Tag Archives: Australian photography

Staging Australia

Essay from: Focus: Australian Government Photographers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martyn Jolly

Wes Stacey Memorial Words

Thank you Gerrit Fokkema and Lisa Moore for giving me the privilege of attempting to sum up Wes Stacey’s contribution to Australian photography for the diverse audience who came to his Memorial at Powerhouse on 30 March. And thank you to the other organisers and participants of the event. This is what I said:

Wes Stacey

Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal of the Eora Nation as traditional custodians of the land upon which we meet.

I’m a photo historian, and my role in this evening’s memorial is to reflect on Wes’s contribution to Australian photography. For this, I’m drawing upon the work of other people who have long recognised Wes’s historical importance. They are Gael Newton, Stephen Zagala, Ziv Cohen and Belinda Hungerford.

Wes’s career was protean, and it is easy to see it as separate bits that at first glance contradict each other. But I think some abiding concerns underly it all.

One of those underlying concerns was a strong sense of history. In the early 60s, when he was working in their graphics department, the ABC did a story on the Holtermann Collection of colonial negatives that had been famously discovered at a suburban house, and Wes found that encounter very stimulating.

Afterwards, he went to London and began to really make a go of it as a photographer, but he decided to return to Australia after just two years. He was, he told his British friends, “returning to his Australian roots”.

A few years after his return he began to produce a remarkable series of coffee table books on colonial architecture with Phillip Cox.  His black and white photographs for these books are tight and architectural, solidly constructed within framing trees out of rectilinear compositional elements set at right angles to each other. For Wes these compositions came from Russell Drysdale, Max Dupain and David Moore, while his interest in colonial architecture itself came from memories of his own childhood houses, and a burgeoning interest in Australian places.

So, place is another underlying idea.

At the same time as Wes was producing these big heavy books on colonial places with Philip Cox, he was also working for the tyro/gonzo publisher Gareth Powell on the men’s magazine Chance and the women’s magazine POL. The magazine work springs from Wes’s hippy hedonism: the dope, the wine, the women. The hyped-up, psychedelic, nude, fashion, and editorial spreads are shot at wide angle, in colour, and on transparency film. In the context of other Australian photography at the time they are truly experimental. That’s why I think that Wes’s failures, such as the bilious cross processing used in the ski fashion shoot for an issue of POL, are so interesting, and should be celebrated,

So that is another abiding interest — transformation.

Experimenting on the front covers of national magazines was something that Wes just did, because he was Wes. As Robert McFarlane wrote in 1968:

‘Physically, Wes Stacey could almost be the epitome of the intense, passionately committed photographer today. Stacey is lean and tall, with a face crowned with a head of the most preposterously curly hair’.

Wes’s sheer presence was the reason he was an integral part of the founding of the Australian Centre for Photography. There is a photograph taken around 1971 by David Moore of Harry Williamson, Peter Keys and Wes at a planning meeting for the ACP. They are all holding beers and looking at a large sheet of butcher’s paper which is headed: “The first extraordinary meeting of the continuous exhibition and archive of photographic art”. But somebody has crossed out and the letter “c” and the word “art”, so it’s not “photographic art” but just “photography”. So much better. Such a crucial point to make. Which one of them did it, I wonder? I bet I know who it was.

This period produced other books, which aren’t as big and posh as the colonial books but are just as important.  For Kings Cross Sydney, his medium format Hasselblad colour, sometimes using the same wide-angle lenses he used for his magazine work, integrate well with Rennie Ellis’s cheeky and sly 35mm Pentax shots. This is by far the best book about The Cross of the period, because it treated it as crucial place within Australia as a whole.

Australia as a whole was an abiding concern for Wes. Travel was his way to find it. He had bought a motor scooter at the age of 16, and his first car at 18, then there was the famous Kombi. With the crucial, collaborative support of his partners Barbara Wilson, Eleanor Williams, and Narelle Perroux he drove back and forth, back and forth across Australia. But, in an era when leaving the city to find something by going ‘Outback’ was a ‘thing’, that is precisely what Wes didn’t do. Rather, like a large-scale performance artist, he traversed Australia equally, almost formally, edge to edge from its cities to its suburbs, its seas to its deserts.

In the early 70s, Wes began to use a 110 Instamatic Camera, and that one-handed Kodak camera synchronised with the one-handed Kombi steering wheel for his most famous exhibition and series of artist books, The Road of 1975, where rhythmic sequences of spontaneous images plucked from behind grimy windscreens or windows half rolled down in the heat were coolly laid out in long, formal strips. By that stage, the ACP which Wes had helped found had opened, and to celebrate they had brought out the power-broking curator from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski, for a kind of ‘Papal tour’. And who did he anoint? He said that Wes’s exhibitions were ‘the most radical thing he had seen’ in Australia.

A few years earlier, when Wes was shooting in Silverton for the architectural book Historic Towns of Australia, he photographed an Aboriginal man outside a ruined building. To be honest, the photographs aren’t all that great, they could easily have been taken by any other Australian photographer of the time.  But, as Gael Newton and Paul Costigan were uploading them to their web site, Wes told them about the experience of photographing that Aboriginal man. He said that he “was nervous, didn’t know if this would be a confrontation … he was friendly, let me take photographs … but [I] didn’t understand what he was saying”. But within just a few years of this typical ‘Aussie’ encounter between white and black, another encounter with another Aboriginal man was to have a profound impact on him.

Wes moved to a bush camp on the far south coast of New South Wales around the mid 1970s. I began these remarks with the standard Acknowledgement of Country everybody does, but Wes really, deeply, truly acknowledged the custodians of the country where he had decided to live. He became a photographic activist within the environmental campaigns to stop the logging of the old growth forests of the area. He collaborated with Guboo Ted Thomas, an elder from the Wallaga Lake community who was charismatic, and something of a self-styled spiritual guru. This led to another extremely important book, Mumbulla-Spiritual-Contact of 1980. Unlike the big, heavy coffee table books, or the mass-produced Kings Cross Sydney, this one was large format, carefully printed, and spiral bound. One startling spread shows Wes’s sense of history, it juxtaposes a shot of monumental anthropomorphic rocks amid dense trees, with a crumpled, creased, and torn snapshot of Aboriginal men on a mission station.

This enduring involvement with a community and its struggle also led to an important exhibition. Wes had always been interested in different ways of exhibiting photographs for their impact, and as part of the political campaign to save Mumbulla Mountain, which was sacred to the Yuin People, from logging, he mounted metre-square prints on hessian screens and displayed them as The Law Comes From The Mountain, at Town Hall Plaza, Sydney, and Capital Hill and Parliament House, Canberra, right where the environmental laws were being made.

Later, in 1982, Wes and Narelle Perroux and Marcia Langton produced a travelling exhibition and book, After the Tent Embassy: Images of Aboriginal History in Black and White Photographs. I think it is impossible to overstate the importance of this project for Australia. It invented in one go a whole new visual grammar for Indigenous debates by juxtaposing horrible, inert, colonial photographs with a variety of marvellous new photographs of Aboriginal life and activism. This brilliant juxtaposition animated the historical photographs with new power and freighted the contemporary photographs with urgent weight.

Wes’s sense of history and place and transformation and travel were all underpinned by his spirituality. As a young man he had prayed every night to a Christian god, later he became interested in Buddhism, Sufism, and Aboriginal spiritualities. As evidenced in the book he made with Eleanor Williams, Timeless Gardens, his spirituality found most direct expression in his landscape photography.

Over the arc of his career, there is a profound philosophical change in the shift from the square format Hasselblad to the panoramic Widelux; from a Eurocentric, rectangular, window-like framing to a sweeping embrace, where the camera lens gathers up the landscape into its arms. But the change is also evident in his printing. He spent the late 1970s down amongst the coastal topography with Guboo Ted Thomas ‘learning to photograph the bush’ — a very humble statement for somebody who had already been successfully photographing it for fifteen years. This also meant, in part, opening up the shadows in his prints. It’s a shock to our sensibilities to see just how heavily Wes printed black and white back in the 1960s. On the pages of those big posh coffee table books all the shadows are thick pools of ink where Australia shrinks from the hard light. But later, in the prints made after his move to the south coast, we sink into its folds and its fronds and join our ‘Koori mates’.

In the portrait Wes has titled “Guboo Aboriginal Elder Defending Mumbulla Mountain from loggers 1979″, Guboo makes a heroic frieze as the patterns of his cable knit jumper, folded raincoat and creased trousers integrate with the foliage in which he is embedded, while drops of dew, in a classic Wes moment, cling to the stems of grass in the foreground, waiting to evaporate with time. Nowadays, paying such respects to ‘elders past, present and emerging’ is commonplace, but it wasn’t so commonplace in 1979. 

Although Australia was the root of Wes’s spirituality, it didn’t confine it. He shot sacred places in Britain, Europe and Japan, and the exhibition he was most proud of was Landscape for Peace in 1994, where his framed panoramas were displayed on easels inside the ancient Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto.

Although these reflections draw on the work of my photo-historical colleagues, I’d like to end with a personal anecdote. In 1975 a sixteen-year-old boy was sitting on the vinyl couch of his parent’s house in Brisbane. He was watching one of his favourite TV shows on channel two, the youth program GTK.  Occasionally this show opened up glimpses of other worlds to him. Suddenly, an old Kombi pulls up on the screen and a hairy hippy jumps out. This didn’t impress the Brisbane boy too much, he already knew about Kombis and hippies. The hairy hippy, who was probably promoting his ACP show The Road through the contacts he had from when he used to work at the ABC, pulled out an instamatic camera and approached the wing mirror of his Kombi. This didn’t impress the Brisbane boy much either, he also had an instamatic camera and had already seen some photographs of car mirrors in the photography books he was beginning to devour. But then the hairy hippy went round to the back of the wing mirror and photographed the distorted reflection in the chrome. And this did impress the Brisbane boy. You could do that?!?

So, when it comes to Wes’s enormous contribution to Australian photography, he didn’t make it the way most of us ‘make a contribution’, he didn’t just get up every morning and ‘clock on to work’ to make his contribution. Instead, he made his contribution by simply and completely being Wes Stacey. He embodied his photography, he lived it. And he was an enthusiastic and generous and loving man, so his living of photography became our living of photography. That was his contribution.

Thank you.

‘Installation View’ in The Conversation

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

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

https://perimetereditions.com/INSTALLATION-VIEW

Salon Pictures, Museum Records, and Album Snapshots: Australian Photography in the Context of the First World War

nla.obj-427900504-1 copy

History of Photography Journal

Volume 43, Issue 1, 2019, pages 60-83

Martyn Jolly & Daniel Palmer

Among the various new modes for making photographs that were explored by Australian photographers in the first decades of the twentieth century, three in particular – Pictorialist images, authentic records, and personal snapshots – had far-reaching implications for the institutions of Australian photography. Pictorialist photographs are now the foundation of many Australian art museum collections; photographic records produced at the time have become iconic in Australian public history, forming the backbone of many social history collections; and personal snapshots from the period are increasingly reproduced in social histories. Historians of Australian photography have discussed and analysed each of these modes1, but they have tended to treat them separately, or even in opposition to each other, and to concentrate on the distinct careers of individual photographers. This article looks at this crucial period, and these key photographic modes, from the point of view of the worldwide networks and systems for the distribution, exhibition, collection, and indexing of photographs. We show how these modes, far from being distinct, overlapped one another as each grappled with the same issues of nation, history, and memory, and as each articulated their nationalistic concerns through international networks and idioms.

Why is an archive when it is lost?

HomeToAustralia.org presents vintage photographs in its busy booth at Sydney Contemporary

Can we ever forgive the hapless Fairfax beancounter who, in 2013, thought he had solved at least one of the troubled news organisation’s many financial problems? Their massive archive of deteriorating photographic negatives and prints was costing a motza to house and maintain, and without a rapid program of digitisation it was going to be hard to monetise it. His answer was to do a deal with an Arkansas sports memorabilia dealer, John Rogers, who said he would buy two million physical items from Fairfax for $300,000 along with the agreement that he would catalogue and scan them. Rogers could sell the physical prints and Fairfax, who always retained copyright, could licence the digital images. In the words of Fairfax executive Garry Linnell, shipping two million negatives and prints overseas would  ‘preserve them for future generations’ of Australians. There were several problems with the deal. As anyone who has done it knows, digitising two million items  is an enormous task, and properly cataloguing them even more so. As it was, Rogers was only ever going to use high speed document scanners, yielding at best low resolution files of little monetary value and little use to our visual heritage. The second problem was that Rogers was a conman.

Shortly after the collection of Australian and New Zealand photographs was shipped off to Little Rock in late 2013, prints which hadn’t even been scanned yet, even at low resolution, were beginning to turn up on eBay. The receiver later estimated that up to a thousand images may have been skimmed off before digitisation even began. Rogers became unresponsive to requests from Australia and then, in early 2014,  the FBI raided him. He was later convicted of fraud, became bankrupt, and a sizeable chunk of Australia’s heritage fell into a legal limbo. In 2015 we in Australia who love photography stared in open mouthed dismay at the ABC’s Glenn Sloggett like images of padlocked warehouse doors beginning to be choked by weeds in the outer suburbs of Little Rock.

Then in 2017 came the news that California’s Duncan Miller Gallery had purchased the entire collection, still estimated to be around two million items.  The new owner of the physical archive, Daniel Miller, reasoned that even though the copyright of images taken after 1955 still resided with either Fairfax or the original photographer, the ’pieces of paper’ could perhaps return him around four dollars each from Australian institutions as a bulk purchase, and considerably more for the ‘name’ photographers who had found their way into the archive, such as Jeff Carter, Max Dupain, Olive Cotton, Wolfgang Sievers and David Moore.

Miller launched a website with the rather Peter Allenesque url of hometoaustralia.org. He sought corporate sponsorship, and came to Australia in 2017 to speak to curators from major collections and go on breakfast TV. In 2018 he had a booth at Sydney Contemporary showing some of the collection in art frames. To aid their repatriation, and the return on his investment, the gallery did a new taxonomic survey of the collection, dividing them into 500 different thematic categories.

So far they estimate that they have sold about 160,000 photographs back to various Australian collections, including the Bradman Museum who have  purchased 24,000 cricket photographs, and Beleura who have purchased 20,000 theatre photographs. Last weekend the Canberra Museum and Gallery announced they had purchased 3,500 Canberra photographs, many from the Canberra Times, at $20,000. A good deal.  They plan to work with the University of Canberra to do the cataloguing that John Rogers promised and didn’t do. They still have to negotiate with the original photographers or Fairfax, which has now been swallowed by the media conglomerate of Nine Entertainment, to reproduce the post 1955 images.

Can we ever forgive that Fairfax executive? No we can’t. But what does this farrago tell us? Firstly that photographs, whether physical or digital are equally vulnerable. Australian photography is full of similar stories at varying degrees of apocrypha — of collodion being cleaned off plates for green house windows, of glass plate negatives being used for road ballast, and so. There are also stories of rescue missions, which is how the Duncan Miller Gallery see their work. For instance in 1929 the bookseller James Tyrell brought 7903 negatives from the Charles Kerry and Henry King studios, which were then sold to Australian Consolidated press in 1980, who donated them to the Powerhouse Museum in 1985. Secondly, it throws into relief the legal separation between the three values that photographs have always had: ownership, display and reproduction. Thirdly it brings to the fore an  increasingly important photographic value — searchability.

Fairfax did eventually got back a set of digital files from Rogers’ receiver in Arkansas. They are probably of low quality anyway, but without even a searchable interface they are next to useless. The physical archive’s current owner, the canny Duncan Miller Gallery, has realised the importance of the interface. While they have certainly capitalised on the short list of proper names of Australian photography in the collection, whose prints can be sold as individual ‘art works’, the gallery also realised they needed a ‘team of archivists’ to generate five hundred new separate categories out of the raw A to Z sequencing of the images. Major Categories, from ‘Aboriginal people’ to ‘Yachting’; Smaller Categories, from ‘Abacus to ‘Witch Doctor’’; and Personalities and People, from ‘Aboriginal people’ to ‘Zoo’. It remains to be seen how useful potential clients in Australia will find these newly generated search terms in approaching the vast opaque repository of images in America. But what is certain is that issues of the archive are only just beginning to come home to us.

Happy Birthday Cyanotype

OK, the big two oh oh is usually the one you pop the champagne and light the fire crackers for but, you’ve got to admit, a one hundred and seventy-fifth birthday isn’t too bad either. It is one hundred and seventy five years ago that Sir John Herschel discovered the process we are celebrating in this exhibition. All you needed was ammonium ferric citrate, potassium ferricyanide, and light. That was it! It was so simple, but oh, look at that blue. Blue, the most sublime the most pure of all the colours — the colour of the sky, the colour of the ocean when it was smiling, maybe the colour of Heaven, certainly, in its lighter version, the colour of the Virgin’s cloak. A colour so pure and airy, but laid down in that chemical reaction with a ferric fist of iron. Herschel’s amazing discovery of what, on 16 August 1842 he called, chemist that he was, the cyanotype (I would have called it the skyograph, but that may not have caught on) endured and endured. In the twentieth century it became the blueprint. Every steel-girded skyscraper, every streamlined jetliner, started out as cyanotyped lines on an engineer’s diagram. The technical blueprint gave three-dimensional form, through physical construction, to our modernist aspirations. But earlier artists had already discovered that through the magic of light modulation the cyanotype also gave three-dimensional form to physical objects that were laid on the sensitive paper out under the sky. When Anna Atkins laid two specimens of dictyota dichotoma, one in its young state the other in fruit, on cyanotype paper for her book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions she was the first of thousands to discover that the seaweed recorded itself in a magically volumetric way — floating in a virtual space of blueness. One hundred and seventy four years later the seaweed is still suspended there as though not a second has ticked past. How do I know it is dictyota dichotoma? Because Anna Atkins wrote a label, using all of her knowledge of biology, and placed that on the sensitive paper as well. Herschel’s implacable reaction photogrammed Atkins’ Linnaean knowledge and the seaweed’s objective existence together into the same stuff of knowing.

So cut the cake. In a hundred and seventy five years’ time people will still be knowing the world by making cyanotypes. Of that I have no doubt.

My words for ‘Out of the Blue’, curated by Ursula Frederick and Kerry Martin, opening tonight  at Photospace in the ANU School of Art & Design. Featuring work from 1981 by Mazie Karen Turner, Bronwyn Rennex, and others