National Gallery of Victoria talk during ‘Good Looking’, exhibition curated by Kate Rhodes

When I was thinking about what to say tonight I thought I would start with the distinctive aspect of this exhibition — how stylistically and historically diverse the photographs are. The curator has had the entire collection of the NGV to dive into at will to extract and re-combine photographs under her broad overarching theme of narrative fiction. She’s able to do this virtuoso piece of orchestration with a fair amount of confidence that because of the nature of the medium the images, although diverse, will kind of hang together in their new semantic configuration because they all, ultimately, have some grounding in reality. For the purposes of tonight, let’s call the NGV collection an archive, although it’s a very particular kind of archive having been carefully curated, selected and vetted to suit the purposes of an art museum.

Of course archives are absolutely fundamental to photography. I think it was Rosalind Krauss who, in the 1980s, said that the central artefact to photography wasn’t the camera but the filing cabinet. (If she was writing today she might add a third artefact, the scanner) The logic of the archive drives the work of creative photographers. We often remind me of bureaucrats, giving ourselves assignments to produce what we like to call ‘bodies of work’ — twelve identical photographs of this, 24 identical photographs of that — which we administer into an archive hung in a row along the wall or stored in a solander box. The public coming to contemporary photography exhibitions becomes like an archivist, comparing the different iterations of the same image, and finding pleasure in contrasting the individualities of each photograph to the generalities and commonalities running through the whole series, which were laid down by the photographer’s initial archival ‘self-assignment’.

Archives also follow the same fundamental law of photography as the individual photograph, that is that the older it is the more interesting it is. Even the most banal photographs taken for the most prosaic purposes become mysterious and evocative when there origins get lost in time. Photographers and curators have used this capacity to construct their own new archives. For instance Thomas Walther, the well-known international collector of avant-garde photography, also assembled a collection of anonymous vernacular photographs from flea markets, these snaps formally look like avant-garde photographs but they have the added dimension of the absence of the photographer’s original motivation, which the viewer can now fill with their own speculation. This collection, now re-authorised by the authority of the connoisseur’s eye, was exhibited as Other Pictures at the MCA in 2002. We might think of Patrick Pound’s installation The Memory Room at the CCP in 2002 as another example of an artist using the mystery of the cast adrift photograph.

But this effect of the evocative mystery of the historically dislocated photograph is exponentially increased when an entire archive is cast adrift across time. In an archive the original motivation to lay down the images in an ordered form is obviously stronger and more defined than the ephemeral evanescent impulse to simply click a shutter, so the archive becomes more mysterious when, through the passage of time, we lose touch with that original motivation. For instance the photographer Rozalind Drummond found an archive of WW11 photographs in an East Berlin junk shop. The lost family connections between the photographs, and the silenced exchange of affiliative looks between the images, amplifies the power of the whole archive beyond any of the single photographs. Like virtually photographer I know Rozalind brought this collection because she thought it was important, it had to be rescues. But now she doesn’t quite know what to do with it. Everything we as artists can think of to do to these archives eventually just seems to be somehow redundant.

Archives also allow photographs to have access to another dimension which is usually denied to the individual photograph — the monumental. A single image which is blown up to monumental size is very often just that — over blown. The decisive moment still retains it’s temporal contingency, its urgency, no matter what scale it is. It never seems to be able to get out of the flow of history. But if an archive of individual moments is spatialized into a grid, photography can become monumentalised. For instance in her recent Adelaide Biennale anti-war protest piece Not in My Name, Silvia Velez downloaded thousands of images from the internet of the futile protests around the world against the inevitable George Bush invasion of Iraq. After abstracting them and printing them on Post-it notes, the most ephemeral of ‘reminders’, she monumentalised them on a wall, mimicking the inscriptions of martyr’s names on so many marble monuments.

The classic essays on the archive in photography is Alan Sekula’s “Reading an Archive” from 1983. In that he refers to an archive as a ‘clearing house of meaning’. Photographs are made available to be separated from the specificity of their original use when they are deposited in an archive. When they are plucked from an archive and re-used and re-contextualised they are given different meanings. This is how historians, book editors and curators use archives. A semantics is given to the archival images which they didn’t have when they lay dormant and ordered in their original grid. This is what Kate has done in curating this show, out of the dormant taxonomy of the art-historical archive — the artist’s name, or their period (19^th century views, 1990s art photograph, etc) — a new semantic enunciation is made: narrative fictions.

For a long time, as well as historians and curators, artists have been fascinated by archives and have used them as ‘clearing houses of meaning’. In Europe one immediately thinks of Gerhard Richter or Christian Boltanski, where specific archives get re-configured as intimations of mortality and the ineluctable processes of time and history. Closer to home, artists like Elizabeth Gertsakis have for a long time been re-narrativising archives, both personal and public, to make statements, amongst other things, about identity.

But without wanting to make too big a deal out of it, I think there has been a slight turn recently in this re-use of archives. I think that not only has there has been a general increase in interest in archives from artists. And I think that there has been turn away from seeing the archive as a clearing house of meaning, a resource from which new enunciations can be made, towards wantinh keeping the archive’s mysterious integrity intact, as discreet and ineffable.

Some people might have gone to Ross Gibson’s performance of Life after Wartime at ACMI Sunday before last. This piece concerns itself with an archive of post war Sydney police images Ross has been working on for six years. I’m not sure what he did in Melbourne, but in the performance I saw at the Sydney Opera House he and his collaborator Kate Richards sat at midi-keyboards at laptops. But instead of being connected to audio samples the keys were connected to strings of images. The images they brought from the archive were combined with haikus by Ross, and this was accompanied by a live soundtrack by the Necks, who are known for their ominous soundtracks to movies such as The Boys. The texts and images generate open-ended non-specific narratives around a couple of characters and locations in a ‘port city’.

Now this idea of ‘playing’ the archive as if it was some giant pipe-organ might not seem to be too different from a curator who plays the tune of ‘narrative fiction’ on the pipe organ of the NGV collection. But there was an element of automation in the way the ‘story engine’ generates the loose narrative, and certainly Ross is keen on preserving the integrity, the artefactuality of the original archive.

Whenever I work with historical fragments, I try to develop an aesthetic response appropriate to the form and mood of the source material. This is one way to know what the evidence is trying to tell the future. I must not impose some pre-determined genre on these fragments. I need to remember that the evidence was created by people and systems of reality independent of myself. 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….” ‘Negative Truth: A new approach to photographic storytelling’, Photofile 58, December 1999

One could argue that, contrary to his claim, Ross has imposed “some pre-determined genre” on the fragments, that of the psychological detective story. But nonetheless, in seeking to be a voodoo spiritualist ‘medium’ for the archive Ross is trying to make contact with it as a whole.That is the distinction I want to make here. Artists are beginning to work with archives on their own terms rather than to make their own enunciations from them.

(As an aside, it is interesting to compare this work with the two opening ACMI exhibitions Ross curated, Remembrance and the Moving Image. These exhibitions, you will remember, were filled with slowed down, granular, archival film footage. But, as always, the forward thrust of film footage, even when turned against itself into an entropic downward spiral, still doesn’t approach the mute enigma, and the feeling of narrative potential, which the still archival image gives.)

Another example of this turn to a concern with communing with the personality of an archive as a whole is a recent series by the Sydney photographer Anne Ferran who shows in Melbourne at Sutton. The series 1-38 comprises 38 images which are details from each of 38 photographs which were taken of female psychiatric patients in 1948. Looking at Ferran’s earlier work we can see why she would be fascinated by this archive, everything about it is lost, the name of the original photographer, the purpose of the photographs, the names of the women, and their disease. The fragments, which are of the hands and torso of the women, are impassively displayed in a strip around the wall. So the structure, personality or mood of the original archive is preserved. Her cropping simply amplifies the inchoate choreography of distress which the inmates exhibited.

The greatest archive we have is our own negative-files. Sometimes the processes of history can turn a few sheets of negatives into an acute and self-contained archive with it’s own ‘mood, logic or occult spirit’, to use Ross Gibson’s words. The Canberra photographer Denise Ferris lived in South Africa for a short while in 1979 and 1980, because of a doomed love affair. Whilst there, she photographed in a poor part of Cape Town called District Six. District Six was bulldozed just before the end of Apartheid. All the remains now is a museum, and the fading memories of those who used to live there. Asked to return to South Africa recently for an exhibition, Denise looked at her District Six negatives for the first time in almost a quarter of a century. Left high and dry by the onward current of her own life, each negative seemed as important as the other. As in Anne Ferran’s work, 1-38, what basis did she have to discriminate between them? She printed them all up onto thin sheets of paper and hung them like falling leaves in two ovoid shapes. The shapes were repeated by the thin strips of prints she made from her original notes on the edge of the negative sheets. People from District Six welcomed the exhibition enthusiastically, and the museum will collect a set. But the archive remains as remote from Denise as ever, she met none of her original subjects while she was there.

Peter Robertson’s two recent exhibitions, Sharpies and Beyond Xanadu also record this uncanny process of what was at one point simply a personal collection becoming, through a process of return and re-nomination, an historical archive. By simply reprinting and renominating some of the photographs in his own photo albums, as well as the photo albums of his friends, under the rubric ‘Sharpies’, or by exhibiting his fashion model tear-sheets and model tests, he alloys together different authorities and moods in the archive: autobiography, nostalgia and urban anthropolgy.

A similar example comes from Brenda L Croft. In the series Man About Town she simply reproduced every Kodachrome slide in the yellow box she found amongst her father’s possessions after he died. Croft did not insert herself into the photographs, she did not make them into ‘art’. It 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 in the 1950s 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.

I’ve been interested in archives for virtually all my career. Recently I’ve also been interested in spirit photographs (not taking them, but researching them). I was amongst the collection of the Society for Psychical Research in the Cambridge University Library researching the 1920s spirit photographer Ada Deane when three large albums came up with 3000 spirit photographs. I had the same reaction I think many people have when they come across a lost archive: I’ve just got to get this out. What to do. I guess I steered a course between the two tendencies I have tried to identify this evening. I wanted to preserve the archive’s integrity, to ‘séance up’ it’s heart and soul, but I also wanted to make art. So I homed in on details of expression and body language.

In a previous body of work, Nineteen Sixty-Three: News and Information, 1997, I used a flatbed scanner to digitally excoriate the original image to produce a high resolution computer file, which was then cropped, enlarged, enhanced and printed. Working in the Australian Archives I made my way through 3000 propaganda photographs taken by the Australian News and Information Bureau during 1963. The metaphor I had in my mind was an excavation of the original mise en scene for photographic details to be isolated like archaeological artefacts. In both cases I gravitated not towards the main subject of the image, but towards its background or its incidental detail. I avoided faces and the centripetal force of the eyes, and instead drifted towards body language—the tensing of muscles or wricking of limbs; and the wearing of clothes—the gaping of lapels, hitching of cuffs and rucking of crotches. I was also interested in textures and material surfaces, as well as the re-vectorisation of the photograph’s original spatial composition that re-cropping allowed.

Review of ‘At Home in Australia’ and ‘In a New Light’

Review of ‘At Home in Australia’, National Gallery of Australia publication by Peter Conrad, and ‘In a New Light’, National Library of Australia exhibition, Art Monthly Australia, December, 2003, pp 5 — 10

At Home in Australia, written by Peter Conrad, Canberra and London, National Gallery of Australia and Thames & Hudson, 2003

In a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s – 1930s, curated by Helen Ennis, National Library of Australia, until January 16, 2004.

Gael Newton has conducted perhaps the boldest and most extraordinary experiment in Australian photography for a long time. Rather than writing her own sober and authoritative account of the Australian photographs in her collection at the National Gallery of Australia, or mounting a blockbuster exhibition showcasing their diverse styles and qualities, she instead invited confirmed expatriate Peter Conrad to make a two week excursion to Australia to look at all the photographs and write a 256 page 70,000 word book about Australia through them.

Conrad is the youngest and last in the line of Australia’s celebrity expatriate writers — Clive James, Peter Porter, Germaine Greer, et al — who have made it in the UK, but have still retained a fraught relationship with the country of their origin, making re-appearances from time to time, as if to deal with unfinished business, and then disappearing again.

Conrad’s text begins with the primal origin du monde which has been the elusive font for so many recent accounts of photography: the box of snapshots his parents kept on the family mantelpiece. Conrad left that maternal hearth, and Australia, for good in 1968, escaping conscription on a Rhodes Scholarship. He left home for what he regarded as a return to his cultural centre in England in an adolescent high dudgeon at the banality, boredom and brutalisation Australia had subjected him to. And when his parents eventually died, their box of photographs was one of the few objects which he transferred to his own mantelpiece in England. But, inevitably, these few images, which went back only one or two generations, weren’t up to the task of reconciling the doubly-deracinated Conrad to his natal home. He therefore adopts the National Gallery collection as a surrogate family album, and declares an intention to write about them as if the were our collective family album since, after all, “remembering, which involves making mental photographs, is a collusive, contagious activity, because our memory is interchangable.” And indeed Conrad has been fearless in weaving much of himself and a lot of his own memories through the photographs. The reader is encouraged to empathise with Conrad’s homesickness and dislocation through the mnemonic vignettes he extrapolates out of the photographs. And he has such a facility with the language that this is not hard to do, even when the occasional spleen he vents on those who were obviously his main childhood tormenters — young ocker men and their girlfriends — has tipped his writing over into petulant displays of colonialist disdain. For instance he describes Peter Elliston’s, admittedly complacent and smug, sunbathing Couple on Platform at Giles Baths, Coogee, as ‘cave dwellers’ who have ‘not yet learnt to walk upright’, at home amongst a sprawl of non-biodegradable filth and pollution

Conrad built his reputation on expansive, encyclopaedic books such as his account of the twentieth century, Modern Times, Modern Places, which like many other popular history books at the moment paints a larger picture through piling up telling anecdote upon telling anecdote, significant detail upon significant detail. And in looking at the photographs in the National Gallery’s collection it is the details in the images, the unnoticed ‘punctums’ from which he can spin a felicitous turn of phrase or an intriguing speculation, that he homes in on again and again. His eye for the detail is acute. So acute that often the incidental details his hungry eye had grasped as he was going through the original prints barely survive their reproduction at much smaller scale in the book. For instance most people wouldn’t have even noticed the front wheel and fender of a car reflected in the window of one of the run-down buildings which the fashion photographer Henry Talbot had used to recreate colonial Australia for a Wool Board Fashion shoot. But Conrad did, and in his fantasy the 1970s fashion models will leap into this reflection and use it to propel themselves back to the future.

The hundreds of details such as this from which Conrad likes to launch his writing are primarily literary ones, visual puns and rhymes, disjunctions of scale, and eccentricities of pose. Hence photographers who hitherto have been relatively minor members of the canon, like Eric Thake who loved discovering linguistic tropes in the real world, figure prominently in Conrad’s book, whereas well and truly canonised Australian art photographers, such as Bill Henson and Carol Jerrems, with their self-enclosed theatres of private desire, don’t appear at all.

There is no doubt that Conrad is a virtuoso writer, his technique in this book is to riff off each photograph he has selected — the two hundred that are reproduced and as many more that are not reproduced — and to run these riffs together into improvised passages that move roughly chronologically through several different nation-defining themes, such as ‘Tree People’, ‘National Characters’ and ‘Remaking the Map’. Occasionally, experiencing the dexterity with which he works these riffs together is exhilarating and refreshing, particularly towards the beginning of each theme. For instance the 1970s Henry Talbot Wool Board fashion image occurs in the middle of a progression of extrapolations on Australian’s attitude towards ‘display’, which Conrad had introduced with what had previously been a thoroughly inconsequential Pictorialist image from 1928 of a white egret preening itself, for which the photographer had chosen the anthropomorphic title Mannequin.

But the longer he continues his verbal glissades, the more the connections between the images tend to become attenuated and the prose indulgent. Conrad’s reputation is as a polymath, his books and his haute journalism cover an enormous amount of territory with ease. Inevitably a certain necessary glibness goes with the job for all polymaths. Nonetheless, there are many extraordinarily glib statements in this book that quickly begin to rankle with the Australian reader. For instance, spinning out from a 1973 Eric Thake photograph of a poster advertising the Guru Maharaj-ji peeling off a building site hoarding he says, “new countries are touchingly innocent, and vulnerable to such confidence trickters”. Oh yeah, and old countries aren’t? Trying telling that to the high-placed Brits like Fergie and Cherie Blair who got involved with our own home-grown slimming-tea conman Peter Foster. Further on he talks of the “happy-go-lucky recruits who volunteered to be slaughtered at Gallipoli”. Well being slaughtered at Gallipoli wasn’t exactly in the job description when the Australians responded to recruitment campaigns to join the AIF and defend the empire. In reading the book the cumulative effect of these throw-away lines — the feeling that one is being patronised — is mitigated somewhat by the fascinating historical tit-bits Conrad has also salted into his text, often supplied by the research of Gael Newton. For instance he mentions what must have been a fascinating exchange of letters, larded with classical allusions, between Norman Lindsay and the young Max Dupain in 1935. I’d also like to know more about the contribution Axel Poignant’s photographs of Arnhem Land Aboriginal ceremonies made to the London choreography of The Rite of Spring in 1962. But there are no references for these facts, and not even a bibliography for the work of other writers who Conrad has quoted. For a major publication by a major institution this is bordering on insulting, and doesn’t dispose the reader kindly to the tone of Conrad’s text as it continues its nimble pirouetting from photograph to photograph across the pages.

If At Home in Australia is the nation’s family album then the story Conrad wants it to tell is that of a settler nation, attempting and failing, attempting and failing again, and finally attempting and succeeding, to make a home for itself in an alien land. And it is essentially the limitations of that story which leads to the book’s central problem. Conrad’s colonialist narrative seems to have been developmentally arrested in the 1960s, when he left Australia. He completed his growing-up in England, and the historical frameworks and preconceptions about Australia he has brought back with him seem to still belong to the conflicted adolescent rather than the mature man. His main protagonists are settlers and the land, battling it out in a kind of Old Testament agony to engender the nation. But throughout his narrative the settlers largely remain cast as pioneers, and the land remains distant and obstinate. Certainly, a lot of attention is paid to Aboriginal perceptions of the land, but they are used as the mystical counterpoint to this struggle. Speaking of the nature shown in the 1958 Hal Missingham photograph Child’s grave, Broome, WA, Conrad says in another one of his perhaps too glib lines: “White Australians die into it, whereas Aboriginal people are born from it.” Notions like this might be serviceable when used with the nineteenth century and early twentieth century photographs in the book, which are what Conrad is best at working from, but they can’t carry him into the present. What about urban Aborigines, or those from the stolen generation, or the spiritual belonging white Australians now instinctively feel for their land?

The writers he likes quoting the most are people like Patrick White. Recent writers who we might have thought had taken us well beyond such dichotomies —Paul Carter, Ken Inglis, Greg Denning, Inga Glendinnen, Peter Read and so on — aren’t mentioned at all. Even old faithfuls like David Malouf, who launched the book, are used surprisingly sparingly, and his 1998 Boyer lectures about the Australian character, A Spirit of Play, are mentioned only in order to re-use the title. Of course Conrad liberally uses plenty of other contemporary references, but they are often events like the opening ceremony from the 2000 Olympics or the film Priscilla Queen of the Desert, which attract Conrad precisely because they recast Australia’s familiar colonialist imagery

When it comes to describing contemporary Australia, Conrad is less assured, hesitating to describe anything more than the potentiality for the country to finally become reconciled to its geography, its history and its land. In attempting to update the Australian colonial characteristics which he has previously described with such facility, he is reduced to identifying things like our hedonism as being somehow our replacement twenty-first century national characteristic. He asks: “Is Australia, which began as Britain’s cloaca, now the pudenda of the envious earth?” Surely Australia has come further in a century and a half of photography than a short swing on a perineal pendulum down under?

To illustrate Australia’s supposed national hedonism he had described, but hadn’t illustrated, some William Yang photographs of Sydney parties and the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. But if he had gone further into Yang’s work, for instance into the images from some of his famous slide performances, he would have discovered an important south/north trajectory, from Sydney, through the Queensland cane fields, to China, which counteracts the east/west trajectory of the settler explorers.

To be fair to Conrad his text was necessarily constrained by the images in the National Gallery collection. Numbering eight thousand or so, the photographs in the collection he has adopted as a surrogate ‘family album’ have all been carefully and self-consciously scrutinised and vetted before acquisition. The collection dates from the 1970s, when it began with James Mollison purchasing large quantities of the newly hot medium of art photography with sponsorship from the tobacco company Phillip Morris. Since then a succession of art-museum curators have diligently purchased a good representation of work from the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, but have purchased contemporary work from the eighties, nineties and now more sparingly and erratically. These strengths and weaknesses undoubtedly had their effect on each of the book’s thematic chapters, which become less assured the closer they get to the present moment in our nation.

The National Library of Australia’s collection, on the other hand, numbers over 600,000 photographs, and is still growing apace. They have been collected in a much more wholesale manner for over fifty years, not for arts sake, but to illustrate the life and development of the country. The experienced curator Helen Ennis has selected the first of two major exhibitions from this democratic depository. Ironically it is the Library exhibition, called In a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s – 1930s, with its teeming and complex display of photographs of different sizes and techniques as well as albums, panoramas and stereographs, which foregrounds the auratic material qualities of the images themselves; while the Gallery project has not exhibited the original images at all, but has instead conscripted them to be homogenously embedded in a fast flowing text.

Like Conrad’s book, this is also an exhibition to pore over, straining to reach into the images, to find and grasp the elusive detail. Conrad searched for recognition, empathy, familiarity, and personal reconciliation in the photographs he chose. The National Library exhibition, however, is not so demanding of its photographs. It lets them be obdurate, obstinate, and disruptive. Ennis has thought of the photographs as nodes of residual historical energy, working both backward and forwards in time. This approach suits a collection that is already so vast that it is a humanly unknowable terrain. It is only when cutated from a collection this big that an exhibition can let a viewer stumble upon a small image that almost takes the breath away in its otherworldy strangeness. For instance a tiny snap taken by James P Campbell at Gallipoli of three diggers looking like the trapped citizens of Pompeii as they sheltered from bursting shells, lies waiting to surprise the viewer like a piece of twisted shrapnel.

Other photographs are also included to deliberately confound the present and the past. Several medical photographs taken by Dr Gabriel at the Gundagai Hospital in the early 1900s are included in the exhibition. The Library had previously published Gabriel’s Gundagai photographs in a handsome volume of 1976. But that book, it now turns out, was a sanitised reflection of the original collection of glass plates. Because it saw itself as a social history of the townspeople, and an account of Dr Gabriel as an auteurial photographer, it hadn’t included many of the photographs he had taken purely for medical reasons. But now in this exhibition we see an aboriginal child with distended belly held up like a puppet for the camera by a starched nurse. We are affronted by the jagged angularity of the ratcheted bed-frame the child is propped on, and the pincer grip of the nurse. But this was originally a thoroughly benign photograph taken, presumably, for the best of reasons of an Aboriginal child receiving the very latest in scientific medical care. Why does it now disturb us so shockingly? Other photographs of Aborigines in the exhibition, say the formal heads of the ‘last’ Tasmanian Aborigines, Truganini and William Lanney, were far crueller at the time because they sarcastically produced their subjects as celebrities in order to be a public valedictory for the dying race. Yet now these images have shrugged off the photographer’s original sarcasm to preserve an enduring nobility. What had happened before, and what has happened since, to invert the values in these photographs?

Ennis’s approach to photographs is an affective one. Rather than forensically plumbing a photograph for clues, she lets its totality as an object work an affect on her, which she then attempts to know. Sometimes this technique makes the text in the exhibition seem over-determined, but it does work when it leads to the assemblage of clusters of images: aboriginal portraits and pioneer portraits, war reconnaissance photographs and soldier’s scrapbooks, for instance, which work off each other in a mute counterpoint.

At a photography forum a few months back a lad got up and told us all in an slightly aggrieved tone that even after doing a course in photography he still didn’t know very much about the development of Australian photography, why hadn’t anybody ever written a history of Australian photography? A panel member helpfully explained that in fact there had been several attempts, one published in 1955 by Jack Cato, and two still serviceable histories published in 1988 by Gael Newton and Anne Marie Willis, which should be in any college library. But, I silently calculated to myself, these books were last available in the shops fifteen years ago, when this enthusiastic young photographer was still probably a toddler.

Since then our major collecting institutions have produced several exhibitions and catalogues cutting a broad historical slice through some aspect or other of Australian photography. For instance, last year the National Gallery of Victoria published a survey of their collection of Australian photography, called 2^nd Sight. Those institutions have also managed to squeeze out a trickle of monographs on contemporary and historical Australian photographers. But there has been nothing like the slew of heroic histories that continue to come out of the United States, and nothing giving readers a sense of the full historical scope or national sweep of Australia’s photography collections. But at the same time, never has the scholarship of photography been more lively, albeit dispersed across many disciplines. People right across the country, in cultural studies, anthropology, English, and history, as well as the fine arts, are working in a variety of archives — big and small, public and private — and are amazed by what they are turning up. Some Australian scholars are also writing with élan and vigour on the biggies of photo-history globally — Catherine Rogers on Fox Talbot and Catherine de Lorenzo on Nadar for instance. Last year the Edinburgh-based editor of the dour academic journal History of Photography asked me why he kept getting so many manuscripts from Australians. Where else can they send them? I answered.

We need some histories of Australian photography to update the existing ones. But it is now clear that they can’t be a procession of the names of photographic auteurs and their styles, and they can’t be a social or political history simply told with the aid of photographs. Our photographic heritage is not simply the work of those who self-consciously defined themselves as photographers, and it is not simply those photographs that belong to recognisable styles, nor is it simply those images that happen to verify other historical narratives. Our photographic heritage has its own ontology, it is deposited in archives big and small across the nation: collecting institutions like the State and National Libraries and Galleries, middens of specialist photographs tucked away in filing cabinets everywhere, the negative-files of individual photographers and, yes, also all those shoe-boxes on mantelpieces. We are well used to the idea of ‘accessing’ these archives, delving into them to find the images we want for whatever our purpose is. Now we now also need to find ways of writing these archives, writing them in their own obduracy and specificity. Both the National Library and the National Gallery have made bold moves in this direction.

Martyn Jolly

Martyn Jolly is a photographer and a writer about photography. He is head of Photomedia at the ANU School of Art.

Artist’s Statement, ‘Nineteen Sixty-Three: News and Information’, Photofile, No. 52.

Nineteen Sixty-Three: News and Information

The project:

This project is a development on my recent photographic installations in which I examined my relationship to Australia’s past by copying small sections out of reproduced photographs. In Wonderful Pictures, for instance, I photographed the upward curving pages of opened Australiana picture books to capture poignant details in thin slices of focus emerging out of blur. That work was exhibited in whole or in part from 1994 to 1996, and a selection of images was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia.

I see ‘Nineteen Sixty-Three’ as an idiosyncratic visual archaeology of Australia’s recent past. I have worked in the Australian Archives amongst a series of some 100,000 photographs which came from the Australian News and Information Bureau. From this vast visual loam I have taken a ‘core sample’ from the period around 1963.1 have chosen this date because it marks the time when my personal organic memory began to intermingle with my mediatised historical memory.

I have sifted through these several thousand images looking for sharp visual shards from the past. I have then used a high resolution scanner to isolate and enlarge the selected details from these photographs, which have been visually enhanced in a computer and outputted by a high resolution ink jet printer. I have concentrated on gesture, unconscious body language, the folds and creases of clothing, the juxtaposition of patterns and surfaces, the orientation of objects within architectural space, and so on.

I have produced one hundred images each of 200mm by 250mm. They are printed onto smooth rag paper and mounted, trimmed to the edge, onto fibrous blocks of rag board several centimetres thick. They will be installed in a loose grid in order to create subtle visual relationships between the images.

Background:

The Australian News and Information Bureau existed, in various forms, from the Second World War until very recently. It promoted Australia overseas and employed photographers and journalists to document aspects of ordinary Australian life, diplomatic receptions, and examples of Australia’s economic and cultural development. The photographs taken by Bureau photographers have been sorted, indexed and stored chronologically by the Australian Archives. Of the hundred thousand or so in the entire collection, several thousand cover 1963, the year in which I turned four years old, and the year from which my first personal memories—of kindergarten— come. Of course I can ‘remember’ back to a time before 1963, but before that date I must share in the collective memory of all Australians which is technologically retained in photographs and film. And after that date I am never quite sure where my own ‘organic’ memory of Australia ends and where my ‘prosthetic’ memory, which comes from the endless photographs, films and TV I have seen about the sixties, seventies and eighties, begins.

We are increasingly relying on photographs to give us a sense of our past. At one extreme they are turning up, monu-menially enlarged and etched into marble, on public monuments. At the other extreme the style of old Box Brownie snapshots or 8mm home movies is being used to advertise more and more products, from home loans to Vegemite. The humble snapshot is becoming increasingly valued within this collective mnemonic process at the expense of the ‘official’ portrait or view. Snapshots seem to be a more authentic, a more direct route to the heart of the past, with less chance for distortion by the power of public institutions. Ironically it is now public institutions, in the form of museums, corporations and advertising agencies, which are trading on the enduring and mesmerising fascination of the snapshot.

And that is what has prompted my fascination with ‘official’ photographs. The ones carefully preserved by their thousands in Canberra, stored in row upon row of acid-free boxes, are boring in the extreme. Although they are professionally composed and exposed on large format film, they have none of the immediate compulsion to look possessed by even the blurriest snapshot. They were taken not for love, but at the behest of a government policy to promote an ideological view of Australia which has long since fallen into disrepair. The people in them are slightly embarrassed, they have combed their hair and straightened their ties. They just want the photographer to finish his job and leave. But such is the power of the photograph that despite the awkwardness of the encounter some trace element of their personality and their time can still be distilled from the emulsion. The people photographed by Australian News and Information Bureau photographers were caught not ‘just being themselves’, as in the snapshot, but ‘being themselves vainly attempting to be a national cipher’. They are awkwardly suspended between the two and it is along this seam that I have attempted to mine for small nuggets of the past.

I do not want to correct ‘wrong’ images, rather, I wish to find evidence of bodily materiality within the overt message of the photograph, and to find fibres of memory in the skeins of history. I am driven by a kind of prurient fascination with these accidentally preserved, yet enigmatic fragments of time, space and bodily presence. To me these fragments are like stolen glances away from the official object of attention, furtive whisperings at the back of the class room. Or else they are like eccentric cinematic cut-away shots from the main drama of history.

Random notes on my practice:

My technique is a very particular one, I am not creating new images. I am not even modifying or manipulating existing images, or ironically recasting them and re-investing them with new meaning like a post modern appropriationist. My practice is a kind of hyper-curating. I am simply identifying and ‘framing’ fragments that 1 like, or which affect me. The task of the viewer is to join with me in mutual recognition.

The viewer needs to deploy particular skills in looking at the pictures in order to ‘get’ them by recognising what 1 have seen, because there are no obvious signs of beauty, crafted facture or compositional skill. In this sense I feel more allied to the picture editor of a newspaper than to the traditional artist. The picture editor regularly calls on the newspaper’s readers to deploy similar semiotic skills of discernment and pick up on the editorial spin given to news photographs by incidental details.

I have been guided in my hyper-curatorship by the twin pole-stars of scopophilia and prurience. I have tried to cultivate an almost libidinal desire to penetrate the emulsion and touch the flesh of the past. I feel allied in this libidinal quest, and in it being ultimately doomed to failure, to two movie characters: David Hemmings in Airtonioni’s Blow Up, who penetrated the photograph only to find the ultimate unknowability of chaotic film grain; and Harrison Ford in Blade Runner who was able to use digital enhancement to overcome the analogical resolution problems of film grain, but alas still did not find real memories, but artificially simulated ones. Like David Hemmings and Harrison Ford I, too, ultimately encountered the intractable resistance of the photographic surface. I too was left frustrated and unsatiated.

In all of my work I have always needed to avoid the twin demons of nostalgia and kitsch. Both haunt my work and need to be eradicated. 1 have used Photoshop to evacuate the images of any atmosphere. They become grainless ink images on paper—non-pannated and non-auratic. I am not interested in a nostalgic chumminess with the past, or an awe filled distance, I want a respectful familiarity.

The Photoshop cleansing has given them a surgical quality. This allows me to present these images as isolated shards or punctums from tlie past. In most cases I have deliberated decapitated figures to exclude the most mesmerising part of the image, the face and the eyes, this redirects attention to the incidental details. In one sense my work is not dissimilar to the American documentary film maker Ken Burns who, in his TV series The Civil War and The West, diegetically animated photographs by putting them on a moving rostrum under an animation camera an tracking and zooming over them to open them out into mini movies. However my details remain mute and enigmatic—like an archaeological fragment.

1 have also extinguished the native title of the original photographers. I know their names, but I have suppressed their auteurial claims. The normal explanatory caption, which

also anchors meaning, has also been expunged. The images have been winkled out of any exegetic carapace.

There are a few themes which run through the collection. One is the bodies of men. 1 think that the bodies of men are actually central to our visual culture- The business pages of any newspapers are filled with large scale pictures of blokes in suits. In part this show is an archaeology of blokeness. I believe that I have discovered that blokes occupied space differently in 1963.

Another thread is the traumatised toddler. Toddlerdom is where the individual is inducted into the collective. But in addition the toddler images are where the autobiographical significance of 1963 conies in, it is just possible that one of those toddlers could be me.

There are also images of a certain kind of sensuality and eroticism, which I have tried to find in unlikely places. The past is erotic.

MARTYN JOLLY is an artist and Head of Photomedia Workshop, Canberra School of Art.

All images, details Nineteen Sixty-Three: News and Information, 1997.

Nineteen Sixty-Three: News and Information was produced with the assistance of the Australia Council. A selection of the work was exhibited at the Australian Archives Gallery in Old Parliament House, Canberra, as a part of the Canberra Contemporary Art Space project. Archives ei the Everyday. Nineteen Sixty-Three:

News and Information will be presented at the RMTT Gallery Melbourne in March 1998 &attheACP, Sydney August 1998.