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

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

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

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

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

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

Hurley Chronology:

Postcard trade and camera club movement 1900s

Mawson Antarctica 1911-13

Shackleton Antarctica 1914-16

Flanders and Palestine AIF 1917

Papua New Guinea  early 1920s

Mawson Antarctica 1929-31

Cinesound cameraman 1930s

Middle East AIF 1940s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summary of points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martyn Jolly

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

‘Cinematic Distopias’, Ruby Davies review, Art Monthly, November, 1995

The empire of the city has risen and fallen in a little over two hundred years. The great cities of the world—Paris, New York, London— are on life support systems, relying on ‘urban renewal’, ‘inner city rejuvenation’ and ‘infilling’ to keep them alive. They were once the political capitals of empires, the psychological capitals of civilizations, and the imaginary capitals of entire centuries, now they are pathogenic trouble spots. Once towering metropolises, now they have collapsed into corroding sprawls.

But as ruins never have the great cities of the world been so romantic, even if their romanticism has changed from the days of their glory. The streets of the great cities are no longer filled with insouciant sophisticates parrying the many shocks and jolts of modernity, today’s urban flaneur must go off on a dedicated, lugubrious search for entropic events, imploded spaces and sunken monuments.

Ruby Davies’ photographs capture this feeling perfectly. They were shot on small format over the last eight years or so on various trips to St Petersberg, Tokyo, Berlin and New York (and there’s a couple shot back home in Sydney). For her recent exhibition at Stills  Davies went back to her contact sheets and scanned them once more. The images she chose to enlarge and exhibit tended to be long exposures, and often taken at dusk or night with lighting coming from diverse artificial and natural light sources. The combination of Fuji negatives and Fuji paper has produced chromatically intense images, but the saturated colours produced by the bright lights of the big city appear thickened and coagulated, as though tainted and by some foreign chromogen.

Davies was interested in the massive geopolitical changes her photographs spanned, but also in the intimate association of space and personal memory they embodied. The status of Moscow and Berlin, exactly what they are capitals of, has changed dramatically during the short period of her photography. But she was also interested in the spatialisation of experience which every traveller remembers and sometimes relives through photgraphs. As Benjamin pointed out in his Moscow and Berlin diaries of the 1930s, and Francis Yates pointed out in her classic The Art of Memory, cities are a way of thinking. They are a way of ordering and storing experience, sorting and retrieving personal and political data. Cities are mnemonic machines, on everything from an individual to an epochal level.

Davies’s was a critical tourism, combining a tourist’s eagerness to see the sights, with a traveller’s willingness to drift across the city and discover her own personally meaningful precincts and monuments. Her exhibition maps what the Situationist Guy Debord would call a ‘psychogeography’ of the city. Her cities are not made up of broad clear thoroughfares providing commanding views of citizens bustling about their business. Her’s is a fragmented city, made up of oblique and occluded glimpses—stilted, vaguely threatening portraits; details of lights, shadows and advertising signs verging on the undecipherable; and fleeting views down strange alleys.

Her photographs have the curious effect of solidifying people and desubstantiating architecture. The people she photographs monumentalise themselves, they appear stilled or temporarily absent from their bodies. The Russian soldier stiffly standing guard in Berlin in 1992, the potentially aggro black American soldier on R & R in Tokyo in 1988, and even the posing rock’n’roll singer in New York in 1988, all seem as uncannilly otherworldly and distant as the spotlit and familiarly heroic Lenin statue, which nobody had bothered to topple, photographed by Davies in St Petersburg in 1993. The Japanese girl asleep on the train to Mt Fuji 1988 has left behind her body to dream, as she leans her head against the steel window frame the dark interior of the carriage seems to absorbed her into itself.

In contrast, most of the solid monuments and buildings Davies photographs appear as though they are melting into sodium-vapour lit air. For instance a statue of General Sherman on horseback with attendant angel was photographed in Central Park in 1990. Shot from below and upwards towards a crepuscular blue sky the statue seems to move above us in ghostly procession, the brassy golden burnish on angel’s wing, horse’s head and general’s cloak melding into a slow motion feathery blur. Curtains at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersberg hang in beautiful, but wet looking scallops of cyan blue and orange. We look through the flourescent green stone columns of St Petersberg’s Kazanskii Cathedral towards a tiny figure, standing alone in a square of tungsten yellow light.

The exhibition space of Stills, with its two-and-a-bit tiny terrace house rooms, actually works to Davies’ advantage in her hang. Where it has all but destroyed many an exhibition there, the hanging of work up and down stairs, over light wells, and so on, helps to create a sense of fragmentation and distopia in this case. The disjointed hang made it clear that the influence of cinema has also been important to Davies, looking through the installation the cinema of distopian filmmakers such as Wim Wenders or Martin Scorcese, with their extended point-of-view Steadicam sequences, came to mind.

One key image in the show confirms a cinematic connection. It is an enlarged frame from a Super 8 film taken in the New York Cafe, Newtown, Sydney, in 1987. The painting is of the archetypal Manhattan skyline. It is the oldest image in the show and inaugurates the artist’s drift across the great metropolises of the northern hemisphere and modernity. The lure of New York painted on a cafe wall in Newtown shattered into thousands of images on photographic contact-sheets from which memory, spatial experience and history were recombined into a personal psychogeography. An image taken two years later, and used for the invitation, was of another commercially painted image representing the desire to traverse. This time it was photographed off the rear roller door of a delivery truck in Central Tokyo’s Tskiji Markets. A samurai crouches over the mane of a wild-eyed white horse which appears to be rearing slightly as it advances. Both rider and horse stare intently into the distance, out of the Tskiji Markets, out of Tokyo altogether, and into an impossible place.

Martyn Jolly

Made up of over eight thousand photographs and seven hundred fragments of overheard conversations — all meshed together by nearly a thousand keywords — Turnstile is an extraordinary cultural archive. David Wills has spent the last four years trawling through our contemporary urban environment like a human drift-net. He has developed a finely attuned radar for cultural objects that are so marginal, so detrital, that they barely register as artefacts at all. He taxonomizes and cross-references this ‘cultural mulch’ using an acute historical sensibility that mixes irony with a passion for his world, as well as nostalgia with a love for the contemporary, in equal parts.  The interlacing of the threads of images and information forms an on-line network vast in scale and microscopic in detail, but unified in structure.

He has not only constructed his own world, but has also produced a thoroughly compelling document of our time, which depicts the early twenty-first century not so much pictorially as granularly.

The archive is a key motif of photography, from nineteenth century ethnographers, through twentieth century artists such as Gerhard Richter and Hans Peter-Feldman, to today’s sardonic flaneurs such as Martin Parr. And of course online archives such as Corbis or Flickr already allow us access to numbers of images at an astronomical scale. But only Turnstile combines the automatic logic of a search engine with the personal sensibility of a singular artist.

‘Peace after war and memories’, catalogue essay in Harold Cazneaux: Artist in Photography, 2008, edited by Natasha Bulluck, Art Gallery of New South Wales. PP136-137 ISBN 978-1-74174-022-6

Cazneaux was a photographer of taste and restraint. His reputation was built on understated images with elegant compositions and carefully modulated lighting effects. Which is not to say that he didn’t tackle big topics, his central theme was the process of historical change itself, the gentle overlapping of one epoch with the next. However, a few images stand out as intriguingly different in Cazneaux’s work. One example is Peace After War and Memories, 1918, exhibited at the London Salon of 1920. Unlike most of Cazneaux’s pictorialist work it is not a generalised view of this or that backstreet of Sydney, or this or that picturesque by-way in the countryside. Its title and date refer to a specific historical event, the end of the Great War. The main figure is presumably a soldier settler, one of the thousands who were given small blocks to farm as a form of repatriation, and in order to build up the Australian nation by forging the returning diggers into a class of agrarian yeomanry. (Although, even in 1918 as a severe drought began to bite, it was becoming clear that the utopian dream of the soldier settler schemes was destined for failure.) The horse-drawn plough of the farm is a familiar enough Cazneaux trope — an anachronistic technology teetering on the edge of nostalgia — but it is the dusty smoky paddock it ploughs that is the most arresting. It is a strange, uncanny landscape, a doubled landscape, at once an image of a precarious attempt to make the harsh Australian land productive and a visual echo of the blasted landscape of the Front returning. The bare trees in the background would have reminded contemporary viewers of the skeletal trees of the Somme, stripped of their leaves by bomb blasts; and the drifting smoke from the burn-off would have reminded them of the newspaper pictures they had seen of the bombs themselves. The dispersing clouds are also a familiar pictorialist convention, but the shafts of light beneath which the soldier/farmer bows his head now seem to directly offer divine benediction to his reverie. Cazneaux has clearly felt compelled to lard all of these extra symbols into his image in order to express his personal reaction to the historical cataclysm that was the most epoch changing event of his time. Although he was a sentimentalist, this mannered symbolism was new terrain for him. However similar images were occurring regularly in lower-brow culture, and Cazneaux drew on this visual vocabulary for his own salon image. For instance in 1915 Melbourne’s Weekly Times Annual printed a montage of a digger on guard duty in a bare battle field, leaning over his rifle and dreaming, in a photographic thought bubble, of his mother waiting for him back home. And in 1919 Frank Hurley was to exhibit The Dawn of Passchendaele at Sydney’s Kodak Salon, in which he montaged a holy-card sky above a terrible battle scene. By the 1920s Cazneaux was back to making sleek images for classy magazines like The Home. It wasn’t until World War Two, when he rechristened his 1937 photograph of an ancient gum tree tenaciously clinging to a dry creek bed The Spirit of Endurance, that he made another of his images resonate in a similar way. That nationalist allegory was more enduring and remains popular to this day.

Weekly Times Annual, Melbourne 4 November 1915, The Mothers Daydream, The Son’s Lonely Vigil, pp12-13

‘Photographs of Time and History’, book foreword in The Twilight of Mr Kemp: Landscapes 1797-1897, by Alexander James, unpaginated two pages. ISBN 0-9532458-4-5

In that period after the sun sets below the horizon, but before the landscape sinks into complete darkness, Alex James works like a demon. With a view camera he urgently exposes sheet after sheet of large-format film. As the gloaming intensifies, his exposures lengthen, from several seconds to many minutes. Eventually he is focussing only on the beam of a torch, and the chemical phenomenon of reciprocity departure has curdled the colour of the last remaining glow of sky a sour yellow.

James is photographing sites where, perhaps, tragedies once occurred. As Europeans moved across the landscape they sowed the ground with such stories. There were not only the massacres and dispersals they perpetuated on the indigenous population, but also their own random mishaps and misadventures — their drownings, their shootings, their shipwrecks, their bungled escapes and their disappearances.

Not for James the antiseptic, suprahuman wildernesses of, say, a Peter Dombrovskis. Against those anodyne microcosmic or macrocosmic spectacles James counterposes a large-format landscape photography where places are entangled with stories, light seems to grow up and out from the ground, and the landscape is not there to be consumed by the viewer, but instead sometimes threatens to engulf the viewer themself.

James is born and bred in south eastern New South Wales and has a profound affection for the place. Since he was a child he has skied, bushwalked and surfed from the Snowy Mountains to the South Coast. [M1] He also loves the process of large-format photography, the muscular physical challenge of getting his camera to the spot, the forensic accumulation of detail, and the dilation of time during the exposure. Like many locals a starting point for establishing a deeper connection to his land and its uncomfortable past began with various local histories. As a genre, these popular local histories are often not much more than patchwork compilations of picturesque anecdotes from various sources which, their authors enthusiastically presuppose, have somehow combined to form the unique character of the region and its current inhabitants. However by re-attaching them to specific landscapes, James has used these local stories to produce a sophisticated visual experience.

In one such history he found an account of a twelve-year old boy who had drowned in the Molonglo River in 1843. This story, complete even with a spooky premonition by the boy’s mother, is typical of the hundreds of such stories from the nineteenth century which testify to the disquieting sense of unbelonging which underscored colonial expansion and settlement.

James returned to the site — now, probably, just below the dam that forms Lake Burley Griffin — to photograph a shallow watercourse choked with weeds and swallowed up by scrubby trees. The receding surface of the water is crawling with worm-like tree-flowers and striated with reflections from the trees, while the vertical plane of the photograph is criss-crossed by a latticework of falling branches which further repel the eye. The threads of light which do manage to penetrate this suffocating space are stained an eerie, indistinct colour — a colour which we know has not been dialled up in Photoshop, but is the chemical and optical result of the process of photography itself at this time of day.

Another oral-history story, which almost has the metaphorical resonances of a fable, concerns a horse which, in the 1890s, escaped a cruel owner on Montagu Island by swimming back to the mainland nearly nine kilometres away — not once, not twice, but three times. In James’s photographs of a low rock platform sloping away into the sea (the only place on the island where the horse could conceivably have entered the water to begin its epic swims) the waves have dissolved under his long exposure into an etheric vapour, and the horizon-line appears like the impossibly distant edge of the world.

Various views of South Coast beaches and headlands are gathered under the title Spring 1797. The date refers to the months when a group of shipwrecked sailors attempted to walk up the coast towards Sydney from Victoria. Despite considerable help from the local indigenous tribes the group progressively died of starvation until only three remained to be found, near death, a few miles south of Botany Bay. James’s crepuscular photographs of the regions they passed through turn what could have been pretty postcard views of holiday beaches, or pleasant pastoral scenes from tourist drives, into something like the ominous and brooding landscape the sailors must have experienced as they trudged through them.

An even more scary ambience is created in a series of rainforest views James titles Spring 1830, in reference to a letter sent at that time by a Batemans Bay resident to the Governor seeking his permission to murder a group of local Aborigines who had been spearing cattle. In James’s airless photographs his wide-angle lens appears to have spreadeagled the ground itself, and the serpentine forms of roots and branches writhe and twist away, plunging into the loam beneath the dense leaf-litter. Each of these shadowless scenes is steeped in an identical sanguineous light.

From these low chthonic reaches, James also took his camera higher, up into the airy tops of the High Country and even above the snow line. For instance Spring 1862 refers to Eugene von Guerard’s expedition to Mount Kosciusko accompanying a scientific survey led by the German scientist George Neumayer, where yet again the expedition’s work was interrupted by a member of the party who got himself lost for several days. But in rephotographing von Guerard’s original famous view from Mount Townsend one hundred and forty-six years later James found himself, like his predecessors, dangerously caught out by the rapidly changing weather, and barely able to make it back to the safety of his tent after darkness unexpectedly closed in.

In these images the scale opens out to approach the majestic, but the horizon line remains high and the colours remain cloying. In the summer of 1835 a mounted policeman shot an escaping bushranger who was desperately swimming across the Snowy River, and his body was never seen again. In James’s photographs of the river the surface of the water becomes skinned with a viscous and glaucous blur.

Towards the end of the book the images approach white-out and the spatial stability offered by a horizon line all but disappears. The series Autumn 1983 is based on the story of a settler who was thrown from his horse and drowned after being caught in a freak snow storm while running cattle in the Snowy Mountains. At this elevation stories such as these seem to have created their own small seismic events as they crack the collapsing crust of snow, revealing the basalt bones beneath. Up here, where the delicate balance of the weather defines the look of the landscape, these fracturing, brittle surfaces have an almost apocalyptic beauty.

All of James’s landscapes are entangled and layered. In his vision time is folded into space, and history is folded into geography. His love for his home, the south-eastern regions of New South Wales, has been deepened by his use of local histories and the bizarre range of stories they offer up. But his photographs do not celebrate the bravery and struggle of the white ‘pioneers’ who ‘opened’ up the land for us. Nor, on the other hand, do they dismissively condemn them for the dispossession of those that, some claim, still have the only authentic relationship to the land — the Aborigines.[M2]  Rather, the loose connections he makes between story and place mobilise the imagination of the audience to narrativize the scenes in a provisional, unsettled way. The viewer virtually enters the scenes and animates them by following along the tracks and lines of tree trunks with their eye, or by spreading their gaze out to suffuse them up to the horizon.

These sites are not monuments to Australian history, like Gallipoli Cove or the Burke and Wills ‘Dig Tree’. They are not sites for prescribed acts of historical memory as a form of national allegiance. The photographs are probably not even taken precisely where the event actually took place, even if, indeed, the event actually happened in precisely the dislocated, fragmentary way in which it has eventually come down to us. Nonetheless story and place adhere to each other like a vague haunting, intermixing and catalysing in the imagination of the viewer. These photographs are experiments in producing a new relationship between ourselves and the land we have inherited — for better or for worse, and along with all of its stories.

Martyn Jolly

October 2008

Dr Martyn Jolly is Head of Photography and Media Arts at the Australian National University School of Art.

Absolutely everybody in Australia, and many other people around the world, would recognise the Bananas in Pyjamas instantly.  To Australian children the lovable bananas in their blue and white striped pyjamas come from a phase they all went through in pre-school. They adore B1 and B2, as the characters call each other, as they rollick across their TV screens getting themselves into, and out of, all sorts of muddles with a delightfully light sense of humour. To Australian adults they are probably the least annoying of all the children’s TV characters. With their slightly camp relationship to each, and their absolutely unique shape — not a cuddly teddy bear or a twee fairy but a two metre tall banana — the identical odd couple of B1 and B2 are ripe for affectionate parody.

The Bananas in Pyjamas are part of the stable of children’s TV characters shown by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. A vast range of Banana merchandise, from plush toys to bed sheets, to backpacks, is available under licence for parents and grandparents to buy for their children’s presents. The ABC guards its copyright as jealously as any other corporation, but at the same time ordinary Australian people feel a sense of ownership and participation in the ABC that they don’t feel for other trans-national media organisations. Therefore, patterns from which you can knit your own Banana have been regularly published in popular magazines such as the Australian Women’s Weekly and in various home-craft magazines. Vernacular, home knitted Bananas regularly appear in children’s bedrooms, alongside the officially merchandised Banana clones which are produced in their thousands by factories in China.

You can’t just walk in and buy these lovingly knitted Bananas from toyshops or ABC franchises. You have to be attending a school fete or Saturday morning market, where you will stumble across them lying in anticipation on a lady’s trestle table, newly knitted in fresh wool and nestled amongst the piles of all of her other knitting — baby’s clothes and coat-hanger covers and beanies. Or you have to be browsing through a garage sale or Op Shop, where you might find one, with its wool smudged and fluffed after a lifetime’s use, amongst all of the other bruised and battered toys a child has grown out of, which they are now offering up for hopeful sale.

For several years David Wills has been rescuing Bananas from the lonely isolation of such places and assembling them into a collection. These ‘other’ Bananas aren’t stamped from the same factory template as the official plush toys, rather a different pair of hands has knitted each one from the same pattern. Each knitter has been more or less skillful in her stitching, each has chosen wool at a higher or lower level of virulence in the Bananas’ signature colours of yellow, blue and white, and each has stuffed the Bananas with more or less wadding, distending the stitches to different degrees in different shapes. Most importantly, each has applied in her own unique way those vital details: the stitching of the mouth and eyes and stalk — that last touch that finally animates the previously inert Banana with personality and life.

David Wills has taken each of these alternate Bananas — aberrant offshoots from an ideal root-stock — and made a series of respectful head and shoulder portraits of them. Toys and dolls have long been a favourite subject for photographers. But these images aren’t just microscopic still-lives of toys, or table-top tableaus of dolls and figurines enacting some socially parodic scenario. They are fully constituted portraits. Each Banana squarely faces the camera, and is allowed to present his own stitched-on face and his own acquired personality to the viewer. This is not a rogues gallery of mugshots. Photographed against a red background and framed in gold, the Bananas present an array of faces to be admired, like oil paintings in an ancestral hall, executive portraits in a boardroom, or graduand portraits in a yearbook. Bravely posing for their portraits in front of Wills’ camera, these knitted toys have none of the abjection of Mike Kelley’s hand knitted toys. They are not the pathetic tragic residue of an excess of cloying love, rather the individuality of that love, which is revealed by the careful repetition of Wills’s respectful portraiture, seems to have granted them an uncanny vitality, independence and autonomy.

Looking along the rows of faces the viewer can compare and contrast the ways in which the identical DNA of the original Banana knitting pattern has been nurtured into unique individuality. In general these Bananas, like their original models, exude generous bonhomie, they open their arms out to us and give us a great big goofy smile. Intelligence was never the original Bananas’ strong point. Part of B1 and B2’s charm, apart from the fact that they are only differentiated by the small ‘B1’ and ‘B2’ embroidered on their collars, is that as they are getting themselves into yet another muddle they are the are always the last to realize what their pre-school audience already, delightedly, knows. Most of the faces stitched onto the other knitted Banana have a similar naïve openness. Some even seem to open their pyjama jackets to us, showing us their generous woolly hearts like a cuddly Jesus. But not all of them. Once the core Banana DNA has bolted the stable of industrial replication it can genetically mutate into all kinds of new creatures. Some of the knitted Bananas seem to have changed gender, growing a well-padded maternal bosom between their outstretched arms. Others seemed to have even crossed over to the other side, with the blue stripes of their pyjamas darkening to black, and their wide grins being pinched into a Mephistophelian leer.

What allows these contrasts to take place, of course, is not only the unique love and care with which they were originally knitted, but the rigorous system of portraiture that allows us compare them. Evolution has trained us to interpret faces. We have to read the language of the face, no matter how crudely the eyes and mouth are delineated, just as we have to compare expressions when we see them presented in a clean grid, where the nuances of expressive inflection are amplified by their modulation of a serial pattern. In David Wills’ care these Bananas, who are mustered together after being scattered to the far corners of Australian vernacular culture, are now no longer alone, but re-united with their siblings. This family of ‘B3s’ are found to be just like each other on the one hand, but also utterly strange to each other on the other. And in that they are exactly like us.

Martyn Jolly