Reusing historic photographs in contemporary Australian photography

‘Reusing Historic Photographs in Contemporary Australian Photography’, The Power to Move, exhibition forum, Queensland Art Gallery, February, 1996

One of the most famous and evocative images from photography’s history is Nadar’s photograph of neatly stacked bones and skulls in the Paris catacombs. It might seem a strange image with which to begin a talk on contemporary Australian photography, but I’ve had this photograph in my mind recently as a kind of visual metaphor for the present state of photography. Taken a few decades after photography’s invention, the image is still compelling because it comes from photography’s prelapsarian period—when the medium seemed new born amidst an Edenic profusion of fresh new things to see, and photographers relished the innocent discovery and capture all the wonders of the visible. (Nadar was able to photograph underground for the first time because of his daring use of portable electric lights and posed mannequins.) But for me this image has now come to represent the medium’s state at the end of its history, when the huge subterranean presence of the subsequently accumulated Total Photographic Archive seems to be defining photography’s current lugubriously retrospective mood.

Certainly this ‘presence of our past’ within photography is well established in Australian visual culture. Examples are numerous. For instance there is the deliberate reuse, parodic or otherwise, of well known classics of Australian photography, such as Max Dupain’s Sunbaker. And his Meat Queue has recently been computer collaged to advertise jeans in a fashion magazine. There is the creation of non-specific, but nonetheless precisley authentic photographic atmospheres from the past, produced for numerous fashion, real estate, or breakfast cereal ads. And photographs are now regularly used in Australia when the highest spiritual values of the nation need to be ritually embodied, as in the Vietnam War Memorial, the 1995 Australia Remembers Celebrations, and the Winfield Cup.

For example Anne Zahalka’s appropriational work from the mid to late 1980s takes a straight Postmodern pastiche approach, where the authority of the original is deliberately deflated in order to be inserted into a semiotic process of citation and comment. When we look at her works we apply them in our minds back to the originals. They are glosses on the received visual texts of the past—gently critiquing their patriarchal or ethnocentric assumptions, or through humorous juxtaposition asking us if these well worn Australian classics might not need to be updated in the light of subsequent history.

I want to characterise this as a ‘reading’ process, where through either a process of cut and paste collage, or recreated dress-up tableaus, images are metonymically and metaphorically juxtaposed in order to be compared and judged by a complicit and knowing audience.

The 1979 collages of Peter Lyssiotis, Industrial Woman, also require a similar ‘reading’ process of visual semiotics. While Zahalka targets particular famous images or easily recognised periods and genres, the images Lyssiotis collages tend to be anonymous—drawn, I would guess, from the thousands of photographs produced every month for annual reports, publicity brochures, magazines and so forth. Only occasionally, and perhaps accidentally, are the images recognisable. Both artists, however, rely on a pre-existent photographic archive: in Zahalka’s case the valorised museum collection, and in Lyssiotis’s case a kind of virtual archive of ubiquitous mass imagery. The images Lyssiotis uses are not nagged into a state of autocritique, as in Zahalka’s work; instead, through the collaged juxtaposition, and through our prior knowledge of the conventional political blandishments which the image fragments would have originally signified, we read a critique of the current state of Australian politics. The nefarious nature of photographs is assumed, and through semiotic reconfiguration the true state of things which they once masked is revealed.

For my purposes I would like to characterise both these processes of reading as ‘horizontal’, because the viewer makes meaning by scanning across the photograph’s content—the past is cited, removed from its original context, and inserted into a new visual text.

In contrast we have another set of images, mainly from the later 1980s and into the 1990s, which I think have a stronger ‘vertical’ axis. By which I mean that we seem to look down into the depths of the image. Leah King-Smith, for instance, also went to the archive to find images, not to chastise them for their political errors, but to liberate them. There is a painful and inconsolable paradox at the heart of her project. Thousands of photographs were taken of Aboriginal people during the nineteenth century—putatively in the name of positivist anthropological taxonomy, but also as part of a process of colonisation, displacement and genocide. As a Koori artist in residence at the State Library of Victoria King-Smith rephotographed some of these images, thereby removing the Aborigines from their scientific classifications, and then montaged them over fish-eye shots of the land they once inhabited. They return as frozen ghosts to haunt a land which has irrevocably changed beneath them. So, even though the prison wall of the archive may have been burst assunder, there has been no real liberation, all that is found are ephemeral spectres. Although the Aborigines in the photographs still have strong individual facial expressions, evidence of a former personality (and perhaps of silent resistance to the camera), in King-Smith’s work they remain doomed. They look up at us through the depths of history, silent and drowned. The only function of these images is mourning. There is nothing to be read, nothing to be said.

The superimposition, hand colouring and fish eye effects give a sense of spatial depth to the images—a vertical dimension back into the ineffable depths of time, history and photography, which in this work all collapse into one another.

Although not as deeply pitched as Leah King-Smith, Jeff Gibson’s Skin Deep, Amoré and Delusions of Grandeur series have a similar elegiac mood. Gibson found and rephotgraphed images of 1950s matinee idol pin-ups, which were once the Platonic models of the ideal form of masculine beauty and the objects of socially sanctioned female sexual desire. He shows them as subject to the corrosive forces of time. But this temporal corrosion has not romantically patinated them: because their potency was always only skin deep anyway, it has eaten away at their essence. Gibson’s elegy for a redundant masculine ideal is suffused with irony: the original images were produced for the female spectatorial gaze, and within the libidinal visual economy of the 1950s the requisite thick make-up, glamour lighting and passive poses entailed a kind of ‘feminisation’ of the male. They were therefore always problematic within Australian masculinity. Gibson’s own relationship to them as a man from at least one generation later is doublely problematic: they loom too large in the visual archive of masculinity for him to simply dismiss them as his gender’s kitsch, but neither are they really viable (except in a suffocatingly nostalgic way) as a historical referent for contemporary men. But that irony aside, his faces have a similar mutely morbid quality to Leah King-Smith, and Gibson similarly uses a process of montaged superimposition which gives a vertical depth to the image.

If the semiotic metonymy and metaphor of collage describes the citational uses of historic photographs in the work of artists like Anne Zahalka or Peter Lyssiotis, perhaps a suitable metaphor for the reuse of archival photographs with all their mnemonic powers intact, which occurs in the work of Leah King-Smith or Jeff Gibson, may be stratigraphy—the archaeological examination of layers of rock. The crucial difference is that the photographs reused by the latter artists remain embedded in history and memory, they are not levered out to be processed, reordered and redeployed in the present.

All of these photographers recognise that photgraphy is generating a new ‘power to move’. The most powerful quality of the medium has always been its notorious verisimiltude—its intoxicating intimacy with fragments of the real and with particular moments of time. But now, after one hundred and fifty years of the accumulation of these billions of isolated physical and temporal fragments, photography is producing an intoxicating intimacy with communal history and popular memory. Roland Barthes, in the book Camera Lucida, described the essence of photography as an equisite, individual moment of personal remembrance, such as he experienced when he held in his hand a snapshot of his dead mother taken of her as a child. Those individuated moments have become collectivised. The private spaces of photographs have joined together through communal use to become shared, almost public spaces. The pricks and pangs of the photographic image have almost become environmental.

This communal power is exploited by Tracey Moffatt. Her work sets melodramatic misé en scenes within pungent atmospheres which seem to rise up and envelop us like a repressed memory. Scarred for Life evokes the printing quality and layout of picture magazines like Life or Post, but they also have a kind of Kodak Instamatic flavour to them. Something More evokes the saturated colours of cheap books, cheap movies or cheap bedroom wall posters. These atmospheres give us a shiver of the uncanny—they are simultaneously from the past and in the present. They are hyper-real and strange, but yet somehow still intimately of us. What charges Moffatt’s melodrama with authentic psychological trauma is the strong mnemonic force of her various photographic styles.

But there seems to be more at stake here than in the knowing stylistic citations of, say, Robyn Stacey, where the artist remains a distanced virtuoso, coolly orchestrating her battery of special effects. Moffatt’s tactic, which certainly in the end is just as knowing, is to allow herself to be enveloped, and to succumb with an almost masochistic delight to the collective memories she unleashes. All of this defies language and takes the viewer beyond the image itself, beyond its mere historical referentiality, and into associated mnemonic, phenomenological and psychological states. The function of these images seems to be to destabilise us, to cast us adrift across the chromogenic currents of personal association.

It is tempting to see these different uses of historic photographs, from horizontal semiotic juxtaposition to vertical stratigraphic layering, as part of a shift in Australian art generally. You could say that they are indicative of the general ‘flight from the sign’ that characterises the shift from the eighties to the nineties—from the classic postmodern concern with textuality to the more recent interest in material and spatial qualities and associations. But I would like to draw an even longer bow, I think that we can also perhaps see here the symptoms of a kind of epochal event within the medium of photography as a whole. Unlike the medium in which Nadar was a pioneer, which was orientated to the future, and scientifically and phenomenologically explorative, photography now is fundamentally retrospective. The medium’s residue, its huge archive, now casts its shadow over every new photograph taken. There are no new prospects for photography, just various new forms of retrospective curatorship.

I think this curatorship may become an important part of the next phase of art photography. We can see it happening in the work of some of the artists in this exhibtion which I have discussed. We can see it in the slew of new coffee table books published very year, such as the Joel Peter Witkin selected Masterpieces of Medical Photography, which excavate and aesthetically valorise ever more arcane pockets of the Total Photographic Archive. We can see it in the ever more sophisticated mannerism of many photographers (and filmmakers) who tweak, embellish and distil past styles. We see it in the work of many photographers (and painters such as Gordon Bennett) who are only able to think the past through the photographic misé en scene—who have no other way of accessing, evoking and imaging pastness itself except through photography. A Kodak slogan from a few years ago, used to market a new, high tech product, seems to capture the current mood of photography pefectly—’the future of memories’.

Martyn Jolly

Photography’s past and its future

‘Photography’s past and its future’, Like Life or Life Like forum, Art Gallery of New South Wales, May, 1996

One of the most famous and evocative images from photography’s history is Nadar’s photograph of neatly stacked bones and skulls in the Paris catacombs. I’ve had this photograph on my mind recently as a kind of visual metaphor for the present state of photography. Taken in the 1860s, the image is still compelling because it comes from photography’s prelapsarian period—when the medium seemed new born amidst an Edenic profusion of fresh new things to see, and photographers relished the innocent discovery and capture of all the wonders of the visible. (Nadar was able to photograph underground for the first time because of his daring use of portable electric lights and posed mannequins.) But for me this image has now come to represent the medium’s state at the end of its history. Since Nadar’s photograph was taken an incalculable number of photographs have become accumulated in millions of archives around the world—ranging from museum collections and government records to private photo albums. The huge subterranean presence of what I call the Total Photographic Archive seems to be defining photography’s current lugubriously retrospective mood.

Certainly this ‘presence of our past’ within photography is well established in Australian visual culture. Examples are numerous. For instance there is the deliberate reuse, parodic or otherwise, of well-known classics of Australian photography, such as Max Dupain’s Sunbaker and Meat Queue. There is the creation of non-specific, but nonetheless precisely authentic photographic atmospheres from the past, produced for numerous fashion, real estate, or breakfast cereal ads. And photographs are now regularly used in Australia when the highest spiritual values of the nation need to be ritually embodied, as in the Vietnam War Memorial, the 1995 Australia Remembers Celebrations, and the Winfield Cup.

These tactics for evoking the past which occur in our broad visual culture are reflected in miniature in the visual strategies of that small part of it called art photography. Over the past fifteen years or so many Australian photographers have reused historic photographs in their work. However lately this reuse has tended to change in its character. In the eighties photographers such as Anne Zahalka raided the archive to appropriate and pastiche well known cultural icons. The authority of the original was deliberately deflated in order to be inserted into a semiotic process of citation and comment. These images were glosses on the received visual texts of the past, gently critiquing their patriarchal or ethnocentric assumptions, or through humorous juxtaposition asking us if those well worn Australian classics might not have needed to be updated in the light of subsequent history. This was a process of historical ‘reading’, where through either cut and paste collage, or recreated dress-up tableaus, images were metonymically and metaphorically juxtaposed in order to be compared and judged by a complicit and knowing audience.

In the 1990s, however, references to the past in Australian art photography are less likely to be cheeky quotational parodies and more likely to be historical excavations into the implacable depths of the image. For instance Leah King-Smith also went to the archive to find images, not to chastise them for their political errors, but to liberate them. There is a painful and inconsolable paradox at the heart of her project. Thousands of photographs were taken of Aboriginal people during the nineteenth century—putatively in the name of positivist anthropological taxonomy, but also as part of a process of colonisation, displacement and genocide. As a Koori artist in residence at the State Library of Victoria, King-Smith rephotographed some of these images, thereby removing the Aborigines from their scientific classifications, and then montaged them over fish-eye shots of the land they once inhabited. They return as frozen ghosts to haunt a land which has irrevocably changed beneath them. Even though the prison wall of the archive may have been burst asunder, there has been no real liberation, all that is found are ephemeral spectres. Although the Aborigines in the photographs still have strong individual facial expressions, evidence of a former personality (and perhaps of silent resistance to the camera), in King-Smith’s work they remain doomed. They look up at us through the depths of history, silent and drowned. The only function of these images is mourning. There is nothing to be read, nothing to be said. The superimposition, hand colouring and fish eye effects give a sense of spatial depth to the images—a vertical dimension back into the ineffable depths of time, history and photography, which in this work all merge into one another.

If the semiotic metonymy and metaphor of collage describes the citational uses of historic photographs in the work of artists in the 1980s, perhaps a suitable metaphor for the reuse of archival photographs with all their temporal associations intact, which occurs in the work of artists in the 1990s such as Leah King-Smith, may be stratigraphy—the archaeological examination of layers of rock. In contrast to a horizontal citational reading of the past, here we have a vertical stratigraphic excavation of the image. The crucial difference is that the photographs reused by the latter artists remain embedded in history and memory, they are not levered out to be processed, reordered and redeployed in the present.

The residual mnemonic power of photographs is exploited by Tracey Moffatt. Her work sets melodramatic misé en scenes within pungent atmospheres which seem to rise up and envelop us like a repressed memory. Something More evokes the saturated colours of cheap books, cheap movies or cheap bedroom wall posters. The colour off-set pages of Scarred for Life evoke the printing quality and layout of picture magazines like Life, but they also have a kind of Kodak Instamatic flavour to them. The strong mnemonic force of her various photographic styles charges Moffatt’s melodramas with authentic psychological trauma. There seems to be more at stake here than in the knowing stylistic citations of, say, Robyn Stacey, where the artist remains a distanced virtuoso, coolly orchestrating her battery of special effects. Moffatt’s tactic, which certainly in the end is just as knowing, is to allow herself to be enveloped, and to succumb with an almost masochistic delight to the collective memories she unleashes. All of this takes the viewer beyond the image itself, beyond its mere historical referentiality, and into associated mnemonic, phenomenological and psychological states. These images cast us adrift across the chromogenic currents of personal association.

It is a familiar complaint about the twentieth century that the past has become increasingly ruptured from the present. Under the reign of Modernity’s technological progress we experience the past less as a supporting, nurturing tradition which is perpetually engendering the present, and more as a commodified series of retinal scenarios which we access retrospectively from a distance. For us now History is a series of stories with causes and outcomes, told within dramatic structures with the aid of pictures. History is technologically produced in the present—encoded for us into books, novels, films, TV shows, re-enactments, historical restorations, and anniversaries—in order to serve the present’s social objectives. This change in history from the environmental to the scenographic has produced a similar change in our collective memory. It is no longer passed hand to hand and mouth to mouth, within a unifying sense of time and place. It too has become retinal and commodified, embodied in photographs, songs, slogans, and fragments of film and TV footage. These images don’t constitute a complete mnemonic environment (as myth and ritual do in tribal societies), but instead prompt individual memories which are then collectivised into popular memory.

Photography therefore has a special relationship with both history and memory. Photographs allow us a ‘window’ on the past, and are therefore the principal showcases of technologically transmitted history. But at the same time photographs act as sharp mnemonic probes into the soft, cerebral matter of personal memory. Sometimes the two functions of the photograph collide, as in the filmed image of the “Dancing Man”, used as an iconic centrepiece to the historical celebrations of the end of WW11, which brought forward separate, mutually exclusive, personal memories from at least four different men, each of whom was absolutely convinced that he was the one and only true “Dancing Man”

The most powerful aspect of photography’s intoxicating verisimilitude is its semiotic indexicality— its optical and chemical adherance to fragments of the real moments of time. But now, after one hundred and fifty years of the accumulation of these billions of isolated physical and temporal fragments, photography is producing an intoxicating intimacy with communal history and popular memory. Now those individuated moments have become collectivised. The private spaces of photographs have joined together through communal use to become almost a social landscape, such that we can now, for instance, almost talk of the one ‘national’ box brownie shot taken in the suburban backyard with the paling fence in the background. The pricks and pangs of the photographic image have become shared, tradeable commodities. Photographs are increasingly becoming negotiable processes for re-establishing broken connections with our forebears, for re-affirming the continuity of fragmented temporalities, and for giving us a reassuring sense of long duration beyond what is an increasingly isolated sense of ‘now’.

For example Fiona Foley uses historic photographs and the genetic continuity and materiality of her own body to re-establish ancestral connections with her dispossessed People of Fraser Island. She poses in the pose to which one of her ancestors was subjected over a century earlier. But she does not simply mourn, or glibly heroicise herself by defiantly returning our gaze. Rather she re-enacts the exchange of gazes which once took place in a nineteenth century photographic studio. By reincarnating the libidinal visual economy of nineteenth century anthropological photography in a twentieth century art gallery she keeps the processes of memory and history alive. One critic has identified here a different kind of response to the end of the millennium: a “custodial aesthetics rather than the prevailing pseudo-existentialist obsession with death and nothingness” (Olu Oguibe, Medium and Memory in the Art of Fiona Foley, Third Text, Winter 1995-96, p60)

Perhaps we are all a bit like that replicant in Blade Runner who, tragically doomed to live in an eternal present with no future and no past, comes to rely on a few photographs to verify her artificial memory implant. Photographs have become our prosthesis memories, simulacra of our past. But now these various memory prosthetics are becoming collectivised and communally transacted. We can see inklings of this in projects such as the Library of Congress’s National Digital Library Program accessed through their Web page American Memory Collection where photographs and other records are available on line, an idea being emulated on a smaller scale by our own Australian Archives.

The past for us is becoming a consensual memory hallucination created by a collectively and simultaneously jacking in to the Total Photographic Archive. I have deliberately recast William Gibson’s famous formulation of cyberspace because if photography is now increasingly identified with the past, the question is raised, what will its role be in the future?

Since I have invoked Blade Runner and Neuromancer, please bear with me while I indulge in a millenarian fantasy of my own. Try to imagine the past. It is relatively easy—the past is made up of photographs and films, real and fictional. Now try to imagine the future. That is much harder. For me, no conventional images readily come to mind, although I suspect that if the same question had been asked in the 1950s it would be easy to imagine, and believe in, conventional SF imagery of a techno-utopia, or alternatively a techno-distopia—depending on taste. Now, however, the futuristic is just another retro style. The past remains photographic or filmic: it is scenographic, perspectival, and prosceniumed. The future, however, has become liquescent: it is fractaled, phenomenological, and vertiginous. (Perhaps some of the hostility to the Museum of Sydney is that it has refused the conventional stability of the photographic or filmic tableau in its displays about the past, and instead has deliberately created a hysterical polyphony of ghosts and virtual presences—a style generally reserved these days for imagining the future.)

In the future there will be no ground on which to plant your feet, and no walls to put your back against. Even the indexical image will be perpetually morphing and fracturing, opening up spatially to admit us into its VRML interior, or denoting something quite different than the photograph’s conventional anterior reality, as in the digitally composite Time cover “The Face of America”, where a national census is both statistically and indexically denoted.

But of course there will still be conventional photographs in the future. Without doubt the private function of the photograph as personal memento will continue. And newspapers are busily trying to establish protocols to contain and stabilise the new liquidity of the image. When they are caught egregiously darkening the only lightly negroid skin of O. J. Simpson, or giving demonic eyes to Martin Bryant, they immediately apologise and dissemble profusely. So it is possible to imagine a time when the photograph, as we conventionally think of it, becomes just one category within a larger set of liquescent, though still indexical, images. It will be protected and valorised, carefully quarantined against digital infection by strict contextual protocols. Rather than being the current representational norm against which visual deviance is measured, it will become a ‘limit case’, with special functions and powers.

Like all millenarian fantasies mine is probably wildly overstated. Certainly photography has always been potentially liquescent right from the start, think for example of the huge enthusiasm for ‘spirit photography’ in the late nineteenth century, or the avant-garde experiments with collage, ostranenie, and visual immersion amongst the Russian Constructivists. But, at the very least, my millenial fantasy of a photography caught between a residual past and a phantasmagoric future casts a useful light on contemporary photographic phenomena. For instance the State Library of NSW’s current exhibition, Photo Documentary: Recent images of everyday life, has a strong sense of its greater eventual importance to an imagined future audience rather than its present day one. The catalogue introduction states: “few personal photographs have significance to anyone other than their owner. But some photographs are much more important. These are documentary photographs which are more public images, showing us aspects of society or our environment that need to be recorded for the future. In addition to the […] ability of the photograph to simply record, they strive to reveal images of enduring interest from everyday life and ordinary spectacle.” The audience is encouraged to project itself into the future and to look back on the present with a historian’s eye. For instance the caption to a Peter Elliston photograph performs a extraordinarily complex hermeneutic forensics on the image (similar to the forensic enhancement and narrativization of a photograph performed by Harrison Ford in Blade Runner) deducing in fetishistic detail the time, date and personal relationships in the image.

It is significant I think that the artists I have mentioned so far, who excavate the implacable heart of the photograph, combine it with another term: the land once inhabited by a dispossessed people as in Leah King Smith, the body of the historical subject genetically persisting, as in Fiona Foley, or pungent memories of adolescent trauma as in Tracey Moffatt. (Nor is it any accident, of course, that they are all Aboriginal. Memory is a much more acutely political and emotional term when history weighs heavily.) I think we have here an indication that in its new protected and cosseted state the photograph will become increasingly a custodial keeping place for a sense of ordered time. I predict that it will grow in ontological status more towards the nameless materiality of the body, land, and organic memory, and away from aesthetics, citational intertextuality and semiotic connotation. There will truly be a corpus of photographs, no longer a conventional document archive to be read, but a monumental virtual catacomb to be exhumed.

Unlike the medium in which Nadar was a pioneer, which was orientated to the future and scientifically and phenomenologically explorative, photography now is fundamentally retrospective, interiorising and densely accretive. There are no new prospects for photography as a medium, just various new forms of retrospective curatorship. We can see evidence of this in the slew of new coffee table books published very year, such as the Joel Peter Witkin selected Masterpieces of Medical Photography, which excavate and aesthetically valorise ever more arcane pockets of the Total Photographic Archive. We can see it in the ever more sophisticated mannerism of many photographers (and filmmakers) who tweak, embellish and distil past styles. We see it in the work of many photographers such as Fiona MacDonald, Alan Cruikshank, Destiny Deacon, John F. Williams and Elizabeth Gertsakis and artists such as Gordon Bennett and Narelle Jubelin who think the past through the photographic misé en scene—who use the photograph to be pastness itself.

A Kodak slogan from a few years ago, used to market their Photo-CD seems to capture the current mood of photography perfectly—’the future of memories’.

Martyn Jolly

May 1996

Photography is Dead! Long Live Photography!

‘Photography’s Afterlife’, Photography Is Dead! Long Live Photography!, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, 23 July – 10 November 1996. ISBN 1 875632 47 6, pp 22-25

Let’s get one thing straight. The dawn of the digital age will not mean the death of photography, any more than the birth of photography meant the end of painting—despite the painter Paul Delaroche’s headline grabbing proclamation in 1839 that “from today painting is dead”. Particular inventions do not suddenly drop from the sky and kill off entire visual mediums, like a meteor might kill off dinosaurs. But although photography has not yet met its apocalypse, without a doubt it is currently going through the most profound and radical transformation of its history. Digital imaging and manipulation technologies, various new interactive and immersive technologies, the newly developed ability to package and disseminate multimedia, and the thickening of the telecommunications system into a global web, have all transformed photography so fundamentally that we have to admit that we are witnessing both the death, and the simultaneous rebirth, of the medium.

We cannot speak about these new technologies without also speaking of the cultural practices with which they are imbricated. For instance new technological tools always coexist with old habits of use. Certain aspects of old cultural practices come to be seen, in retrospect, as having always contained prior forms of supposedly new modes of perception. And everything is ultimately determined by the bottom line politics of industrial production and consumption. For these reasons it is impossible to analyse the transformation in photography without acknowledging the sutures of social structure which always bind future technologies to past cultural forms.

Today’s ‘new’ digitally manipulative, immersive, and interactive technologies have many historical precedents. For example theatrical phantasmagorias and the early ‘cinema of attractions’ delighted nineteenth century crowds by testing their scopic credulity against elaborate technological displays of visual illusion. The massively popular ‘spirit’ photographs of the early twentieth century gave grieving relatives the convincing illusion that they were surrounded by the virtual presences and of their deceased loved ones. The sophisticated avant-garde experiments of the Russian Constructivists expanded the conventional perspectival point of view of the photograph and developed new spatially enveloping ways of presenting images in elaborate interactive architectural environments. And the darkroom techniques of the Surrealist photographers generated liquid, ‘convulsive’ images of morphing bodies in non-cartesian spaces.

Photography has always been more or less open to such darkroom ‘fakery’ and other kinds of manipulation. But to point to this in order to play down the present transformation of photography is to be in danger of missing the point about digitisation. From the moment of photography’s invention the fascination of the medium was that, for the first time, the world was not only being represented by the photographer, but also automatically representing itself. The photograph was optically and chemically caused by the real, and was therefore always intrinsically ‘laminated’ to it. The photograph gave us a direct optical transcription of a prior scene. It gave us palpable contact with real bodies. And it gave us the ‘there then’ of the past within the ‘here now’ of the present. Despite the strong non-realist current that has always flowed through photography, up until now each and every photograph’s normative ontological status was based on its indexical relationship to the real.

The relative liquidity of the photographic image has always been in deviation from this solid core of indexicality. The sense of the normative function of the realist photograph is implied in the very words used to describe variations from it—manipulation, fakery, etc. Paradoxically, even the most extreme non-realist photographic image called upon a residual indexicality for its underlying power. No matter how warped the conventional photograph became, the trace of its ultimate origin in the real still gave it a unique corporeal and temporal charge.

It is possible now to speak of the death of photography because this central indexical core, the ontological basis of the image, has become irrevocably softened. The transformation of an optical and chemical image into a data and pixel image has finally prised apart the previously necessary lamination of the photograph to its anterior optical reality. This lamination may still exist in some instances, but it is not necessary, nor is it any longer the central norm around which relative degrees of deviance are permitted.

For example an image like the Time magazine cover “The New Face of America” is still indexical—it was made by morphing together in statistical proportion the photographed faces of various ethnic models to create a single portrait. The seamless, accumulative montage-face represents a national ethnic census both statistically and visually. (A technique, incidentally, which can be traced back, through the computer artist Nancy Burson, to the composite portraiture of the nineteenth century English eugenicist Francis Galton) This photograph does not represent a single anterior reality—a particular woman—but it does still corporeally index a panoptic, genographic ‘sur-reality’—the new face of America.

Images such as this give us an inkling of the way in which, in the future, photography’s indexicality will become more attenuated, certainly, but also more fluid. Recently many artists have experimented with the exhilarating possibilities offered by the digital motility of the photograph’s content, and the pixelated lubricity of its surface. It is increasingly becoming easier, and more common, for photographs to be morphed together to form navigable panoramas; opened up spatially to invite us deep into their VRML interiors; fractured into a myriad hyper-linked shards; selectively enhanced in their salient details; or stretched beyond their rectangular boundaries to distend themselves through space and time.

Digitisation has entered the very flesh of the photographic process. Every newspaper photograph routinely goes through a digital imaging program such as Photoshop before it reaches the presses. However, even with that knowledge, I still habitually ‘believe my eyes’ when I open my morning newspaper. Now it is the protocols of journalism and the context of the newspaper, rather than the ontology of the medium, upon which my faith must ultimately rest. Hence there is good reason for the fuss created when newspapers are occasionally discovered manipulating their photographs. When they are caught egregiously darkening the only lightly negroid skin of O. J. Simpson, or giving demonic eyes to Port Arthur’s Martin Bryant, they are forced to immediately apologise and dissemble profusely. They must shore up any potential leakage of the denotational power of their reportage photographs, even as they tentatively experiment with the illustrative possibilities of the liquescent digital image.

Until now the normative photograph has been scenographic—it was a prosceniumed stage presenting a miniature theatre of the real to our monocular viewpoint. But it is possible to imagine a time when this kind of photograph becomes just one category within a larger set of liquescent, though still indexical, images. Rather than being the current representational norm against which visual deviance is measured, the scenographic photograph will become a ‘limit case’ with special functions and powers. In the future such traditional photographs, with their precious but delicate connection to a particular fragments of the real and precise moments in time, will need to be protected and valorised—carefully quarantined against digital infection by strict contextual protocols.

So even as some photographers are experimenting with the newly liquescent image, others are re-affirming their allegience to the scenographically stable photograph. For instance the State Library of New South Wale’s recent exhibition Photo Documentary: Recent Images of Everyday Life passionately argues for the continued prime importance of the conventional photograph on the grounds that it is the best way of granting future viewers an accurate and reliable window back onto the present. This raises an interesting, but for the moment unanswerable, question. After the rebirth of photography into the digital age, will posterity come to know the present as intimately and as accurately by the nature of our image manipulations and morphs, as by our selective scenographic realities?

The dominant metaphor for the normative photograph has always been the window. (The first ever photograph was taken from one.) Photography has been our window on the world, and our window on the past. But significantly there are few windows in Photography is Dead!, Long Live Photography! —virtually no images mounted in a conventional mat board and frame, and not one image behind a pane of glass. In this exhibition’s version of the long post-mortem life of photography it appears that the scenographic photograph will no longer reign supreme.

The artist photographers chosen for this exhibition have responded in a particular way to the displacement of the scenographic from the centre of their medium and the photograph’s liquid dispersal throughout cyberspace. They show an almost obsessional compensatory concern for the materiality of their images. Each artist gives their photographs a style-conscious, post-industrial facture. For instance Geoff Kleem glues billboard images directly onto the walls of the gallery; Julie Rrap’s ink jet images are printed onto working window blinds; Fiona Macdonald’s photographs are mounted in thick rubber frames; Felicia Kan’s Cibachromes are pinned to curl under their own weight, whilst Anne Zahalka’s are mounted in light boxes, and Rosemary Laing’s are intrinsically bonded onto aluminium or acrylic sheets; Bill Henson’s prints are cut, torn and gaffer-taped back together again onto marine ply; Merilyn Fairskye’s transparencies double themselves by throwing their shadow on the wall; Fiona Macdonald weaves her historical copy photographs together; and so on.

These artists fetishise a particular type of indeterminate materiality—neither hand crafted texture, nor standardised technical substrate. Their images are not transparent like a window or subjectively reflective like a mirror, rather they tend towards a sticky, or sometimes vaporous, opacity. They are either abstract or oneiric, hyperreal or unfamiliar, overtly posed or melodramatically enacted. What, exactly, they are photographs of is also indeterminate. Are they photographs of anterior realities?—in which case those realities are usually unavailable or unfamiliar to the naked eye. Are they photographs of other photographs?—in which case they denote an anterior genre of depiction before they denote any specific anterior reality. Or are they simply photographs of themselves?—aesthetic images of their own material existence.

In this exhibition the photograph is (often literally) laminated to a fabricated technical ensemble, rather than a scenographic reality. These technical ensembles give equal material weight to both the architectonic deployment of the photograph as an object in the gallery space, and the indexical presence of the photograph as an image in the viewer’s phenomenological apperception. These artists have largely abandoned photography’s now deposed scenographic transcription—they do not see the need to either quarantine or valorise it. But they remain deeply enamoured of photography’s persistent consanguinity with the real—which they deliberately amplify into a hybrid physical and optical presence.

Photography is now dispersing in all directions before our eyes. These artists are following one line of flow: the photograph as image corpus, as a persistent bodying forth of the real, even into the newly liquescent, virtual world of the image.

Martyn Jolly

June 1996

‘Sorely tried men’ : the male body in World War Two Australia

as published with illustrations in Artlink, Vol 16, No 1, Autumn, 1996.

During World War Two the Australian Government’s Department of Information represented the male body in at least two distinct ways. The photographer Edward Cranstone photographed a heroically active, phallicised body; and the cameraman Damien Parer filmed a heroically suffering, abject body.

Edward Cranstone’s main assignment for the DOI was to photograph the Civil Construction Corps of the Allied Works Council. (1) Established in 1942 the AWC conscripted men between the ages of 35 and 55, who were otherwise ineligible for military service, to work on large building projects in northern and interior Australia. However the CCC quickly began to attract adverse publicity. There was industrial unrest on many projects with workers accusing the management of inefficiency and rorting, and management accusing the workers of unpatriotic union activity. (2) Against this background the DOI sent Cranstone, accompanied by a journalist who wrote captions, on an extended assignment to all the AWC projects. His photographs were extensively published in the press, in everything from the Tribune to the Women’s Weekly, and were eventually formed into a large exhibition, which also included paintings of CCC workers by Dobell and other artists, that toured capital cities in 1944.

As a member of the Communist Party of Australia Cranstone was exposed to a rich source of propagandistic imagery. Soviet socialist photographs were regularly published in the Tribune, and the Soviet Australia Friendship League held frequent screenings of classics of revolutionary cinema. Their influence can be clearly seen in Cranstone’s Modernist visual rhetoric — his use of upward looking camera angles, strong diagonal compositions, bright sunlit forms and heroic poses. Although the Soviet photography published in the Tribune can be identified as a specific source for Cranstone, his was a global style shared by other American, British and German propaganda photographers of the period.

Cranstone’s photographs appear to have been effective in persuading the public of the value of the CCC’s contribution to the War effort. As one article reviewing the exhibition stated:

The Australian worker—bareheaded, steady-eyed, stripped to the waist—is the dusty, sweating keynote to a display of about 450 photographs [….] It would be surprising if most people did not take away a warm impression of that typical Australian, stripped to the waist, working on untouched land, levelling it, digging into it or building up from it. In a real immediate way, the show tells the story of how Australia—the country itself— has gone to war.(3)

Cranstone’s men are heroic soldier/worker/pioneer hybrids. The battle which they fight is in the familiar industrial workplace and on the equally familiar colonial frontier. There is a strong erotics to many of Cranstone’s photographs: skin is pneumatically pumped out by muscle, sheened by sweat, and ribboned by shadow; the men vigorously swing crowbars and work machinery. His photographs turn their bodies, which were by definition not Australia’s finest, into splendid specimens indeed.

Although Cranstone’s photographs were widely exhibited and published and generally well received, some commentators reacted against their overt visual rhetoric and mechano-eroticism. In Canberra the exhibition was displayed hidden away in the basement of Parliament House rather than in the usual exhibition space of Kings Hall. The Speaker of the House, complaining about the Modernist paintings of William Dobell with their thick fleshy strings of paint, claimed that the show “was a grave reflection on the manhood of Australia generally, and particularly the fine types who have discharged essential duties during a critical period in Australia’s history.” He added, in reference to Cranstone’s brand of photographic Modernism, that a “photograph allegedly taken in a quarry made me feel that I was in Dartmoor [Gaol].”(4)

Damien Parer was also employed by the DOI, but as a war cameraman. The footage he shot in New Guinea was supplied to newsreel companies to be cut into their weekly newsreels. Parer’s two most famous newsreels, Cinesound’s Kokoda Frontline and Assault on Salamau, were essentially collaborations between himself and the head of Cinesound Ken Hall. In both cases Damien Parer appeared as the ‘star’ to introduce the newsreels. After some titles telling us that Parer has already been responsible for some of the ‘classic footage’ of the War and that he is a reliable witness, Kokoda Frontline opens on Parer, in his uniform, in an empty domestic room, leaning casually against a table. The camera slowly moves in on his handsome face as he speaks directly to the camera.

Eight days ago I was with our advanced troops in the jungle facing the Japs at Kokoda. Its an uncanny sort of warfare, you never see a Jap, even though he is only twenty yards away. They are complete masters of camouflage and deception, […] Don’t underestimate the Jap, he’s a highly trained soldier, well disciplined and brave, and although he’s had some success up until the present, he’s now got against him some of the finest and toughest troops in the world, troops with a spirit amongst them that makes you intensely proud to be an Australian. […] When I returned to Moresby I was full of beans, it was the spirit of the troops and the knowledge that General Rowell was on the job, and now that we had a really fine command. But when I came back to the mainland, what a difference, I heard girls talking about dances, and men complaining about the tobacco they didn’t get; at the front, they were smoking tea some of the time. There seems to be an air of unreality, as though the war were a million miles away. Its not, its just outside our door now. I’ve seen the war, and I know what your husbands, your sweethearts and brothers are going through. If only everybody in Australia could realise that this country is in peril, that the Japanese are a well equipped and dangerous enemy, they might forget about the trivial things and go ahead with the job of licking them.

After this introduction the film cuts to some spectacular combat footage, but most important to the film are the intimate close-ups of the soldiers in retreat down the Kokoda Trail with which the film ends. The soldiers either pass in slow procession past the camera, or compose themselves into tableaus as they have their bandages tenderly applied by their mates, or their cigarettes lit. Cut into these sequences are extended close-up shots of the faces of native bearers and Australian soldiers which act as still portraits of various emotions. The hortatory voice over commentary during these scenes contrasts with Parer’s tender pain, but it re-emphasises the theme he established:

[…] [Here are the] first vivid, starkly dramatic glimpses of the eerie jungle conflict. [Showing] almost incredible hardship. […] Where the patrols go the bearded Parer goes too, so that this strange uncanny warfare can be vividly brought to the outside world. […] This is war, the real thing. The utter weariness of sorely tried men is evident in their faces. […] These are grim pictures, brutally, terribly real, they smash a complacency as nothing written or spoken ever possibly could. […] Half the distance from Sydney to Melbourne men are sweating, suffering, dying in that jungle so that it cannot happen here. Are they getting all the support the deserve, from the mines, from the factories, from the ordinary civilian? […]

In the final seconds Parer’s soft face of concern returns, angelically superimposed over shots of the feet of the soldiers pushing down through mud. He repeats, but now in ghostly tones:

I’ve seen the war, and I know what your husbands, your sweethearts and brothers are going through. If only everybody in Australia could realise that this country is in peril, that the Japanese are a well equipped and dangerous enemy, they might forget about the trivial things and go ahead with the job of licking them.

The newsreel was immediately successful, with a queue snaking out from Sydney’s State Theatre newsreel theatrette and around into George Street. The soldiers in Parer’s films are very different to Cranstone’s workers. The frontline on which they fight is not the domesticated colonial frontier of the purifying, astringent desert, but the dark uncannily wet tunnels of a jungle beyond the borders of Australia. The men are not assertively doing, but passively suffering. Parer’s soldiers are sick, bleeding and blinded. They rely on the tenderness of comrades or natives to survive. Their feet slip through mud as they lean on sticks or each other. They are not symbolic nationalist cyphers like Cranstone’s men, they are individuals, suffering psychological, as well as physical privations on our personal behalf.

Parer was a devout Catholic and many have seen spiritual and religious connotations in his work.

Ron Williams [another DOI filmmaker] believes that Parer was portraying redemption emerging out of suffering in these sequences. While Damien’s notes give no indication of any such intention, one particular shot does have a religious undertone. It shows Salvation Army Major Albert Moore on the far right of the frame lighting a cigarette for a wounded soldier. This is carefully balanced by a group of soldiers on the other side. Parer’s composition is similar to a medieval or Renaissance painting showing as its centrepiece Christ being taken down from the cross. The religious analogy is strengthened by the fact that the soldier is naked, covered from the waist down by an army blanket.(5)

Through their suffering these men will lead us to redemption. We, the audience of Parer’s newsreels, are feminised: we are wives, mothers or sisters who weakly complain at home and don’t acknowledge the danger from overseas. Like Orpheus, Parer has been both there and here. He has suffered too, and has returned, but our indifference is making him suffer again. Unabashed emotion and direct physical contact is both the conduit and evidence of this transaction—it becomes the subject of the newsreel itself. We see with our own eyes that our delusion and triviality has personally dispirited Parer, when he arrived back he was ‘full of beans’ with ‘the spirit of the troops’ but now he has experienced our complacency, he is worried and upset. His voice drops, and his face tightens.

There is an eroticism here too. Not the auto-phallicisation of man and machine as in the CCC, but a polymorphous blending of mate into mate and man into mud. Australians would have easily recognised this eroticism as already part of the ANZAC myth, Australian men similarly suffered together on the beaches of Gallipoli or in the trenches of France. Citing Julia Kristeva and Klaus Theweleit, Leigh Astbury has explained how this eroticism was understood into gender terms.

Again and again accounts of war emphasise the stinking ooze, mud, slush, stench, slime, rotting corpses, gore, human excreta—hybrid substances and odours that could be associated in the male mind with the body, especially with its orifices and, negatively, with the erotogenic zones of the female. Given the soldier’s morbid fear of anxiety-producing, hybrid substances connected with the body, abjection could only be held in abeyance through controlling the body’s purity and integrity and expelling from it the improper and unclean. (6)

However rather than conventionally describing it as that against which the phallic ANZAC heroically struggles to define itself, to Parer the abjection of New Guinea is something to which this generation of ANZAC, mired in the grimmest days of the War, must heroically succumb.

Parer’s trinity of ‘mother, wives and sisters’ had been evoked once before in relation to Australian warrior masculinity. The sculptural centrepiece for the memorial which Sydney had built for its WW1 ANZACs was Rayner Hoff’s Sacrifice 1934. In this sculpture a symbolic Australian mother, wife and sister hold aloft a lithe, cleansed and perfect male body crucified on a sword, they successfully bear him up out of the miasma of battle and into a transcendent erotic masculinity. However in Kokoda Frontline Parer is sadly compelled to inform the women of WW11 Australia that, unlike these women, they have abandoned their soldiers to an abject eroticism.

The newsreel’s powerful message is that, in the darkest hour of the War, while their women are still enthralled by false images and trivial concerns, it is up to desperately abjected soldiers, redeemed by a spiritually defined homo eroticism, to defend Australia. In contrast to Parer’s psychologically specific homo-eroticism, Cranstone’s internationally symbolic, stylised auto-eroticism redeemed the home front labours of another potentially unstable category of Australian male—the worker.

Whilst these two types of male body were produced at a particular extraordinary juncture of Australian history and culture I cannot resist the temptation to extrapolate them into later manifestations. Cranstone’s phallic cyphers of labour have certainly found their way into corporate annual report photography. Large corporations such as BHP still, from time to time, use these ‘masculinist automatons’ as nostalgic labourist archetypes, particularly in areas which are undergoing extreme technological transformation. (7) However this type of pneumatic body, flexing itself against machinery in self-absorbed labour, is perhaps more commonly seen today in the productivist potlaches of the gym.

The Winfield Cup statuette, The Gladiators, sculpted from a photograph of two David and Goliath sized Grand Final team captains helping each other off a muddy football field in 1963, has strong references back to WW11 imagery of the abjected soldier. Does the eroticism of male sport still rely on a mute accusation against sisters, mothers and wives?

Martyn Jolly

1 Martyn Jolly ‘Edward Cranstone: Photographer’ Photofile Vol 1 No 1 1984, pp1-3.

2 H.P. Brown,(Commissioner) Inquiry under the National Security Regulations into certain allegations concerning the administration of the Allied Works Council 5 March 1943.

3 K.K. ‘Australia Portrayed Stripped to the Waist’ Melbourne Herald 3 August 1944, p5.

4 Massey Stanley ‘Art Critic’ Sunday Telegraph 24 September 1944, p10.

5 Neil McDonald War Cameraman: The Story of Damien Parer, Lothian 1994, pp157-158.

6 Leigh Astbury ‘Death and eroticism in the ANZAC Legend’ Art and Australia Spring 1992 Vol 30 No 1, pp68-73.

7 Charles Pickett ‘BHP & the Village People’ The Lie of the Land, Powerhouse and National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University, pp27-28.

Captions will be supplied with illustrations

Frank Hurley’s Vision Splendid

‘Frank Hurley’s domesticated sublime’, Australian Centre for Photography forum. October 26, 1996

David Millar, Snowdrift and Shellfire, David Ell Press, 1984.

Julian Thomas, Showman, National Library of Australia, 1990.

Scot Bukatman, ‘The Artificial Infinite’, in Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances, eds Lynne Cook & Peter Wollen, 1995.

Ken. G. Hall, Directed by Ken G. Hall, Lansdowne Press, 1977

Anne-Marie Condé, ‘A Marriage of Sculpture and Art: dioramas at the memorial’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, November 1991, pp56-59

Hurley Chronology:

Postcard trade and camera club movement 1900s

Mawson Antarctica 1911-13

Shackleton Antarctica 1914-16

Flanders and Palestine AIF 1917

Papua New Guinea early 1920s

Mawson Antarctica 1929-31

Cinesound cameraman 1930s

Middle East AIF 1940s

‘Camera Study’ books 1946-66 (even after his death)

Captain Frank Hurley was much more than just a photographer, he was also a filmmaker, a performer, an adventurer and, by the end of his career, a household name. Colleagues such as the film director Ken G Hall and the journalist Maslyn Williams referred to Hurley as a ‘showman’. By that they meant that he himself was the essential subject of all his work, and that he strove for customer satisfaction, entertainment value, and spectacular effect above all other considerations, including veracity.

For instance Hurley made many combination prints out of the material he shot in Flanders as one of Australia’s two official war photographers. He immediately ran into conflict with the Australia’s war correspondent, later to be Australia’s official war historian, Charles Bean, who needed simple factual documents of the War. Hurley, however, wanted immediate “publicity pictures and aesthetic results”.[Millar 48]

“None but those who have endeavoured can realise the insurmountable difficulties of portraying a modern battle by camera. To include the event on a single negative, I have tried and tried, but the results are hopeless. Everything is on such a vast scale. Figures are scattered—the atmosphere is dense with haze and smoke—shells will not burst where required—yet the whole elements are there could they but be brought together and condensed. The battle is in full swing, the men are just going over the top—and I snap! A fleet of bombing planes is flying low, and a barrage burst all around. On developing my plate there is disappointment! All I find is a record of a few figures advancing from the trenches—and a background of haze. Nothing could be more unlike a battle. I might be a rehearsal in a paddock.” [Millar 50] “[I] Am thoroughly convinced that it is impossible to secure effects without resorting to combination pictures”[Millar 51]

To Hurley photographed battles must be coherent, legible, and dramatic. However Bean was implacably opposed to this argument and called Hurley’s combination pictures ‘fakes’. He wanted historical documents from which a posterior account of the war could be properly constructed. For this reason Bean was very supportive of the concept of the model dioramas built for the Australian War Memorial in the 1920s which, in their dramatic logic, cinematic power, spatial compression and explanatory completeness are, in fact, very similar to the Hurley combination prints he so disapproved of in 1917. For the purposes of this sanctioned presentation of history Bean himself even urged the sculptors involved to judiciously edit and combine the facts of the battles to make for a more expository, emotionally engaging diorama. [Anne-Marie Condé]

Hurley displayed six of his combination prints in London in 1918 as giant seven by three metre enlargements accompanied by 130 or so smaller straight prints and continuous projections of full colour lantern slides. The viewer of Hurley’s combination prints in 1918 would have comprehended them not as literal truth, but as an emotional attraction. They would have seen the combination techniques not as illicit fakery, but as entirely licit ‘special effects’—where it is the production of an effect worthy of emotional and phenomenological investment by the viewer that counts. For the contemporaneous viewer, his WW1 images were verifiable by reference not to reality but to the reality of their affect—on an emotional and ideological as well as a pictorial level. So, despite Bean’s objections, Hurley’s combination prints were never fakes in the sense that a manipulated image would be called a fake later when, with the elaboration of the documentary mode in photography and film, viewers were trained to read an image from the fragmentary, contingent point of view of the participant. By the late 20s and 30s readers of picture magazines and viewers of weekly newsreels had been taught to valorise the sense of physical proximity to the actual moment the photograph conveyed, over its scenographic exposition of the unfolding event.

Hurley was prevented by Bean from bringing this phantasmagoric attraction to Australia. But in the display of smaller images which he was eventually allowed to exhibit at the Kodak Salon in Sydney in 1919 he freely admitted to using combination printing. In the catalogue he states:

“In order to convey accurate battle impressions, I have made several composite pictures, utilising a number of negatives for the purpose. The elements of these composites were all taken in action and submitted to the G.O.C. A.I.F. who gave his approval for their production.”

However Hurley is clearly being disingenuous here, perhaps in response to his dispute with Bean. A large part of the motivation for his use of combination printing wasn’t, in fact, to create a theatrically complete, legible, battle tableau. His addition of piles of cumulus or storm clouds, through which shafts of sunlight are breaking, and the proscenium frames of church architecture, are clearly pictorial tropes of the sacred and the sublime which provide the moral benediction of God and Nature to Imperial victory.

Hurley had extensive experience with the production of popular attractions at this time, all of which used the latest film and photographic technology, and all of which featured himself as ‘showman’. As a postcard photographer in the 1900s he had specialised in pushing the envelope of the new photographic technologies, producing postcards taken at night, using flash or extended exposures, or photographs which dangerously froze high speed trains or crashing waves. The appeal of these images to contemporaneous audiences would have been as much in their status as artefacts of a new technology, as in their pictorial aesthetics.

In 1913 his film on the Mawson expedition Home of the Blizzard screened in Sydney whilst Mawson was still stranded in Antarctica. Hurley appeared at each screening as the figure of the returned Imperial explorer to give a personal recitation to accompany the film. In 1914 he shot and again appeared with Into Australia’s Unknown about Francis Birtles car expedition across Australia. In 1919-1920 he toured internationally with In the Grip of the Polar Ice about the crushing of ‘The Endurance’ on Shackleton’s expedition. And in 1919 he exhibited and narrated With the Australians in Palestine.

In 1920 he appeared with The Ross Smith Flight, about the first flight from the UK to Australia in under thirty days. He accompanied Smith on the final legs of the flight, but the film also incorporated previous footage shot in Palestine and on the Birtles expedition. It also, significantly, had metres of blank film cut into it for the projection of colour lantern slides, and trick effects to produce the illusion of the pilot’s point of view whilst approaching Australian cities, created by jiggling postcards of the cities in front of a tracking camera. Pearls and Savages, shot on two expeditions to New Guinea, ran for five months in 1922 with specially composed piano music, chemical and hand tinting, interspersed colour slides, and a personal appearance and recitation by Hurley as the returned explorer.

These films were made before the Documentary Movement. They had none of the diegetic logic developed by Documentary pioneers such as Grierson and Flaherty after Flaherty’s seminal Nanook of the North of 1922. Nor did they assume the objective invisibility of the filmmaker. Rather they revolved around Hurley’s actual physical presence as the returned hero who was not so much auteur of, as physical witness to, the disjointed sections of film projected on the screen. He was also, of course, the showman impresario of the various technological effects he created and displayed. They therefore conform to the ‘cinema of attractions’ as it has been theorised by Tom Gunning and Miriam Hansen: that is, a cinema of presentation, rather than representation, where the space and time of the film, and the space and time of the audience in the auditorium, remain continuous and are not severed by the illusion of cinematic montage and the diegetic drive of narrative.

Although Hurley’s films were made pre Documentary, they are not proto Documentary. Hurley remained essentially anti Documentary throughout his life. When he was sent to Africa with Australian troops at the beginning of WW11 as head of the Department of Information’s film unit he ran into trouble once more with both the requirements of the Department for exciting newsreel footage, and with his younger colleagues who were intoxicated by the Documentary ethos. As an exasperated Damien Parer wrote back to Max Dupain:

“Hurley hasn’t much news sense which is necessary to the job: he goes mad about bloody native boats, and mosques and clouds (cumulus variety only)…[and] worries about ‘quality’.”

For the decade before WW11 Hurley had been Cinesound’s chief cameraman. In 1924 he had made two ‘location’ fictional films on Thursday Island, Hound of the Deep and The Jungle Woman which he conceived of as extensions on Pearls and Savages, however these were not successful. But at Cinesound he was able to add his ability to shoot sweeping, operatic landscapes, plus his affinity for special affects, to Cinesound’s series of nationalistic features directed by Ken G. Hall. Thus, for instance, for The Squatter’s Daughter he devised the opening sequence of a mob of 10,000 sheep, which in Hall’s words:

“seemed to float like a long white cloud down the valley, stirred by the rising sun. The purely photographic sequence still stands vividly in my memory as a projection of Australia with which I am glad to be associated. I used it at some length in the feature and the rest went into the Cinesound library for use on innumerable occasions” [78 Hall].

He also helped devise the final climatic bushfire sequence lit by festooning the trees with thousands of feet of Australia’s film heritage in the form of flammable nitrate stock. He became something of a specialist outdoors and effects cinematographer throughout the 1930s. Charles Chauvel brought him in to shoot the horse charge sequence in Forty Thousand Horsemen, about the Australian Light Horse in Palestine, where Hurley used a similar technique to one used by Leni Riefenstahl in Olympia, and placed the camera in a deep pit over which the horses jumped.

Eventually Hurley’s outmoded deep focus style, plus with inability to empathise with filming anything other than landscapes, combined with his reluctance to work as part of a team, forced Hall to move him sideways into his own ‘Industrial Division’ to make documentaries for corporate and government clients. This work culminated in the 1938 sesqui-centenary featurette A Nation Is Built where Hurley’s imperial, industrial sublime reaches its highest pitch. The film features some more special effects, such as a scene where Governor Phillip imagines a modernist city rising out of his Sydney Cove tents. But it is most memorable for panoramic sweeps of cities, industry and pastoral landscapes.

The climax features not a floating cloud of sheep, but a field of golden grain beneath his by now trademark cumulus clouds. The narrator declares:

“The amazing transformation of a country of wild bush land into a highly developed commonwealth in the brief one hundred and fifty years has no parallel in history. Nor could we today be harvesting the benefits of a great past were it not for the fact that our nation builders were imbued with a sublime patriotism. […] Nor are our peoples unmindful of the beneficence which has been showered down upon our land by the Creator of all things. This lovely scene inspires us to something more than mere admiration. The bounty of the earth impels us to look up to the good will which is in the heavens and to say ‘We Thank Thee’. Just as those of the past had visions of the greatness of the future, so we the builders of today must build towards our nation’s mightiness of the morrow. In harmony and consort our voices are raised: “God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet’.”

The heavens above are invoked in A Nation is Built in the same way as they were in his Flanders combination prints: as a technologically produced special effect, as a sublime pictorial supplement, and as a divine cum natural benediction on the Empire. In the filmic montage we can more clearly see how, as well as being simply a pictorial trope, Hurley’s sublime clouds actually provide an additional spatial vector to the image. The camera pans around in proprietorial survey of the bounty of Empire. Wipes and dissolves move us horizontally along in a cavalcade of history not unlike the procession of floats up Macquarie Street in the Sesquicentenary Parade. But then the camera also lifts us up ecstatically to the clouds for us to receive a divine blessing on our Imperial progress.

After WW11 Hurley began to produce a series of Camera Study books on each state, major city, and eventually on Australia as a whole. These books ended up selling a total of 168,500 copies. The books are quite different to other ‘Australiana’ picture books. Unlike, say, Ernistine Hill, Ion Idriss, Bill Peach, Albie Mangles, the Leyland Brothers or the Bush Tucker Man, Hurley is not interested in collecting and stringing together anecdotal travel stories or eccentric characters as signs of nationhood. Rather he is interested in nationhood enacted by scenery itself. His landscapes are conceived of as gigantic prosceniumed stage sets complete with all the theatrical machinery of flies, flats and backdrops. His people are not characters, but extras.

In that sense, of course, his sublime is rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But Hurley’s sublime is much more circumscribed than the Burkian sublime of astonishment, terror and awe at a power far greater than the human, a power which paradoxically uplifts us because it threatens to annihilate us, a power whose immensity provokes a crisis in the viewer which can only be resolved by their identification with it. Hurley’s sublime is more circumscribed, even, than the manifest destiny of the nineteenth century American Luminists, with their ideological investment in the natural inevitability of the great American nation evidenced by its sublime wildernesses. Hurley’s own vision splendid takes place within a comforting horizon of civic, industrial or pastoral scenery. His nation’s manifest destiny is domesticated and almost suburban. In all of the 220 pages of Australia: A Camera Study of 1955 there are only a few pages devoted to outback scenery, and virtually none devoted to what we would now affirmatively call wilderness, a word which had entirely negative connotations for Hurley. Aborigines do not appear at all.

His photographs are therefore empty stage sets, images of an imperial potentiality, a libidinal void waiting to be filled with flowing floods of sheep or churning turbines. All his landscape are technologised to some extent, mechanically and repetitively clunking themselves through their pictorial machinations. They encourage us to lob our gazes, almost ballistically, across them. The technique of special effects was still felt by Hurley to be necessary to his project, he still combined negatives to add in clouds, sunrays, birds and aeroplanes.

Summary of points:

Hurley’s photography is anti-documentary. And his cinema conforms to the ‘cinema of attractions’ rather than the proto documentary. It is non-diegetic, non anthropological, and uninterested in actuality. It is interested in affect and is based on the figure of Hurley as showman.

Although Hurley’s sublime aesthetic had its roots in the nineteenth century (via the postcard trade and the camera club movement’s connections to art photography) it was expressed within a twentieth century technic. His sublime is pictorially troped and technologically tamed into a special effect.

Hurley’s sublime is not a phenomenological excess—a visual plenitude which takes us to a great infinity beyond the pictorial space of the image. Rather it gives his images two distinct vectors:

[1] The horizontal pan around a horizon which is spatially consistent with a proprietorial panoptic survey, but also with a temporal cavalcade of history.

[2] A vertical pan up to a transcendent, beneficent, affirming God who is above the imperial thrust of history, but confirms it.

Anne Zahalka: Privacy, Publicity and Inhabitation

‘Anne Zahalka: spurs of the moment’, Art & Text, Number 54, April, 1996

Throughout its short history photography has had a special relationship with both privacy and publicity. It was invented during a period when the domestic sphere of social organisation was reaching new levels of importance. But it also inaugurated the era of mass media and the age of publicity. Photography redefined both the living room and the street.

On one hand photography became the ultimate medium of private communication. Under the rule of painting and its various genres portraiture had been fundamentally declarative—of wealth, status and ideology. With photography it became confessional—of desire, personal obligation and sheer bodily existence. For centuries portraits had been coolly assembled by trained experts out of a generic lexicon of social signifiers—costume, pose, accoutrements. With photography portraits became both more popular, and warmer. They were physically warmed by the cosy fires of the domestic mantelpieces on which they sat, or by the loving bodies against which they nestled; and spiritually warmed by the intimate urgencies they conveyed as mothers looked out of them at their sons who were far from home, or lovers used them to steal secret glances at each other. The inevitable accidents of amateur photography became part of portraiture’s poignancy—the random details, slight blurs and fleeting expressions becoming, in Barthes’s words, punctums to pierce the heart.

But on the other hand photography also represented the public to itself. As Benjamin pointed out, in the nineteenth century urban crowds not only came to dominate the social landscape, but also to demand that they themselves be portrayed, just “as the patrons did in the paintings of the Middle Ages.” . Benjamin recognised that in the twentieth century “mass movements, including war, constitute a form of human behaviour which particularly favours mechanical equipment”. In the age of mass reproduction the masses best reproduced themselves through photography and film. Countless carefully orchestrated revolutions, rallies and sporting events since have confirmed his observation. Our experience of urban space has been slowly re-engineered by photography and film, and we are all now well used to imagining ourselves as civic actors, visible to ourselves every day in the crowds on the street.

Photography was therefore intractably intertwined with the social, architectural and technological changes which produced our modern conceptions of private and public relations, and domestic and civic spaces. In this context Anne Zahalka’s photographic work can be read as a response to recent changes in these fundamental categories of modernity.

Zahalka first began to work with portraiture in the 1987 series Resemblance, which were based on Dutch genre paintings. The delight audiences experienced in the elegant luxury of these large chromogenic prints, and their satisfying recognition of the art historical citations encoded into the images, perhaps masked what was most interesting about the works—the challenge they presented to our current conventions of photographic portraiture. Taking photographs which were intended to function, at least on one level, as ‘real’ portraits of contemporary people, but within a post modern quotational style referring to a painting genre which had been functionally redundant but aesthetically valorised for four centuries, stretched the assumptions underpinning our conventions of candid portraiture. But by jettisoning all of the casual punctums of the candid portrait in favour of cold generic citation Zahalka was potentially doing more than merely glibly tweaking portraiture’s re-conventionalised stylistics. Perhaps she was also engaged in a full blown documentary project, a social taxonomy of her historical period which, like August Sander’s Men of the Twentieth Century, choose its format and style to fully embody the temper of the times.

Side by side with her interest in portraiture Zahalka also pursued an examination of urban geography which she also regarded as a set of received spatial and iconic conventions to be parodied and pastiched. For instance in her Bondi: Playground of the Pacific 1989 series the famous beach was reduced to a painted backdrop for a staged re-enactment of various tableaus of multicultural nationhood. And in an earlier, charming series of straight photographs, precise points of view were chosen to deconstruct Centrepoint Tower’s iconic eminence over Sydney by, for instance, photographing it so that it appeared to be just another chimney sprouting from the roof of a suburban factory.

Both these long standing interests have culminated in two recent series of large backlit transparencies. The Open House 1995 series are portrait tableau vivants staged by members of Sydney’s artistic beau monde within their authentic domestic environments. Fortresses and Frontiers 1993 are views taken in a recognisable Sydney, but of strangely redolent, heterotopic spaces. In some of these views various figures—everything from zoo animals to office workers—appear in a kind of purposeful but suspended pose.

The tableaus of the Open House series allow a kind of visual anthropology of some of Sydney’s domestic spaces. The meticulous art direction of the images, and the attention to the clothes, pose and gesture of the sitters, invites objective scrutiny. But on each of these carefully prepared stages a scene of slight, ambiguous domestic tension is also being enacted. These repeated domestic scenarios tell a story about the fundamental apartness of people, their ‘public’ selfconsciousness even within the bosom of the private. Zahalka’s living room inhabitants submit themselves to self display in the same way we all unconsciously ‘gather ourself’ the moment we step outside our front door. They are as aware of the other people around them, but as unresponsive, as people forced to share a seat on the bus.

In Fortresses and Frontiers Zahalka has set up a series of ironic visual relationships within each urban space. For instance in one image a lonely giraffe in the middle of a bare enclosure at Taronga Park Zoo looks out over the Harbour at the distant capitalist spires of Sydney. In another, a similarly lonely salary man carries his briefcase across a concrete walkway towards the same spires, now turned sulphurically brazen by the setting sun. In a third image a homeless man sits and waits for the evening tennis players from the brightly lit courts in the background to go home, before settling down for the night in a bizarre, cave-like, moulded concrete park shelter. (At Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery this image was hung next to another zoo image of several mountain goats resting on top of a similar concrete.)

In these deliberately ironic juxtapositions Zahalka isn’t revealing anything to us which isn’t already known and acknowledged by the city itself. Everybody has always known that the city is a ‘human zoo’, Zahalka is simply declaring what the city explicitly states on its own behalf every day. However by using these ‘concrete jungle’ cliches, Zahalka has managed to flatter the city into declaring its own implicit boundaries between the public and the private.

To be homeless in the city is to virtually cease to exist, so the two tennis players ignore the homeless man as they walk home after their game. He is a nocturnal, nomadic ‘urban caveman’, waiting in the shadows until it is late enough for the park, and his rustic shelter, to invert their designated function and become his private space. The potentially threatening indeterminacy of city space is also present in images such as the one of children playing on some bright, new, council playground equipment. But the children are playing at night, they have strayed outside their designated temporal zone in the city’s strict diurnal timetable, and a threatening shadow is phallically casting itself towards them. Fortresses and Frontiers documents the shifting physical and temporal boundaries of the city, and the dissolution into each other of the categories of public and private

For Zahalka the fluorescent light boxes on which her large transparencies are mounted refer to the preferred display technology of upmarket advertising, most commonly seen in airport concourses. Photography, film and TV have produced the airport as the key symbol of contemporary de-spatialisation—an affectless, shadowless interzone where will and autonomy are drained and subjectivity itself seems threatened. Airport light box ads for mobile phones, digital watches and other re-assuring accoutrements have a similar ambience to Zahalka’s work—they are declarative, yet inert.

Her light boxes produce quite a different effect to the grand ‘epic of the everyday’ scenes of Jeff Wall. There is no real sense of psychological or phenomenological experience in her images, and no sense of time—no sense of a moment on the verge of either explosion or implosion, as in Wall. Zahalka’s images are deliberately assembled with an art director’s imperative to leave nothing to chance, to leave no potentially disruptive visual excess or scenographic residue. All of her photographs are resolutely expository. They are lit and considered from corner to corner and edge to edge, and evenly irradiate refrigerated light. Even when atmospheric moods are employed, as in some of the Fortresses and Frontiers series, the lighting effects are so deliberately emplaced, and conform to such a corporate vision throughout the series, that they immediately declare themselves before the viewers eyes. All of this gives her images a curious inertness, despite their monumental visual exertions.

The two tennis players walking along the pathway in the background of the homeless man image from Fortresses and Frontiers are friends of the artist conscripted to play the part. But in a complete reversal of the ethic of the street photograph the camera doesn’t instantaneously capture them in mid stride, rather they are photographed standing in the attitude of walking—one foot held suspended, the tennis racket clenched at a particular angle—waiting patiently for the exposure to finish. But in their frozen movement they are not absorbed into the moment either, they are not like those figures seen in nineteenth century city views eternally poised getting their shoes shined. Time has not accreted around their stillness because Zahalka’s figures are already drained of blood and subjectivity.

This reverses the usual relationship between city and citizen. The citizen becomes the scenographic cut out against which the city acts itself out. It is the city which glows and shines, pulses and beckons. Her characters do not even serve the emblematic role of the figures conventionally found in the foreground of picturesque landscapes, they are not there to draw the viewer into the scene, but to confirm an unbridgeable abyss between the new imagistic virtual space of the city and the phenomenological space of the viewer.

Similarly, in the staged tableaus of Open House, the poses are directed to such an excruciating pitch, and held in such a deliberate way by her sitters, as to be neither ‘people posing for their portrait’, nor ‘people acting out a part’. The lighting is arranged to evenly illuminate every surface, every nook and cranny of the room, so the sitters almost become extensions of their furniture, materially continuous with their possessions. The clutter of each house is art directed to within an inch of its life, doing double duty as contemporary clutter, and second degree signifiers of social meaning á la Dutch portraiture. But in contrast to Dutch painting, in these light boxes there is no sumptuous thickness of paint for the ‘thingness’ of their possessions to grow into, no implacably ineffable expressions caught in a few enigmatic brush strokes and presented to our endless curiosity. Instead, brutally irradiated by fluorescent light, the domestic tableaus become almost forensically explicit. As in Fortresses and Frontiers the tableaus are not acted out, but instead enacted in a curiously constricted way.

Zahalka has cited TV sit coms as a point of reference for these works. And those ‘personalities’—actor/character hybrids who live out their lives in three-walled rooms, repeating the same hyperdomestic patterns under the shadowless, public glare of TV lights—could be the result of today’s dispersed, atomised publics demanding that they themselves be portrayed, just as the masses in modernity were, and the patrons of the Middle Ages before them. But Zahalka herself has largely abandoned even the sit com’s vestigial desire to represent particular ‘people’, and instead concentrates on contemporary ‘inhabitation’, where there is little to distinguish between being at home or being out on the street.

Martyn Jolly

Martyn Jolly is an artist, academic and writer and is Head of Photomedia at the ANU Canberra School of Art.

Martyn Jolly

Writing and Photography

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Reusing historic photographs in contemporary Australian photography