Tag Archives: Australian exhibitions

Staging Australia

Essay from: Focus: Australian Government Photographers.

National Archives of Australia, 2023. ISBN 978-1-922209-32-0

Can official photography be interesting? This might seem an odd question to ask, since clearly the National Archives of Australia thinks it can be – hence their exhibition Focus: Australian government photographers.

But this exhibition is swimming against the current of most other photography exhibitions these days. It is not about an urgent social or political cause. It is not devoted to the personal ‘vision’ of a particular photographer. It is not a competition, where anyone can have a go. It does not take us to exotic locations (perhaps it does sometimes) or dramatic events (perhaps it does sometimes), and it does not seek to uncover previously hidden truths (although perhaps, in the end, it does reveal some micro-secrets to us).

Instead, these are publicity photographs for the Australian Government, taken in the second half of the last century. Each one had a job to do on behalf of the government’s various departments, such as trade, immigration and foreign affairs. Each was to be used to promote our science and technology, to show off our industry, our infrastructure, our lifestyle. They were to be used to attract potential migrants with visions of a prosperous, youthful nation; to present to potential trading partners evidence of our cities as modern and safe, our countryside as vast and full of resources, our politicians as capable and trustworthy, and so on.

Such photographs are built on order and predictability, even repeatability. As the years progressed the technologies changed: from the large-format four-by-five-inch black and white sheet film used in the 1950s to the medium format film in both black-and-white and colour used from the mid-1960s, to the 35 mm slide film exclusively in colour used from the 1980s. But the content remained consistent: children, soldiers, scientists, mothers, factory workers, shoppers, sports people, wildlife and so on.

Over the decades the photographs grew into an archive that now numbers hundreds of thousands of images. More importantly, this archive was built systematically. Since 1939, when the Department of Information was first set up at the onset of the Second World War, every photographer entered every photograph they took into a logbook, with names, places and titles. Written in pencil or biro beside each entry was its series identification number and individual control symbol, which still track it in the online catalogue today. There is something beautiful about these creased and dog-eared logbooks as they have accumulated over the decades. The bindings change, the ink and handwriting change, but the system remains the same as the photographers’ entries range across Australia and its region. All of this is preserved in the National Archives’ digital catalogue and can be accessed by any user at a click.

The public accessibility of such a large, well-indexed picture archive has meant that it has already been extensively used by historians and researchers. It has already been supplementing our visual memory as a nation. But the original metadata, recorded by the photographers at various levels of detail as they went about their day-to-day jobs, has produced an enormous integrated dataset.

Of course, as a dataset, various algorithmic affordances are now offered. Archive users are now able to sort the hundreds of thousands of images, this way or that way. For example, they could mine the metadata geographically, displaying all the photographs recorded as being taken in a particular town. With AI working inside the image itself – for instance, on the facial coordinates of all the faces captured by the cameras over the decades – users could extract all the happy people, or all the sad people, for example. Individual photographs could be linked together. Users could pull out of the mix a string of people wearing bow ties, say, or those holding up signs. Or, for that matter, all the people wearing bow ties who are holding up signs. This is the potential remapping of the data space that all that patient work by those photographers has enabled. I can’t wait to be able to do that, and more, in the future. Finely honed, automatic algorithmic searches are one way of opening windows into such an enormous, sprawling, relatively homogenous archive.

But this exhibition has taken a different approach. The archive showcased here was built up by a succession of different photographers. Often their names aren’t even recorded in the catalogue, and in some cases their careers are little known. These photographers weren’t working for themselves; they were applying their skills, talents and personal visual styles to doing a job for this or that government department. They were public servants – public servants with cameras, notebooks and darkrooms. But by considering them as individuals and recognising their professional photography skills in their own right, rather than just as a service to the archive, we can take a fresh look at the images they produced, and at Australian photography as a whole.

Even though these photographers worked for the government, this exhibition has given them back their personalities, their skills, their enthusiasms. The research into the individual careers of the photographers takes us far beyond the single role of ‘government photographer’, and into every aspect of the history of Australian photography. Some, such as Neil Murray, started out as ‘street photographers’, taking photographs on spec of people dressed up for a day out shopping or out on the town. Many were migrants, like the Danish Mike Jensen or the British Eric Wadsworth. Others, such as Jim Fitzpatrick, had years of front-line experience for the newsreel organisation Cinesound, the Daily Telegraph and the RAAF, and as a result his photographs jump off the page. Some, such as Eric Wadsworth or Mervyn Bishop, were newspaper photographers. Many came through the photographic retail industry, from Kodak or Harringtons. Still others, such as John Crowther, began with technical training in chemistry and optics, or as darkroom printers, such as Barry Le Lievre.

From these different corners of Australian photography, all got jobs as government photographers. Recently, after a long period of denigration, the idea of ‘public servant’ has begun to be rehabilitated. We now realise we need them. It turns out that outsourcing to supposedly nimble consultants on short-term contracts cannot substitute for the systematic accumulation of collective knowledge and the long-term honing of individual expertise, particularly when activated by a collective sense of both the ‘public’ and ‘service’. Who knew.

Some could give Orwellian connotations to the names of the departments the photographers worked for, such as the Department of Information (1939–50), the Australian News and Information Bureau (1950–73), the Australian Information Service in the Department of Media (1973–87), the Australian Overseas Information Service (1987–94), the International Public Affairs Branch of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (1994–96) and the Trade Publicity Directorate. And yes, in some sense the people captured by the government photographers are turned into propaganda cyphers. The job of these photographers was literally to stage Australia for a presumed audience: potential overseas trading partners, potential migrants, potential departmental clients. So, yes, the people caught by their cameras are in some sense conscripted, probably without model releases or written permission, to ‘play a part’ as happy Australians, whether they are happy or not.

But the skill of the photographer is such that a little bit of the subject’s selves, outside their role within the ‘public’ scenario of the photograph, is set free within the picture as well. And here are to be found the delights of this exhibition. That is one reason why this exhibition is so timely. It is visual argument against the current atomisation of the public space we share into privatised bubbles, or points of view exclusively focused on the individual. Although staged and somewhat stilted, and representing a now outdated Australia, there is something still fresh in this collective representation.

Yet these are publicity photographs. They weren’t taken for the gallery wall; they were taken for the printed page. They were made to be reproduced in departmental reports, in immigration brochures, and in popular picture magazine stories, posters and advertisements. They needed to be pictorially robust, and able to hold their own on pages crowded with text, graphics and other photographs. This explains the compositional ‘tricks’ many of the photographers employed. For instance, John Crowther frequently put a second visual frame within his camera’s frame. He loved to shoot through door and windows so that even the ‘up’ and ‘down’ escalators of Canberra’s Monaro Mall frame the shoppers at the Embassy Fruit Market in 1966.

Embassy Fruit Market at the Monaro Mall, Canberra 1966. Photographer John Crowther. NAA: A1200, L55270

The photographers were also attracted to repeated patterns and visual repetition in their photographs. Sitters are frequently lined up in rows, giving a sense of order and control. The photographers always sought the visual drama in even the most mundane assignment. This show contains several examples of workers being framed within giant concrete pipes, giving a James Bond glamour to the building of Australia’s infrastructure. At other times, the photographers were attracted to the dynamic energy of swirling crowds as in, for instance, Bill Pedersen’s glorious sea of lady’s hats and gloves at the Centenary Melbourne Cup Carnival of 1960, or Jim Fitzpatrick’s 1968 photograph depicting shoppers descending on $5.99 shoes at David Jones in Sydney.

Fashionable spectators don hats and gloves at the Centenary Melbourne Cup Carnival, Melbourne, Victoria 1960. Photographer Bill Pedersen. NAA: A1500, K6328

Shoppers descend on $5.99 shoes at David Jones, Sydney 1968. Photographer Jim Fitzpatrick. NAA: A1200, L77320

This exhibition contains a selection of the Indigenous news photographer Mervyn Bishop. Of all the photographers here, he was most concerned with the consent and cooperation of his sitters, and when looking at his photographs it is always fascinating to plot the various directions of their eyes and trace the interaction of their gazes. In 1975 he made his most famous photograph, which shows Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pouring sand into the hands of traditional Northern Territory landowner Vincent Lingiari, but in this instantly recognisable Australian ‘icon’ the gazes of Whitlam and Lingiari glance off each other. The year before, at the Royal Queensland Exhibition, however, a backstage Mornington Island dancer adjusts his ceremonial headpiece while looking happily and openly at Bishop. He’s pumped, ready to perform a traditional dance for the crowd at the ‘Ekka’. In the same year at Yarrabah, Queensland, a young girl is emboldened to return Bishop’s stare, assertively parrying the government camera’s gaze.

Mornington Island dancer sharing Lardil culture with audiences at the Brisbane Exhibition, 1975. Photographer Mervyn Bishop. NAA: A8739, A13/8/75/11

Staring down the photographer on a bus, Yarrabah, Queensland 1974. Photographer Mervyn Bishop. NAA: A8739, A26/8/74/25

Other photographers attempted to impose a tighter, more controlled choreography on their subjects. Neil Murray, who trained as a civil engineer, must have spent hours carefully placing his models, who hold their poses like mannequins, in his perfectly engineered compositions. It’s like watching a Jacques Tati film as our eye is led into the evenly lit transit lounge of Trans-Australia Airlines at Essendon Airport, Victoria, photographed around 1946; or through the impossibly clean 4-kilometre-long assembly line of the Ford Motor Company, Broadmeadows, Victoria, in 1960.

Trans-Australia Airlines lounge, Essendon Airport, Victoria c. 1946. Photographer Neil Murray. NAA: A1200, L3864

Cars move along the 4-kilometre assembly line at the Ford Motor Company, Broadmeadows, Victoria 1960. Photographer Neil Murray. NAA: A1200, L34225

Keith Byron, who spent some time in the United States, also had an acute eye for composition. But sometimes small, contingent details intrude themselves. In 1969 his eye was caught by the picturesque betting man in the Members Only enclosure at the Balnarring picnic races, who has sensibly covered his hat with a fly net. But we, the viewers, can’t help noticing the kids, led by a young girl, squashed against the gate behind him, who have also been caught by Byron’s powerful flashgun.

Veteran punter outsmarts flies in the Members area at the Balnarring Picnic Races, Victoria 1969. Photographer Keith Byron. NAA: A1200, L79798

The flashgun was also frequently used to good effect by Bill Pedersen. For example, it picks out the front row of a young crowd who are all shouting at their visiting hero, Koichi Ose, who plays Shintaro in  the Japanese samurai TV show Shintaro, enormously popular with boys of a certain age in 1965. But the presence of the government camera has distracted one young fan from Ose’s sword feats, and his eyes briefly slide off to the photographer himself as the flash goes off.

Young fans call out to Shintaro (Kiochi Ose), star of the Japanese television show The Samurai, as he performs feats with his sword, Sydney 1965. Photographer Bill Pedersen. NAA: A1200, L53173

Bill Brindle, who had worked for the Australian Women’s Weekly before joining the Department of Information, also had an eye for the theatrical. In 1958 he had a woman jump into the air to release two weather balloons outside St James Theatre on Melbourne’s cinema entertainment strip in Bourke Street. She is advertising an Australian Commonwealth Film Unit short film about the Giles Weather Station, Balloons and spinifex, which has been chosen to support the cinema’s main feature All at sea, yet another wheezy comedy from England’s venerable Ealing film studios. In Brindle’s photograph a row of five men, presumably from the Commonwealth Film Unit, look on and dutifully enjoy the stunt. But, out of focus in the background behind this slightly surreal scene, passers-by turn and stare, or in the case of one smartly suited woman, stride away up the street.

Woman with balloons [photographic image] / photographer, W Brindle. 1 photographic negative: b&w, acetate

Posing with weather balloons outside the St James Theatre & Metro on Bourke Street to promote the screening the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit and Bureau of Meteorology documentary, Balloons and spinifex, Melbourne 1958. Photographer Wilfred Brindle. NAA: A1200, L26100

In another slightly stilted Bill Brindle photograph, staged at the Oenpelli (Gunbalanya) mission in the Northern Territory, a line of young Aboriginal men along a stockyard railing have been told to cheer on an older Aboriginal stockman who is breaking in a horse for the camera. Brindle had to use two sheets of large-format film to get the right combination of rearing horse and line of waving hats. But despite this careful choreography it is the three young Aboriginal kids at the end of the row, who don’t yet have hats to wave and wrap their legs around the top rail in squirming apprehension, who most engage our attention.

Stockman breaking in a horse at the Oenpelli (Gunbalanya) Church of England Mission in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory 1950. Photographer Wilfred Brindle. NAA: A1200, L13068A

For contemporary viewers it is these insistent incidental details and fragmentary occurrences, extraneous to the photographer’s original intention or initial government assignment, and resistant to cataloguing, tagging or even, perhaps, AI, which open out the archive to the true pleasure and value of these photographs.

Sometimes the photographer themselves seems to subvert their own publicity message. For instance, all the men posed studiously checking on quality control in Eric Wadsworth’s various factories, from a Toyota car parts factory in Altona, Victoria, to a Prestige stocking factory in Brunswick, Melbourne, seem to be ‘on message’ – in authoritative command of the industrial process. But our hearts go out to the poor worker woman, bent over her machine, sewing the massive thick orange blankets that are beginning to engulf her at the James Miller carpet factory, Warragul, Victoria, in 1971.

Machinist at work at the James Miller carpet factory, Warragul, Victoria 1971. Photographer Eric Wadsworth. NAA: A1500, K28661

Photographs like this, where the glowering orange of the blankets is fundamental to its impact, demonstrate how quickly the photographers became adept at deploying colour which was increasingly required by publications. Colour is intrinsic, for example, to the outback photographs of Mike Jensen, the 35 mm off-the-cuff street-life photographs of John Houldsworth, or to the fashion photographs of Bill Payne.

The idea of professionally skilled photographers employed as public servants to serve Australia’s publicity interests at home and abroad made it through to 1996, when it finally fell victim to government ‘cost-cutting’. Only Norman Plant, who had caught his passion for photography in his father’s amateur darkroom with a box brownie, before studying at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and working in photography studios and as photojournalist, and who had been a government photographer for 28 years, was left to turn out the lights. Publicity photography was thereafter outsourced for specific projects and now, of course, almost 30 years later, young PAs handle ‘the socials’ from their smart phones.

The vast, systematic archive these government photographers built over five decades will continue to be used by historians and researchers for the historical information it contains. And it will continue to release its micro-secrets – the wayward glance of somebody’s eyes, the way they held their body, their fleeting expression, the patterns they made as they congregated together, and so on. But it is only able to give us all this because of the work of the original photographers. They weren’t geniuses, they weren’t special, they were professionals doing their job. They were public servants.

Martyn Jolly

Postponed: Installation View Launch Upcoming at Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne.

Postponed: Perimeter and CCP are thrilled to present a panel discussion to celebrate the publication of Daniel Palmer and Martyn Jolly’s major book Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia (1848-2020), the result of an extensive research project. Hosted here at CCP the panel will feature Palmer and Jolly in conversation with Judy Annear, writer and Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne School of Culture & Communication, and Pippa Milne, Senior Curator at Monash Gallery of Art.

‘Installation View’ in The Conversation

Hoda Afshar’s portrait series Remain in Melbourne 2019. One of myself and Daniel Palmer’s picks for ‘Ten Photography Exhibitions that Defined Australia’, to promote our book Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia (1848-2020), out now through Perimeter Editions.
Photograph by Leela Schauble. Courtesy the artist.

https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-10-photography-exhibitions-that-defined-australia-166755

https://perimetereditions.com/INSTALLATION-VIEW

Free Download! ‘Frontier and Metropole, Science and Colonisation: The Systematic Exhibitions of Richard Daintree’

Daintree detail

Figure 21. Detail from Centennial Photographic Company, Philadelphia International Exhibition, ‘Queensland Court, Philadelphia ’76, Evening Before Opening’, 1876.

Abstract

Richard Daintree is well known as an Australian colonial photographer and geologist. I look at six international exhibitions he created from 1872 to 1879 that promoted the colony of Queensland by systematically integrating spectacular grids of painted photographs with displays of scientific samples. By analysing installation views, I argue that the popular success of these exhibitions came from the use of various new photographic technologies within the space of the exhibition, where the frontier directly interacted with the metropole. Further, I argue that Daintree’s personal passion for the science of geology profoundly structured the colonialist narrative of his exhibitions, which combined the latest apparatuses of scientific knowledge and imperial communication, revealing him to be an innovative and internationally significant creator of synthesised exhibitionary experiences.

Martyn Jolly (2020): Frontier and Metropole, Science and Colonisation: The Systematic Exhibitions of Richard Daintree, History of Photography Journal.

Portraits of Survival at the Sydney Jewish Museum

 

My catalogue essay Portraits of Survival about Katherine Griffiths for the Sydney Jewish Museum’s exhibition ‘Closer’

Touch and vision are closely intertwined in photographs. The super-sensitive surface at the tip of each finger is intimately linked, perceptually if not physically, to the sensitive retina at the back of each eye. Just look at Katherine Griffiths’ photographs, as you look your fingertips will begin to almost tingle at the touch of the objects the survivors are holding. Recently this interest in ‘haptic vision’ has burgeoned amongst artists. In his widely influential book The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa argues for the primacy of touch over all the other senses. ‘Touch’, he says, ‘is the sensory mode that integrates our experience of the world with that of ourselves.’ But not only does touch filter the outside world into our bodies, it also connects us directly to other humans, and to history:

The skin reads the texture, weight, density and temperature of matter. The surface of an old object, polished to perfection by the tool of the craftsman and the assiduous hands of its users, seduces the stroking of the hand. … The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition: through impressions of touch we shake the hands of countless generations.

Touch and the act of holding have long been integral to the history of photography. In early photographic studio portraits sitters were given leather-bound books or other items of social or religious significance to hold. These objects held symbolic power, but they also enabled the sitter to ‘perform’ their hands, their firm grip expressed the solidity of their place in the world. If touch connects us to identity, it also directly connects us to memory. In the nineteenth century bereaved mothers were frequently photographed holding photographs of their deceased children. Part of the emotional impact of these strange images is the paradoxical multiplication of time. The time of the child and the mother were split apart by death, but they are brought together again in the frozen instant of the photograph, which we, as viewers from the future, look mournfully back into. But their power also comes from the tragedy of touch. Instead of cradling the soft warm flesh of her child the bereaved mother can only grip a cold hard frame propped on her knee. In our contemporary mass media it is commonplace to see all types of victims gripping photographs of the dead, the missing, or the imprisoned in public acts of commemoration, mourning, or defiance. Some clutch their photographs protectively to their chests, others hold them up high and proud. Even in these press images it is the act of touching which again becomes the fulcrum of the image, pivoting between inner personal experience and outer public declaration.

It is therefore a rich tradition Katherine Griffiths has entered. But her photographs are not mournful, not defiant, and not ‘heavy’. Instead they are warm and even friendly. The survivors are photographed against an ordinary portrait studio backdrop, with ordinary portrait studio lighting. These are not stark mug shots of monumentalized faces, nor are they gritty evidence of the pathos of elderly people. Instead we see a rapport and collaboration between photographer and subject, all of whom look comfortable, neatly dressed, and … well … nice. They have been through a famously unrepresentable period in history, and hold objects freighted with an unbearable weight of pain, yet they look … well … ordinary. But it is a marvelous, rich, wonderful ordinariness.

Eddie Jaku delicately uncurls a thin, crumbling leather belt — the belt he wore through four prison camps — as though it was a timorous animal curled up in his hands. The viewer’s sense of the texture of the belt’s splitting tongue against his fingers, and the weight of its buckle on his palm, powerfully reconstitute the experiences he endured and the now absent trousers the belt once held up. Egon Sonnenschein looks directly into our eyes as he holds out to us a postcard whose surface is covered with the coloured marks and inscriptions of its ricocheting around Europe. The wings of this ephemeral butterfly appear to have been delicately caught in mid-flight by the tips of his fingers.

When they are held in the birdlike hands of survivors, the yellowing passports, certificates, and identity papers from the past — the slips of paper that enabled the wheels of historical fate to turn — take on a higher charge. This is especially so when a photograph is found amidst the bureaucratic hieroglyphs. Helena Goldstein, aged 97, looks straight down the camera at us as she presents her identity card. Amongst the inky stamps and smudged signatures we find her ID photograph where, aged 24, she once again looks straight at us with a clear-eyed smile. The same looks travel to us in close parallel, though separated by oceans of time. In a reversal of the normal roles of mother and daughter Ilse Charny cradles a tiny image of her mother in the form of an identity photograph within a Shanghai Jewish refugee document. She holds more than just banal data but a direct, even fleshy, connection to history as we recognize family resemblances in both faces.

George Gronjowski holds up his concentration camp tunic for us to see, but his red-rimmed eyes are looking off into the past. This faraway look is also in the eyes of John Gruschka as he fans out, between the parchment-like skin of his fingers, the desiccated pages of the letters his mother wrote to him from Prague, as he sheltered in England, before her murder in Auschwitz. Joe Symon stares frankly ahead as he confidently flips up for us a photograph of his fifteen year old self, while Lotte Weiss, wearing her hair done elegantly in a salon, freshly applied lipstick, golden earrings, pearls, and a warm, open expression, holds her shaven-headed mug shots from Auschwitz across her chest while matter-of-factly displaying the identification number tattooed on her arm.

Peter Rossler gazes into our eyes as he shows us his Aunt’s Jewish star, clasped by its topmost point. It’s a badge, now a tentative emblem of pride, which perfectly plays off the school-crests stitched across his neatly tied neck-tie. In a similar way, Jaqueline Dale holds a model of a wooden ship, an incongruously bulky internment camp souvenir, against her pink top and pearls.

Although they are all humble, not all these precious objects come from the dark days of the Holocaust. Some contribute to other narratives, such as the broader history of migration to Australia. For instance Yvonne Engel ‘brings a plate’ to the exhibition, it was brought from Woolworths in 1949 as a humble wedding gift for the first marriage of child survivors on Australian soil. The weight of the decoratively cut glass Yvonne’s holds out to us makes us think of all the savouries and sweets this plate has carried to social functions over the subsequent decades as the couple put down their roots in Australian society.

The touch and feel of the domestic is a powerful thread throughout these survivors’ lives. Paul Drexler cradles the blanket which comforted him during the war over his knees as he looks off to one side in quiet, inner contemplation. Olga Horak also holds a blanket, this one made of human hair. Here we once again experience the transforming power of touch. Typically, human hair is beautiful on the head, but abjectly disgusting when detached from the head. But under the transformative power of Olga’s soft touch and equally soft eyes the blanket is no longer just a curious museum object, or historical evidence of cruelty and suffering, it becomes a beautiful warm, comforting, familiar thing.

In these portraits a photographer has collaborated with her subjects in the safe, respectful space of the studio. The photographs, although dealing with memories of historical cataclysm, approach the subject through touch — the most ordinary, the most intimate, and the most marvellous of all the senses.

Martyn Jolly

Katherine Griffiths, George Gronjowski, from the Sydney Jewish Museum exhibition ‘Closer’

Katherine Griffiths, Gerty Jellinek, from the Sydney Jewish Museum exhibition ‘Closer’

Katherine Griffiths, Ilse Charny, from the Sydney Jewish Museum exhibition ‘Closer’

Katherine Griffiths, Jack Meister, from the Sydney Jewish Museum exhibition ‘Closer’

Katherine Griffiths, Lena Goldstein, from the Sydney Jewish Museum exhibition ‘Closer’

Katherine Griffiths, Lotte Weiss, from the Sydney Jewish Museum exhibition ‘Closer’

Katherine Griffiths, Olga Horak, from the Sydney Jewish Museum exhibition ‘Closer’

Katherine Griffiths, Peter Rossler, from the Sydney Jewish Museum exhibition ‘Closer’

The Sunbaker — baked in

My essay for the Australian Centre for Photography exhibition Under the Sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker. State Library of New South Wales 18 February — 17 April; Monash Gallery of Art 6 May — 6 August, 2017.

The Sunbaker photograph was taken eighty years ago. That’s an entire lifetime. After eighty years it’s time to look back at your life. But if we were able to wake the Sunbaker up and tell him what had been happening to him he might reckon it was all a bit of a soap opera.

The Sunbaker we know was conceived on Culburra Beach near Nowra in 1937, during the camping trip of a bunch of friends from Sydney who were all twenty-something years old and brimming with sex. Two of the group, Max Dupain and Olive Cotton, took photographs of the trip that are horny and aesthetic at the same time. Taut skin and patterned sunlight predominate. Our Sunbaker was born one of twins, a pair of negatives Max Dupain shot of Harold Cyril Salvage — an English bookseller and avid reader, rower and pipe smoker — who, in Dupain’s words, ‘slammed himself down on the beach to have a sunbake’ after a swim.

A small print of one of the negatives was made for a personal album of the trip compiled by one of the party (the album is now in the State Library of New South Wales). In 1948 a signed and dated enlargement, now lost, was reproduced along with other documentary-style photographs in the book Max Dupain Photographs. Here, the Sunbaker lies darkly and heavily at the bottom of the frame, one hand grips the other, and the distant surf rolls creamily through the crook of his elbow while clouds demarcate the backdrop of sky. He is located. He’s on a particular beach at a particular time. The book was limited to an edition of 1000 copies, didn’t sell well in any case, and is now rare, but on its contents page the Sunbaker was christened. The photograph is not titled ‘Harold Salvage’, but ‘Sunbaker’. And not ‘Sunbather’, but ‘Sunbaker’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary ‘sunbaker’ was an exclusively Australian variant to the more globally accepted word ‘sunbather’. It implies an excess. Not a genteel luxuriant bathing in therapeutic rays, but a vigorous and transformative baking, like a steak slammed down on a BBQ.

Max Dupain copy of original print. Josef Lebovic Gallery

Fast forward to 1975. Photography is now art, not documentary. It is the International Year of Women. Gough Whitlam has been in power for almost three years. His wife Margaret has just opened the Australian Centre for Photography. Max Dupain is sixty-four. It’s time for his first retrospective. The ACP is the place. The negative Dupain had printed before had been lost to history during one of his studio moves, so he prints the second negative, our negative, our Sunbaker. Harold Salvage is moved upwards in the frame and the line of surf disappears behind his forearms so the figure floats abstractly against fields of tone. The hand unclenches so the wet fingertips rest on the sand. Water droplets roll over his muscles. His forearm hair forms rivulets down from his elbows.

 This Sunbaker was chosen for the retrospective’s poster and the rest is history. No longer a document of a particular beach, nor a dark glowering print from wartime Australia, it quickly became mobilized as a bright national symbol within the visual environment of seventies Australia. As the figure, photographed thirty-eight years earlier, lay suspended against the non-perspectival bands of sand and sky, it looked as contemporary as an abstract ‘colour field’ painting of the day. In its composition it almost felt as bold as the new Aboriginal flag, designed in 1971 by Harold Thomas, which graphically deployed the same three symbolic elements of sun, land and people but in an entirely different configuration. Perhaps it even reminded some of Ayers Rock (now Uluru) in its timeless monumentality. Or even, as Harold Salvage’s physically engineered shoulders arched across the frame, it reminded us of the tensile strength of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, opened five years before the Sunbaker was made.

In the following decades until his death in 1992 Dupain made about 200 prints from the surviving negative. The print exhibited at the ACP in 1975 was priced at $85, but eventually he was selling them for $1,500 each. As he iterated prints from the slightly overdeveloped negative he incrementally made the Sunbaker even more abstract, lightening the burned-in borders of sky and sand at top and bottom, and dodging the thick shadows around his head so he is suspended with even more high-tensile strength against the void. The image was frequently reproduced. It became an icon seemingly as delicate and solid as the Harbour Bridge itself. Before his death Max Dupain professed to being embarrassed by all the attention it was getting, from jingoistic Australians in general, and from gay couples decorating their new flats in particular. He said he preferred other of his classic shots such as Meat Queue, 1946, where there is more going on in terms of content and composition.

After Dupain’s death the Sunbaker continued his apotheosis. His studio, which continued to be run by its manager Jill White, made posthumous editions of his famous negatives and the Sunbaker’s edition of ninety, printed slightly lighter still than Dupain’s own prints, virtually sold out at up to $8000 each. Importantly, the Sunbaker began to be pastiched and parodied by photographers and cartoonists. In 1989 Anne Zahalka photographed a pale-skinned red-haired ‘Sunbather’ growing a fine crop of pre-cancerous cells. And in 1985 the Indigenous photographer Tracey Moffatt pointedly displaced him entirely with her photograph of ‘The Movie Star’ David Gulpilil reclining at Bondi complete with boardies, a tinnie, a surfboard, a ghetto blaster, dreads and tribal face paint.

Parodists pounced on the Sunbaker to exploit the incipient ambiguities of his state of mind, which could become a stand-in for the national state of mind. As he claims the beach for himself, sucking up spiritual sustenance from the land and exposing his back to the benedictions of the Australian sun, is he poised, ready to spring into virile action, or is he experiencing the ultimate state of relaxation, in blissful post-coital communion with the beach? Or, is he in some heat-induced stupor, or asleep? In an historical coma, or dead? An example of these many parodies is the cover of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine from 1996, where an obese sunbaker snores away on the beach above the tagline ‘Sleep! Slop! Slob! Wake Up Australia, you’re getting fatter!’ Many other cartoons and photographs used the Sunbaker to comment on Australia’s high sun cancer rates, its general political torpor, its sexism where public space was ruled by men, and his persistent claim to a supposedly ‘pure’ Australian Anglo Celtism in the face of an ethnically diversifying Australia. But, for a time, all these parodies only reinforced his iconicity.

Cover of the Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend Magazine, 4 May 1996.

Geoffrey Pryor, political cartoon, The Canberra Times, 29 December, 1995

Advertising postcard for The Republican newspaper, 1997

Meanwhile the Sunbaker still had his unalloyed fans. In 1995 the retail artist Ken Done made a series of paintings which gridded the Sunbaker’s instantly recognizable muscular arch in a gestural shorthand across a bright orange field. In the year 2000 the Max Dupain Studio licensed the photograph to QANTAS, who obviously still saw it as an unproblematic image of ‘The Spirit of Australia’. For the Sydney Olympics they published it on billboards and across both pages of broadsheet newspapers with the tagline: ‘The Spirit of Australia: When it comes to the art of relaxation, Australians are recognized as truly world class. Perhaps that’s why the people at QANTAS are so naturally good at making you feel at home, wherever in the world you happen to fly.’ QANTAS’s copywriters summed up the essence of his iconicity: the Sunbaker is at home in Australia, truly relaxed in his decisive claiming of the land. He’s baked in.

QANTAS newspaper advertisement, 2000

But Harold Salvage slammed himself down on a very different beach to the beaches of today. In the 1930s, before the rise of bohemian surf culture in the post war period, beaches were unproblematic places for collective displays of health, vitality and nationalism. Surf lifesavers were idolized as embodiments of racial purity, and at annual club carnivals they marched across our metropolitan beaches with Nuremberg like precision. More remote beaches like Culburra could also become tabla rasa sites of personal potential for idealistic groups of young people such as Dupain and his friends, but they were again centred around the vigorous, vital, pure, white body. If the Sunbaker awoke from his coma today we would have to gently break to him the news of the Mabo decision of 1992 which overturned the concept of terra nullius; the Cronulla race riots of 2005 which revealed fault lines in assumed cultural rights of beach ‘ownership’; the advent of the burkini which challenged the hegemony of the body in the scopic regime of the beach; and the inexorable rise in skin cancer mortality rates.

Nonetheless, Sunbaker prints continue to command good prices in the art market. A standard sized print from amongst the 200 or so Dupain printed will set you back between twenty and thirty thousand dollars, while a special larger print from his family estate recently sold at auction for 105 thousand dollars. But there are signs his popular iconicity in the media is fading. Image icons need to be continually reproduced to survive. Unlike the Harbour Bridge or Uluru the Sunbaker is no longer in our face every day. Even though in 2013 his son, Rex Dupain, made a new sunbaker on a Xperia ZI smartphone for a charity auction, we certainly aren’t seeing the same number of parodies as before. The complexity of contemporary debates around our national identity may have superseded his graphic usefulness for cartoonists. And today’s teenagers can’t seem to place him. ‘It’s a guy on a beach’, my daughters helpfully tell me.

Cover of the Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend Magazine, 7 August 2004

In 2004 the Sunbaker made it to the front cover of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine for the second time. This time it was not a parody, but the precious, auratic, original negative that appears, held up to the camera by a white-gloved hand. The lurid tagline, ‘How this tiny negative of Sunbaker came to be at the centre of a tale of love, money and ambition’, refers to an article by the journalist Janet Hawley about the legal tussle over Dupain’s will. Seeing the negative in public for the first time (it has recently been purchased by the Stare Library of New South Wales) we noticed a shadow in the lower right hand corner that had been cropped out of all of the enlargements. It looks like the shadow of the camera strap on Dupain’s Rolleiflex, cast as he lay on his stomach in front of Salvage grabbing his two shots. This common ‘mistake’, made every day by generations of photographers, immediately takes us back to the holiday that started it all. Those friends. That beach. That moment.

Martyn Jolly

 

Octavio Garcia

Catalogue essay for Cihuateotl’s Myth by Octavio Garcia, PhotoAcess, 26 May to 19 June, Canberra, gallery below.

Octavio Garcia

What kind of photograph is a chemigram? It’s made with an ordinary sheet of photographic paper, but negatives aren’t projected onto it in a darkroom. Instead, the lights are left on. This super overexposure ‘charges’ the paper with the maximum potential to react to photographic chemicals. To make the various tones and lines of a picture the photographer must manually modulate the amount of physical contact between the halides embedded in the paper and the chemicals in the developer and fixer baths.

The photographer applies resists of various sorts (lacquers, syrups, sprays and so on), which are then selectively removed to let the chemicals penetrate into the emulsion. Garcia applies a hard resist and makes intricate incisions with a scalpel, chemicals penetrate the cuts, leach through the emulsion, react with the halides, and lay down deposits of metal compound. Through alternating sequences of peeling, soaking, developing, washing and fixing complex images emerge in delicate tones and lapidary colours. The images form through obscure reactions deep in the subterranean strata of the emulsion. If you insist, it’s a process of drawing, but you couldn’t call it ‘mark making’ in the conventional sense. The photographer can direct, but he can never completely control, the slow leaking and leaching as his potent chemicals work their way through his intricate incisions.

Photographers often experience something transcendent in the normal light-based photograph, as the ‘pencil of nature’ delicately writes herself as an image. And I suspect chemigrammers feel a similar deep connection to similarly large, if not more chthonic, forces, as reagents migrate through emulsions and metals microscopically crystalize themselves. If conventional photographs come from the same family of images as paintings, perhaps chemigrams come from the same family of images as tattoos —at the endpoint of a long laborious physical process both tattoo and chemigram appear not on top of, but inside of, a sensitive surface.

Recently there has been a worldwide resurgence of interest in chemigrams and other cameraless photographs of their ilk. A major book Emanations: the Art of the Cameraless Photograph (in which quite a few Canberra-connected photographers get a guernsey) is about to be published, and an exhibition of the same name is currently on at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand. Late last year, The Alchemists: Rediscovering Photography in the Age of the Jpeg, was held at the Australian Centre for Photography; earlier the J Paul Getty Museum mounted Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography; the year before that the International Centre for Photography mounted What is a Photograph?; before that, the Aperture Foundation toured The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography and the Victoria and Albert Museum mounted Shadow Catchers: Cameraless Photography.

Looking back over all this diverse activity you get the sense that many cameraless photographers are seeking a connection to larger forces, often environmental or historical — not a ‘feeling’ of connection, or an ‘image’ of connection, but an actual connection. The sense of actual connection Garcia seeks is historical. Chemigrams are a process as much as they are an end result, and through the almost ritual process the chemigrammer undertakes in the darkroom he can almost feel as though he is continuing, in a way, other equivalent rituals from the past involving sacred libations of various sorts. In his head Octavio Garcia has distilled the chemigram process down to two sacred elements, paper and water: paper, through which the sacred symbols of humans are created and transmitted through the generations; and water, through which life itself is sustained.

Garcia is concerned with his ancestors. As a contemporary Mexican he feels a pull down through the generations, down through the layers of colonial and postcolonial disruption and dislocation, down through the genetic dilutions and recombinations of history, deep down to his ancestors — the ancient inhabitants of Veracruz. Garcia uses his scalpel to incise designs derived from his cultural past into the chemigram resist. Previously he has copied the drawings found in the paper codices collected from Pre-Columbian civilizations and now kept in museums. More recently he has recreated a colossal Olmec head, dating from a millennia before Christ and weighing several tons, which he reconstructed at original scale from a photograph he took on a pilgrimage to the Museum of Anthropology in Xalapa, where it now sits.

In the series exhibited here he has worked with sculptures in the same museum and made by his ancestors more recently (only one to one-and-a-half thousand years ago!). The sacred figures emerge from Garcia’s chemigrams with a kind of geological force. The gesture of Garcia’s wrist is there, as it has swiveled and turned the scalpel to manually inscribe the image of the museum aretefact into his resist layer, but through the darkroom process his drawing interacts in a physical way with the slow propulsions of chemical reaction and metallic deposit. The combination produces an image a bit like fossil suddenly revealed in a split rock, or the faint outlines of an ancient settlement only discernable from the air, or the eroded groove in a petroglyph revealed in a chalk rubbing, or any other of a chain of associations to do with the tangible presence of the ancient past.

The most popular tattoo designs for our deracinated age are ancestral symbols, Celtic braids or whatever. But Garcia goes much further, and much deeper, than these attempts at readymade off-the-shelf skin memory. In his endless search for the presence of his past through the chemigram he has invented both a new visual language and a new ritual process.

Martyn Jolly

Networking the Tradition: Curating Photography in Australia

Photofile

Vol. 95, Spring/Summer, pp48-55.

(with Daniel Palmer)

Australia’s big galleries and libraries have been seriously buying and curating photographs for over forty years now, during a period when the medium itself has undergone profound transformations. It’s time now to take an overview of the interaction between the institutional imperatives of our state and national collecting institutions and the changes in photography as a medium.

Although the institutional curating of photography did not begin in earnest until the 1970s, in the five or so decades before then the powerful idea of collecting photographs was intermittently discussed, at various levels of institutional authority, and with various degrees of vigour. For instance, at the end of the First World War, the amateur photographic magazine the Australasian Photo Review called for a ‘national collection of Australian photographic records’. The Mitchell Library was one of several institutions who responded positively to this idea, even suggesting a list of twelve different categories of photographs which amateurs could take for a future repository. However the librarians did not follow through on their initial positive noises and collections failed to materialise.

Thirty years later, at the end of the Second World War, the idea of a national collection was raised again. Laurence le Guay, the editor of the new magazine Contemporary Photography, devoted an entire issue to new sharp bromide enlargements Harold Cazneaux made from his Pictorialist negatives of Old Sydney, and declared that they ‘would be a valuable acquisition for the Mitchell Library or Australian Historical Societies.’ However, once more the library failed to follow through, and Cazneaux’s photographs remained uncollected.

Nevertheless, the interest in photography as an Australian tradition and the persuasiveness of the idea of significant public collections of historic photographs continued to build. By the 1960s both libraries and state galleries were beginning to make serious policy commitments to collecting photographs. The aims were to both collect photographs as documents of Australian life, and to record the importance of photography as a visual medium. For instance, the National Librarian of Australia, Harold White, began to work with Keast Burke who in 1956 had proposed a two tier national collection: one part to be purely about the information which photographs contained, and assembled by microfilming records and copying images in the library’s own darkrooms; the other part to be about the medium itself, made up of ‘artistic salon photographs’ and historic cameras.

The National Gallery of Victoria, under Director Eric Westbrook, became the first state gallery to collect photography. Despite forthright opposition from some members (one of whom referred to photography as “cheat’s way of doing a painting”), the Trustees approve the establishment of Department of Photography in 1967.[ii] The first work to enter the collection – David Moore’s documentary photograph Surry Hills Street (1948) – was acquired through a grant from Kodak. In the same year the NGV imported The Photographer’s Eye, a touring exhibition from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which had been the first art museum to establish a Department of Photography in 1940.[iii] The exhibition was curated by MoMA’s John Szarkowski, undoubtedly the most influential photography curator of the second half of the twentieth century, as a statement of his formalist position on photographic aesthetics. Its title was adapted for a local version, The Perceptive Eye (1969–1970).

By 1973 the yet-to-be-opened National Gallery of Australia had purchased its first photograph, an artistic confection by Mark Strizic (Jolimont Railway Yards, 1970) that looked more like a print than a photograph. Two years later the AGNSW was laying the foundation for its collection with the acquisition, exhibition and book on the early twentieth century photographs of Harold Cazneaux, collected by them as fine-art Pictorialist prints, rather than as the sharp bromide enlargements that had been published by Contemporary Photography in 1948.

In this period the dual nature of the photograph as both a carrier of historical and social information, and an aesthetic art object and exemplar of a tradition, which had co-existed within the formulations of the previous decades, was finally separated between libraries and galleries. Library collecting focused on the photograph as a document of Australian life. For example in 1971 the National Library of Australia clarified its collection policy: it would only collect photographs as examples of photographic art and technique from the period up to 1960, leaving post-1960s ‘art for art’s sake’ photography to the new state and federal gallery photography departments.[iv]

The stage was set for the much-vaunted ‘Photo Boom’ of the 1970s, when, as Helen Ennis has pointed out, the baby boomer generation turned to photography for its contemporaneity in the context of a counter-cultural energy.[v] Galleries and libraries found themselves embedded in the newly constructed infrastructure of the Whitlam era: the newly established Australia Council, rapidly expanding tertiary courses in photography, new magazines and commercial galleries, and the establishment of the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 1974.

In this context the need to define photography as both a tradition and a new language became more urgent. Such initiatives were largely driven by photographers themselves, whose leading figures made themselves aware of what was happening internationally. Thus Athol Shmith, a key member of the NGV Advisory Committee set up in the late 1960s, corresponded and travelled regularly to Europe. David Moore, one of the key figures in the establishment of the ACP, was familiar with plans for the International Centre for Photography in New York. The first director of the ACP, Graham Howe, was brought back from a stint at the London Photographers’ Gallery. Developments were typically framed around a broadly didactic mission: that photography is central to visual culture but ‘the public needs educating’ in the art of photographic seeing. In addition, the longed-for acknowledgement from overseas materialised in the form of John Szarkowski himself, who was invited on a ‘papal’ tour by the ACP in 1974. Szarkowski gave six public lectures titled “Towards a Photographic Tradition’ (recently recounted in Photofile Vol 93). The purpose of the national tour, as Howe put it at the time, “was to liberate photography from the world of technique and commerce and to suggest that it could also be of absorbing artistic and intellectual interest.”[vi]

Although Szarkowski’s approach was put under sustained stress during the period of postmodernism – especially by feminist critics – his ‘formalist’ approach to the medium continued to dominate the way that photography was understood in the art museum for the ensuing decades. Even as the discourse emerged of an Australian tradition with, for instance, the NGV’s investment in Australian documentary photographers in the late sixties, this became embedded in a model of Euro-American modernism. As Ennis put it, “The argument for ‘photography as art’ was based on the critical position of Modernism. Photography was considered to be a medium with its own intrinsic characteristics”.[vii] At the AGNSW Gael Newton deployed a clear art historical teleology, with the acquisition of Pictorialist photography by Harold Cazneaux and other members of the Sydney Camera Circle forming the foundation for the collection. Pictorialism was important to Newton because it was a: ‘conscious movement, aimed at using the camera more creatively’[viii] Her exhibitions of Harold Cazneaux and Australian Pictorial Photography in 1975 closely followed by a monograph on Max Dupain in 1980, seen as the modernist successor to the Pictorialists. However, the galleries also engaged with the contemporary art photography of the graduates from the new art schools, as well as emerging postmodern ideas. For instance the title of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ 1981 exhibition Reconstructed Vision defined this new style of work against, but within the overall trajectory of, the newly established historical traditions.

In Melbourne a slightly different but equivalent art historical strategy was taking place within the institution of the NGV. This included the mass importation of canonical images from overseas. For instance, shortly after her appointment, the NGV’s inaugural curator (and first ever curator of photography in Australia), Jennie Boddington, ordered Farm Security Administration re-prints from the Library of Congress’s reproduction service. However at the same time the NGV also held solo exhibitions by the young, art school-trained artists Carol Jerrems in 1973 and Bill Henson in 1975.[ix]

While galleries were using art historical strategies to embed photography within their structures, libraries were also confirming their commitment to photography, but as a non aesthetic-object based, content-driven, curatorial strategy. The contemporary cultural relevance of the subjectivist photo boom of the seventies, combined with Modernist and Postmodernist teleologies, drove the aesthetic strategies of galleries, but the nationalistic socially cohesive agendas of events like the 1988 Bicentenary drove the content-based strategies of library photo collecting. In a forerunner to today’s participatory online photographic projects, in 1983 Euan McGillivray and Matthew Nickson proposed a snapshot collecting project, Australia as Australians Saw It, which would copy photographs in the possession of individuals, then index them and make them accessible through the latest technology. During the Bicentenary year Alan Davies, curator at the State Library of New South Wales, travelled to twenty-three country towns and copied about seven thousand vernacular photographs from 576 individuals. Under the title At Work and Play, they were made accessible by a videodisc keyword search (a forerunner to today’s digital database).

Fast forward to the present. Over the intervening 40 years, since the establishment of various departments and the ACP, the boundaries of photography have expanded. However, galleries have largely kept to the historical trajectories inaugurated in the 1970s. In the 1980s, photographic reproductive processes became central to postmodern art, which had the flow-on effect of boosting photography’s place in the art museum (Tracey Moffatt, Bill Henson, Anne Zahalka, etc.). But postmodernism did not fundamentally alter the increasing focus of departments of photography on ‘art photography’. Indeed, as many writers have observed, the wholesale acceptance of photography as art by the institutions and market occurred precisely at the moment of the critique of art photography, as it had been defined within the ‘formalist’ tradition, by artists and postmodern critics.

Photography’s potential as a protean medium to disturb or at least promote a dialogue between institutional disciplines and ordering systems has only rarely been explored by curators. Perhaps the most notable is the disruptive placement of contemporary Indigenous work, like Brook Andrew’s Sexy and Dangerous (1996) – which appropriates an image by the Charles Kerry photography studio – within galleries of nineteenth-century colonial painting at the NGV. Into the 1990s and 2000s, departments of photography essentially continued a monographic and consolidation phase, aided by the international prominence of large-scale colour photography as art, such as the Düsseldorf School (including photographers such as Andreas Gursky), or what Julian Stallabrass dubs “museum photography”.[x]. Meanwhile, we have seen the ongoing integration of photography as part of interdisciplinary art practice which may also include sculpture, performance or installation (sometimes dubbed the ‘post-medium condition’). Simultaneously, we have witnessed the rise of digital photography, which has produced a whole new generation of photographers using online photosharing services like Flickr and Instagram, whose effects are much more widely felt outside the museum. In response to these complex historical changes libraries have invested institutional effort into digitizing their image collections and making them available online, while art museums have embraced photography’s status as an object to be experienced in the flesh, hung in exhibition galleries.

If the primary aim of photography curating in the 1970s was to establish photography as art, this has clearly been achieved. Photography is ubiquitous within contemporary art, but not as an autonomous tradition – rather as a mode integrated within wider practices. And if the now forty-year old institutional structures are still largely with us, if museums continue to have departments, curators and galleries of photography, this is largely for the history of photography, for the knowledge of specific collections and conservation techniques. However, even if photography is now deeply embedded in the art museum, its precise role is still up for grabs. For instance, in 2013 the dedicated photography gallery at the NGV International was given up without any controversy (along with prints and drawings). In the early 1970s, photography enthusiasts had fought for a dedicated area, even just a corridor outside the Department of Prints and Drawings in 1972.[xi]Recently, in a delicious irony, the former photography space was occupied by Patrick Pound’s installation The Gallery of Air (2013) – which the wall label described as a poetic “site specific installation comprising 91 works from the collection of the NGV and 286 works from the collection of the artist” organized around the idea of air. Pound’s work included a wide variety of media in its playful exploration of collecting (both personal and institutional), but its inspiration lay in photography’s role as an ordering system. Various inclusions (such as Man With a Tie) were included in a previous work of found photographs, Portrait of the Wind (2010).

Clearly, museum departments can no longer work in isolation. However, what the mere integration of photography into the newly contemporary art museum all too easily elides is that photography’s place there has always been unstable, its ambiguous status as object and information continually threatening the grounds of the art museum’s hierarchies and collection policies. This instability manifests itself in different ways in different periods, but as we have already hinted at, one of the underlying themes in photography in the museum is the constant exclusion of the vernacular and of reproducibility itself. As Douglas Crimp argued in the late 1970s, the inclusion of photography within the canon of modernist art practice, by its own logic, excludes photography as reproduction.[xii] We have seen this in Australia in relation to the location of photography between the library and the art museum, in terms of a split between information and aesthetics, a documentary database versus an aesthetic object. Photography’s recent insertion into digital networks reveals these tensions yet again, in a new guise. Within a modernist logic, the networked digital image, circulating as reproducible information, is guaranteed to be excluded. The potential for different kinds of photography in the art museum goes largely unnoticed.

It could be argued that similar issues are faced by other Departments such as Painting, in the ‘post-medium’ age. And indeed that the sway of the MoMA Photography Department could be compared to the influence of the massively influential travelling show Two Decade of American Painting in 1967. However, we argue that the protean and unstable nature of the medium of photography makes its placement more problematic. As a result, within the rapidly growing discourse of curating contemporary art, we argue that more attention needs to be paid to the specific situation of photography and the history of photography exhibitions. This is not to regress into conventional medium specificity. It is simply to acknowledge that photography’s multiple, democratic and ambiguous presence as image and object within our culture complicates its place in the art gallery. Photography as a creative art has a more or less integrated tradition that we can and should continue to value because it drives further developments. But we should simultaneously recognize that this tradition is based on a series of exclusions, and addressing these exclusion can also energize the medium. As Peter Galassi once put it, the tradition is both indispensable and inadequate.

In identifying the future potential of photography in the art gallery, perhaps we can learn from the popularity of ‘metaphotographers’ such as Patrick Pound, working with the (always incomplete) archive.. Furthermore, if curators are engaged in creating innovative contexts for public engagement, networked photography opens up new possibilities for this to happen. We are not arguing that the art gallery ought to emulate the hyper-linked experience of the Internet, or the swipe-based logic of mobile media. However, we are proposing that authoritarian presentations of a connoisseurial canon need to become part of a larger project: exploring photography’s protean nature as a medium and its potential to complicate spectatorship and activate audiences in new ways.

Daniel Palmer & Martyn Jolly

[i] This essay derives from early research into the various forces currently influencing photography curating in Australian art galleries, funded in the first instance by an Australian Council grant.

[ii] Isobel Crombie and Susan van Wyk, 2nd sight: Australian photography in the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2002), 7.

[iii] Founded in 1929, MoMA presented its first photography exhibition in 1937 (the major Beaumont Newhall exhibition on the history of photography in 1938–1937). MoMA held their first one-person exhibition, by Walker Evans, in 1938, and established their Department of Photography in 1940, then the only one in any art museum.

[iv] Helen Ennis, ‘Integral to the Vision: A National Photographic Collection’ in Peter Cochrane (ed.), Remarkable Occurrences: The National Library’s First 100 Years (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2010), 210

[v] See Helen Ennis, ‘Contemporary Photographic Practices’ in Gael Newton, Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839–1988 (Canberra : Australian National Gallery, 1988), 134.

[vi] Graham Howe, ‘The Szarkowski Lectures, Art & Australia, July–September , 1974, 89.

[vii] Ennis, ‘Contemporary Photographic Practices’, 136.

[viii] Gael Newton, Silver and Grey: Fifty Years of Australian Photography 1900-1950 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980), np

[ix] In Canberra the National Gallery not only purchased photographs from young art-school trained Australian photographers through the largesse of the Phillip Morris Arts Grant, but also, in 1980, before it even opened, gained Ministerial approval to spend $150,000 for the Ansel Adams Museum Set from an American gallery.

[x] Julian Stallabrass, ‘Museum Photography and Museum Prose’, New Left Review, no. 65, September-October 2010, 93–125.

[xi] Crombie and van Wyk, 2nd sight, 10

[xii] Douglas Crimp, ‘The Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject’ in Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 3-13. See also Andrew Dewdney, ‘Curating the Photographic Image in Networked Culture’ in Martin Lister, ed., The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, Second edition (London: Routledge, 2013), 95–112.