Australian First World War Photography 1999

pdf: Australian First World War Photography 1999

Australian First World War Photography

History of Photography, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer, 1999.

On the twenty-sixth of September 1917, during the Third Ypres Campaign on the Western Front in Flanders, Frank Hurley and Charles Bean began a long argument about photographic verisimilitude. Captain Frank Hurley, one of Australia’s newly appointed war photographers, wanted to combine several different negatives into a single battle tableau, and C. E. W. Bean, Australia’s long-standing war correspondent and official war historian, prohibited it.

An amateur photographer himself, Bean valorized photographic objectivity in his own reportage writing. After he was appointed official Australian ‘eyewitness’ to the war in 1915, he referred to himself in his diary as an Australian recorder’ and was angered when Australian newspapers preferred to publish the more lurid and fanciful accounts of the Reuters pool reporters over his own official dispatches, which ended up being described as ‘colourless’ by the Bulletin.” To Bean, however, ‘the private interests of papers are something which cut right across the interests of the country — scoops, competition, magnification and exaggeration are out of all harmony with what is best for country’. In 1916 he began a campaign to establish an Australian War Records Section which would ‘preserve and tenderly care for the sacred things which will some day constitute the greatest public possession Australia will have’. It would collect war relics (a term he preferred to trophy),³ which would act as both vivid historical expository devices, and as spiritual shipping containers in which to bring some essence of the experience of the Anzacs⁴ back to Australia from France, where many thousands of their bodies were to remain. It would also collect photographs as ‘sacred records — standing for future generations to see forever the plain simple truth’.⁵

To Bean, both photographs and relics sat on the same continuum, because both received and retained direct index-ical impressions of the fighting. For example, in July 1918, Bean had two, front-and-back, anthropological-style photographs taken of two diggers⁶ when they came out of the fighting.⁷ Then he had their uniforms and all their gear taken from them and replaced by a completely new outfit. In the words of Bean’s biographer: ‘Everything that was taken from these soldiers, with all the emanations evocative of battle, fear, death, endurance and heroism, was to be sealed up, just as it came from these men, and sent back to Australia so that their countrymen might feel these emanations and be reminded what manner of men these had been’.⁸

To Bean both the war relic and the record photograph would also provide a ready-made archaeological substratum for the nascent Australian nation. For example, in 1919, after the Armistice, Bean returned to Gallipoli with the Australian Historical Mission and, in a scrupulous valedictory labour, combed the ground for relics which he referred to as ‘ “antiquities” only four years old’.⁹ These were then forens-ically examined to determine how far inland the Australians had penetrated on the morning of the first landing. Significant finds were photographed in situ. A seemingly insignificant photograph of a water bottle lying under a bush, Australian relics on the north-easternmost spur of Battleship Hill, is only activated into historical, and spiritually mnemonic life by its caption: ‘This was probably the point reached by Tulloch’s Company on 25th April 1915’.¹⁰

The Australian War Records Section was established in June 1917, and two Australian photographers, Hubert Wilkins and Frank Hurley, were appointed to the Section shortly thereafter. If Bean revered the photograph as an inviolable historical record and immutable spiritual artefact, to Hurley it was a manipulable, spectacular showcase. Frank Hurley was much more than just a photographer. At the time of his appointment to the Section he was a household name as a polar explorer and a showman film maker, photographer and adventurer.¹¹ He already had extensive experience with the production of popular attractions, all of which used the latest film and photographic technology, and all of which featured himself as showman. A youthful apprenticeship in Sydney as a postcard photographer specializing in spectacular subjects and unusual effects prepared him for the heroic work he produced on the Mawson Antarctic expedition of 1911 — 13 and the Shackleton Antarctic Expedition of 1914—16. Hurley produced and appeared with theatre presentations of the cinema film and lantern slides he shot on these expeditions. His film of the Mawson expedition, Home of the Blizzard, was screened in Sydney in 1913 whilst Mawson was still stranded in Antarctica. Hurley appeared at each screening as the figure of the returned imperial explorer to give a personal recitation to accompany the film.

After receiving the honorary rank of Captain from the AIF,¹ Hurley established with Bean a clear separation between the duties of himself and Lieutenant Hubert Wilkins: ‘Wilkins will attend to the records, and I myself to the publicity pictures and aesthetic results’.¹³ Bean saw the division of labour between the two photographers in similar terms, but placed quite different weightings on their relative importance. Whilst admitting that both photographers were ‘utterly daring fellows’, Bean always felt more affinity for Wilkins. To him Hurley was merely a ‘keen commercial man’ devoted to publicity and propaganda, whereas Wilkins was committed to providing future historians with records accurate enough to be relied on as historical evidence.¹⁴Bean not only saw these as ‘conflicting activities’,¹⁼ but to him the publicity photographer was necessarily excluded from the urgent historical imperatives of military, and therefore national, destiny. Only the record photographer who risked his life out of ‘his own sense of duty’¹⁶ truly ‘played [his] part as [an] Australian soldier’.¹⁷ After the Third Ypres Campaign, Bean warmly recommended Wilkins for a Military Cross, and rather lukewarmly recommended Hurley for a Mention in Dispatches.¹⁸ Wilkins received his Military Cross but Hurley never received his Mention in Dispatches.

However, like Bean, Hurley was overwhelmed by the horror of the Front and greatly impressed by the futile bravery of the Anzac soldiers, which he immediately saw in the same nation-forming terms as Bean. His picturesque imagination was excited by the weird juxtapositions of modern warfare, where expansive scenes of pastoral beauty existed within a few kilometres of the compacted hell of the trenches, and everything was overseen by awesome new technologies. Hurley had trouble scenographically encompassing this visual sweep. During the Battle of Polygon Wood the speed and intensity of battle were his biggest problem. Both Hurley and Wilkins wanted to capture the random instantaneity of aerial bombardment: ‘In spite of heavy shelling by the Boche, we made an endeavour to secure a number of shell burst pictures. … I took two pictures by hiding in a dugout and then rushing out and snapping’.¹⁹

It was that evening that Hurley and Bean began their argument: ‘Had a great argument with Bean about combination pictures. Am thoroughly convinced that it is impossible to secure effects, without resorting to combination pictures’.²⁰ Composite printing was a staple technique with which Hurley was well acquainted. He had already produced composites from his Shackleton Antarctic Expedition negatives. The technique was widely used by amateurs to add moodily artistic cloud effects to landscapes, but postcard companies and illustrated newspapers also occasionally used it to recreate complex scenarios. ¹

The dispute was important to both men because the Australian High Commission in London was planning an exhibition of war pictures at the Grafton Galleries in May 1918. Bean also sought to get a perspective on the argument by retreating to his diary: ‘ … had a long argument with Hurley who wants to be allowed to make “composite” pictures for his exhibition — i.e. to put in a shell burst made by trench mortars at St Pol. I can see his point, he has been nearly killed a dozen times and has failed to get the pictures he wants — but we will not have it at any price’.²² Five days after their initial confrontation Hurley and Bean continued their argument, and both hardened their stances. Bean got General Headquarters to prohibit Hurley from making composites and Hurley, banking on his prestige as a famous polar explorer, tactically responded by tipping the ante:

Had a lengthy discussion with Bean re pictures for exhibition and publicity purposes. Our authorities here will not permit me to pose any pictures or indulge in any original means to secure them … . As this absolutely takes all possibilities of producing pictures from me, I have decided to tender my resignation at once. I conscientiously consider it but right to illustrate to the public the things our fellows do and how the war is conducted. They can only be got by printing a result from a number of negatives or re-enactment. This is out of reason and they prefer to let all these interesting episodes pass. This is unfair to our boys and I conscientiously could not undertake to continue to work.²³

I sent in my resignation this morning and await result of igniting the fuse. It is disheartening after striving to secure the impossible and running all hazards to meet with little encouragement. I am unwilling and will not make a display of war pictures unless the Military people see their way clear to give me a free hand.²⁴

However, Hurley continued to photograph and film. Called to General Headquarters to photograph the 1st Anzac staff, he spoke to General Birdwood who promised to ‘fix matters up’.²⁵ A few days later Hurley was able to report in his diary: ‘Headquarters have given me permission to make six combination enlargements in the exhibition so I withdrew my resignation … . However it will be no delusion to the public as they will be distinctly titled, setting forth the number of negatives used, etc. All of the elements will be taken in action’.²⁶ In early November Hurley was sent to Palestine to cover the Australian Light Horse. Away from the strictures of both the Front and Bean, he flourished. He found the battalions, and battalion commanders, extremely amenable to staging re-enacted ‘stunts’ for his camera.

Hurley returned to London in May 1918 to prepare for the exhibition of Australian war pictures at the Grafton Galleries. He arranged to have 130 negatives printed, his six composites and other images enlarged to mural size at Raines & Co in Ealing, and colour lantern slides made from the Paget colour plates. He enthusiastically described the exhibition in his diary:

The exhibition was well patronised today. The colour lantern is working excellently. The colour slides depict scenes on the Western Front, Flanders and also Palestine. They are gems and elicit applause at every showing. A military band plays throughout the day. … Our largest picture ‘THE RAID’ depicting an episode at the Battle of Zonnebeke [is a combination of twelve negatives] and measures over 20ft x 15’6′ high. Two waves of infantry are leaving the trenches in the thick of a Boche Barrage of shells and shrapnel. A flight of bombing aeroplanes accompanies them. An enemy plane is burning in the foreground. The whole picture is realistic of battle, the atmospheric effects of battle smoke are particularly fine. Another sensational picture is ‘DEATH THE REAPER’. This remarkable effect is made up of two negatives. One, the foreground, shows the mud splashed corpse of a boche floating in a shell crater. The second is an extraordinary shell burst: the form of which resembles death. The Palestine series are magnificent … . It is some recompense to see one’s work shown to the masses and to receive favourable criticism after the risks and hardships I have taken and endured to secure the negatives.²⁷

The composite Hurley referred to as ‘The Raid’ was subsequently variously known as An episode after the Battle at Zonnebeke,² or sometimes Over the Top²⁹ (figure 1). The foreground is constructed from the final two images of a rapid sequence of three photographs he shot of a group of soldiers going over the top (figure 2). In the composite, these sequential images of the same soldiers become spat-ialized two lines of advancing troops, and planes, shrapnel and smoke have been added into the background. The original sequence was most probably taken during a training exercise or a re-enactment since they have been accessioned out of series by the Records Section; in addition, it is extremely unusual to see any photographs, let alone a sequence of three, taken from such an exposed position during a battle; and, finally, the actual battle was fought in torrential rain and a quagmire of mud, whilst in the composite the ground appears dry.³⁰

Although oil and water colour sketches were exhibited in a separate room, the photographs received most press attention. In particular the colour lantern slides received notices that confirm Hurley’s enthusiastic diary entries.³¹ A day or so later Wilkins visited London sporting his Military Cross. Hurley commented darkly, ‘Strings have been pulled’.³² Bean also came to London and visited the exhibition. He had already discovered that Hurley had attempted to smuggle some colour plates out of France for the exhibition without going through the censor — he was angry, but not surprised, at Hurley’s unscrupulousness.³³ He was further angered when he realized that Hurley now intended to abandon the task of photographing the continuing trials of the Anzacs in France in order to return to Australia to continue his showman career. And he did not like -what he saw when he visited the exhibition either:

Our exhibition is easily the best I have seen, although there is too much Hurley in it — his name is on every picture with few exceptions — including some that Wilkins took; and what should be a fine monument to the sacrifice of Australians in France is rather an advertisement for Hurley. … Hurley was married in Egypt and is determined to go back to Australia straight. I shall see that he does not have management of this exhibition there.³⁴

As the exhibition continued to attract larger and larger numbers of visitors (on one Sunday a thousand people saw it in three hours) Bean mobilized his forces against Hurley’s plans. Hurley recorded it all in his diary, only hinting that he knew who might be pulling the strings:

I am urging that the present set of enlargements be sent to Australia for propaganda. No better medium could we possibly have. The exhibition has been pronounced by experts to be the best since the beginning of the war.³³

I have omitted a week from my diary, having been so disgusted with the treatment I have received from the High Commissioner’s office and the A. I. F. It has worried me considerably. A deadlock has been arrived at which excludes me from taking the Exhibition of my own pictures to Australia …. The only reason Australia House ascribe to their attitude is because I am soliciting publicity. They accuse me of making a Hurley show of the exhibition, which is an infernal lie. … It seems beyond conception that government officials can assume such an attitude which is nothing but the outcome of personal jealousy. … I do not intend to let the matter drop here, but will have it taken up further by the Australian press.³⁶

The exhibition was sent on a provincial English tour. Hurley unsuccessfully tried to persuade Australia House to produce a duplicate set to take to Australia. He resigned on 11 July and received permission to make smaller versions of the AIF photographs, including the composites, for his private use, paying for the materials himself.³⁷

Meanwhile, Bean was, in his own way, attending to the propaganda potential of photographs. His attempt to prohibit Hurley from taking his composite tableaux to Australia did not mean that he was ignoring the value of photography for propaganda altogether. Whilst Hurley was arguing with the High Commissioner, Bean was organizing for 72 small 4×6 cm photographs to be available for purchase by the troops, at a shilling each. Bean also produced several series of lantern slides for the recruiting authority in Australia. As Bean admitted, ‘the originator of this scheme was really Hurley’.³⁸

Back in Australia, Hurley was amongst friends once more. In early 1919, after the Armistice, he got permission from the Minister for Defence to exhibit his personal collection of the smaller AIF photographs at Kodak’s Sydney Salon, which paid for the framing and mounting. The proceeds of the exhibition, some £300, were donated to the Red Cross. He used the press consummately to complain about his treatment in London. A talk he gave to the Photographic Society of New South Wales was reported under the headline ‘Australian War Pictures Kept In England’,³⁹ and two correspondents wrote letters of support to the Sydney Morning Herald, which conveniently allowed Hurley to reply:

Sir, After seeing Captain Frank Hurley’s wonderful war pictures … 1 cannot help wondering how it is that we have not become acquainted with them before. They are the real thing, and are of historic value. … I believe this collection is only one third of the pictures he has photographed on the battlefield, the others are in the keeping of military authorities in London. Why have they not reached Australia? Isn’t it worthwhile making some effort to obtain them for our National Art Gallery or Mitchell Library or some other place where they could have a permanent home, and serve as a memento of what our soldiers actually did in the great war, when they travelled 12 000 miles to help the Motherland. I write as an Anzac’s sister. I am etc. May Summerbelle.⁴⁰

… The last I heard of the collection of pictures was that they rested in peace, or rather pieces, in the vault of Australia House, London, in a shroud of red tape and cobwebs. Surely, indeed, this is gross injustice to the people, and a poor tribute to those who had deeply at heart the immortalisation of doings great in the history of our nation. … I am etc. Frank Hurley, Captain.⁴¹

Hurley’s Kodak Salon exhibition received much publicity. The composites were reproduced in many different newspapers and magazines. Hurley had assured the AIF that there would be ‘no delusion to the public’,⁴² and in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition he freely admitted that: ‘In order to convey accurate battle impressions, I have made several composite pictures, utilising a number of negatives for the purpose’.⁴³ However, the catalogue does not identify the composites, and when they were reproduced sometimes their composite nature was noted, sometimes not. All the time, however, the authenticity of the composites was stressed. Considerably stretching the truth, the catalogue stated that ‘The elements of these composites were all taken in action and submitted to the G. O. C. A. I. F. who gave his approval for their production’.⁴⁴ It was crucial for the reception of the images as authentic that all the component parts of the composites be assumed to be taken in action. Newspaper reviews certainly worked on that assumption.

War Pictures Realistic Collection Capt. Hurley’s work

‘The Dawn of Passchendaele’ immediately arrests attention, this is a very striking picture with all the sinister suggestions appropriate to that dreadful day. It was taken under machine gun fire at a spot where some stretcher-bearers had laid down their stricken burdens overnight to await for a relief party. The recumbent, shrouded figures — the attitude of complete exhaustion in which a guarding bearer leans against a wall — tell a mute story of suffering and endurance which gives the heart a sharp pang and stirs the imagination to a perhaps more intimate realisation of what prodigies of devotion and sacrifice those shell swept trenches of Flanders witnessed.⁴³

The pictures … are photographs taken at great risk during battles, and not fancy pictures faked from a safe position behind the lines. I received this news from the mouth of a returned soldier who said, ‘They are the goods, in the thick of the fight was Hurley with his camera; both he and his camera must have been charmed’.⁴⁶

These responses to Hurley’s composites (figures 3—5) are themselves a kind of composite: the reading of the ‘sinister suggestions’ produced by the addition of heavy clouds conforms to a conventional mode of pictorial decipherment which uses a generic lexicon derived from salon painting, whilst, at the same time, the assumption that the component parts are actual adds a ‘sharp pang’ of authenticity. The word ‘faked’, here, is used to distinguish composites supposedly comprising authentic components from staged re-enactments.

Hurley, explaining himself to a camera club readership, appropriated their word ‘impression’ in order to further validate his composites. Within camera clubs, ‘impression’ was normally used to describe ‘artistic’ or ‘pictorial’ photographs, but Hurley used it more generally to describe an authorized auteurial mode of photographic malleability:

Special permission was granted … for the making of ‘Photographic Impression Pictures’ …. None but those who have endeavoured can realise the insurmountable difficulties of portraying a modern battle by camera. To include the event on a single negative, I have tried and tried, but the results are hopeless. Everything is on such a vast scale. Figures are

scattered — the atmosphere is dense with haze and smoke — shells will not burst where required — yet the whole elements are there could they but be brought together and condensed. The battle is in full swing, the men are just going over the top — and I snap! A fleet of bombing planes is flying low, and a barrage burst all around. On developing my plate there is disappointment! All I find is a record of a few figures advancing from the trenches — and a background of haze. Nothing could be more unlike a battle. It might be a rehearsal in a paddock. Now if negatives are taken of all the separate incidents in the action and combined, some idea may be gained of what a modern battle looks like.

Ironically, Hurley had, in fact, used photographs taken of ‘a rehearsal in a paddock’ to create his most hyper-real and convincing battle scene. Besides dexterously fudging the truth, Hurley also took the opportunity to reply, inter alia, to Bean’s interdiction by citing the ultimate authority — the digger:

During a recent exhibition held in London by the High Commissioner for Australia, one such picture, depicting a scene near Zonnebeke, was enlarged up to 300 square feet. Attired in civilian dress, I often mingled with the ‘diggers’ to hear their scathing criticism. When I find they approve and pass favourable judgement, then I feel convinced such impression composites are justified.⁴

Immediately after his exhibition Hurley offered to sell his prints to the National Art Gallery (now the Art Gallery of New South Wales) and they were eventually acquired by the Mitchell Library. Two years later, in August 1921, the first photographic exhibition from Bean’s Australian War Museum opened at the Melbourne Aquarium, and was seen by 83 000 people in five weeks. Mural-sized enlargements and colour prints were on display, and particular photographs could be ordered to raise money for the future Memorial. Like Hurley’s show, the exhibition reproduced the horror of the war on an immediate level:

There, most truly and vividly, war in all its frightfulness is pictured …. The horror of all those things so vividly shown in these photographs makes itself most terribly felt …. Every phase of the war is presented without trimmings or politeness. It is a real record, and one which Australians will value and be proud of. The photographs have been selected from 20 000 negatives in the possession of the War Museum’s committee. They were so accurate and complete that the military censors in France insisted on their being treated as secret documents.⁴⁹

But this exhibition, compiled on Bean’s terms, was able to achieve more, even, than had Hurley’s own exhibition: the archival monumentality of the 20000 negatives in the nation’s collection, plus their ontological status as ‘real records’ which at one time even had the strategic status of ‘secret documents’, gives these images an extra artefactual solidity. In addition, the exhibition was a mnemonic event that directly addressed itself to each returned digger and each grieving relative individually:

[I]t is estimated that nearly 60 percent of the personnel of the A. I. F. appear in the views, which are ‘keyed’ and indexed so that it is possible to identify nearly every man who was ‘snapped’. … By means of a unique system of indexing, hundreds of relatives have been able to see photographs of men who were killed or missing, and soldiers who have returned have identified themselves and their comrades on the battle fronts.⁵⁰

Two years after that, in 1923, the twelfth volume of Bean’s Official History was devoted entirely to photographs, 753 in all, each one meticulously captioned and each one, Bean was careful to note in his introduction, ‘as far as possible, scrupulously genuine. … The pictures here printed have not been retouched in any way except to remedy scratches or other obvious flaws in the negatives’.⁵¹

In photography the division between the fake and the not-fake has always been unstable. Bean’s argument with Hurley took place before the full development of the documentary genre in the 1920s and ’30s which established the technical slice of the shutter-blade, guillotining and encapsulating a contingent moment, as the only guarantor of truth. However, in the case of Hurley’s composites, photographic authenticity is guaranteed by the manual virtuosity of scenographic effect which is able to assemble multiple moments into a single tableau, with a second-degree pictorial expressivity to provide legibility, and an exegetic, performative testimony from the impresario/witness to provide authenticity. To the contemporaneous viewer Hurley’s composite techniques were not illicit fakery, but licit special effects tacitly deployed to produce a legitimate scenario worthy of emotional and phenomenological investment.

Hurley’s argument with Bean also took place when the specific gravity of the photograph as artefact was still high — before photography’s atomization during the age of its mechanical reproduction — when the photograph was primarily encountered as an object to be pasted into an album or placed on a mantelpiece. Bean’s pious reverence for the purity of the photograph related as much to its status as a potent relic to be eternally exposited by his larger history, as to its putative ‘documentary’ ability to contain a self-evident historical truth. For Bean the main game was long-term national memory, and that needed artefactually stable images which interlocked into a monumental reliquary archive. In that context, Hurley’s composites were dangerous fakes because they drained the indexical charge from the relic.

Hurley’s composites are quaint historical footnotes now, and would not move audiences even if they still existed in their original salon picture size. The heroic stories they told, and their rich pictorial embroidery, now seem threadbare and slightly disreputable. On the other hand, none of Wilkins’s record photographs have become iconic either, despite being reproduced many times. Many do, indeed, look like rehearsals in a paddock, and tend to be crippled without Bean’s meticulous captions. Hurley’s sensational effects compromised the photograph’s optical and temporal specificity, but strategically produced an immediate, though evanescent emotion. Bean’s collection of indexical photographic records did become integral to his highly successful Memorial, but they are only able to act as a monument to the dead within larger sustaining institutional structures and mythic mnemonic mechanisms.

Despite the subsequent historical slippage of the terms in which it was couched, their argument lined up along either side of a dialectic that has remained persistently entrenched within photography. The major theorists of photography within modernity (Benjamin, Bazin, Barthes) all subsequently elaborated on this dialectic when they distinguished, in various ways, between the indexical charge of the photograph as artefact and the semiotic mutability of the photograph as image. Current postmodern developments in digital technology have added new twists to their argument. Recent journalistic anxiety over the supposed threat of the digital to the autonomous authority of the news photograph would have had a familiar ring to Bean. Photography’s role within the newly digital mass media is less now as a provider of an endless series of rectangular, guillotined slices of time and space, and more as a font for a continuous stream of mutable visual data to be assembled and reassembled into various pictorial configurations. Exegetic protocols are currently being established within the media to set the various levels of agreed fakery, from factual reportage to editorial illustration. In addition, the media’s own ubiquitous presence throughout the real means that the distinction between a spontaneous and an enacted profilmic event is more and more difficult to make. And the growing archive of historical photography and film, which distinguishes less and less between documentary and fictional sources, means that the past is known as much through fabulated as actual historical images.⁵

As the twentieth century progressed, the guillotining blade of the camera shutter became the core of photography’s technical ontology. The documentary movement entrenched the snapshot image as photography’s normative style, and the indexical photograph became our culture’s key historical and mnemonic artefact. But although it might once have appeared that the issue of fakery had been settled for good, it now seems that an argument of eighty years ago is far from over yet.

Notes

D. McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme: The Story of C. E. Sydney: John Ferguson 1983, 233, 270.
C. E. W. Bean, C. E. W. Bean Diary, Australian War Memorial, AWM38, 3DRL606, series 1, item 88, 19 September 1917.
C. E. W. Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Canberra: Australian War Memorial 1948, 6.
Members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.
M. McKernan, Here is Their Spirit, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press 1991, 42.
Australian colloquialism for an Australian soldier, particularly those that served in the First World War.
AWM E2818, E2819, ‘Two diggers from the 5th Australian Division’, 30 July 1918.
D. McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, 34.
Bean, Gallipoli Mission, 4.
Ibid., 111.
J. Thomas, Showman, Canberra: National Library of Australia 1990; D. Millar, Snowdrift and Shellfire, David Ell Press 1984.
Australian Imperial Force.
F. Hurley, My Diary, Official War Photographer, Commonwealth Military Forces, from 21 August 1917 to 31 August 1918, typewritten manuscript, National Library of Australia, MS883,Series 1, Item 5, 5 September, 1917. Bean, Gallipoli Mission, 20.
x
C. E. W. Bean and H. S. Gullett, Photographic Record of the War:
Reproductions of Pictures taken hy the Australian Official Photographers,
Sydney: Angus and Robertson 1923, vii—viii.
C. E. W. Bean, Wilkins and Hurley recommendations, Australian War
Memorial, AWM38, DRL6673, item 57, 24 October 1917.
Bean and Gullett, Photographic Record of the War, vii—viii.
C. E. W. Bean, Wilkins and Hurley recommendations.
Hurley, My Diary, 26 September 1917.
Ibid. ‘
For example, the Australian War Memorial holds a composite postcard
by Underwood, ‘Battle in Skies During Zeppelin Raid on England’,
AWM, H18216.
C. E. W. Bean Diar)>, 71-2.
Hurley, My Diary, 1 October 1917.
Hurley, 2 October 1917.
Hurley, 3 October 1917.
Hurley, 6 October 1917.
Hurley, 26, 27, 28 May 1918.
C. F. Hurley, Catalogue of an Exhihition of War Photographs, Sydney:
1919, Cat. No. 77.
F. Hurley, Press cuttings, National Library of Australia, MS883, series 2, items 29-36, Newsy Notes (August 1919), n.p.
The first shot from the sequence was exhibited as ‘ “Fix Bayonets”, Australian Infantry preparing to resist a counter attack at Zonnebeke’, State Library of New South Wales Collection PXD19-PXD31. Catalogued in C. F. Hurley, Catalogue of an Exhihition of War Photographs, Sydney: 1919, cat no. 36; and D. O’Keefe, Hurley at War, Sydney: The Fairfax Library 1986, 53. The second shot from the sequence was exhibited, as a detail from the larger composite, as ‘A wave of infantry going over the top to resist a counter attack, Zonnebeke’, SLNSW Collection. Catalogued in C. F. Hurley, cat. no. 41; and D. O’Keefe, 51. The third shot from the sequence is in the Australian War Memorial at E5429 as A photograph taken in France in June 1919 [incorrect date] illustrating the commencement of an attack’. The background aircraft montage was also exhibited separately as ‘Shrapnel bursting amongst reconnoitring planes. Picture taken over the tail of a leading machine’, SLNSW Collection. Catalogued in C. F. Hurley, cat. no. 45. (However, Hurley did not take his first flight until he was sent to Palestine at the end of 1917.)
‘Colour Photographs. Capt. Hurley’s Work in Palestine’, The Times, London, (6 June 1918), 5. Hurley, My Diary, 4 June 1918.
D. McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, 333.
C. E. W. Bean Diary, 5, 6, 7 June 1918.
Hurley, My Diary, 4 June 1918.
Hurley, My Diary, 14-21 June 1918.
Information given hy Captain Frank Hurley (Official Photographer A. I. F.)
during interview with Principal Librarian on 27/6/19, State Library of New
South Wales, 27 June 1919.
C. E. W. Bean Diary, 26 June 1918.
Hurley, Press cuttings, National Library of Australia, MS883, series 2,
items 29—36, n.d., n.t., n.p.
Hurley, Press cuttings, Sydney Morning Herald (19 March 1919), n.p.
Hurley, Press cuttings, Sydney Morning Herald (20 March 1919), n.p.
Hurley, My Diary, 6 October 1917.
C. F. Hurley, Catalogue of an Exhihition of War Photographs, Sydney:
1919, n.p.
Hurley, n.p.
Hurley, Press cuttings, Sydney Morning Herald (13 March 1919), n.p.
Hurley, Press cuttings, The Sun (12 March 1919), n.p.
Captain F. Hurley, ‘War Photography’, The Australasian Photo-Review
(15 February 1919), 164.
C. F. Hurley, (15 February 1919), 164.
Australian War Pictures: A Wonderful Collection’, The Age (20 August
1921), 3.
‘Display of War Pictures, Appeal of the Personal Touch’, The Argus
(21 August 1921), 5.
C. E. W. Bean and H. S. Gullett, Photographic Record of the War, viii.
D. MacDougall, ‘Films of Memory’, in Visualizing Theory: Selected
Essays from V. A. R. 1990-1994, New York and London: Routledge
1994.

Composite Propaganda Photographs during the First World War 2003

pdf: composite propaganda 2003

‘Composite Propaganda Photographs during the First World War’,

History of Photography, Vol 27, No 2, Summer, 2003, pp 154-165

During the final two years of the First World War, a series of propaganda photography exhibitions were held in London. The centrepieces to these exhibitions were giant mural enlargements. Some of these spectacular battle scenes were artificially coloured and some were composites produced from several different negatives. The exhibitions were popular successes, and the mural images attracted favourable press attention. They also produced a degree of controversy behind the scenes with respect to their status as ‘fakes’.

Pictorial War Propaganda in Britain

In the first years of the war, all forms of propaganda began to be used more frequently and more strategically by all belligerent nations. By 1916 war propagandists were taking seriously the potential of pictorial propaganda. Britain appointed official photographers and set up a pictorial department to distribute British photographs and films overseas. From early 1917, when the war had bogged down in the trenches and there was danger of public disaffection, propaganda became as concerned with managing domestic opinion and mood as with promoting foreign policy interests abroad. By the closing stages of the war it had become apparent ‘that almost for the first time in history success in war had become directly dependent on general public opinion’. Pictorial propagandists quickly recognised the importance of the new media, such as the cinema or illustrated newspapers, for disseminating their images. Images became central to public understanding of the war, and photography and film supplanted the written word as the most powerful weapon in propaganda.

The driving force behind pictorial propaganda in Britain was Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian financier who, as Max Aitkin, had come to Britain in 1910 and quickly rose in politics through his wealth, newspaper interests as owner of the Daily Express, personal friendships and high-level political allegiances. At the outbreak of the War, Aitkin persuaded the Canadian Prime Minister to make him ‘Official Canadian Eyewitness’. In January 1916 he was allowed to set up and run the Canadian War Records Office. By the end of the year he had also become the Chairman of the British War Office Cinematographic Committee. Early the following year the new British Prime Minister Lloyd George granted him the peerage of Lord Beaverbrook as a reward for his support in the overthrow of the Asquith government. A year later, in 1918, Lloyd George made Beaverbrook Britain’s first Minister of Information. Beaverbrook energetically set about shaping what had previously been piecemeal efforts into a single operation.

From the start British propagandists distanced them¬selves from the sensational fabrications and gross jingoism of Boar War propaganda. In the phrase of the first head of the British Foreign Office’s Bureau of Propaganda, Charles Masterman, they were to use ‘the propaganda of facts’.2 While acknowledging this tenet, Beaverbrook demonstrated a more sophisticated understanding of media-based propaganda within the complex and fragmented social environment of wartime Britain. When he became Britain’s Minister of Information in 1918, he declared what his approach had been throughout the war. Public opinion must not be allowed to form itself, it must be formed for it — by the truth certainly — but the truth ‘in an acceptable form’:

It is useless to imagine that the mere existence of a fact will penetrate everywhere by its own weight, or that facts themselves do not requrre treatment according to which audience they are to be presented. Public opinion is indeed so volatile a thing that nothing except a mixture of tact and persistence will induce it to accept and realise what to the preacher is self evident.3

Earlier, as head of the Canadian War Records Office, Beaverbrook had realized that photography would be central to the documentation of this war because it was thoroughly in tune with the dual responsibility of a government records office to disseminate information and collect documents. The photograph was able to operate along both the axes of publicity and record keeping, propaganda and history. Photographs took part in the urgency of the moment, while simultaneously implying the importance of that moment for posterity. ‘Many of these have not yet passed the censor’, wrote Beaverbrook, ‘but five or ten or twenty-five years from now, they will be shown to us and our sons and will link the decades together in a way unimagined by our ancestors’.4

Beaverbrook also had the most acute understanding of anyone in Britain of the importance of photography and film for the new psychological depth of the task propaganda had to perform. He felt the visceral primacy of the image over the written word, and he understood the importance for war propaganda of the technical affinity that the most modern forms of visual experience had with the most modern forms of warfare.

Under modern conditions nations are fighting and are sacri¬ficing bone and sinew to an extent never known before — and realisation alone can justify the sacrifice. We must see our men climbing out of the trenches before we can realise the patience, the exhaustion, and the courage which are the assets and trials of the modern fighting man.”1

As the war dragged on, photography became even more important to Beaverbrook because the directness of the image was able to combat the fatigue the public was feeling with respect to the war itself and with the increasingly hollow-sounding rhetoric of traditional propaganda. Photographic facts addressed themselves particularly to the working classes and were able to form a direct point of contact between the totally estranged experiences of those in Britain and those on the front.

It is hard enough for the civilian, on whose endurance to the end the issue of the world war depends so largely, to realise conditions at the front: without photography it would be practically impossible. But what the mind can’t take in by the reading of descriptions, the eye can assimilate from the actual outline of the scene and the men depicted on the plate. Besides, the great bulk of mankind soon wearies of the word. At the bottom of his heart man feels of the war story that of the makers of such books there is no end, and that much study of them is weariness to the flesh. Photography has about it the convincing atmosphere of naked reality. He has only got to open his eyes to see it. So is modern science applied to the acts of war as well as of peace.’

Beaverbrook’s other innovation as head of the Canadian War Records Office was to use the established film and photography trades for the production and dissemination of propaganda. The official British and Canadians photographers

came largely from London’s most pictorially oriented illustrated newspaper, the Daily Mirror, which had since 1904 exclusively used photographs as illustrations. The Canadian official photographs were licensed for distribu¬tion through picture agencies on a commercial basis. ‘No propaganda reaches the hearts and minds of the people’, wrote Beaverbrook, ‘unless it is so convincing and that the public is ready and anxious to pay a price to see or read it’.7

In addition, in the emerging mass media environment of the time, there were many rivals for the attention of the public, and appetites easily became jaded. In this context, a fundamental principle of propaganda must be that ‘obvious propaganda is not only of little value but may even do more harm than good.’ Although Beaverbrook wanted his images to carry the authoritative premium of the ‘official’ imprimatur, he also wanted them to become an intimate part of the public’s media consumption, a consumption that was driven by the compulsions of choice and desire. Moreover, because this public appetite was changing and continually seeking formal novelty, only trade photographers trained under commercial imperatives, not bureaucrats, could provide effective propaganda.

Official war photographs were disseminated into a very fluid, polyvalent media environment. In the illustrated papers of the time photographs were not diegetically integrated into the news articles. They were generally given their own section in the paper — in the case of the Daily Mirror, as a front page, back page and centre double-page spread — with supporting captions. The caption might denote either a non-specific ‘scene at the front’, or a specifically reported on raid. Valencies of authenticity and scenographic legibility were exchanged between different kinds of image and text across the page. Photo¬graphic realism became the core model for all illustration, and the fresh, proximate, eyewitness report became the model for all text. Illustrated magazines such as the Illustrated London News, for instance, which still largely relied on drawing and paintings to convey scenographic information, often published an uninformative photo¬graph of a particular engagement, followed by a stirringly composed drawing of the same engagement, with the caption ‘drawn from eyewitness accounts’.

Although the intrepid official photographer became a key figure in this newspaper landscape, the idea of the ‘photojournalist’ — the autonomous photographer inde¬pendently reporting on events as they unfolded — made no sense at the time. Official photographers were given honorary ranks and saw themselves as propagandists, not reporters, their photographs were part of the war effort, not a comment on it.

The Problem of the ‘Fake’

In this context, propagandists and photographers found themselves having continually to finesse the balance between

the qualities of authenticity, actuality and immediacy in their images and their legibility as historical scenes. This was new iconographic terrain, where everything was at stake. The value of authenticity had never been more politically crucial, but at the same time the need to provide scenographic spectacle to feed the public appetite for images, and the need to re-cohere fragmentary and disjointed images into readily legible pictures, created a huge temptation to fake.

Faking took place in several forms. Photographs taken during training were passed off as real battle reportage or scenes were deliberately staged for the camera. Photographs themselves were manipulated with bomb blasts or aeroplanes being montaged into the pictures, and elaborate composites were sometimes constructed from several negatives. Virtually every photographer or filmmaker faked to some extent, and everybody seemed to know about it.

Not only did the accusation of fake directly threaten the propagandistic value of the photograph or film, it could also upset the internal politics of the army and undermine the photographer’s honorary position within its structure. Fakes could bring photographers and cinematographers into disrepute with soldiers at the front. For instance, a shot with a dog supposedly minding its master’s kit and rifle in the snow was returned to the official photographers from General Staff with the terse note: ‘I am instructing the photograph censors not to pass this type of photo in the future. To every soldier serving with a combatant unit, this must be patently and obviously a “fake”‘.10

Although such instances of faking remained relatively rare, and were usually officially disavowed and surrepti¬tious, they were nonetheless an integral part of pictorial propaganda. In his position as the Chair of the War Office Cinematographic Committee, Beaverbrook sacked a Lieutenant Bovill, a film cameraman, because his wholesale faking made his footage useless. At the same time, Beaverbrook continued to sponsor the successful British film cameraman Lieutenant Malins and Canada’s official photographer Ivor Castle, both of whom were widely suspected to have faked from time to time.

Propaganda Exhibitions

The most explicit ‘fakes’ made during the First World War were the central set pieces to a series of massive photographic exhibitions that Beaverbrook initiated. In 1916 and 1917 Beaverbrook organised two exhibitions of ‘Canadian Official War Photographs’ at the Grafton Galleries in London. The success of these exhibitions led to two British exhibitions: an exhibition of ‘Imperial [British, Canadian and Australian] War Photographs’ at the Royal Academy in January 1918; and ‘British Official War Photographs in Colour’ at the Grafton Galleries in March 1918. By this time Beaverbrook had become Minister of Information. The Australian War Records Section concluded the sequence with an exhibition ‘Australian Official War Photographs and Pictures’ at the Grafton Galleries in May 1918.

The first Canadian exhibitions not only went on to tour — first in England and then to France and to North America — but they were also the locus for considerable press attention, visits by royalty and huge public attendance. They were partnered as media events by the reproduction in newspapers and magazines of images made from them. They were also points from which images were sold to the public in a variety of formats and prices, ranging from nine pence to several hundred pounds.

These exhibitions were organised by Ivor Castle, an experienced English press and war photographer, whom Beaverbrook had recruited to the Canadian War Records Office in mid 1916 from the photography department of the Daily MirrorV Castle photographed Canada’s role in the disastrous Somme offensive of late 1916, and then returned to London to mount in December 1916 the first exhibition of over 200 Canadian War Photographs. The photographic printing company Raines & Co of Ealing enlarged these negatives to sizes ranging from one square metre to two by three metres and mounted them in heavy oak frames. The proceeds from the picture sales went to the Canadian War Memorials Fund to pay painters to paint grand battle pictures for a post war memorial.

Captions to photographs in this exhibition emphasizd both the technical sophistication of the photographs, and the bravery of the photographer:

Heavy Barrage Fire

This is the only panoramic photograph of a shell barrage in the world … It is obvious from the picture the risk which the photographer ran in taking it.

The Shelling of Courcelette

The photographer approached as near to the scene as he could without being killed, and declares it to be a veritable ‘hell on earth’.12

In this exhibition, however, staged photographs were also shown without compunction. The exhibition’s central sequence of photographs, which supposedly showed lines of troops heroically clambering ‘over the top’ into an onslaught of enemy machine gun fire, was in fact taken behind the lines at the St Pol training school. The canvas breech covers on the training rifles held by the soldiers had been cropped out, and shell bursts, which were probably shot separately at the nearby trench-mortar school, had been montaged into the sky.1

Shortly after the photographs had been staged and three months before their display in the exhibition, this sequence had been received enthusiastically by the press, which had published them as up-to-the minute news photographs. They were published by the Illustrated London News with the caption: ‘”Over the Top”: The meaning of a phrase now familiar.’14 They were also reproduced on the front page of the Daily Mirror, with the caption ‘These Striking Photographs Show In Vivid Fashion An Attack By The Canadian Troops’.13 A month later the Daily Mirror published them again, along with a dashing portrait of Ivor Castle posing in a trench (figure 2), in order to advertise their sale as postcards, with profits to go to the Canadian War Memorials Fund.16

When the enlargements were exhibited at the Grafton Galleries two months later, they relied on a more elaborately fabricated catalogue text to verify them:

The Last Over The Top

Here is to be seen a remarkable picture of a German shrapnel shell bursting over a Canadian trench just as the Canadians are going over the parapet. A fragment from this shell killed the man whose body is seen sprawled across the parapet.17

This incident of staging remained officially unac¬knowledged, and Castle, coming from a commercial background and having a flare for publicity, went on to exaggerate his personal derring-do in the magazine Canada in Khaki: ‘Taking photographs of the men going over the parapet is quite exciting. Nothing, of course, can be arranged. You sit or crouch in the first-line trench while the enemy does a little strafing, and if you are lucky you get your pictures’. This studied insouciance gave Castle’s colleague on the Daily Mirror, William Rider-Rider, who was the second official Canadian photographer recruited to the Canadian War Records Office in June 1917, a lot to live down when he visited some units. There, he later recounted, he was met by remarks such as, ‘Want to take us going over the top? Another faker?’19

As the exhibition toured to Canada and the United States over the next two years, the ‘over the top’ pictures continued to be met with press acclaim for their realism, vividness and sense of immediacy. In all of these press accounts the figure of the intrepid photographer, who like the soldiers themselves risked death to capture his shots, figured strongly.

Cinema Propaganda

Castle staged his ‘over the top’ pictures at about the same time as the seminal propaganda film Battle of the Somme was breaking all box office records in Britain. The centrepiece to the film was a similarly stirring ‘over the top sequence’, which had been filmed a month or so before. The first two shots in the sequence were staged, probably also at a training school behind the lines, by the British War Office’s Official cinematographer, Lieutenant Geoffrey Malins.”

The Second Canadian Exhibition

After the success of his first Canadian exhibition, Castle remained in London until April 1917, when he returned to France and photographed the Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge. These photographs formed the basis of the second exhibition, also sponsored by the Canadian War Records Office, which opened in July 1917 (figure 3). Like its predecessor this exhibition featured 188 enlargements in oak frames, some of which were further enhanced by artificial colouring. The pictures were reported as depicting the Canadian operations with a ‘terrible realism’ and supplying a ‘most intimate insight’ into the difficulties of the front.”1 As in the first exhibition, the intrepidity of the official photographer was highlighted in the catalogue.

Barbed Wire and the Shells

The Canadian official photographer was out along the front line when the Germans suddenly began a bombardment. The pho¬tographer had to take cover for three hours, but he emerged periodically to take pictures of the Germans’ morning ‘hate’.

The Death Cloud

It is one of the hardest things in the world to get a really good ‘snap’ of bursting shrapnel. Pretty as this little cloud of smoke looks, it is very deadly, and the man who handles the camera at such a moment does so at the risk of his life.

Many of the pictures were giant enlargements. The catalogue drew the visitor’s particular attention to picture

number 158 (figures 4, 5), ‘which is the largest photo¬

graph in the world taken on “no man’s land” by the

Canadian Official photographer as the Canadians went over to the attack on Thelus Village’. The picture would have been hard to miss since it occupied an entire wall of the central gallery and measured six by three metres. Raines & Co had printed it in five separate panels. The image was a composite of several different negatives, with printed-in shell bursts in the sky and printed-in bodies in the foreground. The catalogue’s extended caption served as a film-like commentary, taking the visitor step by step through the correct way to experience the picture:

The Taking of Vimy Ridge

No individual soldier taking part in a modern battle can have the faintest idea of the scope of the battle, or the conditions of that battle. Distance and perspective are necessary to secure the correct impression of the actual facts. For this reason it is idle to stand close to this picture. It must be looked at and studied from a sufficient distance to enable one to understand the immensity and importance of the scene before one. It is true that the Canadian Official photographer, who took this picture, was in the midst of the men who were advancing to the attack, but knowledge of his craft alone enabled him to take a picture, the real wonder and sense of which can only be studied with quiet reflection and at a distance. Nonetheless the terrible nearness of things in which the photographer stood, which enables one to, as it were, ‘watch the battle from the neighbouring hill’, at the same time sweeps one into the conflict. One becomes absorbed into the picture. It is as though one were on the battlefield itself. The picture of the battle is taken in profile. It is taken from the flank looking along the line of attack. To the left of the picture, beyond the frame, one must imagine the smoke of our guiding and sheltering barrage fire. Guiding, yes, but sheltering only to a degree. Through that barrage the German shells are hurtling. The white smoke in the distance, which lies along the ground like a dewy mist above meadows at dawn, is smoke from the counter barrage of the German’s piercing our own. Every fleck of smoke, indeed, in the grim sky is smoke from bursting enemy shells. The great splodges of black smoke show where German shrapnel is showering thickly. Far along the ridge, in the middle distance, through the lane of men, may be seen the tanks heavily engaged. In the immediate foreground lie those who have already made the supreme sacrifice. Between, strolling to their ‘rendezvous with death’, are the men who made Vimy deathless. At the moment they are on what had been ‘no man’s land’ but a short time before; there still protrude from the broken ground the supports which held the German wire entanglements swept away from our guns. It is an awful pageant of war as it is waged today. It is an impression, nay, indeed a reality, of the splendid horror snatched by the photographer, in the fraction of a second, from the clutchings of death.23

This extended description not only navigates the audience through the abstracted, fragmented and disorienting experience of modern warfare, but also instructs it how to experience the picture in the gallery space. The viewer is asked to immerse himself within the battle, while also retaining a distance from it. This phenomenological act of doubling attempts to project an experiential bridge between those in London and those in the trenches. It links the two new, modern experiences — warfare and giant photograph exhibitions — through the mechanisms of nationalist empathy and the virtual space created by advanced photographic technology.

Like the first exhibition, this one was a spectacular success. At one point people queued for nearly two hundred metres to get in, and the exhibition raised £1100 for the Canadian War Memorials Fund. It was also the occasion for much associated press coverage. The Daily Mirror, whose photography department Castle had formerly headed and to which he would return after the War, was especially enthusiastic:

WAR PICTURES WITHOUT EQUAL,

CANADIAN BATTLE SNAPS, SHOTS THAT

WILL THRILL

To gaze, for instance at the huge picture showing the Canadians going to the attack at Vimy Ridge is to be carried away in imagination to the grim realities of war. To obtain a full impression of the splendid awesomeness of this amazing masterpiece of photographic art the visitor should stand some distance away. The result will be thrills as if one were on the battlefield itself24

The exhibition later toured Britain, and a copy went to Paris and Canada. The success of the Canadian War Records Office did not go unnoticed. John Buchan, head of Britain’s Department of Information, wrote in August 1917 to Sir Reginald Brade of the British War Office. He wanted to revamp and increase the support and supervision afforded to British photographers because the flood of good quality Canadian photographs was lending support to criticism in the US press that ‘Canada [was] running the war.’ Buchan was opposed, however, to emulating Beaverbrook by putting British propaganda photography on an entirely commercial footing. He did not want to tie distribution to the monopoly of one commercial agency and, balking at Beaverbrook’s commer¬cial understanding of the new dynamics of public image consumption, thought it unwise to restrict attendance at propaganda exhibitions by charging admission.”3

Castle’s use of composites had the full support of Beaverbrook. He was planning an exhibition of Imperial War Photographs for January 1918 and was determined to retain the right of the Canadian Office to make composites for display. ‘Fake them … that’s what you could call it’, he declared in a meeting.” He brazened down British General Staff by directly requesting a ruling from the Chief Censor as to how they should be treated. He received the crisp reply: ‘All photographs whether “composite” or single exhibited as representing an actual scene on the Western front should be censored. If the Canadian Photographic Section care to exhibit “composite” photos clearly marked as such, then it will suffice if each separate photo has been censored’.27

The biggest composite was produced not for the Canadians, however, but on behalf of the British, for the exhibition ‘British Official War Photographs in Colour’ held in March 1918. Beaverbrook now led Britain’s Ministry of Information, and Ivor Castle probably orchestrated the composite, although he was still nominally attached to the Canadian War Records Office. At Raines & Co the photographs in the exhibition were printed in sepia, then broadly hand coloured with spray guns, before being coloured in detail by hand. They were mistakenly assumed by some daily newspapers to be colour photographs.~x Mounted prints measuring 1.3 by 1 metres were on sale for £150, with an additional 50% added for hand colouring. The catalogue to the exhibition proclaimed:

Great Record of the War

No photographic exhibition has ever been attempted on such a scale before. It comprises many thousands of square feet of photographs, coloured under the supervision of experts, with the most particular care to detail. Truth to colour has never been sacrificed for the sake of creating an impression, but nonetheless the impression which this amazing collection conveys will be ineffaceable. If all the Master Artists of the world had laboured for a year they could not have produced a record of War so humanly vivid, arresting and complete. One walks through the doors of the Grafton Galleries on to the grey flats of Flanders, and on to the golden but burning sands of the deserts of the east. It is as though one was transported on a magic carpet into the battle zone half the world over. This wonderful collection is the apotheosis of the camera. The unflinching eye of the lens has looked on the War

in all its aspects, and has recorded more faithfully even than any historian could do, the greatest and the smallest things in the greatest and most wonderful war in history.-

The centrepiece to the exhibition was the new ‘largest photograph in the world’ (figure 1), a hand-coloured composite, which, despite General Staffs request, was not identified as such:

Dreadnoughts of the Battlefield This, the largest photograph in the world, was taken during a recent advance on the Western Front. The tanks, those giant landships which indomitably plough the oceans of mud in France and Flanders, are moving forward to attack. In the photograph heavy shells may be seen bursting thickly in the line of their path, but no barrage daunts them. The picture is so vivid that it brings the realisation of modern battle into the heart of London. The best way to appreciate its wonders is to stand away from it as far as possible, when every detail will stand out in stereoscopic relief. The picture actually measures 23ft 6in by 17ft, without the frame, and it was necessary to make it in two sections, as the builders of the Galleries never anticipated a ‘canvas’ on such a scale. Neither doors nor windows could accommodate a picture of such gigantic dimensions.3″

This picture therefore subsumes into itself all previous and rival technologies: the humanity of the history paint¬ing, the magic carpet ride of cinema and the corporeally based illusionism of the stereoscope. The magnitude of this gesamtkunstwerk can only be achieved through composite montage, but this montage has to be disavowed in order to preserve the integrity of photographic verisimilitude, while inscribing it into a new regime of modernist spectacle. As a Ministry of Information press article commented: ‘It is a far cry from the old garish family group pasted in the album of Victorian days to the great picture twenty-four feet by seventeen feet showing the first tanks in action.'” When the King and Queen visited the exhibition to view ‘the soul of the War laid bare in pictures’, they remained for a long time in front of this picture. The King remarked that the photographs were the finest he had seen.32

After two months at the Grafton Galleries, the exhibition had been seen by a quarter of a million people and had raised £7000 for charity. The exhibition was then moved into the East End, to the People’s Palace in Mile End Road, presumably to address itself more directly to London’s working classes. A smaller version of the exhibition simultaneously toured smaller towns, and a set of battle photographs was prepared for dispatch to the United States.

Australian Propaganda

The establishment of a Canadian War Records Office in January 1916 had been a model and a goad for Australia’s War Recorder, C.E.W. Bean, to agitate for the establish¬ment of an Australian War Records Section, which he finally achieved in June 1917. The Canadian office was always more generously resourced and commercially aggressive than the Australian section. Because of Lord Beaverbrook’s status as simultaneously Canadian War Records Officer, Chairman of the British War Office Cinematographic Committee, Peer, newspaper proprie¬tor and Whitehall power broker, the Canadian War Records Office had also had much more weight in London. In fact, in late 1917 and early 1918 Bean had to fend off several attempts by Beaverbrook to bring the entire Australian photography section under his wing.” The two organizations also took radically different approaches to their work. Bean was a reporter and a historian. Although he sometimes skewed his reportage for propaganda purposes, he was nonetheless committed above all else to making a record of the war, which he saw in nation building terms.’4 Beaverbrook was a poli¬tician and newspaperman, committed to propaganda and publicity and, above all, the management of public opinion.

Like Beaverbrook, however, Bean was also convinced of the crucial role the photograph must play in war records, not because of its propaganda charge but because of its status as an inviolable historical artifact. Beaverbrook used experienced English press photographers as Cana¬dian official photographers because they knew best the contemporary media landscape. Bean wanted to use Australian photographers to record Australian soldiers, because they would be contributing to the foundation of an Australian heritage. In August 1917 the two Australian photographers Bean had requested — Hubert Wilkins and Frank Hurley — were appointed directly to the Australian Imperial Forces.

After a few weeks at the front, one of the photogra¬phers, Frank Hurley, became convinced that the only way to make convincing battle photographs was to make composite prints. Hurley was already well acquainted with the techniques of composite printing. Before the war he had read a paper to the Photographic Society of New South Wales on the subject, demonstrating his study by combining several different negatives taken of different animals at the zoo into a single scene, complete with clouds.” * He had also made composite prints in London just before his appointment as an Australian official photographer.

In November 1916 Hurley had arrived in London as a hero. He was the photographer and cinematographer of the Shackleton Antarctic expedition, which had just returned to London after a sensational escape from the ice. On 5 December 1916 Hurley’s expedition photographs were published exclusively across all of the photography sections of the Daily Mirror. The Shackleton expedition had been financed against expected future earnings from the sale of the film and photograph rights. Because much material had been lost in the crushing of the Endurance or left on the ice, the backers of the exhibition decided that Hurley should return to South Georgia to shoot more wildlife scenes to supplement the Antarctic material. Before leaving in February 1917, however, Hurley worked in the darkrooms of the Daily Chronicle, owned by one of the expedition’s backers, as well as with the Paget Company, where his colour lantern slides ‘were developed, and at Raines & Co, where his negatives were printed. During this period, Hurley made the most of the limited number of plates that he had brought back from Antarctica by combining some of them into composite prints. He also worked with a variety of British companies to manufacture cutting-edge display technology for the marketing of the expedition’s photographs and films. Newtons, for instance, who were lantern slide experts, constructed a special lantern able to project colour images on to a screen five metres square.

Hurley was in London, working with the Shackleton material at Raines & Co and making composite prints, during the period when the Canadian exhibitions were being mounted. He would have easily recognized the printed-in clouds and composites, but his diary does not record that he visited the exhibitions. Nor does it record him meeting Castle until a week or so after his own decision to make composite prints of the fighting in Flanders.’

Hurley and Charles Bean had a running argument, extended over several days, about Hurley’s right to make composites.37 The idea was anathema to Bean, for whom the war photograph was becoming a sacred, inviolable historical artefact. The example of the Canadian composites was there for each man to draw upon as they argued. Bean wrote in his diary:

[HIad a long argument with Hurley who wants to be allowed to make ‘composite’ pictures for his exhibition … I can see his point, he has been nearly killed a dozen times and has tailed to get the pictures he wants — but we will not have it at any price. The Canadians to some extent print their battle pictures with shell bursts from other photos — but we don’t want to rival them in this.’

Hurley, on the other hand, declared to his diary:

I am unwilling and will not make a display of war pictures unless the Military people see their way clear to give me a free hand. Canada has made a great advertisement out of their pictures, and I must beat them.’

At about this time Beaverbrook had approached Hurley to make composite prints for the Canadians outside of the Australian areas. ” This may have been what emboldened Hurley to threaten to resign he if did not get his way. Australian GHQ eventually gave Hurley permission to reproduce six composites, requesting only that they be clearly labelled as such.

In early November Bean sent Hurley to Palestine to cover the Australian Light Horse. Away from the stric¬tures of the front and of Bean, he flourished. He found the Australian light horse battalions amenable to staging re-enactments for the camera. He met with the commanders beforehand and planned with them whole, day-long programmes of ‘stunts’.

In late 1917, while Hurley was still in Palestine, the other Australian photographer, Lieutenant Wilkins, chose the Australian photographs for the exhibition of Imperial Photographs. Each country had its own gallery, and a giant enlargement dominated each gallery. Incongruously, the Australian mural enlargement was not of a battle scene, but was a triumphal image of the Band of the 5th Australian Infantry Brigade marching confidently through the still smoking ruins of the French town of Bapaume (figure 6). Bean visited the exhibition, and it did not escape his notice that some of the Canadian photographs were composites. ‘Ours were simply and strictly true’, he observed, T would rather have them a thousand times’.

Hurley returned to London in May 1918 to prepare for the exhibition of Australian war pictures, organised in London through the Australian High Commission. He arranged to have 130 negatives printed, his six composites and other images enlarged to mural size at Raines & Co, and colour lantern slides made from the Paget colour plates. As well as Hurley’s composites, some of the photographs exhibited were of re-enactments. The Australian War Records Section attempted to ensure that they were given titles that protected them from the accusation of fake. For instance, a shot of a re-enactment of a charge at Gallipoli, probably taken behind the lines by the British official photographer Ernest Brooks, was entitled ‘Illustrating how the Australians charged the Turkish trenches at Gallipoli’. Some re-enactments slipped through the net, however, and officers visiting the exhibition commented upon those. The Australian War Records Section com¬plained to the Australian High Commission: ‘I have heard today a great deal of adverse comment upon the pictures. It comes from those who … know that the pictures cannot possibly be true, [they] say the obvious inaccuracy of the titling of the pictures made them doubt all the others, and in their opinion quite spoilt the whole show. Personally I am inclined to agree with them’. “

The exhibition still featured Hurley’s composites, however, most spectacularly showing a large composite exhibited under the protectively generalised title ‘The Raid’.43 The catalogue description of this composite was considerably more circumspect and ambiguous than the strident sensationalism of the captions for the Canadian and British composites, although it does retain their sense of cinematic montage.

The Raid

A large composite picture. Australian troops are seen advancing to the attack prior to the Battle of Broodseinde. A heavy enemy barrage is seen falling on the distant ridge. Aeroplanes are shown flying low for the purpose of machine gunning the enemy trenches. At the extreme right of the picture is an aeroplane down in flames. This picture shows the thick smoke and haze which are characteristic of the battlefield in this sector.44

Hurley was also keen to test the reaction of the soldiers to his composites:

Attired in civilian dress, I often mingled with the ‘diggers’ to hear their scathing criticism. When I find they approve and pass favourable judgement, then I feel confident such impression composites are justified.”13

Hurley’s composite was made up of twelve negatives and far surpassed Castle’s in intricacy. It was not coloured, however, nor was it the latest ‘largest photograph in the world’ (missing out by half a metre or so). Perhaps because giant composite murals had already been seen in London and perhaps because Hurley had no close personal links with the newspapers, the composites for which he had fought so hard aroused little interest in the London press. The lantern slides received more press attention. The British Journal of Photography reported that the half-hourly displays of half-plate Paget plates projected onto a full-size lantern screen were in fact the first real colour photographs to be exhibited of scenes and incidents of the war. Hurley’s status as an explorer photographer was also recognized, as well as his highly developed sense of the picturesque which, for the journal, was as important as the intrinsic interest of the subject. For instance, he exploited the emotional potential of colour by contrasting the ‘wealth of flower and foliage in France’ to the ‘ruin wrought by warfare close at hand’.41 The Times agreed:

A cluster of soldiers’ graves, described as ‘one of Australia’s most sacred spots’, is covered with flowers which have sprung from the shell scarred earth. It might seem that nothing could grow in such soil, and the ordinary photograph would have to be very good indeed to persuade to the contrary. But the coloured photograph is complete proof. These pictures …. should not be missed by any who would learn what photography can accomplish.

Like his British and Canadian counterparts, Bean was now fully attentive to the propagandistic potential of photographs and to the need to massage public opinion. Whilst the exhibition continued its run in London, Bean catalogued the official Australian photographs, including Hurley’s composites, that were to be made available for sale to the public directly from Australia House at a shilling each. Beaverbrook’s British Ministry of Informa¬tion was already selling official photographs directly to the public from a shop front at Piccadilly. Bean also produced several series of lantern slides for the recruiting authority in Australia. As he admitted, ‘the originator of this scheme was really Hurley’.

This extraordinary series of exhibitions attempted to engage, and then re-engage, the public directly in the war. Using all the new visual technologies then available, while drawing on familiar and long established modes of pictorial representation, they attempted to link the experience of the viewing public in London with the unimaginable experiences of those in the trenches. These images sold ‘thrills’ into a competitive marketplace, but thrills that attempted to bring together and reconnect a fracturing nation. Although these images coveted their authenticity, they were also willing to trade some of it in return for the values of coherent spectacle. Different propagandists and photographers evidently took different attitudes with respect to how many facts could be exchanged for how many thrills.

Notes

1. Beaverbrook, Memorandum for the Committee from the Minister of Information, House of Lords Records Office, BBK/E/3/4, 1918, 1.

2. J. Carmichael, First World War Photographers, London: Routledge 1989, 16.

3. Beaverbrook, Memorandum for the Committee, BBK/E/3/4, 1.

4. Beaverbrook, Report submitted by the Officer in charge, Imperial War Museum, Canadian War Records Office Records, 11 January 1917.

5. Ibid.

6. Beaverbrook, Draft of the ‘Ministry of Information, its Organisation and Work’ for publication in the Windsor magazine, HLRO, BBK/E/3/49, 18 June 1918.

7. Beaverbrook, Report submitted to the Officer in Charge, IWM, 13 March 1918.

8. Beaverbrook, Ministry of Information Minute, HLRO, BBK/E/2/18, 1918, 3.

9. For a more detailed discussion of illustrated newspapers during the First World War, see J. Taylor, War Photography: Realism in the British Press, London: Routledge 1991, 18-51.

10. M. N. Lytton, Note from Photography Section, GHQ, to Ministry of Information, IWM, Ministry of Information files, Box 1, No. 3, 8 January 1918.

11. Canadian official photography is discussed in greater detail in, P. Robertson, ‘Canadian Photojournalism during the First World War’, History of Photography 2:1 (January 1978), 37-52.

12. Catalogue of the Canadian Official War Photographs Exhibition, London: 1916,”n.p.

13. Robertson, ‘Canadian Photojournalism’,43.

14. ‘Over the Top’, the meaning of a phrase now familiar. The Canadians making one of their brilliant attacks. Men leaving their trenches’, Illustrated London News, London (21 October 1916), 4.

15. ‘GOING OVER THE TOP: A CHARGE BY THE CANADIAN TROOPS ON THE SOMME FRONT’, The Daily Mirror, London (16 October 1916), 1.

16. ‘CANADIAN OFFICIAL WAR POSTCARDS’, The Daily Mirror, London (6 November 1916), 4.

17. Catalogue of the Canadian Official War Photographs Exhibition.

18. I. Castle, ‘With a camera on the Somme, by the Official Photographer with the Canadian Forces’, Canada in Khaki, London: Canadian War Records Office 1917, 68.

19. Robertson, ‘Canadian Photojournalism’, 43.

20. For a detailed study of parallel issues in propaganda films see N. Reeves, Official British Film Propaganda During the First World War, London: Croom Helm 1986 and N. Reeves, ‘Official British Film Propaganda’, The First World War and popular cinema 1914 to the present, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 2000.

21. ‘News and Notes: Canadian War Photographs’, The British Journal of Photography (20 July 1917), 381.

22. Catalogue of the Canadian Official War Photographs Second Exhibition.

23. Ibid.

24. ‘WAR PICTURES WITHOUT EQUAL, CANADIAN BATTLE SNAPS, SHOTS THAT WILL THRILL’, The Daily Mirror, London (16 July 1917) .

25. J. Buchan, Utter to Sir Reginald Brade, War Office, HLRO, BBK/ E/3, 14 August 1917.

26. C. E. W. Bean, C. E. W. Bean Diary, Australian War Memorial, AWM38, 3DRL606, series 1, item 94, 20 November 1917.

27. B.-G. J. Charteris, Note to Major Neville Lytton, IWM, Ministry of Information files, 6 January 1917.

28. ‘Exhibitions: Imperial War Photographs in Colour’, The Britisli

Journal of Photography (8 March 1918), 117 and (15 March 1918),

130.

29. ‘Catalogue of the British Official War Photographs in Colour London:

1918.

36.

30. Ibid.

31. Beaverbrook, Draft of the ‘Ministry of Information, its Organisation and Work’ for publication in the Windsor magazine, 18 June 1918, HLRO, BBK/E/3/49, 18 June 1918, 9.

32. ‘SOUL OF THE WAR, The King’s tribute to Realism in Pictures, VISIT TO EXHIBITION’, The Daily Mirror Sunday Pictorial, (3 March 1918), 2.

33. C. E. W. Bean Diary, Australian War Memorial, AWM38, 3DRL606, series 1, item 94 20 November 1917, and Ministry of Information file note, IWM, Ministry of Information Files, Box 2, Number 4, 22 March 1918.

34. J. F. Williams, ‘The gilding of battlefield lilies’, The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism 1013-19)9, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995, D. MCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme: the Story of C. E. W. Bean, Sydney: John Ferguson 1983.

35. F. Legg, Once More On My Adventure, Sydney: Ure Smith 1966, 20. F. Hurley, My Diary, Official War Photographer, Commonwealth Military Forces, from 21 August 1911 to 31 August 1918, typewritten manuscript, National Library of Australia, MS883, Series 1, Item 5, 26 October 1917.

37.

38. 39.

This argument and Frank Hurley’s war photography are discussed in greater depth in M. Jolly, ‘Australian First World War Photography: Frank Hurley and Charles Bean’, History of Photography 23: 2 (Summer 1999), 141-148. C. E. W. Bean Diary, item 165, 71-72. Hurley, My Diary, 2 October 1917.

43.

44.

40. C. E. W. Bean Diary, 20 November 1917.

41. McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somm, 314.

42. Captain Treloar to L. C. Smart, 25 May 1918, Re: Exhibition in the Grafton Galleries, AWM, AWM16, 4375/11/13, 25 May 1918. Catalogue of Australian Official War Pictures and Photographs, London: 1918. Ibid.

45. C. F. Hurley, ‘War Photography’, The Australasian Photo-Review (15 February 1919), 164.

46. ‘Colour Photography of the Battlefield’, The British Journal of Photography (7 June 1918), 24.

47. ‘Colour Photographs. Capt. Hurley’s Work in Palestine’, The Times, London,sssss (June 6, 1918), 5.

48. C. E. W. Bean Diary, item 116, 26 June 1918.

165

Robyn Stacey Presents, 1985

Robyn Stacey Presents

Mori Gallery, Sydney October 8-26, 1985

Photofile, Autumn 1986 page 30

Robyn Stacey’s photography has always been concerned with self-perception of self-image. Her handcoloured portraits portray an individual’s sense of their own special character as they present it to her camera.

Her first one person exhibition, held at The Australian Centre for Photography in 1983, approached this problem in a more casual, informal and ‘documentary’ manner than her recent show at Mori Gallery. For her first exhibition she photographed a range of social types, from topless barmaids to Aborigines, to Punks and Rockers. The portraits were generally taken in their subject’s ‘natural’ environments, then enlarged and delicately handcoloured with colour pencils. In this first exhibition, as in the second, her subjects confidently posed for their portraits. However, this self-contained display of self-image generally took place within a particular social environment. All of her subjects were immediately inscribed within a specific social relationship.

This often contradictory interaction between a self contained personality and the surrounding social landscape gave the images a poignant, bitter-sweet accent, as self-image played off social position. For instance in the Queensland Out West series, purchased by the Australian National Gallery, there is a memorable image of three Aboriginal youths clowning for the camera. One proudly wears a tee-shirt bearing the tragically ironic words ‘Shaddup You Face’, from the mock-Italian pop song of the time. In another series of photographs, purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a punk father tenderly plays with his baby, who sports a mohawk haircut almost as impressive as his dad’s.

Robyn Stacey, Body and Soul I, 1985 colour print

Stacey’s sensitive handcolouring, with the fibres of her pencil strokes just breaking through the photographic surface, added to the emotive power of these images. Their immediate charm may lie in the fact that they fall safely into a long photographic tradition — the documentation of social and cultural phenomena in which the photographer acts as a hyper-sensitized reporter, sending poetic dispatches back from the periphery of society. This tradition has

been celebrated since Robert Frank, at least.

In her latest exhibition, subtitled Well Known Unknowns, Stacey confidently steps out of this tradition and onto the slippery, constantly sliding surface of mediatized imagery and personalised fantasy. In these portraits she retreats from a particular social environment into the non-specific cultural potentiality of the studio. Her subject’s self-perception of self-image becomes the therapeutic acting out of an inner fantasy. Character collapses into characterization as she photographs her friends as mermaids, devils, boxers and Film Noir heroes. She becomes complicit in their manifest imaginings. Quite another photographic tradition is being reinterpreted now, the tradition of the studio portrait, the

glamour photograph, and the fashion spread.

In the sense in which fantasy is important to us all, these image still function as portraits of ‘real’ people. However, Stacey does not sink into that well worn mode of portraiture in which fantasy is used to describe an interior ‘psychological’ space. These portraits are dislodged from a particular psychological reality, as well as a particular social or cultural environment. They freely float across a thoroughly mediatized field made up of an array of conno-tatively redolent costumes, props, colourful cutouts and dappling projections.

Her images have a disarmingly eccentric, 2D feel. Even the picture surface itself seems to participate in this retreat from the specific and the real. Some of the images, for instance Fantasy at 20,000 Fathoms, axe hand-coloured photographs that have been copied onto colour film; others, such as Water Baby, axe copied 20 x 24 inch Polaroids. These techniques give the photographs a sort of elusive non-presence which oscillates between two kinds of materiality: neither photographic nor graphic, neither true not false, both handcrafted object and technological product.

The referent of these images is no longer a particular personality, rather it becomes popular culture as personal possession. Stacey’s photographs are portraits of chimeric individualities constructed from the dislocated fragments of lovingly remembered postcards, posters, cartoons, films, videos, toys and art works — all the things that comprise Western popular culture.

However, these images are not a commentary on pop culture, they are not reducible to the kitsch or the camp, or even to the second degree. They are to be believed in, Body and Soul. They have been made as serious and well meant additions to the field of mediatized imagery. Ultimately, they are more than just the fun and games of a particular inner city milieu. As portraits they function as images of a personal disavowal. Liberal-humanist notions of cultural and social determinancy are repudiated, and a global regime of univalent, non-denotational imagery is embraced.

However, in this delightful oscillation between personality and image there remains a Taste of Terror which finally gives these images their edge: these images so cunningly and wittily eschew the normal photographic referents of the ‘real’, the ‘psychological’ and the ‘commentary’, they are so self contained, yet so elusive, that they appear to be in danger of spinning Outta Sight all together.

Martyn Jolly

Exposing the Australians in Focus

Exposing the Australians in Focus

Harold White Fellowship Lecture, National Library of Australia, 2011

The books I’m going to talk about this evening are the books you find on the bottom shelf at the very back of the second-hand bookshop. They have been slowly bending the chipboard shelves with their weight over the past years forty-five years. Now I think it is time that they were dusted off and re-examined.

There had been a trickle of Australiana photobooks throughout the twentieth century. For instance the British photographer E. O. Hoppe came to Australia in 1930 and shot the book The Fifth Continent. In the next decade Oswald Ziegler began to publish a long series of large-format commemorative volumes co-sponsored by various governments and municipalities. Many of his publications were designed by the European trained designer Gert Sellheim, who often constructed elaborate double-page panorama-montages of national destiny using photographs from a diversity of anonymous sources. Usually the images he used came from stock sources, however every now and again we can trace a montage fragment back to its origin. For instance one of his montages from 1946 contains an image taken by Roy Dunstan, a photographer for the middle class travel magazine Walkabout, of Gwoja Tjungurrayi, known as ‘One Pound Jimmy’. The image was originally taken near T. G. H. Strehlow’s camp in 1935 and first published in Walkabout in January 1936 with the caption ‘The aboriginal, as seen by the early explorers’,

During the 1950s Frank Hurley began to publish his series of ‘Camera Study’ scenery books, and they continued to be published well into the early sixties, even after his death in 1962. And occasionally the posh fine-art publisher Ure Smith would produce genteel photobooks about Sydney, or surfing.

As the 1960s progressed photobooks in this well established mould continued to be produced, but at a steadily increasing rate, and in an increasing diversity of approaches. The New Zealand photographer Robin Smith continued the tradition of Hurley’s scenery books. One of his many books, Australia in Colour, sold 50,000 copies. But the dodgy colour reproductions and haphazard layouts of his books were were beginning to look very tired and old fashioned. As well, corporations such as BHP or James Miller Ropes produced books as promotional tools. An example is The James Miller Story published in 1962 which succeeds in making even the daggiest of industries, rope making, appear glossy, glamorous and modern.

However some creative experiments with photographic formats were also published. For instance in 1957 Angus and Robertson published Piccaninny Walkabout, a children’s book shot on an Aboriginal mission by Axel Poignant, which told it’s story almost entirely in photographs. Three years later a small, charming book of post-Pictorialist photographs won a ‘Book of the Year’ prize. It was Melbourne a Portrait, designed and shot by the photographer Mark Strizic with words, translated into French and German to appeal to the overseas gift market, by the architect David Saunders. The cover was by Len French. The judges commented:

This book of photographs, printed by offset, is an outstanding production. All the illustrations have an attractive softness. Not often is text printed by offset so clearly and evenly carried out. The preliminary pages have been well treated and refreshingly break away from the stereotyped pattern…..

The judge’s comments pointed to one major technological change which was leading to the expansion of photobooks. Offset printing, as opposed to letterpress printing, allowed text and image to be more cheaply, conveniently and intricately integrated on the one page, while retaining photographic quality and textual clarity. The book was printed from Griffin Press in Adelaide, who were to establish a reputation for high quality offset printing. In addition, access to large offset printers in Asia meant that Australian picture books could be printed in Singapore, Hong Kong or Japan in bulk and at low cost. Many glossy promotional books were beginning to be printed in Asia. The Age said of Strizic’s Melbourne a Portrait: ‘It gives a truer picture of Melbourne than a book of more glossily conceived and executed pictures could ever do. It also gives a picture of an exciting and a vital city” Melbourne Truth (2/12/60) called it ‘friendly and intimate … Melbourne’s old familiar places, caught and held by the art of the camera, come alive with fresh beauty…In comparison, the glossy production of the Victorian Promotion Committee, Melbourne — Big, Rich, Beautiful, sinks to the level of a singing commercial’.

But in the mid to late 1960s there was a dramatic acceleration to this increasing flow of photobooks. Books began to be published which were larger in format, better in design, and integrated text and image even more closely. In addition, these books were no longer simply about scenery, or worthy propaganda flattering the progress of this or that municipality, or this or that manufacturing company, they were about Australia itself. And they were timely, about Australia in the 1960s, rather than timeless, about a generic Australia. And they were quite explicitly about the new Australian identity that was emerging in the post war period.

During this period there was a radical increase in the number of independent, start-up publishers in Australia such as Rigby, Landsdowne, Nelson and Jacaranda, all trying to get a slice of the boom in book sales. The value of Australian publishing increased eight fold between 1961 and 1979; and from 1961 to 1971 membership of the Australian Book Publishers Association increased from 37 to 67, of which nearly 40 were Australian owned.

There was also a vibrant discourse on the nature of Australian identity being carried on during this period, with landmark texts being widely read and discussed. These included the smash hit post-war migration novel They’re a Weird Mob, 1957, which sold 300,000 copies in three years; critiques of Australia’s urban environment in The Australian Ugliness, Robin Boyd, 1960; discussion of the supposed success of Australia’s assimilation policies in I, the Aboriginal, by Douglas Lockwood, 1962; critiques of how Australia’s wealth and provincialism had made it uninspiring and indolent in The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties, Donald Horne, 1964; discussion of the country’s changing ethnic and age demography in Profile of Australia, Craig McGregor, 1966; and new approaches to thinking about Australian history in a world context in The Tyranny of Distance, Geoffrey Blainey, 1966.

As a background to this there was unprecedented wealth flowing from a mining boom, continuing mass migration from Southern Europe, and the beginnings of what would be our escalating commitment to the Vietnam War from 1966.

Significantly, as well, the Australian film industry would not undergo a renaissance until the 1970s. There were only a handful of feature films made in Australia during the sixties, and most were by overseas directors. The biggest hit was They’re a Weird Mob made by an English director in 1966, eight years after the book was first published. You can count the number of 1960s Australian feature films on the fingers of one hand, but at least sixty significant Australiana picture books were published during the same period

Looking back on this period from 1970, the novelist and journalist George Johnston commented:

I think it is significant that the rise over the past 20 years of a new, different, technological Australia runs almost parallel with the startling increase in and acceptance of books about Australia.’ The magazine quoting him added: ‘Perhaps there is also evidence that Australians are looking for an ‘instant heritage’”. [Walkabout 1970]

The Australians

In 1962 a National Geographic photographer named Robert Goodman came to Australia on assignment. Whilst here he met the Australian photographers Jeff Carter and David Moore, and worked with the Tasmanian born National Geographic staff writer Allan Villiers on a major National Geographic article on Australia. The article came out in September 1963 and established the dominant theme of the decade, the contrast between country and city. The articles he had assisted in lining up for Jeff Carter came out as ‘The Alice in Australia’s Wonderland’ in 1966; and for David Moore as ‘NSW The State That Cradled Australia’ in 1967. Whilst here, Goodman also conceived the idea of producing a high production value coffee table photobook about Australia for a global market.

Goodman, an extraordinarily energetic entrepreneur, got the support of a series of companies who were persuaded of the benefit of having a stock of books to be used as promotional gifts. 12 companies made $150,000 available over three years to finance the book, in return for10,000 copies to be used as promotional gifts. The companies were travel, mining and manufacturing companies and included: Qantas, the National Travel Association, Alcoa, Ansett, Associated Pulp and Paper, BHP, Commonwealth Bank, Felt and Textiles, IBM, International Harvester, Mutual Life and Citizens Assurance Company, P&O, H. C. Sleigh.

Goodman returned to Australia to shoot the book in 1964. He met the novelist George Johnston who had just returned from living abroad for fourteen years, and whose just-published sentimental autobiographical novel My Brother Jack was receiving critical and popular acclaim. Johnston agreed to write the text. Although many photobooks at this period were making use of the new Asian printers in Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore, Goodman ensured quality control by using the Adelaide independent publisher Rigby and the Adelaide printery Griffin Press, which was known for its quality, to have control over the colour separation, plate production, and paper quality. This control is indeed palpable in the final product. There is a wide variation in the print quality of the books I am discussing, but The Australians is amongst the best.

Goodman had also made important media connections, including with the class travel magazine Walkabout who a year out from the book’s publication began to build anticipation for it by covering his travel around Australia with his wife. When it was finally published in September 1966 the book was supported by an unprecedented publicity blitz, with articles and mentions in every magazine, from Pix, to the Women’s Weekly, to Walkabout, to Australian Photography, to Vogue Australia, as well as the newspapers. The coverage was tailored to each magazine, the Women’s Weekly featured his wife, Australian Photography showed the gear he had used. Even with the assistance of the copies going to the corporate sponsors, sales were excellent, despite the hefty coffee table price of $7.95. After it’s first edition of 35,000 copies sold out it went through several editions eventually staying in the best-seller list for a total of 14 months, and staying in print until well into the seventies. By 1970 it had sold 90,000 copies. [Walkabout 1970]

The big splash the book made was further increased by two exhibitions which were printed, one by the Australian Government for display in the US, and one by Ansett-ANA for display in Australia. 66 prints were sized from 1.5 metres x 1metre down to 75 cms x 50 cms. The book became a favourite corporate and government gift, being an official Gift of State at the Montreal Expo of 1967.

As well as its bar-setting production values, the other significant shift in the book was its change in subject matter from previous photobooks. It wasn’t about the continent of Australia simply inhabited by some people, it was about the people of Australia as formed by their continent. The empty urban and pastoral vistas of Hurley or Robin Smith, images of imperial potentiality, became landscapes of faces, a collective portrait.

The modernist designer Harry Williamson, a typographer who had trained at the London School of Printing, designed the book. Goodman and Williamson worked together projecting slides onto an enlarger baseboard. Goodman even returned to slide-rolls he had shot in 1962 on his first trip here, but flipped them and re-cropped them. Williamson cleaned up and de-cluttered each spread, and regularly punctuated the reader’s progress through the book with dramatic double-page images. But these spreads weren’t of vast distant landscapes or urban ravines, as we might expect from previous photobooks, but of the faces and most significantly the gazes, of Australians. Williamson said of his design of The Australians:

I believe it was quite a major statement in design. I tried to produce an integrated statement, to relate the pictures to the words and also to work to a specific grid which I designed, based on Bob Goodman’s 35mm shape. I could bleed the 35mm shape across on to the next page and it conditioned the column of text, generating a continuity throughout the book. I learned quite a bit about tuning things up from an editor from Newsweek [Jonathan Rinehart] who we used to edit the text. I’d do things in a rough sort of way, but he’d say ‘Look, we’re going to end every story on a big red shot, or … we’re always going to start this way.’ Although my grid was rational, I learned a lot from him about structure, about orchestration of pictures and that sort of thing.’ Caban 117

The flavour of The Australians was determined by its international context. It was photographed by a hot-shot American photographer, and narrated by a famous writer returning home after fourteen prodigal years as an expatriate. The bulk of Johnston’s text was a sequence of potted history chapters. These chapters followed a trajectory very familiar from lots of other Australiana photobooks — from the ‘land’ to the ‘people’ to ‘industry’, to ‘arts’, to ‘sport’ and finally ‘Anzac’ — but they were given personal colour by a series of short written vignettes mixing Johnston’s nostalgic recollections, anecdotes and social speculation. These paralleled the photographs quite closely, so text and image informed each other. For instance opposite an image of two Australians on a park bench we read:

The simplest generalization is that Australians and Americans are the two most instantly identifiable peoples of the western world. After ten years of living in Europe I could on a Mediterranean waterfront unerringly recognize from 150 yards away an Australian arriving on the noonday steamer. When I returned to my native land I had been absent for almost fourteen years. Yet everywhere I looked they were the same people I had recognized from the quayside, but infinitely multiplied. The first vivid impressions of homecoming I have not had reason to change…..

Reviews confirmed that The Australians had set a benchmark both in terms of the physical quality of the book, and in terms of its broadening of the themes and issues which could be encompassed by a Australiana photobook. Walkabout’s review of The Australians picked up on the book’s design sophistication and the closeness of the collaboration ‘His running text, which parallels the pictures, is a successful exercise in verbal interpretation which manages to avoid any trace of redundancy.” [September 1966]. While the bookseller trade journal Ideas indicated that this was a book to be sold as fundamentally about the national character of Australians caught between bush and city: ‘Both text and photographs reveal the outback — the back breaking pioneer character of the country which lead to the mateship quality of its inhabitants [as well as] the present-day, suburban, industrialized situation, which now leaves a question mark hanging over the character of today’s Australians’ [September 1966:]

Southern Exposure

The extraordinary success of The Australians prompted a series of replies from other publishers, as well as a series of attempts to jump on the Australiana bandwagon. The most trenchant reply came from Collins who published Southern Exposure in 1967, using a text by Donald Horne, who’s ironically titled The Lucky Country had been a talking point since it’s publication in 1964, and the photographer David Beal, whose black and white photographs had traces of the gritty documentary acerbity and class consciousness of photographers like Bill Brandt or Robert Frank.

The dust jacket states blurb its intention clearly:

Southern Exposure is the most original picture book on Australia yet to be published. It marks a departure from the stereotyped, quasi-official, ‘coffee table’ productions which portray in verbal and visual clichés an idealized picture of Australia. As Donald Horne says in his forward: ‘Neither of us — photographer or writer — could be bothered producing the ordinary kind of picture book on Australia. There are no photographs of koala bears in gum trees here … We are trying to get down in pictures and words the Australia we see…..

The cover images are just as explicit, and almost satirical. A prototype of ‘Norm’, the character Phillip Adams was to invent eight years later for a government sponsored exercise campaign called Life Be In It, holds a worker’s shovel but incongruously licks an ice cream — almost a visual encapsulation of The Lucky Country — while on the back cover the ‘real’ Australia remains dry and parched. The faces in The Australians were frontal and open with frank gazes, the faces in Southern Exposure are belligerent or turned away. Their gobs are plugged with bottles, cans or cigarettes. As in the cover, the book is full of sly and sardonic puns. A theatre-goer’s be-jeweled décolletage transmutes with the turn of the page to a drinker’s empty beer glass shoved down her blouse. The book ends with a sequence of two shots implying that both the bush and the suburbs are places where we are equally marooned. Other images, such as of bleached skeletons, a major visual trope of post war Australian iconography, seem to be out to directly trump Goodman’s more glamourized depictions, and Beal’s ANZACS, rather than looking weary but quaintly proud as in Goodman, just look smug and slovenly.

In contrast to Johnston’s expansive and easy-going anecdotes, Horne’s essays are densely written monologues, or almost harangues. To Horne, following on from The Lucky Country, Australians were provincial, complacent and intolerant. Just a skim through the chapter headings and sub-headings are sufficient to give a flavour of his text:

A transported civilization —What the Australians brought with them; Deserts of disaster —Australia’s manic-depressive cycles; The same but different — Australia as a province; Life in the south-seas — Good time Australia; Boxes of brick — Australia as a suburb; Mates— The Australians as a folk; Non-mates — The ‘Blacks’; Bosses — A crisis in leadership; The new Australia — A freshening; Existential Australia — A new style?

The pre-publicity for this book was nowhere near as extensive as that for The Australians. The trade journal Ideas said in July 1967:

Collins are very excited about this book and from what we can see have every reason to be. The photography is excellent and depicts the Australia that most of us know, rather than the Australia many publishers attempt to expose to the eyes of the world. … Absent are the clichés; the overtones of self-congratulation are missing’

The Australian newspaper was also keen:

Everything about it is brilliant, from its sardonic title and sleek presentation to its blistering essay and acute photographs (From ad in Ideas September 1967)

However the book raised the hackles of Walkabout, the travel journal that had doyens from the travel industry on its board, and which had supported The Australians. They complained:

This new genre of picture-book, solidly established last year by The Australians, was given an impeccable and sophisticated pattern by George Johnston’s text and Bob Goodman’s pictures. A welling, wholesome sanguineness swept through it. Australian frailties were admitted with grace, but Johnston’s pride in and Goodman’s American admiration for a people who had tamed but had been simultaneously moulded by a fiercely raw nature, and from scruffy beginnings had built a nation with no small part in the world’s affairs, arts, sciences and sports, seeped through unashamedly. Achievement was the keynote.

[But]

In [Southern Exposure], people will read what is tantamount to a lecture to Australians themselves from a superior posture of niggling, radical intellectualism. The Top People, gibes Donald Horne, have come to a dead end, and can’t tell the rest what to do next. Australians are provincial, superficial, and existential, and they have lost the ability to “conceptualise”, raise issues and find broad meaning [except] in action which is now a relief from meaning. They have become imitators and adapters. Even their individualism has become group individualism. They are more concerned with “ordinariness” and mindless conformity.’ [September 1967]

Not surprisingly most Australians agreed with Walkabout’s assessment and weren’t going to pay money to be insulted. The book did reach the best seller list in September 1967, exactly one year after the Australian’s spectacular debut, but stayed there only one month, compared to Goodman’s fourteen. (However many other books I will discuss never made it to best seller status at all.)

It was clear from Walkabout’s over the top reaction that the agenda for photobooks had now shifted, from the purely promotional where it had been for decades, to the personal and political.

Jeff Carter Outback in Focus

Jeff Carter had cleared the equivalent of $3200 from his National Geographic assignment and, more importantly, it had left him with a stock of 3000 colour slides to draw upon. He was regularly publishing letterpress books, where photograph and text were printed on different pages, but in 1967 he moved into offset photobooks with Central Australia in 1967, and Outback in Focus in 1968, published by Rigby, the publishers of The Australians. These books enabled him to place the National Geographic slide stock, and the work he had been doing on an almost weekly basis for the popular magazines Pix and People into the broader more expanded context established by The Australians and Southern Exposure. Even some of the layouts that were occurring in the weekly magazines, such as Pix, People and Australasian-Post, could be transferred to books with higher quality printing.

These books took as their topic Carter’s favourite site, what he called ‘Centralia’. Outback in Focus valorised individual farmers, stockmen and fossickers, but took issue with the pastoral industry as a whole, which he accused of destroying the environment of central Australia. He also critiqued the standard assimilationist trajectories espoused by magazine like Walkabout. In these comforting narratives traditional Aborigines were noble, fascinating and grand, but they were inevitably the last of their generation. White education would produce new Aborigines fully functioning in white society, but still with some residual qualities of Aboriginality.

Carter was quite clear to his readers that this narrative couldn’t play itself out while there was still social and economic exploitation and injustice in Central Australia. Quasi ‘anthropological’ gangs of figures or faces were a very popular graphic trope in many photobooks. It was used on any exotic species from opera dowagers to Aborigines. In one spread Carter seems to use this ganging layout to give us a standard assimilationist ascension to civilization across the two pages, but only when reading the caption do we realize that he is undermining it.

This Wailbri tribesman is amongst the last generation of Aborigines still capable of a nomadic life.

This man could still live in the bush too, but looks to the ways of the white man for a better life.

This Alice Springs policeman works as a white man, but is not paid as a white man or treated like one.’

On the page before Carter’s triptych another familiar image of a tousled hair aboriginal boy, commonplace enough since the days of Piccaninny Walkabout, comes with the warning:

Friendly, but doubtful now, this youngster’s attitude to white men will almost inevitably harden into active dislike. The onus is squarely on the white man to win the respect and trust of the black minority.

Walkabout, by now connoisseurs of travel books, praised the proximity Carter got to their beloved outback. They themselves had been responsible for reproducing frequently the head of ‘One Pound Jimmy’ taken by Roy Dunstan in 1935, such that it finally becoming iconicised into a postage stamp, so they praised the frank frontality of Carter’s Aboriginal heads — while ignoring the acerbity of their captions.

Some of his pictures here, in particular aboriginal portraits in colour, are magnificent. In flesh tint and texture, definition of form and line, use of light and projection of character they, in my view, transcend the mechanical and become Carter-creative. I have never seen better, nor such good reproduction by a Japanese printer.

Perhaps because two years had elapsed since the publication of The Australians, they didn’t directly take issue with his critiques of the outback as vehemently as they had Beal’s critiques of Australia as a whole.

The author-photographer describes the aboriginal population as he knows it, and deplores the poor treatment they get, despite legislation to improve their lot and their pay. ‘The new laws are scarcely worth the paper they are written on’, he asserts. A lot of outback topics Carter writes about are well in focus, starkly defined indeed. [August 1968]

Like Southern Exposure a year before Outback in Focus spent just one month in the best-seller list in August 1968.

Kings Cross

Other topics can also been looked at to trace this development in the sophistication and agenda of photobooks. Kings Cross was a staple subject of almost all photobooks about Sydney. Kenneth Slessor, author of the quintessential Sydney poem, 1939’s Five Bells and the book Darlinghurst Nights, was the virtual laureate of Sydney. In 1950 he wrote the text for a Ure Smith book on Sydney illustrated by a variety of photographers including Max Dupain, and in 1965 he wrote the text for a book on Kings Cross.

However his prose in Life at the Cross is rather journalistic and anodyne, and the photographs by Robert Walker are rather distant. The book, which in true promotional style includes a welcome from the Lord Mayor of Sydney, never really gets behind the scenes, or when it does there is a sense that the action has been staged. The design uses lots of small photographs to create a sense of business, but their grouping is incoherent, and their visual dynamism is dispersed.

However six years later, after several years of visitation to The Cross from US servicemen on R & R leave from the Vietnam War which began in late 1967, and the beginnings of the hippy movement, Kings Cross was done again by Rennie Ellis and Wes Stacey. Their book, Kings Cross Sydney, is much more satisfying than the earlier book. The picture groupings are graphically dynamic, and we are taken right into the dressing rooms and hippy pads of the area. The text, while not poetical, is nonetheless pungently personal.

Graham Kennedy’s Melbourne

Other publishers undoubtedly saw a bandwagon to jump on. The ‘King of Television’, Graham Kennedy, lent his name and his image to a book published by Nelson in 1967. The Channel 9 photographer Barrie Bell went round with Graham and took a total of six shots which were dropped in amongst the stock photos from the likes of Mark Strizic and Wolfgang Sievers. For a shot by Brian MacArdle of a South Yarra restaurant Graham comments:

Every second Melbournite has become a sort of instant connoisseur who can chat knowledgeably about Cabernet reds and steak Béarnaise. I know, because I’m one of them myself. I used to think it was snobbery to go beyond a steak (medium thanks) with chips, washed down with a lager. Now I know there are few things in this life to beat good cooking, good company, and a glass or two of good wine.

Made in Australia

When the English low cost, mass distribution publisher Paul Hamlyn entered Australian publishing they also saw potential in the photobook boom. After working with the English photographer David Mist on a book about Sydney. They accepted his idea of copying a 1967 book by the London fashion photographer John D Green called Birds of Britain, and doing a Swinging London, Carnaby Street style take on Australian women. The Sydney bon vivant and wine expert Len Evans would write the cheeky Playboy-style captions. Made in Australia the large format book that resulted in 1969 attempted a kind of groovy design aesthetic, but the ungainly addition of graphic elements like speech bubbles shows the limits of offset printing at the time. Nonetheless it was launched by none other than Patrick McNee from The Avengers TV series in Len Evans’ own restaurant.

In Her Own Right

Made in Australia deliberately and completely ignored the Women’s Movement. But in the same year Nelson published a book of essays called In Her Own Right edited by Julie Rigg which addressed what she called ‘the woman problem’:

The unresolved struggle for equal pay; the occupational problems faced by married women — whether or not to work in a society where industrial expansion depends on tapping married women as a convenient labour pool, but in which child care facilities are grossly inadequate — and the problems of the older married woman who finds her skills as a mother redundant once her children have grown, but is ill-equipped to do very much else; the inequalities of status and treatment which women still experience in many areas of occupational and social life.

The book was illustrated with photographs by Russell Richards, and its design was generally conservative and subservient to the text, however occasionally it breaks in to full bleed double page spreads reminiscent of The Australians.

To Sydney With Love

The combination of David Mist and Len Evans was a good one to target the upwardly-mobile, male, urban-dandy market, but other combinations seem more forced. In 1968 Nelson teamed the social commentator Craig McGregor, who had had the idea for In Her Own Right, with the Austrian-born landscape photographer Helmut Gritscher in To Sydney With Love. McGregor attempted a very personal beat-poetry meditation on Sydney. He opened his text late at night standing on the roof of a block of flats in Potts Point looking into Woolloomooloo:

I know this city, I comprehend it utterly, my guts and mind embrace it in its entirety, it’s mine. It was a moment of exhilaration, of exquisite and loving perception, my soul stretched tight like Elliot’s across this city which lay sleeping and partly sleeping around me and spread like some giant Rorschach inkblot to a wild disordered fringe of mountains, and gasping sandstone, and hallucinogenic gums.

But despite this attempt to ramp up the emotional ampage of the book Gritscher, primarily a landscape photographer most comfortable behind a long focal-length lens, shots things very much at a distance and brought the book back down again to the pedestrian level.

In The Making

However in 1968 McGregor collaborated with the photographers David Moore and David Beal as well as the designer Harry Williamson (the designer on The Australians) on another Nelson book which was to be the largest and most technically ambitious book of the decade. The reader’s experience of In the Making was very much led by Williamson’s design, which compared to the robust simplicity of The Australians, over-reached itself in its complexity. Ostensibly about the process of art making, from poetry to opera, the book must have been a confusing experience for the reader. McGregor’s potted biographies were quite trivial, and had a clever archness to them which failed to engage with any real issues. The photographs were often repetitive in their documentation of the artist at work or, confusingly, they were used as abstract design elements to illustrate the meaning of some poems or pieces of music. And the collage-like design with its lack of chapters and headings was often bewildering. It was a giant book, and at $19.95 a very expensive one, even if aimed at the Paddington or South Yarra coffee table market. It seems to have never made it anywhere near the bestseller list.

By the 1970s the number of Australiana photobooks being published died down. Although some notable photobooks were published from time to time in 1970s, not many took the totality of Australian identity as their topic, and few had the big corporate budgets of the 60s books. The adventures of travel writers like Jeff Carter transmuted into the gonzo TV shows of the Leyland Brothers or the films of Albie Mangles. The expeditions of Walkabout magazine transmuted into the TV shows of Bill Peach. What the seventies had, of course, which the sixties didn’t, was an Australian film industry. Perhaps the last book in the traditional style was A Day in the Life of Australia, initiated by another American photojournalist Rick Smolan, and published in 1981.

Conclusion

In conclusion I hope that I have convinced you that the late 1960s produced a series of photobooks which were not only important and formative collaborations between publishers, writers, artists and designers, but also engaged with real issues of the moment. Is there any legacy here for us? These books were produced during a period of economic boom and geopolitical re-alignment. Many of them were structured around the contrast between the economy and culture of the bush, in particular the mining industry and the pastoral industry, and the economy and culture of the city, in particular its suburban inhabitants. The 1960s had a two-speed economy and a two-speed culture. Mining and pastoral interests have recently re-entered our media and our cultural discourse in a big way to argue against things such as the Mining Industry Super Profits Tax, the temporary cessation of the live export trade, or a price on carbon, and to argue for such things as special industry assistance. In doing so they have been able to draw upon a deep well of iconography produced over many decades, largely, though of course not exclusively, by photobooks such as the ones I have discussed. I think at the background to many of these massive PR campaigns is the implication that real jobs, authentic Australians and nationally significant activities remain in the bush, rather than the suburbs, and should naturally take some kind of historical priority in defining the terms of everything else. This is exactly the same background implication that was at issue in The Australians, Southern Exposure, and Outback in Focus

This debate appears to be coming around again, but after having my head stuck in these books for the last couple of month, its terms, and its visual iconography, appear to me to be very familiar.

Art from Archives

‘Art from Archives’

***Shaping Canberra*, Humanities Research Centre, ANU, 17-20 September 2013**

This is the age of the archive. It is the age when newly discovered collections of idiosyncratic or vernacular oddities are brought to light virtually every week; it is the age of the dataset; it is the age of the digitization and dissemination of vast, previously subterranean, institutional archives in massive labour-intensive projects of scanning and metadata matching; it is an age when those same institutions develop interfaces on their websites to encourage visitors to add their own metadata to the archive; it is the age when institutions, desperate to hit the KPIs of the their funding masters, hire ‘creatives‘ — what an odious term — to do funky things with their archival images in order to attract a younger audience.

Paradoxically, to be contemporary now is to be archival. Archives are everywhere, and in art archival strategies are ubiquitous. To quote from the back cover of the recent ‘Documents of Contemporary Art’ anthology The Archive:

Among art’s most significant developments worldwide since the 1960s has been a turn to the archive — the nexus of images, objects, documents and traces through which we recall and revisit individual and shared memories and histories. … the archive has become central in visual culture’s investigations of history, memory, testimony and identity.

But I want to spend some time sketching out how I think the notion of archive is operating at the moment in Australia, but particularly in Canberra. During the last thirty years more and more contemporary artists have been using archival strategies. They usually work in one of two modes.

The first mode is to create your own archive. This takes the normal personal declarations of the artist and sublimates them within an archival structure. Instead of composing a work or moulding a form, the artist simply nominates and then assembles a collection of found objects or images in a rudimentary taxonomic structure. Examples of this mode could be the work of David Wills who, for instance, produced a very moving work about grandmotherly love and growing up. Called B3 he brought thirty-three different Bananas in Pajamas from op shops. All had been knitted from the same Women’s Weekly pattern by different loving grandmothers, and all had eventually been abandoned by their recipients. Wills’ website, Turnstile, is an interactive interlocking database of his own continual process of collecting and archiving through the camera, which the viewer jumps around in via hyperlinked metadata. Another example could be Patrick Pound who collects snapshots from junk shops and places them into idiosyncratic categories. His po-faced taxonomy draws attention to the profound individuality and uniqueness of the relationship between the anonymous photographer and subject found in each image. A third example could be Maureen Burns, who cruises Ebay and downloads and reprints the photographs people have posted selling items of mid twentieth century design. This becomes a comment on history, design, taste and domesticity. In these cases the art’s meaning or content becomes potential, rather than stated. It is up to the viewer to navigate the archival structure, do their own aesthetic research amongst the idiosyncratic taxonomies the artist has folded into the collection, and find their own meaning. And in these cases also, the artist’s work borrows some of the prestige of the archive as a complete, autonomous, and somehow authentically ‘natural’ structure which automatically generates meaning independent of overt authorial intention.

The second mode of archival work is to work within an existing archive. There are two distinct approaches within this mode. Some artists ‘mine’ or ‘sift’ archives to reclaim lost memories or reconnect severed filaments of time. An example of this may be my own 1996 work 1963: News and Information, from where I cropped small samples of material texture and details of body language out of an archive of government propaganda photographs held in the Australian Archives. (When I did this work in 1996 I used the same archive which the National Archives of Australia has subsequently mined for their exhibition Faces of Australia.) Other artists ‘interrogate’ the archive to ask questions of the historical assumptions that underpin its structure. An example of this might be Fiona Macdonald’s 1993 work Universally Respected, where she wove together two archival photographs of white colonists and black labourers in a process of photographic miscegenation.

The mining or sifting approach sees the archive as a positive, generative presence, a material heritage which needs to be refined, distilled or concentrated in order to have its signal to noise ration enhanced, or to tune into the different frequencies which are hidden within it. The second approach, the interrogative approach, takes a more critical stance to the authority of the archive, it sees the archive as a negative presence, a subterranean power that in its very structure reproduces old politics in the present. Yet in both these approaches to working with existing archives, the generative approach or the interrogative approach, the archive remains an almost occult presence. It has its own power, its own personality, its own presence. Far from being inert or passive, it seems to have an almost autonomous agency to conceal or reveal, to generate spectres or exhale miasmic atmospheres.

The most popular photographic archive in Australia by far is the Justice and Police Museum archive of 130,000 police photographs. It has spawned exhibitions at the Justice and Police Museum itself; history books by Peter Doyle; a mens clothing range by Ralph Lauren; the production design of documentaries like Utopia Girls; and, not least, inspiration for artists. For over ten years the Sydney artist Ross Gibson and Kate Richards have made works based on the collection under the general title of ‘Life After Wartime’, this has included performances with a live soundtrack and generated haikus performed at the Opera House, as well as various computer coded interactive installations and site specific projections in the windows of an old house at the Rocks

Writing in 1999 Gibson acknowledged that he felt a kind of occult power coming from the 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. … 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. [1]

In seeking to be a voodoo spiritualist ‘medium’ for the archive, the work was not trying to quote from it, or mine it for retro titbits ripe for appropriation, so much as to make contact with it as an autonomous netherworld of images.

Indigenous Australians have always had the strongest stake in our photographic archives. As early as 1986 Tracey Moffat was entering into direct and explicit dialogue with J. W. Lindt’s photographs in her series Some Lads, where her sexy dancers playfully appropriated and parodied the stiff colonial gaze built into Lindt’s studio tableaus.

However as aboriginal activism grew in intensity and sophistication during the 1980s and 1990s, anthropological portraits began to be conceived of not only as the theoretical paradigm for colonial attempts at genocide, but also as acts of violence in themselves, technically akin to, and instrumentally part of, that very process of attempted genocide. They began to be used by young aboriginal artists to ‘occult up’ their ancestors. Rather than just creating a feeling of active dialogue with past photographs, these new forms of indigenous reuse attempted to use photography to create a two-way corridor through time, a sense of New Age channelling back to the actual subjects of the photographs. For instance, in a meditation on the archive of nineteenth-century anthropological photographs left behind by the Northern Territory policeman Paul Foelsche, the indigenous photographer and curator Brenda L. Croft retroactively invested the agency of political resistance in to the 140-year-old portraits.

Images like these have haunted me since I was a small child … [and] were instrumental in guiding me to use the tools of photography in my work … The haunted faces of our ancestors challenge and remind us to commemorate them and acknowledge their existence, to help lay them, finally, to rest.[2]

But, rather than laying their ancestors to rest, many aboriginal artists have photographically raised them from the dead to enrol them in various contemporary campaigns of resistance. One of the first Australian aboriginal photographers to receive international attention was Leah King-Smith. Her 1992 exhibition Patterns of Connection travelled throughout Australia as well as internationally. To make her large, deeply coloured photo-compositions she copied anthropological photographs from the State Library of Victoria, liberating them from the archive to be superimposed as spectral presences on top of hand-coloured landscapes. For her, this process allowed Aboriginal people to flow back into their land, into a virtual space reclaimed for them by the photographer. In the words of the exhibition’s catalogue: ‘From the flaring of velvety colours and forms, translucent ghosts appear within a numinous world.’[3]

King-Smith held spiritualist beliefs which she enacted in her photographs. She concluded her artist’s statement by asking that ‘people activate their inner sight to view Aboriginal people.’[4] Her work animistically gave the archival photographs she reused a spiritualist function. Some of her fellow aboriginal artists thought the work too generalist. It lacked specific knowledge of the stories of the people whose photographs were reused, and it didn’t have explicit permission from the traditional owners of the land they were made to haunt. But the critic Anne Marsh described that as a ‘strategic essentialism.’

There is little doubt, in my mind, that Leah King-Smith is a kind of New Age evangelist and many serious critics will dismiss her work on these grounds …But I am interested in why the images are so popular and how they tap into a kind of cultural imaginary [in order] to conjure the ineffable … Leah King-Smith’s figures resonate with a constructed aura: [they are] given an enhanced ethereal quality through the use of mirrors and projections. The ‘mirror with a memory’ comes alive as these ancestral ghosts … seem to drift through the landscape as a seamless version of nineteenth century spirit photography.[5]

A new age spirituality also permeates the recent work of the indigenous artist Christian Thompson. As part of a large ARC project returning digital copies of nineteenth century ethnographic portraits back to the communities from which they came, he was invited to work on the collection of nineteenth century photographs held in one of the most famous anthropological archives in the world, the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford. The curator of photographs at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Christopher Morton, puts the original photographs as artefacts, as distinct from their reproducibility as images, on the same continuum as the actual remains — the skulls or bones — of aborigines. He says:

But in the case of archives – and in particular photographs – those ancestors held in the images remain in the storerooms of remote institutions even after copies have been returned or shared online.The reproducibility of the photographic image means that the surface information it holds can easily be shared, especially in the digital age. But the images of ancestors, as ethnographic studies around the world now show us, are more than the chemical traces of light on a surface – they have a direct and spiritual connection to the person photographed, and so hold significant spiritual and emotional qualities. It is this creative tension, between the archive as a permanent ancestral resting place, and yet as a reproducible, re-codable, and dynamic historical resource, that lies at the heart of Thompson’s concept of the exhibition space as a spiritual zone. (Catalogue essay to We Bury our Own)

For his part Christian Thompson saw his role as an artist in shamanistic terms:

I wanted to generate an aura around this series, a meditative space that was focused on freeing oneself of hurt, employing crystals and other votive objects that emit frequencies that can heal, ward off negative energies, psychic attack, geopathic stress and electro magnetic fields, and, importantly, transmit ideas. …. I asked the photographs in the Pitt Rivers Museum to be catalysts and waited patiently to see what ideas and images would surface in the work, I think with surprising results. Perhaps this is what art is able to do, perform a ‘spiritual repatriation’ rather than a physical one, fragment the historical narrative and traverse time and place to establish a new realm in the cosmos, set something free, allow it to embody the past and be intrinsically connected to the present?

Another example in this mode of intergenerational animism is the drawings which Vernon Ah Kee exhibited last year based on the Tindale collection of aboriginal portraits taken in the 1930s. For many years this archive has been a genealogical resource for aboriginal people trying to stitch back together the torn connections to their sibling, parents and grandparents, but in Transforming Tindale Ah Kee re-drew the photographic portraits of his own family members. Through the loving ministrations of his soft pencil graphite the images were humanized, transformed from ‘ethnographic samples’ or ‘genealogical evidence’ to ‘human portrait’.

While not buying into such direct visual spirituality as Leah King Smith or Christian Thompson, or direct family connection as Vernon Ah Kee, other aboriginal artists have also attempted to use the power of old photographs to make the contemporary viewer the subject of a defiant, politically updated gaze returned from the past.

Most recently Brook Andrew has worked in the personal archive mode, curating an exhibition for the MCA called Taboo, where racist imagery from around the world was gathered together into a cabinet of curiosities. However earlier, in the mid 1990s, Andrew had made some of the most iconographic imagery re-using archival photographs. In a series of works from the mid 1990s, Brook Andrew invested his nineteenth-century subjects, copied from various state archives, with a libidinous body image inscribed within the terms of contemporary queer masculinity, and emblazoned them with defiant Barbara Krugeresque slogans such as , I Split Your Gaze (1997), Ngajuu Ngaay Nginduugirr [I See You] (1998) and Sexy and Dangerous (1996) Andrew exploits the auratic power of the original Aboriginal subjects to re-project the historically objectifying gaze straight back to the present, to be immediately re-inscribed in a contemporary politico-sexual discourse. Although Andrew was also criticised for using the powerful portraits of the aboriginal subjects without appropriate consideration for their original tribal and geographical identity, these works have since become almost iconic in contemporary Australian art.

The iconicity of these archival art works is beginning to feedback into the historical archive itself. For instance, in May this year Sotheby’s put an ad in the paper advertising their upcoming auction of six albums of ethnographic photographs by Kerry and King. Out of all the images they could have chosen from the albums for the ad they chose the same one Brook Andrew had chosen 17 years before. Perhaps, like Andrew, they were attracted to the sexiness of the man; but I think also that the fame that Andrew’s appropriation had given to this man, and his posthumous conscription to the identity debates of contemporary Australia, had changed the value and valency of the original photograph as historical document in a kind of reverse historicism.

These transcultural uses of the archive by contemporary indigenous artists, who put themselves in the front line of contemporary debates around Australian identity and historical obligation, may seem a long way from the genteel streets of Canberra. But nonetheless I think the strong shadows they cast help to illuminate the way we all relate to the photographic archive, even on a day-to-day level.

Canberra is an archival city. Not only in the sense that it houses some of the nation’s biggest archives, but that an archival presence continually pinpricks our civic space. Perhaps back in some utopian Old World, Europeans like me may have walked down urban precincts with their mixture of old and new buildings and felt a chthonic connection to time and place. But now we need memory markers, picture boards that remind us of what buildings or precincts once looked like. This attempt to create a collective sense of place and time is now no longer performative, but archival. Archival photographs are found, reproduced and irrupted into our streets on sign boards, to be more or less ignored by passers by. Thus, marginalised urban precincts, seen in need of a relevance injection, are embellished with evidence from the archive which hopefully reminds people that they are walking through a lieux de mémoire with a rich and rounded history.

Similarly, in acts of national commemoration the archive is replacing other modes of memorialization, such as symbol, prayer or song. Since the the Vietnam Memorial of 1992, many other memorials such as the Nurses Memorial, the Airforce memorial and Reconciliation and Federation place, have followed its lead in reproducing the momentary slice of time of the photograph within various ageless, either vitreous or lithic, surfaces. Lately, also, Canberra’s national memorial architecture is increasingly becoming a screen for the projection of archival photographs. Charles Bean had always put a library of photographs at the heart of his conception for the future Australian War Memorial, but I doubt that even he could have imagined the outside walls of the Memorial becoming a screen for the projection of Archival photographs in the lead-up to the Dawn Service, as happened this year.

For these reasons it perhaps was inevitable that photographs should feature in the ACT Bushfire Memorial. Because of my interest in re-using archival photographs I was invited to submit a proposal to design the proposed Memorial, I realized I had no chance of getting the gig until I teamed up with Tess Horwitz and Tony Steele; their public-art smarts combined with my photographic credentials meant we had an unbeatable proposal. We held two sausage sizzle days where victims of the fire came in to meet the artists and look at our maquette, as well as inscribe a brick and show me the snaps they had taken on the day of the fires and in the aftermath leading to their recovery. I got a scan of the photos I liked, and got them to fill out a sheet giving me copyright permission and relevant metadata. One of the textural themes of the Memorial was the humble house brick, so I cut out brick-sized details from my scans and laid them out vertically into five glass columns. The palette ran from earthy and fiery tones at the bottom, up to images of people and incidents at eye level, and then up to the greens and blues of regeneration towards the sky. Captions giving the photographer’s name and a short title were placed in the ‘mortar’ between the images. I still think that this memorial is rather unique because, rather than choosing one image to be iconically embody the whole experience of the event being memorialized, as in the Vietnam Memorial, or doing an impressionistic collage of different elements, as in the Nurses or Air Force memorials, individually tagged and identifiable photographs, albeit details of them, are presented in a grid which retains their individual specificity. I think this approach worked because the victims were all fairly homogenous — middle class suburbanites with cameras — and the event was concentrated and coherent in its narrative meaning — ‘fire comes, community suffers but regenerates’ — with only some minor counter-narratives — of the financial culpability of various governments — around the edges. This approach may not have worked in memorials to more complex disasters, or addressing more heterogenous constituencies.

I’ll finish by talking a little bit about a small installation I have in the show which is opening tonight. In my head I divide the history of Canberra into two periods. There is the utopian period from its foundation to self-government, where Canberra was used by the Commonwealth Government as a model of an ideal Australian polity, and a kind of ideal template for a future Australian city. During this utopian period, which in my imagination peaks in the 1960s, Canberra was tolerated as a noble experiment by most Australians. Then there is the distopian period from self-government till now, where Canberra is regarded by Australians and governments alike as parasitical, perverse, pretentious, indulgent and ‘out of touch’. In both these Canberras there are no actual people. In the distopian Canberra of today the people who live here are despised as a vitiated, degenerated, foppish sub-category of the real Australian. They are people of literally no account. As Clive Palmer said last week:‘In Canberra they have the best roads, but nobody to drive on them’. However the utopian Canberra was also devoid of actual people, the few people that appear in the photographs are national cyphers, actors in a political fantasy, like the schematic figures that occur in architectural drawings.

So I’ve collected tourist brochures and NCDC publications from the utopian period of Canberra, making my own archive. Using an ‘Office Works’ aesthetic I have covered up the generic photographs with coloured sheets of A4 paper, obscuring the various civic vistas of national potentiality but revealing hapless pedestrians or passers by accidentally caught in the photographer’s camera, thereby pulling them out of their unwitting role as national cyphers, an perhaps returning to them their individuality as people.

My work is cool and ironic, it is a million miles from the fervent spiritual juju of indigenous artists. It is affectionate, rather than interrogative. But nonetheless I think that on some level we are all engaged with the same occultish power of the archive.

Martyn Jolly

[1] R. Gibson, ‘Negative Truth: A new approach to photographic storytelling’, Photofile 58, 1999, p30.

[2] B. L. Croft, ‘Laying ghosts to rest’, in Portraits of Oceania, ed. by J. Annear, Sydney, 1997, p9, p14.

[3] J. Phipps, ‘Elegy, Meditation and Retribution’, in Patterns Of Connection, Melbourne, Victorian Centre for Photography, 1992, np.

[4] L. King-Smith, ‘Statement’, in Patterns of Connection, Melbourne, Victorian Centre for Photography, 1992, np.

[5] A. Marsh, ‘Leah King-Smith and the Nineteenth Century Archive’, History of Photography, 23, 2, 1999, p117.

Before Carol, Australian photography of the 1960s

‘Before Carol, Australian photography of the 1960s’,

Carol Jerrems symposium, National Gallery of Australia, 8 September 2012. The images that accompanied the presentation can be found below the text as either a PDF or a Powerpoint

Before I begin I’d like to thank the National Library of Australia, who gave me a fellowship to do some of this research, and Gael Newton, who gave me access to some of her research materials.

As the great Shirley Strachan once put it, I feel a bit like ‘I’m in a payphone without any change’ standing up here, because I don’t really have very much to add to the discussion of Carol Jerrems. I think many excellent people have done a lot of excellent work on Jerrems and her milieu, and I don’t really have a problem with any of it. The only thing I do have a slight problem with is: whatever happened to the sixties? Even though Jerrems did her art school training in the closing years of the sixties she is rightly seen as the quintessential seventies photographer. But, too often I think, the early seventies, of which Carol is the preeminent photographer, is seen to be the Edenic origin of contemporary Australian art photography, with the decade before being simply some undifferentiated primordial slime of bad commercial and worse amateur photography. There certainly was a lot of bad photography in the sixties, but it wasn’t all undifferentiated slime.

It’s understandable why this view would slowly become the norm. All of the infrastructure which we still more or less enjoy — the galleries, the collections, the funding — began in either the very late sixties or the very early seventies. 1968: The Australian Council for the Arts established. 1972: the NGV photo department commenced, and Rennie Ellis’s Brummels Gallery opened. 1973: the Australian Centre for Photography opened. 1974: four, count them, four books of Australian photography came out, two in Sydney published by the brand new government funded Australian Centre for Photography, and two in Melbourne published, with the assistance of Australia Council grants, by Outback Press, a small start-up publishing company which had emerged out of Melbourne University student publications, and which also published poetry and politics. The two ACP books classily surveyed the extraordinary efflorescence over the previous couple of years of purely ‘personal’ photography by the new generation of art school trained photographers; while the two books by Outback Press combined the photography of two of that new generation with new writing. Into the Hollow Mountains combined Robert Ashton’s photographs of Fitzroy with poems and experimental literature about the suburb by the likes of Helen Garner; while A Book About Australian Women combined the writing of Virginnia Fraser with the photographs of Carol Jerrems

In her 1973 application to the Visual Arts Board Jerrems had said of the proposed book:

The emotions, attitudes, sexuality and intellect of Australian women through the eyes of women has not been considered in the anticipated format, and a greater depth will be achieved by going beyond the single picture concept, and by intermeshing of photographs and words concerning themes personally experienced by the artists involved.

In the end however, as was the case for many other picture books before them, the words and photographs weren’t as enmeshed as the grant application had envisaged. Rather than in tandem, Fraser and Jerrems worked separately on their sections, which were alternated on different paper stock throughout the book. But in her layout for her sections, printed on glossier, thicker stock than Fraser’s, Jerrems certainly did go ‘beyond the single picture concept’, with cinematic sequences of shots being laid out like frames from a film. The sister book, Robert Ashton’s Into the Hollow Mountains, also separated text and word. But although, like Jerrems, Ashton also experimented with multiple picture layouts, he didn’t do it as consistently as she had. Jerrems even retained the book’s layout unchanged when she worked on the wall for the Brummels exhibition the two held together at the launch of their respective books.

In the years before the book came out Jerrems had had the opportunity to experiment with multiple picture layouts when she contributed several photo series to the Melbourne University magazine Circus, on which the publishers at Outback Press cut their teeth. For instance in the final issue of Circus Jerrems interspliced the photoseries Hanna, about Ross Hannaford, with the Photoseries Hanging About, with Pearl, and in addition, experimented with repeating the image from the previous page in Hanging About, with Pearl as a kind of thumbnail afterimage on each new page.

A year after A Book About Australian Women, Jerrems worked on a much smaller scale for the cheap, hip-pocket sized paperback, Skyhooks: Million Dollar Riff. Jerrems’ sections of back-stage photographs, again printed on gloss stock and bound in between Jenny Brown’s prose, retained the same sequential layout structure as her previous work.

The popularity of these small paperbacks had been promoted in the sixties by publishers such as Sun books. There were a wide variety of book experiments being undertaken in the late 1960s, as small publishers jostled against each other for new angles onto the market. Even film tie-ins were experimented with. In 1968 Tim Burstall made a semi-autobiographical feature film about a creative young man feeling stultified by, but bound to, Australia. Called Two Thousand Weeks, the film bombed at the box office, with audiences rejecting its subject matter and European art-house stylings as self-indulgent and pretentious, so probably the accompanying photo-roman produced by Mark Strizic bombed in the bookshops as well, even though in the tiny arena of the double page spread Strizic tried to integrate film dialogue and sequential photographs in a new way.

A Book About Australian Women, produced during the international year of women, and launched by Margaret Reid, Australia’s first commissioner for women, was a feminist project. But it was intended to be feminism from the ground up, through the eyes and the mouths of as wide a range of women themselves as possible. Had women been considered before in Australian photography, if not quite in Jerrems’ anticipated format of ‘themes personally experienced by the artists involved’? Well, yes they had. By way of complete contrast I can’t resist taking a cheeky look at the Sydney photographer David Mist’s Made in Australia, which in 1969 stole an idea from a 1967 British book called Birds of Britain. It responded to the emerging independence and self-assertion of women throughout the 1960s by packaging up different young Australian women into a useful compendium aimed at the aspirational, cravat-wearing, bachelor-playboy market. The Outback Press books were cheap, cheap, cheap, printed cut-price at a suburban newspaper and imperfectly bound so that they fell apart almost immediately. Mist’s book, on the other hand, was printed in Hong Kong by the British publisher Paul Hamlyn who was seeking new angles to access what was a very healthy Australian market for books about contemporary Australia.

However in 1969, the same year as Made in Australia came out and was launched by Patrick MacNee, the dapper star of the 1960s TV series The Avengers, another major international publisher with offices in Australia, Nelson, published a series of feminist essays on the new 1960s woman called In Her Own Right. This book, well bound and printed in Hong Kong, was edited by Julie Rigg, and illustrated with photographs by the unknown photographer Russell Richards. Perhaps it was the visual approaches of books such as these that Jerrems had in mind when, four years later, she counterposed against them the ‘greater depth’ of her multiple picture approac’ taken as though through the eyes of women themselves. However, amongst the stilted studio shots that illustrate In Her Own Right’s essays there were also long-lensed portraits taken in photojournalistic style. These, in their frankness and frontality, are effective; even if they convey no sense of the personal connection or warmth feminist photographers like Jerrems were to seek for later.

The unnamed designer of Julie Rigg’s book had clearly been greatly influenced by the single most important book of the 1960s, The Australians, which was still a best seller in 1969 three years after it was first published. Shot by a hot-shot National Geographic photographer called Robert Goodman, and funded by the mining and tourism industries, The Australians dominated the photographic landscape well into the 1970s and initiated a slew of imitations, such as the design and photography of In Her Own Right.

If the ‘new woman’ was a major topic in the late sixties and early seventies, ‘woman’ in general had become a category of mainstream interest even earlier. In the early sixties a group of three male amateur photographers, Albert Brown, George Bell, and John Crook, broke away from the camera club movement and formed their own group called Group M. They were particularly inspired by the Museum of Modern Art’s Family of Man exhibition that had finally made it to Melbourne in 1959. In 1963 they staged an exhibition of their work in the Melbourne Town Hall under the theme Urban Woman. Like the Family of Man it was arranged from youth to age, but it failed to get close to its subject, relying on telephoto lenses. Even the woman invited to open the show, Myra Roper from Melbourne University’s Women’s College, complained that: ‘a lot of the pictures show women just waiting — waiting for buses, waiting in queues, or waiting for a man to finish his tea.’

Because of exhibitions such as this and books like The Australians, the long-lensed street-shot became a major trope of late sixties photography; so much so that, in talking to the journalist Craig McGregor for Men Vogue in 1977 Jerrems told him that, because she was looking for sympathetic warm portraits, she did not use a wide-angle lens because it distorted, nor a telephoto lens because, to quote her, ‘it seems like you should have walked up closer’.

Jerrems’ period, the early 1970s, came immediately after a period from the mid sixties on when there had been a real thirst for photography books about Australia. The sixties were a period of economic boom because of mining and manufacturing, and a period of social transformation because of wealth and immigration. While there were only a handful of feature films made during the period, there were tens upon tens of picture books published. If the main topic of the 1970s was the personal — personal relationships, personal politics, personal journeys, personal spiritual experiences — the main topic of the 1960s was national identity — what was an Australian, what did they look like, how were they different to other nationalities, what was special about them, how did they collectively define Australia? (When this national 1960s anxiety persisted into the 70s it was usually as caricature or parody.) The new publishers of the 1970s, like Outback Press, followed on from their start-up predecessors in the 1960s, like Sun books, by also being small, lean, front-room publishing operations. But they differed from 1960s publishers because they were able to produce even cheaper large-format offset paperbacks for distribution, as well as apply for government grants to support their books.

It was the journalist Craig McGregor who had first suggested the idea of In Her own Right to Julie Rigg, and who had covered the new generation of Australia photographers, including Roger Scott, John Williams, Richard Harris, Wesley Stacey and Carol Jerrems for Men Vogue. In the same year he used a detail from Vale Street on the cover of his novel The See-Through Revolver. In the 1960s McGregor had written books attempting to statistically measure Australian society and define Australian identity as a whole, but he also had sympathy for the kind of intensely personal experience that characterized the 1970s. In 1968 he worked with Helmut Gritscher on the photobook To Sydney With Love. The photographs themselves were prosaic, but they allowed McGregor the opportunity to attempt a very personal beat-poetry meditation on Sydney that predicted the expressionistic writing of the 1970s. Unusually for the period, he opened the book’s text with his experience of a late night epiphany standing on the roof of a block of flats in Potts Point looking into Woolloomooloo:

The two Outback Press photobooks of 1974 both concentrated on Australia’s social and political demimonde, as well as on notorious areas of urban pressure and social change. In fact a poem by Peter Oustabasadis on the final page of Into the Hollow Mountains, complained about the very process of groovy gentrification that the book itself was part of:

Get out of Fitzroy/ you’ve side-stepped the blood pools/the pus holes &/raised the rents/classed the restaurants/closed down the hamburgers/gouged the stomachs out of houses/& photoed the bedrooms of drunks/you’ve made this place hell/WE’LL BURN THE STREET SIGNS/we know our way around

But other earlier books had identified similar sub-cultures and potent urban sites. For instance in 1965 the poet Kenneth Slessor and the photographer Robert Walker produced the first picture book about Kings Cross. It was pretty boring, but six years later Rennie Ellis and Wesley Stacey produced a much more vivid and lively portrait published by Nelson, the same publisher as In Her Own Right. Kings Cross Sydney: A Personal look at the Cross by Rennie Ellis and Wesley Stacey, 1971, used the double page spreads of the book in a graphically exciting way, and took the reader into the dressing rooms of Les Girls, as well as into the bedrooms of junkies.

Institutionally, sixties phtography was dominated by two major formations. The Institute of Australian Photographers, represented the commercial photographers — the industrial, illustrative, fashion and advertising photographers; and the Australian Photographic Society, representing the amateurs — still largely pursuing Pictorialism through their camera clubs. By the late 1960s and early 1970 this photographic divide had produced two distinctive strands when it came to the category of ‘creative’ photography, both of which relied on very high contrast printing. The 1972 book Concern: The Ilford Photographic Exhibition showcased both approaches. The overall winner of the competition to address the theme of ‘concern’, who walked away with prize money of $1000 and a round the world plane ticket for two, was Barrie Bell. He had submitted four gritty street-drunk shots, which were well and truly clichéd even in 1972. A photographer with Melbourne’s Channel 9, Bell took the opportunity to defend his patch against the prominence of the new generation of personal photographers, he said: ‘I hate to see photography abused, particularly by those with no professional training, offering photography from a backyard, doing poor stuff, taking work from the pro, and giving photographers and photography a bad name.’ There were other more effective photographs from this genre of gritty realism in Concern, for instance Rennie Ellis submitted four junkie photographs from the Kings Cross

The other dominant ‘creative’ style during these years was a quasi-surreal, darkroom crafted, graphically designed, high-contrast negative composite. This style had been showcased three years before Concern in 1969, in a publication from the Melbourne University Photography Club called Spilt Image. With layout design by Suzanne Davies, it juxtaposed experimental short stories with photo-sequences that were described by the Melbourne Herald at the time as ‘quite sick’, “way out”, and ‘weird’. The style was represented again in Concern by the Gordon de’Lisle with a series that attempted ‘to show the raped land, Australia, as it would appear to a woman who returns from the dead to discover that her country, too, is dying.’ (Although why the woman is beautiful and nude, de’Lisle didn’t explain.) Paul Cox, Carol Jerrems’ mentor at Prahran CAE, straddled both well-worn genres with three sets of photographs accepted into Concern — negative double exposures, window lit portrait tableaus, and journalistic travel photographs. A year earlier Cox too, like Stacey and Ellis, and Julie Rigg, also produced a book with the publisher Nelson. His was based on two trips to New Guinea, described by him in his autobiography as ‘a romantic journey in search of man’s childhood’. In Home of Man: The People of New Guinea his high contrast images were juxtaposed by the writer Ulli Beier with poetry by New Guinean students.

So the few years around 1974 were certainly a watershed for Australian photography. Even looking forward one year to 1975 we have the publication of the crucial and very sophisticated book Green Bans by Marion Marrison and Peter Manning, published by the Australian Conservation Foundation; as well as the first of the widely popular Rennie Ellis books, Australian Graffiti. And by the late seventies, of course, museums were collecting heaps of photos and the boom was well and truly on. However, clearly, any direct causality between the Australian photography of the 1960s and that of the 1970s was minor, obviously what was happening in the US and to a lesser extent the UK was far more important to Jerrems and her generation. But nonetheless if we widen our scope out from just gallery exhibitions and museum collections to books and magazines we can see that the transition in Australia itself was not from nothing to something, but from something to something else.

During the transition the telephotos and fisheye lenses were dropped; the contrast of photographic paper went down from grade 4 and 5 to grade 2 and 3; the darkroom faux-surrealism and neo-pictorialism by-and-large faded away — at least until the invention of Photoshop; and the figure of the personally expressive photographer became central to progressive Australian art and culture, not marginal to it. But, lest we forget, there were at least a handful of important Australian photography books published before that key date, back in the mid to late sixties.

Martyn Jolly

Click here for a PDF of the pictures:

Before Carol

Click here for a Powerpoint of the pictures:

Before Carol

Mark Strizic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martyn Jolly

Sources:

NLA Photographers Files

NLA Clippings Files

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

Wolfgang Sievers’ Photographs: From the Future to the Past

‘Wolfgang Sievers’ Photographs: From the Future to the Past’, catalogue essay for Wolfgang Sievers 1913 — 2007: Work, curated by Stuart Bailey, pp 5 — 14, Glen Eira City Gallery, 2007.

One night in 1983 Wolfgang Sievers steadied himself on a tug as it heaved on the waves of Bass Strait and with a long hand-held exposure photographed an oil rig belching a giant tongue of flame and spouting a curtain of water. The experience was the high point of his career as a professional photographer. It was, in his own words, like the grand finale to a fantastic, dramatic opera. When Sievers saw the diabolical Wagnerian result, Inferno, Nymphea Oil Rig, Bass Strait, he thought that he couldn’t have done any better, and decided there and then that it was to be almost his last professional photograph[i]. But in making the decision to ‘stop whilst he was on top’ there was also an element of sourness and disappointment about the progress, or lack of progress, in Australian society, industry and architecture during the half-century his professional career had covered. As a bombastic vision of industrial power and excess the oil rig photograph was a long way from Sievers’ first industrial photographs. For instance it contrasts strongly with one of his favourite photographs taken in 1939 at the very beginning of his career in Australia, of the dipping of match heads at Bryant & May, in Richmond, Victoria. Although also of a toxic industrial process, this image had a delicate clarity that for him encapsulated the ideas of simplicity and functional beauty which he thought should underpin all of his work.

For Sievers, as for many of the other European artists, designers, photographers and architects who also fled to Melbourne to escape the rise of Nazism, the ideas of pure functional beauty they brought with them were inextricably linked to wider ideas of social progress. The political foment of 1920s Weimar Germany had given rise to the famous Bauhaus, which taught not only the importance of truth to function in design; but also the importance of unifying the artist and the designer, the machine and the worker, to forge a new future society. In the post-war period these ideas were to pervade the entire world through the global rise Modernism, but Sievers also had a direct connection to them through his years in the late 30s at Berlin’s Contempora School of Applied Arts, which was a small private school that had taken up the Bauhaus project after it was closed by the Nazis in 1933.

As a young man in Germany during the 1930s Sievers was inevitably caught up in, and forever formed by, the political events of the time. He moved to Portugal in 1934 to try to make a career as a photographer, but then became briefly involved in the Spanish Civil War against Franco, for which he was arrested by the Gestapo on his return to Germany in 1936. He was not Jewish, though his mother was a Jewish descent, but in 1937 he decided to arrange his emigration to Australia, using as one of his guarantors the documentary photographer Axel Poignant who himself had emigrated to Australia ten years before. He was forced to dramatically expedite his plans when the Luftwaffe called him up for two years service as an aerial photographer. He was given one day’s grace and immediately escaped to England.

He left Germany at the age of 25 steeped in the ‘New Objectivity’ style of photography: he had taken front-on, clear-eyed photographs of poverty in Portugal; he had taken deep-focussed architectural views of nineteenth-century palaces on behalf of his art-historian father; he had been commissioned by the contemporary expressionist architect and family friend Erich Mendelsohn to photograph the last of his buildings in Germany before he himself had fled for Britain in 1933; he had made advertisements for modern products such as sheer stockings, dramatically lit in the latest studio style; and he had made low-angled sunlit portraits of his fellow Contempora School students heroically looking into the future.

He arrived in Melbourne in 1938 and set up a studio in South Yarra with the latest photographic equipment which he had sent on ahead. But he found pre-war Melbourne to be very different to Berlin, and opportunities severely limited. He decided to specialise in industrial and architectural photography, where he could immediately apply what he had learnt about the purity of design and the essential honesty of the machine. He rapidly found several large clients, but from 1942 volunteered to assist in the Australian war effort. After the war Sievers’ career took off again, buoyed by Australia’s building and industrial boom. For his industrial clients Sievers provided shots for their annual reports, publicity brochures and advertising.

One of his biggest clients was the heavy engineers Charles Ruwolt, which were taken over by the British based company Vickers in 1948. A problem many industrial photographers faced was the visual mess and distraction of any factory floor. (This can still be seen in some of Sievers’ shots, such as the grim Sweatshop, Melbourne, 1958). The graphic designers of annual reports generally got around this problem by simply cutting the distracting background out of the photographs, often leaving a heavily airbrushed image of an odd-shaped piece of machinery floating isolated on the page with no sense of scale or drama. Sievers solved the problem photographically by either raising his camera to look down on the machinery, or lowering the camera to shoot upwards against the roof, and using his own lights to light the machinery whilst leaving the distracting background in darkness. For example in reality the Nordberg Crusher he photographed in 1969 was hemmed around with factory paraphernalia, but Sievers organised a thorough clean up of the area around the crusher and built a platform to elevate his camera, he then descended into the crusher with ladders to light its interior, emphasising its circular shape and its depth. As a bonus he wedged a dramatically lit lab-coated operator into the lower right hand corner for the final shot. The image then created its own graphic force and internal visual drama that could be used in any publicity situation. (According to Seivers himself the subsequent publication of the image in the financial press resulted in a multi-million contract for the company.)

Man and machine were Sievers’ quintessential subjects. To Sievers the essence of a good factory was not labour by itself, nor the technical process in isolation, but that ‘everything is as it should be’, with men directing machines efficiently, and each augmenting the other.[ii] In Sievers’ photographs the operators are functionally connected to the machine by their hands and their eyes — they peer through loupes, or pull levers, or intently measure the details of gigantic pieces of machinery with finely calibrated instruments. The image of a technician establishing the accurate positioning of a hydraulic pump crankshaft with a micro-alignment telescope, Quality Control at Vickers-Ruwolt, 1960, was published in a Vickers Ruwolt brochure. Running across the pages of the brochure in a kind of staccato modernist poem to industry were the words: “From a concentration of trained minds — emerges mechanical excellence … experience is combined with intelligence and work proceeds …from molten metal … to tools of high precision and great power …precision created out of precision … born in the toolroom … the climax—assembly and testing …”. [iii]

These sentiments of corporate pride were given an almost nationalistic resonance a few years later in another, even more constructed, shot for Vickers Ruwolt. In Gears for Mining Industry, 1967, an engineer, like an operatic hero ascending a stage mountain, climbs the teeth of a giant gear which has been especially raised upright by a crane, to steady with one hand and measure with the other the second half of the gear whose several tons has been suspended upside down above him.

During the 1970s and 1980s photographs such as these began their migration from the pages of company reports to the walls of art museums. In 1991 this image was one of four chosen by Australia Post to become a stamp to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Australian photography. It had become a fully fledged icon of Australia as an industrial nation, complementing other national icons such as Harold Cazneaux’s mighty gum tree The Spirit of Endurance, 1937, or Max Dupain’ Sunbaker, 1937, which encapsulated other aspects of the national myth — it’s land and its lifestyle.

However throughout his career there is a continuing visual tension in the respective role of worker and machine. His vision was clearly centred around the trained technician rather than the knockabout aussie manual worker, though he did love to photograph traditional workers who seem to have a heritage of noble labour going back centuries. For example in his 1962 image of a worker in the Miller Rope factory hefting the rough rope in his firm hands Sievers saw ‘the dignity of man … staring you straight in the face’. In other images, in contrast, such as Finishing of Hitachi Brand Valves for the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, 1967 or Coal Mining Dredges, Yallourn, Victoria, 1956, the technicians of the modern industrial age are squashed uncomfortably into tight corners by the looming bulk of the machine.

Workers by themselves, however, unconnected to any machine, rarely figure in Sievers photographs. He admits that his poor English initially made him scared of the human element, although later his bilingualism could be an advantage with Australia’s ethnically diversifying workforce. One of his rare photographs of workers by themselves and with their own autonomous personalities, is the crowd shot taken from an aerial point of view of the Shift Change at Kelly and Lewis, Springvale, 1949, where friendly workers smile and squint up at Sievers’ camera. Nowadays the idea of the dignity of manual labour has been grossly devalued, and corporations are unlikely anymore to be interested in commissioning photographs of their workers as a collective force. In this light the image now has an elegiac character, and reminds me of another Sievers’ aerial view with receding perspective, Old Frankfurt before its total destruction in World War 11, Germany, 1937 — both are photographs taken on the verge of destruction.

The metaphors of theatre or opera are the ones most commonly applied to Seivers’ industrial work. But other genres sometimes come to mind as well. For instance the dramatic side lighting used to apply strong shadows and bright sheens to the equipment in Lathe operator at Marweight, Burnley, Melbourne, 1968, not only isolates the lathe against a black background, but also gives the scene a B Grade Frankenstein appearance. Other shots, such as Sulphuric Acid Plant at Electrolytic Zinc, Hobart, 1959, could almost be described as industrial pornography as the gleaming steel tubes turn and curve in on themselves. (When it was reproduced full page and in full colour in the BHP book The Fabulous Hill, its caption was much more prosaic: ‘This new acid plant will bring Risdon’s capacity for the production of sulphuric acid to 170,000 tons a year.’)[iv]

As his career progressed the symbiotic relationship between his own ideals, forged in the Europe of the 1930s, and the reality of Australian industry swept up in the resources boom of the 1970s and 80s, began to pull apart. Sievers was always a political animal and proud of his past. In 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, he placed a photograph of a GI holding up the severed head of a Vietnamese in his studio showcase window at the Collins Street entrance of the Australia Arcade. He accompanied the image, which had been taken from LIFE magazine, with the following sign: ‘I Wolfgang Sievers: victim of Nazi persecution — prisoner of the Gestapo —volunteer of the AIF and RAAF 1939 — volunteer Australian Army 1942- 1945 PROTEST against the undeclared war — against conscription by lottery — against imprisonment of conscientious objectors whose just stand has been laid down at the Nuremberg trials to be the duty of all men.’ As a result of this protest Sievers estimates he lost 60% of his industrial clients.[v]

Although they are certainly full of drama, Sievers’ photographs are devoid of any sense of noise, smell, dirt or toxicity. Floors have been cleaned, workers’ hands washed, and their chins shaved. Clean lab coats have been put on and 500-watt lights carefully positioned to obscure the ugly backgrounds. As Sievers himself admitted ‘industrial photography is lying most of the time.’ Increasingly, Sievers became concerned with the pollution that was produced by the industries that his photographs pictured as being pollution free, with ‘everything clean and wonderful.’ The worse it got, he said, the nearer he got to the end of his days as a photographer.[vi] He was also concerned with the foreign ownership of Australian resources.[vii] During the 1980s he concentrated more and more on retrospectives of his own career, as well as other historical and political interests.

Sievers was much more than just an industrial photographer, however. The artists, designers, architects and photographers who fled to Melbourne to escape Nazism made enormous contributions to Melbourne’s growth as a cosmopolitan city, and Sievers photographed much of it. For instance he made advertisements for the Prestige company which produced textiles designed by Gerhard Herbst who, like Sievers had trained in Germany and fled to Melbourne in 1939.[viii] Herbst also designed the striking poster advertising New Visions in Photography, a 1953 exhibition Sievers and another émigré photographer, Helmut Newton, held promoting their work as commercial photographers. A boldly designed sign in the exhibition announced: ‘the aim of this exhibition, the first of its kind in Melbourne, to demonstrate, through actual work done, the potential of industrial and fashion photography as a means of better promotion and bigger sales in business today.’[ix]

He also photographed the cutting edge modernist architecture of fellow émigrés Frederick Romberg, who arrived in Melbourne from Germany via Zurich in 1939 and also knew the influential expressionist architect Erich Mendelsohn; and Ernest Fooks who arrived in Melbourne in 1939 from Vienna where he was a progressive town planner and architect.[x] Like Sievers, both these architects saw their work as directly affecting the development of a socially progressive, technologically modern society. He photographed their work in the international architectural style, with dynamically receding horizontal lines, sternly orthogonal vertical lines, and cleanly isotropic spaces. These deeply-focused sharply-defined views of ideal modernist architecture could have been made at any time in any metropolis modernism had spread too— Europe, Japan, Canada, Brazil or Australia. Today they all seem uncannily empty and devoid of atmosphere, as though they are waiting for the future to happen

In the 1950s émigré architects designed many houses and modernist flats around the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Sievers photographed the house Fooks designed and built for himself in Caulfield in 1966. His photographs beautifully capture the sense of the house experienced as a procession of enclosed and semi-enclosed spaces and courtyards from street frontage through to the garden, all modulated by Japanese inspired timber screens, an undulating timber ceiling, and detailed joinery — a testimony to Fooks’ Viennese heritage.[xi]

But, just as he had parted company with industry, Sievers also found himself parting ways from the mainstream of Australian architecture and design, where the ideal, designed future he envisaged appeared increasingly derailed by thoughtless and crass developments, which could be just as effectively photographed quickly with small format cameras. In 1988 he was invited out of his semi-retirement to photograph the new Parliament House in Canberra, but he refused because he did not approve of the design by the US architects Mitchell/Giurgola. Increasingly looking to the past, Sievers travelled to Berlin and Paris in 1989 to research war criminals who had also emigrated to Australia. Whilst there he briefly rediscovered his excitement in architecture as he photographed I. M. Pei’s newly opened pyramid entrance to the Louvre, with its spectacular and explicitly engineered glass walls.

Sievers’ work is now firmly ensconced in the nation’s image of its past. Art museums and libraries had consistently purchased his key images from the early 1970s onwards, and the National Gallery of Australia toured a major retrospective nationally in 1991 and 1992. In 2004 the National Library of Australia completed the purchase of his complete archive of 51,700 negatives and transparencies and 13,700 prints, which they are now in the process of digitising.[xii] His images, which were once about creating an ideal modern future for Australia, are now subsiding into the nation’s official past. The irony is that the future his photographs so keenly anticipated never actually happened. The wealth and prosperity they predicted certainly came, but the sense of social balance, equality and honesty, where ‘everything is as it should be’, which they were attempting to create, never really did. We can see that clearly now, but Sievers himself could feel it, twenty-five years ago.

Martyn Jolly

[i] Wolfgang Sievers, Wolfgang Sievers: Contemporary Photographers Australia, Writelight, 1998, np.

[ii] Photographers of Australia: Dupain, Sievers, Moore, Film Australia, 1992.

[iii] Vickers Ruwolt Proprietary Limited, Melbourne, Australia, nd, np.

[iv] Alfred Heintz, The Fabulous Hill, BHP, 1960, np.

[v] Daniel Palmer, ‘Wolfgang Sievers’, Flash, Centre for Contemporary Photography Newsletter, June-Spetmeber 2004, pp10-11.

[vi] Photographers of Australia

[vii] Helen Ennis, ‘Wolfgang Sievers’, Photographers of Australia: Dupain, Sievers, Moore, Film Australia, 1992, np.

[viii] Anne Brennan, ‘A Philosophical Approach to Design: Gerhard Herbst and Fritz Janeba’, in The Europeans : emigré artists in Australia, 1930-1960, (ed) Roger Butler, National Gallery of Australia, 1997.

[ix] Helen Ennis, ‘Blue Hydrangeas: Four Emigré Photographers’, in The Europeans : emigré artists in Australia, 1930-1960, p105.

[x] Conrad Hamann, ‘Frederick Romberg and the Problem of European Authenticity’, in The Europeans : emigré artists in Australia, 1930-1960.

[xi] Harriet Edquist, Ernest Fooks: Architect, RMIT, 2001, p20.

[xii] Linda Groom, ‘the Dignity of Man as a Worker; The Sievers Archive’, National Library of Australia News, January 2003, np.

Rennie Ellis: Aussies All

‘Rennie Ellis: Aussies All’, review in Photofile 78, pp71-72, 2006

National Portrait Gallery, Commonwealth Place
21 April – 27 August 2006

Nobody would seriously argue that Rennie Ellis was a great photographer. His photographs had neither a sophisticated visual wit, nor a clear-eyed charm. The best ones were unabashedly pervy pictures of people who were, by and large, also unabashedly flaunting themselves. Ellis may not have been a great photographer, but he was clearly a great character, with an endless appetite for people and parties. He and his camera cheerfully blammed their way through most of the brash characters and glitzy media events of the seventies, eighties and nineties. He shot at the sporting spectacles of yobbos, the nightclubs of sub-cultural habitués, and the kitsch homes of freshly minted millionaires. He loved subjects who flaunted their money and sexuality, the twin lenses through which he saw Australia. He delivered his best shots from sites of ostentatious display — the beach or the Melbournne Cup — and his best subjects were sports stars or business moguls who, pumped with their own success, willingly and openly burlesqued themselves for his camera.

During his career Ellis published a remarkable ten books about Australia, beginning with the seminal Kings Cross Sydney, 1971, produced with Wesley Stacey. That publication continued the long tradition of Australiana picture books, but orientated it away from the previous nationalistic trope of homogenous equality in a rural landscape, towards an acknowledgement of various distinct urban subcultures whose gritty co-existence was nonetheless still quintessential to an Australian egalitarianism. However, as a photographer, Ellis was to become most closely identified with his two later books, the mega-selling Life’s a Beach, 1983, and Life’s Still a Beach, 1998, which celebrated the nation with numerous long-shots of Australian tits and bums in bikinis. Now, three years after his death, this show, although primarily designed to feed Baby-Boomer nostalgia, deserves credit for bringing back to our attention many of the other portraits Ellis took for magazines like Playboy and Who Weekly. The National Portrait Gallery has also accompanied the portraits with their usual useful biographical captions, which sometimes speak volumes about their subjects in just 150 words.

Ellis styled himself as an egalitarian photographer, in his view all Aussies had an equal claim to this country’s fabulously open lifestyle. But, ironically, what he has most powerfully bequeathed to us is an image of the crass venality of so many Aussies, before their inevitable downfall and expulsion from the country’s carnival. Thus we can savour as a parable of hubris the ridiculous set-up shot from 1979 of Derryn Hinch wallowing in newspaper-strewn bed with a Playboy playmate, like a hirsute toad-prince in a swamp of tabloid journalism. On the other hand, if he was in the right place at the right time, Ellis was occasionally able to deliver quite complex and genuinely exciting images, such as the frieze of classic football types on either side of Ron Barassi, frozen whilst hysterically launching themselves into the air at the cue of a decisive try by their team.

Martyn Jolly

Erica Hurrell

Erica Hurrell does more than just ‘shoot from the hip’, she incorporates imaging into the jagged flow of her life. You have to use the ungainly word ‘imaging’ because her photography is more than just individual stills taken with a camera, and more than just videos grabbed with a handcam. It’s a staccato of images that can be reconfigured in any number of ways — projected, printed, bound, screened — whilst retaining its aesthetic unity. These intense images, with their pungent colours, distorted sounds and ragged laughter, are all plucked from the immediacy of her life: her family and friends, and their families and their friends. Living in the outlands of Canberra they puncture their boredom with moments of high speed intensity, or briefly reinvent themselves in a camp karaoke performance, or lovingly deliver doses of tender pain to each other, before sinking back into the mundanity of the day to day. Erica participates in it all, even encourages it, realizing that her camera is ramping up the stakes of all this bad behaviour. But it’s worth it for these intimate, ultimately beautiful images.

Martyn Jolly

Martyn Jolly is head of Photomedia at ANU School of Art

Martyn Jolly

Writing and Photography

Tag Archives: Australian photographers

Australian First World War Photography 1999

Composite Propaganda Photographs during the First World War 2003

Robyn Stacey Presents, 1985

Exposing the Australians in Focus

Art from Archives

‘Art from Archives’

***Shaping Canberra*, Humanities Research Centre, ANU, 17-20 September 2013**

Before Carol, Australian photography of the 1960s

Mark Strizic

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

Wolfgang Sievers’ Photographs: From the Future to the Past

‘Wolfgang Sievers’ Photographs: From the Future to the Past’, catalogue essay for Wolfgang Sievers 1913 — 2007: Work, curated by Stuart Bailey, pp 5 — 14, Glen Eira City Gallery, 2007.

Rennie Ellis: Aussies All

‘Rennie Ellis: Aussies All’, review in Photofile 78, pp71-72, 2006

National Portrait Gallery, Commonwealth Place
21 April – 27 August 2006

Erica Hurrell

‘Art from Archives’

Shaping Canberra, Humanities Research Centre, ANU, 17-20 September 2013

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

‘Wolfgang Sievers’ Photographs: From the Future to the Past’, catalogue essay for Wolfgang Sievers 1913 — 2007: Work, curated by Stuart Bailey, pp 5 — 14, Glen Eira City Gallery, 2007.

‘Rennie Ellis: Aussies All’, review in Photofile 78, pp71-72, 2006

National Portrait Gallery, Commonwealth Place 21 April – 27 August 2006

***Shaping Canberra*, Humanities Research Centre, ANU, 17-20 September 2013**

National Portrait Gallery, Commonwealth Place
21 April – 27 August 2006