going on. (Citation)

The magic lantern shifted the locus of the spiritual to the limelight itself, and turned the lanternist into a kind of thaumaturge. For instance, before the third production of Soldiers of the Cross at South Melbourne Town Hall Brigadier Unsworth prayed with at congregation:

The Army’s spiritual bellicosity was evoked in another comment by the War Cry:

The lecture is a double-barreled weapon, which captivates both sense of sight and enchains the mind, while indelible impressions are made upon it. (MWC 22/9/00 )

THE DISSOLVE

You would be gazing intently at a street girl’s red jacket, until all at once you would discover that it was not a street girl’s dress, but a Salvationist’s guernsey, and the surroundings were totally different. You would be taking in that fact when a glance would show you that what you took for a guernsey was a fire, the pantaloons of an actor, the side of a house, red Maria, a red flannel petticoat, or the leg of a horse. (Citation)

INNOVATION

Booth’s major innovation was to scale up the traditional lantern lecture into a complete evening’s production, and to give it a thematic unity. As the War Cry reported:

Although the audience was take through a great variety of scene and incident, the intervals were cleverly bridged or, to change the metaphor, the stories, instead of being scattered gems were strung on an elocutionary necklace and, in their semblance or contrast made into a beautiful and complete circlet. (MWC 29/09/00 p8)

A secondary innovation was to work the kinematograph into the slides more closely. In Booth’s words:

I saw at a glance that living pictures, worked in conjunction with life-model slides, would provide a combination unfailing in its power of connecting narrative.’ (Citation)

THRILLS

This was in search of thrills — Army thrills to compete with all of the other thrills young people, particularly young men, had to divert them in 1900. In its pre-publicity for Soldiers of the Cross, the War Cry described it as a ‘new sensation’. It was the power of the thrill which led Booth to chose as his subject the martyrdom of the early Christians, because the bloody and violent martyrdoms provided opportunity for spectacle and action. If the thrill was one key concept, the other was realistic action. The intention was to create a retinal connection between the audience and the Christian martyrs. The ultimate objective was for people to pledge their souls to Christ and their lives to the Army at the end of the lecture. Realism, through the meticulously researched and supposedly historically accurate costumes, was one conduit of empathy, the other was the contemporary shots of the Holy Land and the copies of the great and familiar paintings which introduced each chapter.

As the War Cry predicted before opening night:

TRANSPORT

Part of this thrill was also a sense of transport, to take the audience out of their seats in Melbourne, and into another spatio-temporal realm. As Booth promised:

This to me sounds very similar to the promises which had been made by stereograph manufacturers since the 1850s. By the 1900s sellers like Underwood and Underwood were marketing complete ‘Travel Systems’ incorporating, stereographs, guidebooks and maps, to give a similar, touristic sense of optical and retinal transport.

But to the Army audience this transport was more than just virtual tourism, it was transport of a more profound kind. A later report on a limelight meeting said:

the meeting almost becomes as a séance, and our spirits seem to blend with the spirits of these just ones.’(MWC 9/2/01 p9)

AFFECT

The Age said:

The Argus said:

CONCLUSION

Soldiers of the Cross is extremely important not because it was Australia’s first film, but because it was Australia’s first large scale multimedia production. On at least several occasions it kept close to 2000 people simultaneously enthralled by a production which was experientially integrated over an entire two and a half hour period. It used technology from the nineteenth century, and technology which would to come to dominate the twentieth century, while it weaved together familiar technologically mediated experiences, collective viewing protocols and ritualized audience behaviours that had been developed and inculcated into Australian audiences during the previous decades. The scale and the complexity of the integration of these experiences looked forward to twentieth century media forms. One of those media forms was certainly the cinema, but others include the continuing history of the lantern itself, as well as much later media forms such as broadcast television and even, at a stretch, contemporary digital media platforms. For these reasons it is an extraordinary event in Australian history.

Martyn Jolly

Handmade Media

‘Handmade Media’, Return to Sender, exhibition catalogue, University of Queensland Art Museum, 2012, edited by Michelle Helmrich, pp 61-80, ISBN 978-1-74727-050-0

Only now, when you re-visit this work twenty years after it first became familiar do you realise, with something of a shock, that our attitude to images in general, and photographs in particular, has changed profoundly.

It is impossible to think about the art and photography of the late 1980s and early 1990s which was made in any city in Australia – Brisbane, Melbourne, but most especially Sydney – without also thinking about the pervasive presence of ‘theory’. The semiotic theories of the image, developed in the 1960s and 1970s by people such as Roland Barthes, and widely read in Australia in the 1980s, imagined the image as a complex machine. In semiotics, images produce meaning through the interaction of layers of denotation and connotation. They became personally significant through the pricks of a personal punctum that pierced the skin of the image’s public studium. These devices of visual linguistics were linked in with other written texts through further mechanisms of ‘anchorage’ and ‘relay’. Within the psychoanalytic theories that were also widely read at the time, images mainlined larger political power structures directly into our deepest desires via yet more processes of ‘the gaze’ and identification.

By the 1980s, too, theorists such as Paul Virilio or Jean Baudrillard had amped up Marshall McLuhan’s universal theory of the media from the 1960s to an apocalyptic, millenarian fever pitch. Baudrillard’s lectures, which took such grand titles as ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ or ‘The Evil Demon of Images’, were translated into English and published in Australia.¹ To Baudrillard, images had ‘a force of seduction in the literal sense of the word, a force of diversion, distortion, capture and ironic fascination’. To him, images contaminated reality, so that the real could no longer exist in and of itself, but was always preceded by the image. This had short-circuited representation as such. Baudrillard declared that the ‘image has taken over and imposed its own immanent ephemeral logic’ on reality.²

In retrospect, the millenarian manifestos of the postmodern media theorists of the 1980s appear shrill in the face of the more recent orders of image exponentiality brought about by social media and the internet. Today it feels slightly absurd to endow individual images, which congeal themselves out of the mist of pixels we now inhabit, with anything like the ‘force’ they once seemed to possess. We are now less concerned with their ability to compromise our experience of reality itself. But, back in the period treated by this exhibition, the hyperbolic language of theory gave images a strange prestige. Such theories also endowed the artists who engaged with them a sense of power and centrality that seems, at least to me, quite distant now, when artists appear less concerned with breaking images down, or pulling meanings apart, than turning images to account once more. In retrospect, also, artists from that period seemed relatively untroubled by qualms about engaging head on with the big issues of national identity, historical memory and gender politics. They did this without recourse to identity, autobiography or personal anecdote, which nowadays might be necessary to permit or authorise such an intervention.

Australian art of the late 1980s and early 1990s assumed that the viewer came to the artwork armed with a set of conceptual tools – borrowed from political, racial, psychoanalytic, feminist, semiotic and media theory – with which to discern the mechanisms of representation and simulation that lay dismantled before them for their connoisseurial delectation. What was on display to such an audience member cum media critic was the elegance of the artist’s dismemberment, the nicety of their dissection, and the finesse of their excoriation.

In order to dismantle the image it often had to be refabricated as an auratic sculpture. New objects were built from old images in a loving labour that turned visual codes into physical artefacts, semiotic procedures into sculptural events, and human performances into pantomimed tableaus. And what I love about these works is how handmade they often are. Many, while taking the requisite ‘critical stance’ towards our mediatised landscapes, were nonetheless handcrafted in the sense of the word that entails all of its loving, nurturing connotations. Media images appeared to be undergoing a technological apotheosis during this period that gave credence to the millenarian temper of the times. TV had been regularly beaming its glowing images instantaneously around the globe since the 1960s. But, in early 1991, Desert Storm in Kuwait was the first war to be televised instantaneously into our homes, complete with its celebrated ‘slam-cam’ footage transmitted from the nose cones of smart bombs. As well, thick, glossy, art, fashion and lifestyle magazines continued their reign, and in Australia were sliding off the printing presses in slicker and thicker wads at unprecedented numbers. But to the young artists on their subsistence budgets, the resources they had at their disposal remained the conventional ones long used in the twentieth-century atelier. In 1990, Adobe’s Photoshop was still at version 1.0, and years away from becoming the commonplace verb it is now; while readily accessible video compositing software such as After Effects, and photographic-quality digital printing, let alone the World Wide Web, lay a good five years over a still-distant horizon. So, in this period, even those images targeted at the very hypercentre of the mass-media experience had to be made by hand.

Thus Robyn Stacey made black and white prints, which she hand-coloured using techniques that had been employed for decades in commercial photographic studios before they were re-discovered by the feminist photographers of the 1970s. She then, crucially, copied them onto medium-format transparency film and printed them onto Cibachrome paper. In the pulp-fiction series Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 1985, this extended process of hand application and mechanical reproduction created a generalised sense of the mass media’s generational memory. But when, in the series Redline 7000 1989, the hard metallic surfaces of the Cibachromes are bonded onto acrylic sheeting, the rush of a wide-screen cinematic experience seemed to be literally freeze-framing and materialising in the viewer’s presence.

Cibachromes are now a virtually extinct process, remembered with wry nostalgia by old darkroom hands for their unforgiving optical characteristics and extreme chemical toxicity. Then they were the epitome of mass-media aura made physically manifest. They appear again in Rosemary Laing’s work Untitled 1992, encased in Perspex boxes pierced by a giant steel needle. Works such as these are not concerned with the mise-en-scène of mass-media images, but with the constituent parts of their visual mechanics that have been stilled, re-dimensionalised, and made auratic in a gallery. To be effective, Laing’s works have to look as though they have been technically produced, rather than handmade in a studio, but, nonetheless, they revel in the same artisanal qualities employed in fabricating shop signs or hand-moulding surf boards.

Collage and juxtaposition were other studio techniques aimed at deconstructing the diabolical image. While Robyn Stacey might have materialised a cinematic cross-fade in Cibachrome and Perspex, Fiona MacDonald wove the body of one photograph, sliced into strips, into the body of another, creating a tessellated surface of colonial miscegenation. Tracey Moffatt and Lindy Lee used strategies of seriality and repetition straight out of a conceptual artist’s tool bag. Moffatt resurfaced a historical image of Aboriginality with the sheen of contemporary glamour. Lee revisited the unsolvable modernist conundrum of mobile image versus unique historical artefact by emphasising the auratic facture of the mechanically reproduced image with shifting washes of paint over fused Xerox pigment. In contrast, Jeff Gibson’s cheap and cheerful screenprints mined pop-cultural archives to create semiotic perpetual-motion machines by juxtaposing different, but formally related, images articulated across a double-jointed caption.

The Super 8 film format, originally developed by Kodak for the home movie market, also proved a remarkably versatile medium for the collating and colliding of mass-media sounds and images. Both pre-recorded and live TV could be filmed directly off the domestic television set — along with lashings of electromagnetic snow, colour oversaturation and cathode ray distension — and manually intercut, repeated and layered, either in the camera or through an editing splicer. In the hands of Super 8 filmmakers like Gary Warner the tiny frames of Ektachrome emulsion, each half the size of the fingernail on your little finger, and the film’s thin magnetic sound-stripe, became like a sedimentary repository for the powerful but evanescent electronic images and sounds that encircled the globe. In his Resistance Today of 1987 Australia’s role in the American Alliance was satirized through a mash-up of television footage that mixed the kitsch Hollywood genres beloved by other artists such as Robyn Stacey with contemporary news footage.

This aesthetic was also present in the video work of Mark Titmarsh and Ross Harley where the layering, repetition and juxtaposition produced by video’s phantasmagoric electronic effects once again presumed a contemporary viewer primed to recognise ideological cues and read mass-media codes, rather than psychologically invest in narrative exposition or original mise en scene.

Finally, performance and masquerade were other tactics used by the Davids of the studio to subdue the Goliath of the media image. Stacey’s friends dressed up and enacted historical pop-media typologies for her art-directed scenarios, while John Gillies and the The Sydney Front, again through repetition and juxtaposition, broke down the body’s universal demand to express itself into a disjointed language composed of isolating hysterical gestures.

Using this clever array of studio-based tactics, efficiently applied at an economical scale, these artists plunged into the centre of the maelstrom of mass images that obsessed the late 1980s and early 1990s, and re-fashioned them to address head on the biggest issues of the day: history, politics, and the mechanics of meaning itself.

In the decades that followed, the works produced by emerging Australian artists got bigger, bolder and brassier as newer and cheaper technologies allowed them access to much the same tools as were used in the mainstream media. But as the scale, definition and seamlessness of their works increased, perhaps their focus shortened. In general, it seems to me, younger artists increasingly feel that they need the passport of personal identity or autobiography to enter the territory of images, or that the paraphernalia of ‘media production’ is needed to reinforce the denotational power of their works, rather than deconstruct it. So when looking at the works of the parvenu artists in this exhibition, produced after their arrival in the metropolises of the south, concentrate not only on their craft, but also on their ambition.

Martyn Jolly

Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of Simulacra,’ trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton, Art & Text 11 (1983): 3-47; Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images, trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton (Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1987).
Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images, 14–15, 23.

Introduction to screening of Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman

Before we leave the early part of the twentieth century I thought it would be worthwhile to show a sustained work from the period, rather than the short films I have been showing so far. Of the many I could have chosen, I have selected The Camerman. This is a film made at the end of the silent film era in 1928, and it demonstrates how sophisticated this genre had become since the beginning of the cinema industry in the early twentieth century. It was made by an established comedy ‘star’, Buster Keaton, who had been hugely popular for ten years. The film sustains a conventional love story narrative over a feature length, delaying the romantic pay-off till the very end. However it takes time out to stop the process of plot development for extended periods of comedy ‘business’, which hark back to Keaton’s origins in early silent comedies. Although they don’t develop the plot, these sections have Keaton’s characteristic balletic fluidity, for which he was famous, as he runs up, down and across the frame, pitting his body against the modern city for the cause of love. It’s a ‘big budget’ film, using many locations, from Coney Island to China Town to Fifth Avenue, that defined the metropolis of New York. It is also a film very much engaged with the present (1928) and modernity. It comments on the emerging mass media landscape of spectacular parades and newsreel companies feeding the audience’s insatiable appetite for spectacle. It even parodies some of the ‘avant-garde’ films we have seen, when Buster accidentally double exposes some film. It is also fascinated with the power of the camera, and its ‘automatic’ purely mechanical presence in people’s lives — in a similar way, in fact, to the stop-frame insect animation we saw from 1913 – The Cameraman’s Revenge. My favourite moment is when we see Keaton in the act of falling in love as he is jostled against his love object, the secretary of a newsreel company, in a crowd — to me this moment is sublime.

Facial Velocities

‘Facial Velocities’, Time Machine Magazine, Issue 2, on-line from 28 October, 2011, http://timemachinemag.com/current-issue/facial-velocities-by-martyn-jolly/

Facial Velocities Talk Text

That configuration of eyes, nose and mouth stuck to the front of our heads, which we call the face, not only connects the outer sociological self to the inner psychological self— the old ‘window on the soul’ idea — but it also connects one person to another in a relationship. For the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas the face was the place of authentic encounter between self and other: ‘The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation’. (1979, p. 210) According to Levinas, when two faces face each other, each demands something from the other, even if it is only recognition. It is the power of ideas such as this that still underpin controversies around the role of the face in public places of social interaction. For instance the debate around recent attempts by various European governments to ban the burqa and the niqab in public, place the face at the very centre of contemporary definitions of personal autonomy and public citizenship. (Chesler 2010)

In order to perform this social function of human interaction the face has to be abstracted away from the body so that it can enter into a system of semiotic exchange. Deleuze and Guattari (1988) called this ‘faciality’, a process that over-codes the organism of the body with other strata of signification and subjectification. To them, the face is an abstract machine of ‘black holes in a white wall’. It is a technology increasingly becoming enmeshed with other technologies.

But in many ways this process of abstraction and ‘over-coding’ begins much earlier, with John Caspar Lavatar’s popular Essays in Physiognomy from the 1770s. Lavater defined his new science of physiognomy as the ‘the science … of the correspondence between the external and the internal man, the visible superficies and the invisible contents.’ (1885, p. 11) He established that correspondence by either visual analogy, where a bovine-looking person must exhibit dull, bovine personal characteristics; or by biometric algorithms, where the slope of a brow, for instance, indexed cranial capacity and thus intelligence. A brow at a high angle above the nose was the mathematical index of a large brain, but also the visual equivalent of Roman nobility. A brow at a low angle indicated a small brain, and was also literally simian. Lavater’s analogical mapping and algorithmic vectorization allowed him to compare and classify faces, but they also removed the face from the ranks of the purely human, and placed it into an abstracted morphing space which was also shared by animals. Plate 80 of his Essays in Physiognomy demonstrates this with startling clarity as Lavater’s illustrator morphs a drawing of a frog’s face through twelve separate frames. The frog’s eyes slowly become more almond shaped and the whole face lengthens until, by the twelfth frame, we find ourselves looking into the face of an androgynous human.

Eighty years later Charles Darwin completed the project of placing the human face within the realm of animals with his discovery of evolution. In his wildly popular follow-up book of 1872, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he homed in on the mechanics of the face and established that human facial expression was an instinctual animal behaviour, rather than a social language. (1872) He demonstrated the automatic, biological mechanics of expression by artificially decoupling the external hydraulics of the facial muscles from their usual inner, instinctual motivations. For instance, for plate 7 he obtained from the French scientist Dr Duchene a photograph of the facial muscles of an intellectually impaired man being twitched into the expression of ‘horror and agony’ by the external application of the terminals of a galvanic battery. He then juxtaposed this with a photograph he had commissioned of the photographer Oscar Rejlander acting out exactly the same expression. By photographically proving that muscles could be manipulating by two entirely separate methods — electricity and pantomime — to produce exactly the same expression, Darwin demonstrated that the face lay on top of the self. The face alone, without the self, could enter the plane of abstracted analysis and comparison.

Lavater’s physiognomic analogs and algorithms, and Darwin’s muscular decoupling, had the effect of conceptually delaminating the face from the body. But it was photography that then circulated that face within society. The greatest celebrity of Victorian England was the royal courtesan, partygoer, actress, beauty, and endorser of Pears Soap, Lillie Langtry. Through photography her face left the realm of her body and entered other media spaces. In Victorian England the most lubricious place where newly mobilised images bumped up against each other was the stationer’s shop window, and Lillie’s photographs were right in the middle of every window, disturbing the pre-existing social order. A writer at the time commented on:

… that democratic disregard of rank which prevails in our National Portrait Gallery of the present day — the stationer’s shop window — where such discordant elements of the social fabric as Lord Napier and Lillie Langtry … rub shoulders jarringly. (Ewing 2008)

Langtry was also the very first person in the world to find herself in a photographic feedback loop, that is, to feel the effects of her photographed face, as it circulated though Victorian visual culture, reflecting back on to her actual body. She recalled:

Photography was now making great strides, and pictures of well-known people had begun to be exhibited for sale. The photographers, one and all, besought me to sit. Presently, my portraits were in every shop-window, with trying results, for they made the public so familiar with my features that wherever I went — to theatres, picture galleries, shops — I was actually mobbed. Thus the photographs gave fresh stimulus to a condition which I had unconsciously created. One night, at a large reception at Lady Jersey’s, many of the guests stood on chairs to obtain a better view of me, and I could not help but hear their audible comments on my appearance as I passed down the drawing-room. Itinerant vendors sold cards about the streets with my portrait ingeniously concealed, shouting ‘The Jersey Lily, the puzzle is to find her’. (1925, p. 40)

In the subsequent 130 years, of course, the velocity of that photographic circulation has only increased in speed and brutality. And now it is not just the mega-famous who find themselves caught up in photographic feedback loops.

Erno Nussenzweig is the poster boy for the ever-present possibility that any of us can become an accidental celebrity. One day in 2000 this elderly, bearded, orthodox Jewish man innocently emerged onto the sidewalk from a subway at Times Square. It wasn’t until five years later that he discovered that at that decisive moment he had been photographed by Philip-Lorca diCorcia who had exhibited the portrait at Pace/McGill Gallery, published it in a book called Heads, sold out its edition of ten prints at between twenty and thirty thousand dollars each, and had eventually won London’s prestigious Citibank Prize with it. Nussenzweig sued for 1.6 million dollars claiming the photographer had used his face for purposes of trade, as well as violated his religious beliefs. His lawyer, Jay Golding, put his case best succinctly to the New York Post who in their report ‘What’s a picture worth — he wants 1.6 Mil’ quoted him as saying: ‘It’s a beautiful picture. But why should this guy make money off of your face?’. (Hafetz 2005, p. 23) DiCorcia’s lawyer, however, was able to convince the judge that the photographs were taken primarily for the purpose of artistic expression, not commerce, and were therefore protected by the First Amendment.

Or consider the case of Neda Soltan. In 2009 she was videoed by the mobile phones of three separate pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran as she lay dying from a government-sniper’s bullet. After the videos went viral on the internet her face was even turned into a mask and worn by pro-democracy demonstrators at a protest in Paris. (Wikipedia, ‘Death of Neda Agha-Soltan’ 2013) Meanwhile, in the hours after her death, some eager journalists mistakenly harvested a photograph of another Iranian woman with a similar name, Neda Soltani, from her Facebook page. It was this face that was used in many improvised shrines to the other, assassinated Neda. Iranian authorities then began to harass Soltani in order to get her to cooperate with them in claiming hat the original murder had been a set-up by the western media. After twelve days of harassment the other Neda was forced to flee Iran and seek refuge in Germany, from where she wrote a book about her experience, My Stolen Face. (Soltani 2012)

Or put yourself in the shoes of Nicole McCabe, an Australian citizen living in Jerusalem and pregnant with her first child. She also had her photograph harvested from Facebook. In 2010 the Israeli Government had stolen McCabe’s her identity for a Mossad agent to use in order to assassinate a Hamas official. When the story broke and the passports the Israeli’s had forged were circulated in the media, complete with their actual passport numbers, Nicole McCabe decided she did not want to talk to Australian journalists, or be photographed by them. But after having the door slammed on them by McCabe’s angry husband, the journalists simply sourced photographs of her from Facebook, where friends had posted her wedding photographs. Nicole said she felt:

‘sick, angry, embarrassed and upset … even if Facebook is public, they have no right to take what they want without asking. I was more determined than ever not to let anyone take a photo of me.’ (Media Watch 2010)

Or consider the fate of the footballer Sonny Bill Williams. In 2007 he embarked on an afternoon drinking session at the Clovelly Hotel with his team-mates and a group of football groupies that included celebrity iron woman Candice Falzon. Later that night one Clovelly local got a message on his phone. The local reported: “It said Candice Falzon had followed Sonny Bill into the toilets upstairs at the pub and everyone knew about it. The next message I got was an … um … action shot.” The shot, taken by putting a mobile phone under the toilet door as William and Falzon had sex, was soon being widely circulated amongst the mobile phones of Clovelly, and when it was eventually published on The Daily Telegraph’s website, it attracted a record number of hits. Williams reportedly had to spend all the following morning buying up copies of newspapers in his area in a futile attempt to stop his girlfriend learning of his toilet tryst. Although the person who took the photograph could have been liable for two years jail under the summary offences act for taking lewd photographs in toilets and change rooms, the newspaper itself could not be successfully prosecuted for posting the photograph once it was taken. (The Daily Telegraph 2007)

Incidents such as this show that faces don’t just have features, they also have velocities. The more famous you are the more recognizable you are to more people, but also the faster your face is circulated in the media. Even if you aren’t famous, a lightning bolt of sudden celebrity can dramatically, thought temporarily, catapult your face into a higher strata of recognizability, which propels exchange at a faster velocity.

While some have felt themselves suddenly swept up into these currents of facial velocity, others have attempted, with mixed success, to ride those turbulent currents to even greater fame. Consider the career of Lara Bingle. Once an ordinary bikini model, her celebrity stocks rose in 2006 when she was chosen for a tourism campaign. The men’s magazine Zoo Weekly then published revealing photographs of her that had been taken eleven months earlier, before she was chosen to be the wholesome face of Australia. She sued the magazine for defamation. She won the case when the judge accepted that the magazine was smutty and had implied that she had willingly consented to pose for the sexual titillation of its readers. (Sydney Morning Herald 2006a, 2006b) However by the end of 2006 the tourism campaign had flopped, and Bingle was having an illicit affair with the married footballer Brendan Fevola. But by 2008 her stocks had risen again, she was engaged to the cricketer Michael Clark, and they were one of Sydney’s foremost celebrity couples, even endorsing an energy drink. By early 2010 she had even signed up with celebrity agent Mark Marxson. But then Woman’s Day published a mobile-phone photograph her ex-lover Brendan Fevola had taken of her in the shower back in 2006, which his football mates had been circulating between their mobile phones for some time. Her engagement with Michael Clark broke down and the energy drink company dropped them. Mark Marxson threatened to ‘strike a blow for women’s rights’ by getting her to sue Fevola, but she did not have a case because, unlike in the Zoo Weekly case, no specific laws of defamation were broken. (Byrne 2010) Bingle’s stocks in the celebrity marketplace plummeted but, after a period of careful career management including charity work, family-friendly television appearances, and the avoidance of footballers, they begun to rise again. They rose so far that by 2012 she successfully negotiated with a TV production company to become the subject of a ‘reality’ TV series Being Lara Bingle on a commercial television network. Conveniently, just before the premiere was about to air, another controversy erupted when she was supposedly photographed surreptitiously by the famous paparazzi Darryn Lyons (who was in fact a business partner of Bingle’s) standing nude near the window of the Bondi flat that had been rented for the show. This confected ‘invasion of privacy’ allowed her to tell breakfast radio that: “There should be a law against someone shooting inside your house …. it’s just not right”, thus garnering pre-publicity for the series, and conveniently forming the content of the first episode. That first TV episode rated highly, however subsequent episodes in the series steadily lost viewers, to the point where Bingle’s career languishes once more. (O’Brien 2012)

The camera has ruled Lara Bingle’s career as celebrity, someone defined by our desire to look at her. But this has been the case ever since Lillie Langtry. However the roller coaster ride of Bingle’s value as a bankable celebrity has also been ruled by the sudden eruptions or irruptions, whether planned or not, ‘authorised’ or not, of particular recognisable photographs which re-attach the ‘face’ of Bingle to the ‘brand’ of Bingle in different ways. The speed of their circulation through both social media and the mainstream media, create the volatility of the market for her images. Celebrities sometimes are forced to engage in this market directly. For example, in 2013 the TV and radio presenter Chrissie Swan, who had acquired her celebrity status dispensing homespun wisdom to ordinary women, was photographed smoking whilst she was pregnant, something she herself had campaigned against. So that they could never be published, she engaged in a bidding war with two magazines for the photographs, eventually pulling out after offering $53,000, two thousand dollars less than the winning bid by Womens Day. (news.com.au 2013)

These examples indicate the high speed of facial velocity. But what of facial vectorization? The terrain of the face continues to be the site of scientific research that updates Lavater’s and Darwin’s pioneering efforts and re-affirms the face’s muscular mechanics as central to our humanity — although now not by indexing some immutable inner person as Lavater had supposed, but through their intrinsic role within language comprehension. Contemporary cognitive psychologists such as professor Rolf Zwan, from Erasmus University Rotterdam, are researching the ways that facial muscle-movement directly feedbacks to the brain. For example experiments have shown that if you are smiling you can read sentences about emotions quicker than if you are frowning; and if you have had Botox you have more difficulty interpreting photographic portraits of emotions because in conversation your facial muscles subtly enter into a feedback loop of micro-mimicry with your interlocutor, which Botox decouples. (Lingua Franca 2011; White 2011; Zwaan 2013) Other experiments suggest that if you are in the presence of the representation of a face your moral standards are higher. (Bourrat, Baumard, McKay 2011; Smith 2011)

While the face as a concept remains central to discourses of the human, individual faces are also increasingly caught up in ever-finer meshes of delamination, vectorization, and mobilization. For instance plastic surgery is moving down the social scale from being the prerogative of the famous and the fatuous, to being a commonplace convention practice for all of us. ‘Extreme makeovers’ are increasingly re-mapping everyday faces, and recalibrating the vectoral angles between eyes, noses and chins in order to shift their owners up in scales of beauty.

If the facial structure itself can be morphed through surgery, in other instances the facial pixel maps representing the person can be manipulated. The regular Photoshoping of celebrity portraits in our magazines simply replicates in two dimensions the effects of the cosmetic surgeon’s scalpel, and the amount of pixelated deviation away from the ‘truth’ can even be algorithmically calculated and given a value. (Fahid, Kee 2011) Photoshop can also be used to disguise faces. Consider the case of Christopher Paul Neil who liked to post pictures of himself sexually abusing Vietnamese and Cambodian children on paedophile websites. He applied a swirl filter to his face to disguise his identity, but German police simply applied the same filter in reverse and unswirled the pattern and reveal his face. Interpol then posted the image on their website where he was recognised by five different people and identified. After his face was picked up by a surveillance camera at Bangkok Airport he was eventually arrested in. (Daily Mail 2007; Wikipedia ‘Christopher Paul Neil’2013)

Neil was recognised by a human being, but the technological possibility exists that eventually his face could have been recognised by a machine. Facial recognition software applies algorithms to the same sets of vectors between eyes, nose and mouth that Lavater originally identified. Australia is at the forefront of facial recognition research. We have not only already introduced ‘smart gates’ at our airports to match our facial algorithms with a database, but National ICT Australia (NICTA) received 1.5 million dollars from the Cabinet to research what it describes as the ‘holy grail’ of surveillance: ‘real-time face-in-the-crowd recognition technology’. Concurrent with these Australian research projects, international protocols are also being developed. For instance the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology hosted the Face Recognition Grand Challenge open to entrants from industry, universities and research institutes. This means, according to NICTA, that:

The surveillance industry is currently undergoing the same revolutionary changes that shook up the computer industry when internet use took off in the 1990s. Instead of each supplier providing a unique product, the sector will soon be dominated by standards and interoperability. Surveillance will eventually merge into a virtually seamless multimedia network embracing social media, location services, mobile devices, maps, and 3D models. (Advanced Surveillance Project 2013; (Bigdeli, Lovell, Mau, 201abc)

However even though technology is yet to actually deliver on its promise, the idea of facial recognition and facial manipulation has already become commonplace in the media, and almost domesticated. For several years it has been something we can all indulge in as a kind of game. A whole class of smart phone apps are based on face recognition software. We can also apply face recognition algorithms to the vast reservoirs of faces on the internet, or on Facebook, or in our iPhoto libraries, in order to locate friends we are looking for even when the metadata tags aren’t available; or to look for celebrities; or to calculate how much we look like a celebrity; or to calculate which of our children most looks like us. Many new cameras also have face recognition software built in which recognises, automatically focuses on, and tags, particular people even before the shutter is clicked.

In a way of thinking about the face that is very similar to Lavater’s and Darwin’s, the frontier of contemporary 3D computer animation is the mapping of actual micro-muscular movements onto animated wire-frames. The most famous example of this so far has occurred in the movie Avatar, 2009, where actors wore head-rigs which filmed the movement of motion-tracking markers on their faces. This digital information was then ‘peeled’ off the actor’s face and re-applied to a 3D animation wire-frame model. The use of the same rigs on the actor Andy Serkis for the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 2011, finally placed the human face and its expressions in the realm as animals, as imagined by Lavater 230 years ago. Significantly, this technology has also become domesticated in on-line games such as Macdonald’s website Avartize Yourself. Other games take forensic ‘age progression’ software used by missing-persons bureaus, and turn them into games such as the iPhone app Hourface.

Why is worthwhile looking so closely at tabloid trash and silly on-line games? Because they, as much as high-end cutting-edge research, are the symptoms of two new tendencies in the valency of the face. Firstly, we are all becoming celebrities, at least potentially. The velocity of our own faces can suddenly speed up when we least expect it. Secondly, our faces are all part of what NICTA calls a ‘virtually seamless multimedia environment’. This is not just analogical space, the bit-mapping and comparison of appearances, but algorithmic space, where faces are vectorised and turned into equations that can instantly interact with a myriad of other equations. The pervasiveness of celebrity culture, combined with the explosion of algorithmic biometrics within merging media and data spaces, has had a profound effect upon the ways in which every one of us regards our own face. The face is congealing as a bastion from which to advance privacy rights and proclaim property rights.

There has been a consistent and inexorable drift in legal opinion in Australia towards a tort of privacy — which we currently do not have — that is ultimately focussed on protecting the human face. Way back in 2001 Justice Dowd was able to confidently claim that a person ‘does not have a right not to be photographed’. But by 2003 Justice Michael Kirby was commenting that extending the law in Australia to protect the ‘honour, reputation and personal privacy of individuals’ would be consistent with international developments in human rights law. (Nemeth 2012)

By 2008 Professor David Weisbot, president of the Australian Law Reform Commission, was saying that during their inquiry into privacy law, the ALRC had:

consistently heard strong support for the enactment of a statutory cause of action for serious invasion of privacy. While the debate overseas has focussed on the activities of paparazzi photographers, interestingly, most of the concerns expressed to the ALRC related more to the private sphere than the mainstream media — and to the protection of ordinary citizens rather than celebrities. People are extremely concerned about new technology and the ease with which their private personal images may be captured and disseminated.

In their recommendations the ALRC called for: ‘a private cause of action where an individual has suffered a serious invasion of privacy, in circumstances in which the person had a reasonable expectation of privacy’. (Australian Law Reform Commission 2008) And in 2011 the NSW Law Reform Commission agreed, releasing draft laws that stated that an invasion of privacy should exist where a person ‘has a reasonable expectation of privacy’, which could potentially even include a public place. (New South Wales Law Reform Commission 2010; Marr 2009))

So, why this paradox? Why, when our personal information is flowing more freely than ever before, when 80% of people want CCTV cameras in their public spaces, and when the vast majority of Facebook users are happy to use its default settings where there is little or no privacy at all, why are we getting increasingly paranoid about our faces? I think it is because the face is caught up in a wider transformation. It is swimming against the tide that is pulling the private into the public because it is part of a stronger current, from signification to possession. Those of us feeling the effects of both celebrity culture and algorithmic data-media are regarding privacy less as a singular inherent right, and more as a fungible personal commodity which can be exchanged in a market place. For instance Nicole McCabe knew her participation in Facebook was not free, she knew she had ‘sold’ it some of her privacy in order to enjoy its benefits, but suddenly and unexpectedly she came to realize that perhaps she had ‘traded off’ too much of her privacy. This mercantile logic is also beginning to pervade other environments of facial interaction, such as public places. Within the politics of the face the receding sense of the private, in the sense of the ‘the discreet’, is being overtaken by an encroaching sense of the privatised, in the sense of ‘the owned’. We all increasingly agree implicitly with Nussenzweig’s lawyer: ‘why should this guy make money off of your face?’.

The abstraction, delamination and mobilization of the face has led to its reification. The face is closing down on the sense of mutual obligation that, in Levinas’s terms, once arose when one face faced another. This reification is intensified by the way that all faces, even our own, can be peeled away from bodies to enter new virtual spaces. Celebrities are merely at the vanguard of this transformation. Celebrities believe they are their own commodity. They believe that their face is the result of their labour and their talent. It is their capital, their brand, their corporate logo. They believe they therefore have a proprietary right in it. In America their faces are even protected by a common law ‘right of publicity’ which grants them, in the words of one key judgement, ‘the exclusive right to control the commercial value and exploitation of [their] name, picture, likeness or personality.’ (Wikipedia, ‘Personality Rights’ 2013) And, just like them, we ordinary people also feel that our own faces are also becoming more monologic, less a window or an interface, and more a logo for ‘Brand Me’. That configuration of eyes, nose and mouth stuck to the front of our heads, which we call the face, is now not so much a portal to the inner self, or a species of physiognomic autobiography, or an interface to our fellow citizens, as much as a rebus of identity, or perhaps a corporate logo for the persona.

Martyn Jolly

Bibliography:

Advanced Surveillance Project 2013 NICTA, viewed 31 January 2013, http://nicta.com.au/research/projects/safe_as

Australian Law Reform Commission 2008, ‘For Your Information: Australian Privacy Law and Practice (ALRC Report 108)’, viewed 31 January 2013, http://www.alrc.gov.au/publications/report-108,

Bigdeli, A & Lovell, B & Mau, S 2011a ‘You, yes you: welcome to the world of advanced surveillance”, The Conversation, 23 May, viewed 31 January 2013, < http://theconversation.edu.au/>

Bigdeli, A & Lovell, B & Mau, S 2011b ‘Something to watch over me: policing our national borders’ The Conversation, 26 May, viewed 31 January 2013, < http://theconversation.edu.au/>

Bigdeli, A & Lovell, B & Mau, S 2011c ‘All-seeing eye: the future of surveillance and social media’ The Conversation, 27 May, viewed 31 January 2013, < http://theconversation.edu.au/>

Bourrat, P & Baumard, N & McKay R 2011 “Surveillance Cues Enhance Moral Condemnation.” Evolutionary Psychology, 9(2) pp193-199

Byrne, L 2010 ‘Lara Bingle to sue Brendan Fevola over nude photo’, Herald Sun, 2 March, viewed 31 January 2013 <http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/lara-bingle-to-sue-brendan-fevola-over-nude-photo/story-e6frf7l6-1225835852364 >

Chesler, P 2010 ‘Ban the Burqa? The Argument in Favor’, The Middle East Quarterly, Fall, pp34-45.

Daily Mail 2007, ‘Police name internet paedophile caught out in digitally altered images’, 16 October, viewed January 31 2013 < http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-486334/Police-internet-paedophile-caught-digitally-altered-images.html>

Darwin, C 1872, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, J Murray London.

David Hafetz 2005 ‘What’s a picture worth — he wants 1.6 Mil’, New York Post, 26 June 2005, p23

Deleuze, G & Félix Guattari, F 1988, ‘Year Zero: Faciality’, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, , trans Massumi, B, Athlone Press, London.

Ewing, W A 2008, Face: the new photographic portrait, Thames & Hudson, London.

Fahid, H & Kee, E 2011, ‘A perceptual metric for photo retouching’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the Unites States of America, 28 November, PNAS 108 (50) 19907-19912

Langtry, L 1925 The Days I Knew, George H Doran Company, New York,.

Lavater, C 1885 Essays on physiognomy, also one hundred physiognomical rules, taken from a posthumous work by J.G. Lavater, and a memoir of the author, 17th ed, trans Holcroft, T, Ward Lock, London, p11.

Law Reform Commission of New South Wales 2010, ‘Report 127 – Protecting Privacy in New South Wales’, viewed 31 January 2013, <http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lawlink/lrc/ll_lrc.nsf/pages/LRC_r127toc>

Levinas, E 1979, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans Alphonso (Lingis, M. Nijhoff Publishers The Hague, Boston, p201.

Lingua Franca 2011, ‘Embodied Cognition, interview with Professor Rolf Zwaan’, ABC Radio National Broadcast 10 September, viewed 31 January 2013 <http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/linguafranca/embodied-cognition/2939354>

Marr, D 2009 ‘Pesky Press Annoying You? Now You Can just Sue Them’, The National Times, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 August 2009, viewed 31 January 2013, <http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/pesky-press-annoying-you-now-you-can-just-sue-them-20090814-el51.html>

Media Watch 2010, ‘Identity Fully Revealed’, Episode 05, 8 March, viewed 31 January 2013, <http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2839839.htm>

Nemeth, A 2012, NSW Photo Rights: Street Photography Legal Issues, 4020, viewed 31 January 2013 < http://4020.net/words/photorights.php>

news.com.au 2013, ‘Tearful Chrissie Swan admits she hasn’t been able to quit smoking while pregnant’, viewed 10 February 2013, < http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/mix-fm-presenter-chrissie-swan-admits-to-smoking-cigarettes-while-pregnant/story-e6frfmqi-1226572082685>

O’Brien, S 2012 ‘Lara Bingle’s nude paparazzi snaps a privacy invasion’, Herald Sun, 2 May, viewed 31 January 2013, <http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/lara-bingles-nude-paparazzi-snaps-a-privacy-invasion/story-fn56aaiq-1226344709298>

Smith, D 2011 ‘Why one look will put the fear of god into you’ June 11, Sydney Morning Herald, viewed 31 January 2013 < http://www.smh.com.au/national/why-one-look-will-put-the-fear-of-god-into-you-20110610-1fx30.html>

Soltani, N 2012, My Stolen Face: The Story of a Dramatic Mistake, Random House, Kailash.

Sydney Morning Herald , 2006, ‘Bingle bites back — sues men’s mag’, Stay in Touch, , 11 May, viewed 31 January 2013, < http://www.smh.com.au/news/stay-in-touch/bingle-bites-back–sues-mens mag/2006/05/10/1146940612505.html>

Sydney Morning Herald 2006, ‘Judge Backs Bingle on Zoo Smut’, 8 December viewed 31 January 2013, <http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/12/08/1165081128065.html?from=rss>

The Daily Telegraph 2007, ‘Sonny Bill, Candice toilet Joke’, Sydney Confidential, 14 April, viewed 31 January 2013, <http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sonny-bill-candice-toilet-joke/story-e6frewt0-1111113317469 >

White, S 2011 ‘Pardon the Expression’, Spectrum, Sydney Morning Herald, 6-7 August, p23

Wikipedia 2013, ‘Christopher Paul Neil’, viewed 31 January 2013, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Paul_Neil>

Wikipedia 2013, ‘Death of Neda Agha-Soltan’, entry, viewed 31 January 2013, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Neda_Agha-Soltan>

Wikipedia 2013, ‘Personality Rights’, viewed 31 January 2013, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights>

Zwaan, R 2013 Brain & Cognition, Erasmus University Rotterdam, viewed 31 January 2013 <http://www.brain-cognition.eu/>

Illustrations:

: Lavater, C 1885 Essays on physiognomy, also one hundred physiognomical rules, taken from a posthumous work by J.G. Lavater, and a memoir of the author, 17th ed, trans Holcroft, T, Ward Lock, London, plate 52.

: Lavater, C 1885 Essays on physiognomy, also one hundred physiognomical rules, taken from a posthumous work by J.G. Lavater, and a memoir of the author, 17th ed, trans Holcroft, T, Ward Lock, London, plate 80.

: Darwin, C 1872, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, J Murray London, plate 7.

: ‘Christopher Paul Neil’, Wikipedia,

: Lara Bingle, photographed by Brendon Fevola, as published by Woman’s Day magazine

: Andy Serkis performing in Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Facial Fascination

‘Facial Fascination’, National Portrait Gallery, 13 April, 2011

Temperature of the face has increased:

Faces always important:

Scientific basis:

Nineteenth century science erroneously believed that facial ‘types’ indicated criminality and intelligence.
Charles Darwin established that expression was an instinctual animal behaviour.
Paul Ekman’s work in the 1960s established that facial expression, and unconscious microexpressions were biological, a result of deep evolution, rather than cultural. His work has become wide popularized and influenced popular TV shows like ‘Lie to Me’.

The face is still seen as the repository of the self.

Also long history of painted portraiture, miniatures and photography.

But at the same time recent changes have raised the ‘temperature’ of the way that we interact with faces.

Burkas and niqabs

Yesterday the French law threatening fines of 200 euros to women wearing burkas or niqabs came into force. No matter which side of the debate you fell on, nonetheless it established how important faces are. To one side of the argument, since the face is the self it should be open and frank and engaged when out in the collective civic space, to signify your participation in the civic community. To the other side, female faces are dangerous things, constantly soliciting licentious gazes, therefore women are more safe and self-contained if their faces are covered

Technology

Facial recognitions software is beginning to effect the way we think about the face, basically it transforms the bit-mapped map of the face as a terrain and transforms it into a short algorithm based on the angles between eyes, nose and mouth.

Camera focusing automatically finds faces in the viewfinder
iPhoto automatically finds faces in my iPhoto library
Airport security
Animation, in movies such as avatar the microexpressions of real actors are peeled of their skulls and directly mapped onto 3D animation wireframes

Celebrity

Then there’s the rise of celebrity culture. This has also ramped up and invaded our own everyday lives, so we are beginning to think more like celebrities, where our face is less an interface, but more a logo for ‘brand me’. Our face is private, less in the sense that it discreetly ours and more in the sense that it is privatized, our property:

Plastic surgery is becoming more commonplace, faces can be morphed and improved
There are continual battles between paparazzi and celebrities, such as that between Nicole Kidman and Jamie Fawcett over the circulation of the celebrity image.
In America people in street photos have attempted to sue photographers

Privacy

There has been a long line of scandals involving the increasing ease and speed with which photos can be taken and circulated. Lets track back through the scandals, all of which have happened in substantial legal grey areas.

Currently there’s Kate, whose sex with another ADFA cadet was Skyped to the next room.
There’s the St Kilda Photo scandal, where a 17 year old schoolgirl maliciously posted naked photos of footballer Nick Riewoldt on a bed, which she had appropriated from footballer’s Sam Gilbert’s computer, on the web. (Although he also took part in a campaign for bed linen for Linen House)
Another footballer sent his mates mobile phone photographs of Joel Monaghan having sex with a dog, which circulated for a few weeks amongst the mobile phones of footballers, before being tweeted by an animal rights campaigner.
Then there’s Brendan Fevola, sending mobile phone photographs of Lara Bingle in the shower to his mates, which eventually led to the breakdown of her engagement to the cricketer Michael Clarke.
Lara Bingle had previously successfully sued Zoo Weekly for defamation when they photographed sexy photographs of her during the Australian tourism campaign, but she had no legal basis to sue Fevola.
Or then there’s Sonny Bill Williams photographed with a mobile pone having sex with iron woman Candice Falzon in a pub’s toilet cubicle. After the photograph was sent to the Daily telegraph he had to spend all the next day buying up copies of the newspaper in his area so his girlfriend wouldn’t find out.
Then there’s Nicole McCabe, an Australia woman living in Israel. She had her identity stolen by Israel so they could give it to one of their agents to assassinate a Hamas official. Then, when she decided she didn’t want to talk to the Australian media, the media simply lifted her wedding photographs off Facebook. Facebook can do anything it likes with the photos you post, and regularly sells private photographs to the press.

Moral Panics

Then there’s moral panics over the supposed predatory behaviour of photographers.

We have widespread panics over the art photography of Bill Henson.
Regulations against using mobile phones in change rooms and pools
Attempts by councils to widen those regulations to cover beaches and parks.

So this produces the following subtle, but I think profound, tendencies:

Trends in legal opinion

There has been a consistent and inexorable drift in legal opinion in Australia towards a tort of privacy, which we currently do not have, which would be focussed on protecting the human face. Way back in 2001Justice Dowd was able to confidently claim that a person ‘does not have a right not to be photographed’. But by 2003 Justice Michael Kirby was citing the European Convention on Human rights to say that jurisdictions were beginning to look toward an actionable wrong of invasion of privacy ‘stimulated in part by invasions of individual privacy, including by the media, deemed unacceptable to society’. And in 2008 the Australian Law Reform Commission said that it consistently heard strong support for a tort of privacy. Although it noted: ‘the concerns expressed … related more to the private sphere than the mainstream media — and to the protection of ordinary citizens rather than celebrities.’ This year the NSW Law Reform Commission released draft laws that state that an invasion of privacy would exist where a person ‘has a reasonable expectation of privacy’, which could also include a public place.

Consistent with this trend in legal opinion, street photographers consistently report that ordinary people are more wary about being photographed than they were ten years ago. They report that security guards and police feel perfectly entitled to stop photographers photographing even when what they are doing is perfectly legal.

The exhibition

Has all this had an effect on the exhibition? Well obviously not directly. But the whole show does feel quite private and secure.

Many galleries, including this one, balance a public appetite for celebrity with an interest in the psychology of the face. (Martin Schoeller Close Up, playing recognisability off against uncanny closeness; next show: Inner Worlds. The current Annie Liebovitz show has her magazine work enlarged up big, interspersed with her ‘personal’ snaps following he life of her family and her partner printed small and in black and white, when I was there at the weekend, hardly anyone was looking at the black and whites, but they were all gathered around the colour celebrity shots.

Only a very few photographs are candid, taken without the sitter being aware of the camera. Only three photographs (Ballet dancer, journalists, wife and baby) are taken on the street, the place where faces are in most contention. And in only one photograph is there an ‘audience’ within the photograph (NAIDOc Ball). These photographs stand out for me because they relieve the intense domestic privacy of the rest of the show. Quite a few photographs are taken at the beach, that other place of contention, but that has also been made a private almost domestic space by their framing. Similarly there are only a few staged or studio tableau shots.

Australian Photography as a whole

Australian photography dominated by prizes.

National Photography Prize 25,000 1200 x 25 = $30,000 One in twenty chance of being picked.
Doug Moran Contemporary Photography Prize SLNSW $100,000
Head On Portait Prize ACP $50,000
Albury Gallery acquisition Prize
Monash Gallery Bowness Photography Prize
Gold Coast Gallery Joseph Ulrick and Win Schubert Contemporary Photography prize

Curator Sarah Engledow — according to catalogue essay, has deliberately avoided the sensational or the gimmicky or the too arty, perhaps to contrast it against the Head On portrait prize. The dominant style seems to be an intense, basic sincerity. The overall themes that emerge are the family, and the stages of life

Winner is deliberately low key, non-gimmicky, but intense.

The Hang

The hang is given some coherency, as we follow from childhood to adolescence to old age, with a final room based on the eternal cycles of birth and death. This could be called a ‘Family of Man’ hang. Photography’s most famous show from the 1950s, where the metaphor of growing up in a family was applied to the entire human race.

Because these shows are selected from emailed jpegs, and it is up to the photographer to enlarge and print their photographs, there are often unfortunate errors of scale which have to accommodated. But fortunately in this show too big pictures and tacky frames are kept to a minimum with some exceptions:

Too big: Sisters; Les and Eileen

Too small: My ancestors, myself and my alternate

Just right: Donna Gibbons, Martin Smith

Too tacky: Robert; Vicki Lee and Bill Higginson

Successful walls:

Wall of patriarchs, good solid photography harking back to ‘traditional styles’ of say August Sander

Soldiers of the Cross and the Quo Vadis connection, blog entry, National Film and Sound Archive

‘Herbert Booth and Joseph Perry’s Soldiers of the Cross of 1900’, National Film and Sound Archive, Arc Cinema, 1 March, 2013

‘Mark Strizic’, National Library of Australia Magazine, 2013

‘The Disinfected City in Australia’, Eugene Atget Symposium, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 25 August, 2012

Disinfected Sydney The Panoramic, the Evidential and the Picturesque The idea of Atget and archival delirium in Australian photography

The idea of Atget

Urban photography in Australia

The Panoramic

The Evidential

The Picturesque — Harold Cazneaux

Kid Stakes

Conclusion

‘Herbert Booth and Joseph Perry’s Soldiers of the Cross of 1900’, Magic Lantern Convention, Australasian Magic Lantern Society, Melbourne, 27-28 October 2012.

‘Handmade Media’, Return to Sender, exhibition catalogue, University of Queensland Art Museum, 2012, edited by Michelle Helmrich, pp 61-80, ISBN 978-1-74727-050-0

‘Facial Velocities’, Time Machine Magazine, Issue 2, on-line from 28 October, 2011, http://timemachinemag.com/current-issue/facial-velocities-by-martyn-jolly/

Facial Velocities Talk Text

‘Facial Fascination’, National Portrait Gallery, 13 April, 2011

Disinfected Sydney
The Panoramic, the Evidential and the Picturesque
The idea of Atget and archival delirium in Australian photography