Tag Archives: Curating photography

Networking the Tradition: Curating Photography in Australia

Photofile

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

(with Daniel Palmer)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Palmer & Martyn Jolly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should art museums think of themselves as ‘collections’ or ‘archives’?

Lecture at Art Gallery of New South Wales, in association with the exhibition The Photograph and Australia, 29 March 2015

(The research for this lecture was done in association with Dr Daniel Palmer as part of our ARC Discovery Project Photography Curating in the Age of Photosharing)

the powerpoint is below

INTRODUCTION

When the Art Gallery of New South Wales asked me to write an essay on nineteenth century photograph albums for the catalogue to the exhibition The Photograph and Australia they emailed me some jpegs of the albums they would be exhibiting. One jpeg was from an album in the State Library of Queensland that had been compiled by the Lethbridge family of pastoralists. It showed a charming fresh faced girl and I could see immediately why the curator, Judy Annear, had been attracted to it. The photograph’s informality, and the girl’s easy manner was quite anachronous in the context of the other photographs of the period, which I guess was around the early 1870s. A member of the Lethbridge family member had evidently come along later and written in pencil on the album page: ‘Effie Dalrymple, sister of Florence Lethbridge (nee McLean)’. Of course I did what every highly skilled and highly trained photographic researcher with thirty years experience in the field does with such precious metadata, I typed it into Google and hit return. In 0.49 seconds the results came back, I clicked on ‘images’, and in another fraction of a second I was looking at Effie again, this time in 1900. In less than a second she had aged thirty years and all of the fresh bloom of youth had drained from her face which was now pinched and tightly pulled back by her hair. The second photograph Google found for me also came from the State Library of Queensland, but it came via a circuitous root, my first hit was to a computer-student’s blog. He had used the SLQ’s on line image database for a class exercise in data management. It is only through his blog that I got to the SLQ digital record. A few more searches took me to some genealogical sites, and the site of the Mackay Historical Society, and within minutes and I knew what had happened to the lovely girl in the photograph: in 1880 she had married the Mayor of Mackay who went on to become a widely disliked right wing politician in Queensland, and had had four children by him.

My little story exemplifies two things photography does best. First it deals with aging and mortality. Photography can show us with a shock how bodies and faces age and die. By freezing time it makes the passing of time more tragic, especially when you spend that time married to a right wing Queensland politician. The second thing my story shows is that photography is a networked medium. Photographs by themselves don’t mean as much as photographs in relation to other photographs. And photographs are slippery things, they do not want to stay in one format, as objects secured in albums for instance, they want to be copied and duplicated. With the digital revolution photographs are now everywhere, they are digitized into ‘digital assets’ and available in Digital Asset Management Systems, along with other digital assets such as sound files or text files, which are accessible through various Content Management Systems. Individual end users like you and me and the student blogger though which I found Effie again are connecting and threading those databases together as we blog and tweet photographs.

At the preview to The Photograph and Australia the director of the AGNSW Dr Michael Brand proudly announced that the Art Gallery of New South Wales photography collection now numbered 5000 objects. My first thought was: ‘what, only 5000? Is that anywhere near enough? I’ve got more than that on my iPhone in my pocket, and some of them aren’t too bad either.’ Of course what was implied in Dr Brand’s boast was that these were carefully selected photographs, it was a curated collection, assembled by a succession of experts who had developed collection plans, strategic directions, and curatorial policies, which interlinked with the plans, directions and policies of the Art Gallery as a whole. These strategies are even outlined in the 2007 book Guide to the Photography Collection.

 

ART GALLERY COLLECTION

There are several things to say about the AGNSW’s collection, as well as the photography collections in other art galleries. This is a collection of photographs as art, and that therefore means it is a collection of photographs as art objects. Since the beginnings of art photography the photo object, as opposed to the photo-image, has been primary. We only need to go back the Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery in 1906 to see the paradigmatic display of photo-objects, each isolated in its elegant amplitude of olive and grey, burlap and hessian. It was clearly to this heightened aesthetic attention to the photograph as object that Harold Cazneaux aspired three years later in his 1909 one man show, although his hang still has the feeling of a cluttered Edwardian parlour, rather than an elegant New York Gallery. Nonetheless the foundation curator of the AGNSW collection, Gael newton chose Harold Cazneux and his Pictorialist friends in the Sydney Camera Circle to be the firm foundation stones of the collection because, in her words Pictorialism was ‘a conscious art movement, aimed at using the camera more creatively.’

The main artefact of this approach to curating is the print. And amongst prints the most highly valued are vintage prints, those made by the photographer close to the date the image was taken. The idea of the vintage print, which still rules the market, contains all of the fetishizations of art objects: a single point of origin in time, a singular artistic vision, and the artist’s crafting hand. Even when there is no artist, the power of the vintage print still remains. For instance on online photo dealer recently offered for sale a set of press prints which had been released to the press by NASA in 1966. The images were made robotically by the Lunar Orbiter 1 as it circled the moon, and radioed data back to earth to be read out in strips onto 35 mm film like a fax achine. The site offers them as ‘vintage silver prints’ in very good condition, not mounted. Their slight yellowing adds to their aura as precious relics from the space age, and these press prints would be worth less, I think if they were still crisp and white.

Around this idea of the vintage print other scopic machineries are built. One is the passé partout (pas par too) mat board, which the Pictorialists loved, which isolates the single image from visual contamination. Another piece of museal engineering is the solandar box where the few lucky prints selected to be collected will be preserved until the end of time. When I was a young curator I was frequently reminded that the initial cost of buying a print was minimal, it was the ongoing cost as that print had to be accessioned, catalogued, tracked, conserved and stored in controlled conditions for ever and ever which was the real cost.

If the matt board and the solandar box are the museal engineering for art photography, the curators are the engineers. Here we see Ralph Eugene, Alfred Stieglitz, Heinrich Kuhn and Edward Steichen gazing intently at a print, I like to imagine that Kuhn is looking so surprised because the print is beginning to smoke under the intensity of their gazes, like we used to burn paper with our magnifying glasses when we were children. After his Pictorialist phase Steichen became a visual engineer of propaganda shows, and he was photographed in action with the Family of Man, building visual architectures out of prints.

This concern with the photograph as object is of course a natural fit for an art gallery. When most art gallery collections were being founded in the 1970s it fitted in with the collection logic all of their other objects — prints, paintings, sculptures, decorative art and so on which had previously been collected in the season before. Only since the 1990s, with the growth in video art, computer art and multimedia art has another potentially ‘virtual’ or non-object based collecting category entered the art gallery. But the idea of a curated collection of photographs is still a natural fit to an art gallery. The collection to which Dr Brand referred, then, is very different to an archive. While an archive is potentially infinitely expandable and is only restricted by contingencies such as storage space, the collection is deliberately shaped. Representative selections are handpicked from representative photographers, so that the collection itself in its very structure forms a picture of photography, or as the curators would hasten to add I’m sure, one picture amongst many other possible pictures.

Curators are continually rewriting their policies in order to re-draw the picture they want to make of the photograph and Australia. For instance Gael Newton began the AGNSW collection in the 1970s with an emphasis on Pictorialism, while before she retired from the National Gallery of Australia last year she shifted the collecting emphasis of that collection to the Asia and the Pacific, in order to re-draw the picture it was making of photography relevant to Australians in the twenty-first century. While there can never be too many images in an archive, here can be too much in a curated collection which needs to be restricted in number so it can be shaped. Notions of quality come into play.

LIBRARY ARCHIVE

In a curated collection an image of ‘poor quality’, from a set of say twenty prints brought from a photographer, will reduce the effectiveness of the entire set; however in an archive where there might be hundreds or thousands of photographs, so one more or less good or bad image doesn’t matter. For instance while the National Library of Australia has catalogued 10,987 Wolfgang Sievers photographs and put them on line. The AGNSW has just 22. The 22 the AGNSW owns are a fine selection, covering his career from his early days in Germany to his later big scale corporate work, as well as some early colour. The selection of 22 tells us what has been accepted by scholars as Sievers’ main story as a creative artist, the relationship between the noble worker and his industrial tools. The NLA on the other hand acquired the lot when Sievers died a few years ago, and has almost completed the mammoth task of putting them online, with only a couple of thousand to go. It would take a lot of work to get the shape of Sievers as a creative photographer from the NLA’s vast archive, but it is a resource within which we can find evidence Australian industry, architecture and advertising.

THE AUSTRALIA HISTORY OF THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN COLLECTION AND ARCHIVE

So that might seem to be one distinction between gallery and library, collection and archive — one tells us about the creative individual, the other is a resource through which their photographs can tell us about our society and history. This distinction has been characterized by other scholars as that between ‘canon’ and ‘archive’. Another distinction might be between curation and retrieval: in a gallery collection photographs have already been selected to tell a story, and other experts will, from time to time, sequence them into exhibitions; in the archive meanings await retrieval through user searches.

But this distinction between canonical collection and archive and is not clear-cut, and in fact they have been institutionally entangled for the last 100 years. For instance, at the end of the First World War, perhaps in the throes of the same nationalistic fervour we are feeling one hundred years later, the amateur photographic magazine the Australasian Photo Review called for a ‘national collection of Australian photographic records’. The Mitchell Library was one of several institutions who responded positively to this idea, even suggesting a list of twelve different categories of photographs which amateurs could take for a future repository. The photographs included:

  1. The topography of districts, such as panoramic views, extended landscapes etc., showing general features of districts
  2. Street views and principal thoroughfares, artistic by-ways, etc., not only cities and town, but even of small country centres.
  3. Celebrations, pageants, festivities, great functions, etc, no matter whether they are political, civic, social or religious
  4. Celebrities and even oddities (including public men, politicians, authors, artists, actors, leaders of industry, agitators and reformers, town characters, etc.)
  5. Trade and industry, commerce and transport, depicting the various operations connected therewith
  6. Public buildings, statues, monuments, churches — old and new, architectural curiosities and follies, etc.
  7. Public parks and gardens and memorial avenues.
  8. Prize stock, famous horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, etc.
  9. Sport and pastimes, such as racehorses and their jockeys, racing yachts and their crews, famous cricketers and footballers, sculliers, etc.
  10. Nature studies, such as growing trees and flowering plants in situ, birds nests in natural position, animals at play, etc.
  11. Aboriginals, showing their physical features, corroborees, habits and customs, sports and pastimes
  12. Any other phase of life, scientific photographs, collections of views illustrative of tours in Australasia and the Pacific

It is interesting that The Photograph and Australia conforms almost perfectly to this hundred year old template.

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

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

The National Gallery of Victoria became the first state gallery to collect photography. The first work to enter the collection – David Moore’s documentary photograph Surry Hills Street (1948) – was acquired through a grant from Kodak. In the same year the NGV imported The Photographer’s Eye, a touring exhibition from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which had been the first art museum to establish a Department of Photography in 1940. The exhibition was curated by MoMA’s John Szarkowski, undoubtedly the most influential photography curator of the second half of the twentieth century, and a curator in the lineage of Stieglitz and Steichen. The Photographer’s Eye was a statement of his formalist position on photographic aesthetics. Its title was adapted for a local version, The Perceptive Eye (1969–1970).

By 1973 the yet-to-be-opened National Gallery of Australia had purchased its first photograph, an artistic confection by Mark Strizic (Jolimont Railway Yards, 1970) that looked more like a print than a photograph. Two years later the AGNSW was laying the foundation for its collection with the acquisition, exhibition and book on the early twentieth century photographs of Harold Cazneaux, collected by them as fine-art Pictorialist prints, rather than as the sharp bromide enlargements that had been published by Contemporary Photography in 1948. However at the same time the National Library of Australia was also collecting Cazneux prints in accordance with its policies to collect exemplars of the medium, and documents of history. In the end the AGNSW ended up with 203 carefully selected Cazneaux’s, while the NLA ended up with 1414.

It was only after this period, in the late 1970s, that the dual nature of the photograph as both a carrier of historical and social information, and an aesthetic art object and exemplar of an individual’s creativity, which had co-existed over the previous decades, was finally separated between libraries and galleries. Both galleries and libraries found themselves embedded in the newly constructed infrastructure of the Whitlam era: the newly established Australia Council, rapidly expanding tertiary courses in photography, new magazines and commercial galleries, and the establishment of the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 1974.

In this historical context the photographer as creative artist, and the photograph as art object gained brief cultural ascendancy. The longed-for acknowledgement from overseas materialised in the form of John Szarkowski himself, who was invited on a ‘papal’ tour by the ACP in 1974. Szarkowski gave six public lectures titled “Towards a Photographic Tradition’ .The purpose of the national tour, as Howe put it at the time, “was to liberate photography from the world of technique and commerce and to suggest that it could also be of absorbing artistic and intellectual interest.”

Photography was considered to be a medium with its own intrinsic characteristics”. At the AGNSW Gael Newton deployed a clear art historical teleology, she built on the Pictorialist foundation with a monograph on Max Dupain in 1980, seen as the modernist successor to the Pictorialists. However, galleries also engaged with the contemporary art photography of the graduates from the new art schools, as well as emerging postmodern ideas. For instance the title of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ 1981 exhibition Reconstructed Vision defined this new style of work against, but within the overall trajectory of, the newly established historical traditions.

While the gallery use art historical strategies to embed photography within their structures was certainly in the cultural ascendancy at this time, nonetheless libraries were also confirming their commitment to photography, but as a non aesthetic-object based, content-driven, curatorial strategy. The contemporary cultural relevance of the subjectivist photo boom of the seventies, combined with Modernist and Postmodernist teleologies, drove the aesthetic strategies of galleries, but the nationalistic socially cohesive agendas of events like the 1988 Bicentenary drove the content-based strategies of library photo collecting. At the same time as curators in galleries were building such art historical teleologies, library curators like Alan Davies at the State Library of New South Wales were taking a more encyclopedic approach producing comprehensive surveys such as 1986’s The Mechanical Eye in Australia. At the same time as gallery curators were seeing ‘creative’ photography finally getting the recognition it deserved from a reluctant art establishment still fixated on painters like Brett Whitley, vision of vast searchable databases began to open up for librarians. In a forerunner to today’s participatory online photographic projects, in 1983 Euan McGillivray and Matthew Nickson proposed a snapshot collecting project, Australia as Australians Saw It, which would copy photographs in the possession of individuals, then index them and make them accessible through the latest technology, which at that time was microfiche. Their idea never got off the ground. But, two years after the publication of The Mechanical Eye in Australia, during the bicentenary, Alan Davies, curator at the State Library of New South Wales, travelled to twenty-three country towns and copied about seven thousand vernacular photographs from 576 individuals. Under the title At Work and Play, they were made accessible by a videodisc keyword search (a forerunner to today’s digital database and tagging methodology).

CRIMP

The contest between the logic of the gallery and the library in the 1970s and 1980s was a global phenomenon, and part of poststructuralist, Marxist theoretical discourse. This situation was dramatized in the US by the critic Douglas Crimp in 1979 who saw the institutional aesthetization of photography as a contraction of its power as a medium. In The Museum’s Old, the Library’s New Subject he wrote:

Photography will hereafter be found in departments of photography or divisions of art and photography. Thus ghettoized, it will no longer primarily be useful within other discursive practices; it will no longer serve the purposes of information, documentation, evidence, illustration, reportage. The formerly plural field of photography will henceforth be reduced to the single, all-encompassing aesthetic. Just as, when paintings and sculptures were wrested from the churches and palaces of Europe and consigned to museums in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries, they acquired a newfound autonomy, relieved of their earlier functions, so now photography acquires its autonomy as it too enters the museum. But we must recognize that in order for this new aesthetic understanding to occur, other ways of understanding photography must be dismantled and destroyed. Books about Egypt will literally be torn apart so that photographs by Francis Frith may be framed and placed on the walls of museums. Once there, photographs will never look the same. Whereas we may formerly have looked at Cartier-Bresson’s photographs for the information they conveyed about the revolution in China or the Civil War in Spain, we will now look at them for what they tell us about the artist’s style of expression.

THE CURRENT DISTINCTION BETWEEN COLLECTION AND ARCHIVE

Fast forward to the present in Australia. Over the intervening 40 years, since the establishment of various departments and the ACP, the boundaries of photography have expanded. However, galleries have largely kept to the historical trajectories inaugurated in the 1970s. In the 1980s, photographic reproductive processes became central to postmodern art, which had the flow-on effect of boosting photography’s place in the art museum. But postmodernism did not fundamentally alter the increasing focus of departments of photography on artefacts of ‘art photography’.

Into the 1990s and 2000s, and until perhaps the AGNSW’s The Photograph and Australia show, departments of photography essentially continued a monographic and consolidation phase, aided by the international prominence of large-scale colour photography as art, such as the Düsseldorf School. Simultaneously, we have witnessed the digital revolution, which has produced a whole new generation of photographers using online photosharing services like Flickr and Instagram, whose effects until now have been felt much more widely felt outside the gallery. In response to the digital revolution libraries and social history museums have invested institutional effort into digitizing their image collections and making them available online. They have brought software from international companies that give them sophisticated Digital Asset Management Systems for organizing images and other data in the same digital space, and they have brought Content Management Systems for delivering that information to users in different ways. In the digital space of social history museums and libraries the logic of ‘asset management’ and ‘content delivery’ is merging. For instance the popular Emu Digital Asset Management System advertises a ‘narrative’ module which automatically connects together diverse digitized objects within the catalogue itself, but across normal taxonomic categories, for instantaneous publishing on line, or to be available for public searches. This is in contrast to traditional gallery spaces where storerooms, catalogues, and exhibition spaces are maintained as separate entities. Likewise the Android labels on objects in museums are multimedia rich, and can be updated instantaneously from a curator’s desktop through the institution’s Content Management System. This is in contrast to the art gallery’s commitment to the status as an object to be experienced in the flesh, hung in static exhibition installations.

The Melbourne scholar Scott McQuire has compared the ‘vault’ approach to what he calls an ‘operational archive’, in the vault approach the collection is kept in a specific space, from which its objects are occasional produced; the ‘operational archive’ on the other hand is continually active as data is transferred in and out. In this distinction there is a shift from cataloguing, where a discrete process of description and accessioning adds static information such as title, date, subject, to active ‘tagging’ where users continue to add tags to the image. This shift might also be between a curated exhibition, where a set of pictures is chosen and sequenced, to an active search, where an archive is sampled using a keyword. A further distinction might be between a spatialized ‘display’ of photographs, and a temporalized ‘stream’ of photographs in, say, an Instagram feed.

FUTURES

If the primary aim of photography curating in the 1970s was to establish photography as art, this has clearly been achieved. Photography is ubiquitous within contemporary art, but ironically now not as an autonomous tradition – rather as a mode integrated within wider practices. But if the now forty-year old institutional structures are still largely with us, if museums continue to have departments, curators and galleries of photography, this is still largely for the autonomous and separate history of photography, for the knowledge of specific collections and conservation techniques, rather than for its networked ubiquity with our art and culture. So even if photography is now safely and deeply embedded in the art museum, its precise role is still up for grabs.

Clearly, museum departments can no longer work in isolation. However, what the mere integration of photography into the newly contemporary art museum all too easily elides is that photography’s place there has always been unstable, its ambiguous status as object and information continually threatening the grounds of the art museum’s hierarchies and collection policies.

We have seen this in Australia in relation to the location of photography between the library and the art museum, in terms of a split between information and aesthetics, a documentary database versus an aesthetic object. Photography’s recent insertion into digital networks reveals these tensions yet again, but with even more complexity. Within the modernist logic which originally auspiced photography in the art gallery, the networked digital image, circulating as reproducible information, is guaranteed to be excluded. If gallery photography departments continue to adhere to the logic which gave birth to them the potential for different kinds of photography in the art gallery could go largely unnoticed. But there may be the potential for art galleries to judiciously incorporate some aspects of the archival image mode, retain their integrity, and enhance their relevance to contemporary culture.

In identifying the future potential of photography in the art gallery, perhaps we can learn from artists. For instance The Photograph and Australia has deliberately placed Patrick Pound’s computer programming work, which is about the continual digital slippage of photographs, next to a bank of cartes de visite and postcards. Furthermore, if curators are engaged in creating innovative contexts for public engagement, networked photography opens up new possibilities for this to happen. I am not arguing that the art gallery ought to emulate the hyper-linked experience of the internet, or the swipe-based logic of mobile media. However, I am proposing that authoritarian presentations of a connoisseurial canon need to become part of a larger project: exploring photography’s protean nature as a medium and its potential to complicate spectatorship and activate audiences in new ways.

HISTORY IN PICS

It is clear that the cat is already out of the bag, and that previously separate spaces and categories have already collapsed for art galleries as they have for libraries and museum. For instance something that drive curators in both galleries and libraries absolutely crazy is twitter feeds such as @historyinpics, which is run by two teenagers, a 17 year old from Victoria and a 19 year old from Hawaii. The experts say that this Twitter stream is a genuine phenomenon. Last year it had twice as many followers as the Library of Congress, and reportedly earned the teenagers $50,000 a month, last week it had 2.38 million followers, of which, apparently, only 5% are bots. Every day a new photo which has been scraped from an online archive is tweeted, and though there is preponderance of Hollywood movie stars the feed is addictive, and it is now how many people understand historic photographs. But these photographs are entirely cast adrift, without authors or attribution or location. The site infringes copyright, frequently posts fake photographs, and rarely credits the photographer. It may be history candy, but it give its followers no sense of history.

GOOGLE INSTITUTE

The Google institute is a way that institutions can wrest back this powerful internet space from the ignorant teenagers who currently rule it. It allow them to put parts of their collections online, and it allows users to ‘curate’ their own sequences. For instance the AGNSW’s ‘Posts from the Past’ is an online slide show of 22 cartes de visite from the exhibition The Photograph and Australia with some captioning, and some ability for the user to re-arrange and compare the photographs. However this is essentially still a very short slide show, a short extract from a larger installation, and it still has the sense of a finite experience served up to the user

HISTORY PIN

Similarly HistoryPin is used by institutions to pin images from their collections onto Google maps.

COLLECTION FISHING

The hashtag #collectionfishing is also used by archivists to try to get their collections out to the public.

AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL

Some more interesting examples of how curators in social history museums are using the opportunities afforded by Digital Asset Management Systems and Content Management Systems can be found in the new World War One Galleries of the Australian War Memorial. The gallleries cost over thirty million dollars to prepare, but from my point of view the results are problematic. The spaces are congested with technology, and the visitor’s head is filled with audio soundtracks featuring ‘war’ sound effects and children singing plaintive songs. Any personal affective response which the viewer may have to the auratic power of the artefactual material is pre-empted and crowded out by the emotional manipulation of the galleries themselves which think and feel for us — and think and feel a very restrictive, jingoistic version of the ANZAC myth as formative to our national identity. Nonetheless there are some interesting aspects to the installation which indicate future directions for development. One aspect is to do with quantity, the other is to do with scale.

A large quantity of photographs are included in The Life at Anzac display which was developed to showcase the Memorial’s collection of amateur photographs taken by the soldiers at Gallipoli, and to introduce visitors to the realities of soldier life at Gallipoli – beyond the narrative of the landing and battles at Lone Pine and the Nek which are frequently reproduced in the media. The Memorial’s curators wanted to minimise the curatorial voice and draw directly from the records of soldiers to interpret their experience at Gallipoli. The 372 photographs selected for use in the display were uploaded to the Collection Management System. Twenty-two tags were developed based on what the photographs and diaries illustrate – what the soldiers have chosen to capture and tell us about their experiences. For example: living amongst the dead, lost friends, dugouts, behind the lines, weather — storm, heat, snow — faces, general views, medical, religion. From this set of twenty-two, one to three tags were assigned to each photograph, so that multiple subjects could be explored in each photograph. The Memorial curators told me that they didn’t have to force any of the tags onto the images, most images ‘spoke’ to them pretty clearly, they said.  Each column in the display relates to a tag, some tags cover multiple columns because of the quantity of images. 153 quotes from soldier diaries were also entered on to the CMS and assigned tags. These appear at random when a visitor pulls up a photograph. The Memorial has the ability to change the display remotely through the CMS, adding new content (images, tags & quotes), theming the selection to a particular event or visit, or changing the selection entirely. The photographs selected represent a very small proportion of what the Memorial holds and it hopes to include more as resources/allow. The users interaction is subtle which was important given the limitations of the physical space. The ‘falling rain’ or cascade appearance was chosen to give the impression of an infinite collection and introduce some movement and graphic energy.

The other aspect is scale, this is seen in a slide show produced from a high-resolution scans of the glass plate negatives made by Frank Hurley and Hubert Wilkins, these are projected from a bank of 49 separate data projectors, so the projection is not pixelated and is at the level of the film grain. However unfortunately the visual power of this technology is compromised by its positioning.

While not suggesting that art galleries do anything like these kind of social history displays, which are very ideologically directed in their affective power, perhaps there may be some clues for art museum to develop new ways to approach contemporary photographic practice.

Interestingly, although the Australian War Memorial World War One galleries rely so much on digital images, they still need to evoke the artefactual, auratic quality of snapshots, however these need to be simulated in inkjet prints.

LEE GRANT

The digital revolution is affecting the practice of art photographers. Many artists do not work in a single visual space any more, producing prints for books or exhibition, say. They work across platforms. For instance the photographer Lee Grant carefully edited 65 photographs into the book Belco Pride, about the Canberra suburb of Belconnen. But she has 200 photographs of Belconnen that she considers to be part of the set. Many other photographers work in this way, so there could be a curated selection of say 65 photographs, or there could be various iterations of the archive produced by users.

Many other photographers produce a continual stream of Instagram posts, which are as integral to their practice as their officially published work.

Other artists return to particular topics or subjects over an extended period of time revisiting them and changing them.

CONCLUSION

This implies that there could be the potential for curators to not only purchase a selection of prints from a photographer, but to ‘contract’ with a photographer to maintain an interface to their ‘operational archive’ to use Scott McQuire’s term, as it grows and mutates. There could be the potential to not replace the power and the beauty of the unique object, but to augment it with other ways of creatively experiencing the photograph as a networked image, as well as a crafted print.

Martyn Jolly

Should art museums think of themselves as ‘collections’ or ‘archives’?

Should art museums think of themselves as ‘collections’ or ‘archives’?
Martyn Jolly
Photography has always been a numbers game, and the bigger the number the better. In the context where words like ‘exponential’ or ‘ballooning’ barely begin to describe the current state of the medium, is the notion of a photographic ‘collection’ relevant any more?

I’m talking along with Robyn Stacey

Art Gallery of New South wales, this Sunday 10.30am.

Edward Steichen at work in the Family of Man

Edward Steichen at work on the Family of Man

Looking at The Photograph and Australia exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

This important show rejects conventional narratives and thematics, as well as standard modes of looking at photography as they have developed in art museums recently. Instead of leaning back and taking it all in, we have to bend down and peer closely. The viewer is given no quarter, and the installation brooks no lapses of attention. Visitors must work hard and long to divine their own meaning from either sepia smudges in tiny cartes de visite, or the fugitive sheen of daguerreotypes. There is little help from the labels which for the most part eschew the conventional narrativising comforts of extended captions (Yes, I know, we are meant to buy the book) and provide only the bare museal bones on which the viewer is required to build their own understanding.

Because the show is committed overwhelmingly to the auratic power of the photograph-object, and many of its objects have faded and were in any case initially scaled to domestic or bureaucratic situations rather than museum consumption, it is up to the dramaturgy of the hang to carry the show for visitors. Its emotional pitch is set by the doleful procession of aborigines who accompany us through the galleries to its very end with Kerry’s kitschly racist postcards. In contrast the panoramas of Vaniman, which are also threaded through the show, ironically play against them like a cheerfully optimistic chorus.

The architectural engine room of the show is the installation in the central void. Here the audacious curatorial strategy of using certain contemporary works to dramatically set off the historical works is most dramatically played out. In this space we can’t really look at the Moffats and the Maynards hanging above us, they are too high. As we bend ourselves to work over the vitrines, they look down at us like the crazy ancestral portraits in a haunted mansion (thanks Anne). This same reflective strategy works very well with the Ferrans in the Beattie room, where they spookily re-set the tone of the whole space. But the Laing work in the twentieth century critique section is not good enough to activate its space. The magnificent Ford installation has lot of work to do as it sits across from the astronomical photographs — two constellations of time, I guess — but this curatorial stroke also works. The vintage backlit X-rays placed between them — including the old skeletal hand with a wedding ring memento mori — are a treat, and maybe even make the Gills redundant?

There are many other spine tingles to reward our labour; while some icons, such as say Cazneaux’s Spirit of Endurance, are deftly detourned with some new surprising Cazneaux images. But sometime other image clusters, such as say the one with the two Poignants and the Bishop aren’t given quite enough curatorial spin, and perhaps allow us to lose the concentration which the show makes essential.

The show is committed to quantity, which it sees as the essence of the medium, thus we are not given the usual serving of one Goodman Daguerreotype, but the whole extended family of them. The auratic power of the patinated print is the show’s obsession, but it is wonderful to see the X-rays and a real, live, Holterman negative. I wish there had been other occasional ‘break out’ spaces to allow us to exercise other scopic regimes than just the ‘intense peer’. Some printed pages to touch, or some stereo viewers to look through, maybe?

Because of the show’s persistent close-up intensity, the sudden transition at the end to the projection of Pound’s computer installation, which certainly has the wit and elan we would expect, is too sudden. Although, flanking a programming work based on Google with a cascade of carte’s and a line of postcards makes its point! (For me Pound’s real punchline actually came in the gift shop, have a look)

There I was, going through the final bank of cartes, peering at what felt like was my gazillionth albumen surface. What was it? It was barely discernable even as an image. The label wasn’t much help, it just said J Davis, Sydney, 1860s to 1890s. So this pale smudge could have been taken any time during a thirty-year period. I think, but I’m still not sure, that it was somebody’s prize fruit tree, which they were obviously so proud of they made a carte of it. It had almost disappeared but there it was still, in the AGNSW, demanding to be seen.

The Photograph and Australia, AGNSW

The Photograph and Australia, AGNSW

The Photograph and Australia, AGNSW

The Photograph and Australia, AGNSW

 

Photographies: New Histories, New Practices

Foreword for unpublished book based on PHOTOGRAPHIES: NEW HISTORIES, NEW PRACTICES conference at ANU

As a discipline, the history of photography has undergone significant transformation in the past few decades. It has long since overflowed the channels of traditional art history which it first followed. and has now become concerned with more than establishing the canonic artists of the medium, or tracing the teleologies and genealogies of its visual styles or artistic genres. Scholars in disciplines as diverse as anthropology, history and cultural studies have found many uses for photographs and much to explore. Since the early 1980s these developments have been chronicled in such signal articles as Douglas Crimp’s ‘The Museum’s Old / The Library’s New Subject’.[1] It could be argued that the particular ubiquity of photographs has driven the whole ‘pictorial turn’ in philosophy where, as W. J. T. Mitchell describes it, ‘pictures form a point of peculiar friction and discomfort across a broad range of intellectual enquiry … emerging as a central topic of discussion in the human sciences in the way that language [once] did …’.[2]

This broad pictorial turn in the humanities has been complemented by a cultural and social turn in the history of photography itself. The histories which are now most commonly referred to by photography students, such as Mary Warner Marien’s Photography: A Cultural History or Michel Frizot’s A New History of Photography, tend to follow the innovative model established by books such as Giséle Freund’s Photography and Society, with its separate sections each tackling a different aspect of the medium, rather than once classic texts such as Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography, with it cumulative teleology of styles and techniques.[3] Current photographic histories approach the problem of photography from a variety of different directions, and discuss the medium by taking different slices through it, or core sample from it, rather than telling it as a unified story. Chapter headings in generalist histories of photography are now more likely to be conjunctive phrases such as ‘Photography and War’, Photography and Science’, or ‘Photography and the Body’, rather than the bald labels of particular genres or periods within photography. Another new approach to photographic history, exemplified by Singular Images: Essays on Remarkable Photographs, is to focus down to a small selection of key images as the starting points for broader investigations into the various ideas that every photograph mobilises.[4]

Anthologies such as Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson’s Photography’s Other Histories have gone even further towards breaking apart the pre-given mold in which photographic history has been cast.[5] In books such as these, photography is a powerful cultural practice performed differently by different cultures, at different times, and in different private or public contexts. It produces meanings which are far from being self-evident or universal, but which can nonetheless empower cross-cultural dialogue. Other anthropologically orientated anthologies, such as Elizabeth Edwards’s Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality if Images, have focussed not on photography as an ever-widening pool of images, but the photograph itself as a discrete anthropological artefact.[6] This shift of critical focus away from interpreting the visual content of images towards understanding the social exchange of images as objects, is characteristic of recent photographic scholarship.

Perhaps this shift has been accelerated by the fact that photography has finally ceded to new media its position as the ultimate medium of theoretical contemporaneity. Several decades ago the photograph, with it ubiquitous presence throughout culture and society, was the very sign of contemporary experience within cultural theory. Now the explosion of new media has eclipsed it. But even within new media the single photograph survives, pretty much in tact, as an absolutely crucial and fundamental component of the accelerated trajectories of mobile and on-line technologies. Today photographs are taken in their billions to be emailed or uploaded, but in the nineteenth century they were also taken in their hundreds of thousands to be circulated amongst individuals. The discourses generated by new media therefore continue to owe much to the history and theory of photography, while the study of photography itself continues its close attention to the continuing reality of photographs in our lives.

None of the disciplines that have recently turned to photographs for new sources of meaning have been able to use them as simple, unproblematic evidence for historical research or cultural discourse. Photographs are, and remain, not just slippery semiotically, but also ambiguous ontologically; so their simultaneous status as historical documents, physical objects and time events continues to be explored and re-explored by a widening range of theorists, philosophers and writers. Even literary writers are undergoing a photographic turn. Photographs have become literary objects, as much as artistic objects, found in novels as well as in art galleries. The photograph has long been used as a figurative metaphor or a plot device for novelists exploring the memories or desires of their characters, but now actual photographs are being used, not as extraneous ‘illustrations’, but as textual operators. W. G. Sebald is the most famous of a range of writers who have recently used the deadpan allusiveness of the photograph as an integral, if not entirely comfortable, component of their texts, to be read by the reader in the same poetical mode as the words in which they are embedded. Sebald’s literary photography is now even beginning to have an impact back onto art photographers.[7]

Photographs have therefore been the grist to many mills. They have given rise to an extraordinarily rich and varied quantity of research, writing and speculation — from historical research to imaginative creative writing — in an extraordinarily diverse range of theoretical contexts. Photographs are convenient because there is no shortage of them and they are all around us all the time. Nothing is simpler than plucking some out and turning them to work. But often in this work the photograph itself is considered with only enough attention to make a larger point, before any further investigation of it is dropped. The specificity of the individual photograph itself, along with all of its attendant uses and re-uses over time, its transformations and modifications as both physical object and mobile image, are often left far behind. The meanings of particular photographs have formed a key currency of critical thought in disciplines such as history, cultural studies, anthropology, and so on. But once those meanings get caught up in the theoretical streams within whatever discipline they are serving, they sometimes seem to flow over and around the actual photographs themselves, forming larger currents that, through their own dynamic turbulence, obscure the original objects beneath.

Lately, however, a wider and wider range of scholars are turning back to the photograph itself, as both a semiotic event and a material artefact. They work from the photograph up, rather than the theory down. They do this not to re-invent some kind of connoisseurship of the artefact, or to reduce the image to a static collection of facts, but to assert that much remains to be learnt by returning as often as possible to the source of photographic meaning, which is not just particular photographers, nor just particular reproductive technologies, but both of them together. Photographs are dense complex things in their own right, and these scholars want to slow our attention down to give that density its due. Each of the authors, irrespective of their interest or approach, have been primarily driven by the particular qualities of particular photographs. This turn to the specificity of the photograph itself is the first of three themes which run through the chapters in this book.

For instance, Geoffrey Batchen’s research re-embeds photographs in the context that gave rise to them in the first place, which is never just the rarified thoughts and feelings of the photographer, or their visionary ambition, but often complex commercial imperatives and technological realities. From this basis he has been able to propose an alternative model of photographic history which puts photography as work at its centre. In discussing the rivalry between Talbot’s photographic business in Reading which used his own process, and the first studios in London which licensed the daguerreotype process, Batchen establishes that photographs are never just the product of one local context, they were always, right from the moment of their origin, embedded in international currents.

As well as the importance of a close attention to the photograph as object, the currents through which these photographs circled the globe form the second dominant theme of this book. But in addition, we shift the focus of these global currents southwards, away from the dominant presence of Europe and America as the site for photographic history, towards Asia and the Pacific. For too long the photography of these regions, where the global politics and social change of the last two hundred and fifty years has been at its most raw and intense, has only been seen reflected in the mirror of European and American photography. Questions were often framed merely in terms of how Asia and the Pacific changed European and American photographers as they passed through the region, or how the careers of Asian and Pacific photographers could be stitched into larger global narratives generated in Europe and America. The writers in this collection are not interested in such an approach because they start from specific photographs in specific contexts.

Ken Hall, for example, starts with an almost forensic examination of a partially obscured inscription on an early studio group portrait depicting a British colonist settler and a group of South Island Maori, and then proceeds to open the image out to a large and complex story. John L. Tran looks at Taisho Pictorialism, a Japanese strain of the global Pictorialist movement, which used Pictorialist nostalgia to help construct an emerging Japanese identity. Likewise, Victoria Garnons-Williams casts a new and surprising light on the well-known Grafton Aboriginal portraits of J.W. Lindt. These images have long circulated in Australian history almost as icons of the colonial treatment of Aborigines. However Garnos-Williams returns to their source in Grafton, to the almost microscopic surface of the photograph itself. Other chapters read and analyse well-know photographs with an unprecedented closeness, and with an unprecedented access to the original context of their production to offer new and more complex understandings. For instance Shelley Rice’s survey of the evolution of political directorial photography and masquerade within American photography, and its complex relationship to photography’s more usual ‘documentary’ and touristic function, is given even more complexity in terms of the globalised currents of identity politics when photographers such as Australia’s Fiona Foley and Samoa’s Shigeyuki Kihara are added to the discussion.

These chapters reflect the recent burgeoning scholarship from Australian and New Zealand Universities, and reveal the fresh perspectives that are still being opened up by the close reading of key photographs and collections. For instance through Tim Smith’s detailed work on the glass plates of the photographer Paul Foelsche, a more complete understanding of the circumstances behind the photographs emerges which complicates the historical narratives they have previously been used to justify. Max Quanchi analyses a large collection of postcards from four Pacific colonies in the late nineteen and early twentieth centuries. His quantitative analysis of the various categories of subject matter, as well as his analysis of individual images, reveals a unified visual construction of the colonial world which was posted back to various metropolitan centres, irrespective of whether the colonies were German, British, French or Australian.

In a more poetic meditation on the ontology of photography, Australian novelist Gail Jones, who is well known for using the idea of photography as an element in her fiction, considers the encounters with portrait photography of a wide range of writers, from Henry James to Don DeLillo. All of her literary sources have responded in various ways to the subtle, yet compelling mysticism of photographs, which for them comes from the ambiguous and mysterious relationship in each of the images they encounter between fixity and flux, presence and absence.

In this final chapter Jones homes in on what has emerged as a third major theme of this book: that is, that the return to the specificity of the photograph as object, and the increased attention to the networks and flows in which those photographs are embedded, only brings us closer to the photograph’s ultimate ineffability. No matter how forensically close we get to actual images, to the faces and the eyes of their subjects, and no matter how detailed and sophisticated our analysis of the specific conditions of their production and dissemination, it is still the narrow but unbridgeable fissure between reality and the uncanny copy of that reality that drives our fascination with the photograph. As Jones quotes Giorgio Agamben, the photograph remains the site of a gap, a ‘sublime breech’ between what we can see and what we can know.

Martyn Jolly and Helen Ennis

Crimp, D. (1989). The Museum’s Old/The Library’s new Subject. The Contest of meaning : critical histories of photography. R. Bolton. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press: xix, 407 p.

Edwards, E. and J. Hart (2004). Photographs objects histories : on the materiality of images. London ; New York, Routledge.

Freund, G. (1980). Photography & society. London, Fraser.

Frizot, M. (1998). A new history of photography. Köln, Könemann.

Marien, M. W. (2006). Photography : a cultural history. London, Laurence King.

“This survey of international photography, which examines the discipline across the full range of its uses by both professionals and amateurs, has been expanded and brought up to date for this second edition. Each of the eight chapters takes a period of up to forty years and examines the medium through the lenses of art, science, social science, travel, war, fashion, the mass media and individual practitioners.”–BOOK JACKET.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). The Pictorial Turn. Picture theory : essays on verbal and visual representation. Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 11 – 34.

Newhall, B. (1997). The history of photography : from 1839 to the present. New York

Boston, Museum of Modern Art ;

Distributed by Bulfinch/Little Brown.

Patt, L., Dlilbohner, et al. (2007). Searching for Sebald : photography after W. G. Sebald. Los Angeles, Calif., Institute of Cultural Inquiry.

Pinney, C. and N. Peterson (2003). Photography’s other histories. Durham, Duke University Press.

[1] Crimp, D. (1989). The Museum’s Old/The Library’s new Subject. The Contest of meaning : critical histories of photography. R. Bolton. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press: xix, 407 p.

[2] Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). The Pictorial Turn. Picture theory : essays on verbal and visual representation. Chicago, University of Chicago Press: p13.

[3] Marien, M. W. (2006). Photography : a cultural history. London, Laurence King.
Frizot, M. (1998). A new history of photography. Köln, Könemann.
Freund, G. (1980). Photography & society. London, Fraser.
Newhall, B. (1997). The history of photography : from 1839 to the present. New York Boston, Museum of Modern Art ; Distributed by Bulfinch/Little Brown.

[4] Howarth, Sophie, (Ed.) (2006) Singular Images: Essays on Remarkable Photographs, New York, Aperture

[5] Pinney, C. and N. Peterson (2003). Photography’s other histories. Durham, Duke University Press.

[6] Edwards, E. and J. Hart (2004). Photographs objects histories : on the materiality of images. London ; New York, Routledge.

[7] Patt, L., Dlilbohner, et al. (2007). Searching for Sebald : photography after W. G. Sebald. Los Angeles, Calif., Institute of Cultural Inquiry.

Prizes! Prizes! Prizes!

‘Prizes, Prizes, Prizes’, Photofile 83, Australian Centre for Photography, pp 56 — 59, 2008

This year there will be well over $100,000 up for grabs in the fifteen or so photography prizes running across the country. It seems everybody loves a good competition, and as the most democratic of art forms photography readily lends itself to the format. Entries can be submitted digitally for easy short-listing, and artists and amateurs can both have a go on roughly equivalent terms. No matter what you think of the judge’s final, painfully arrived at decision, a bit of controversy never hurt anyone, and anyway, there’ll be a different judge next time. For the lucky photographer who does eventually come up trumps there is the professional recognition of the prize, plus the thrill of actually winning something — cash or just a camera — and the opportunity to have their image and name reproduced in newspapers and journals around the country. For those that only get short-listed, there is still the extra line on their CV. And for those that hopefully sent off their jpegs along with their entry fee and didn’t even get a guernsey, well, there’s always next time.

Some photographers make the conscious decision to spend a lot of time and money entering as many art awards as they are eligible for, in the hope of eventually striking it lucky. The stats can be discouraging though. Almost 1500 people paid 25 dollars to enter one of the country’s most recent and richest prizes, the National Portrait Gallery’s National Photographic Portrait Prize, but only about 1 in 20 could get short-listed, and of course only one photographer could win the $25,000. For its part the gallery got a feisty show that’s sure to be popular, where unknown amateur photographers cheerfully rubbed shoulders with the big names, and serendipitous happy snaps added zest to monumentally posed portraits.

Some photographers make the conscious decision to spend a lot of time and money entering as many art awards as they are eligible for, in the hope of eventually striking it lucky. The stats can be discouraging though. Almost 1500 people paid 25 dollars to enter one of the country’s most recent and richest prizes, the National Portrait Gallery’s National Photographic Portrait Prize, but only about 1 in 20 could get short-listed, and of course only one photographer could win the $25,000. For its part the gallery got a feisty show that’s sure to be popular, where unknown amateur photographers cheerfully rubbed shoulders with the big names, and serendipitous happy snaps added zest to monumentally posed portraits.

(And if you want this punter’s opinion on the judging committee’s decision to choose Robert Scott-Mitchell’s portrait of his wife, Lindy Lee — Birth and Death as the winner, well, I can understand why they would have eventually plumped on this portrait because it safely covered so many bases: it included other family portraits in the frame, it was collaborative, it was intercultural, it was spiritual, it was about conjugal love, and it was of a glamorous art world figure. But in plumping for this merely competent image they passed over many, much more visually compelling and interesting photographs, such as George Fetting’s David Gulpilil {although he had already won the Tweed River Regional Art Gallery’s Olive Cotton Award}, Ruby Davies’ Water as Life: The Town of Wilcannia and the Darling/Baaka, Petrina Hicks’ Rosemary, or even as a roughie Vasili Vasiliaskis’s, Peter Robinson, Lingerie Importer. Still, there’s always next time.)

Prizes can make a lot of sense for smaller galleries and museums too. Regional galleries with limited resources but big ambitions can use a prize to efficiently sample the national scene. For 25 years the Albury City Regional Art Gallery has been running its biennial National Photography Purchase Award (won last year by Anne Zahalka) with a $10,000 acquisition fund, and has built up a formidable collection of contemporary Australian photography. The Gold Coast City Art Gallery has been using the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award (won last year by Paul Ferman) to similar effect, and it was been joined in 2005 by the Tweed River Regional Art Gallery with the Olive Cotton Award (won last year by George Fetting), and in 2006 by the Monash Gallery of Art (which already had a substantial photography collection) with the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize (won last year by Ray Cook).

Prizes are also a good option for galleries to negotiate with philanthropists, particularly in a straitened cultural climate, because what the philanthropist is being asked to sponsor is not this or that particular photographer or image, but on ongoing process based on access and merit. The sport-like fun of the competition provides an entertaining show for the local community, and the announcement of the winner gives the gallery a national presence. Prizes are always great shows to visit. There is always the judge to disagree with, and even though curators work hard to corral the entries — each one clamouring for individual attention — into a coherent hang, inevitably some of the scandalous geo-politics of the nineteenth-century salon remains. For example, which image, which looked good as a jpeg but disappointed when it was unpacked, ends up next to the fire extinguisher? Or which image, which arrived bombastically enlarged and in a tacky frame, ends up in an under-lit corner?

Although no individual institution should be begrudged its photography prize, the fact that they are increasingly dominating the photography scene is unprecedented. By their very nature photography prizes have to be superficial. In most, though not all, cases only one image is selected from each short-listed photographer, despite the fact that the photograph’s natural home is as part of a group or a series. Photographs usually need proper contextualization, but many prizes hang photographs with no supporting material at all to explain the work. Others include short artists statements, which in their naivety sometimes do a disservice to the photographer. Some prizes are specifically designed to encourage particular genres such as landscape, portraiture, or documentary. But, probably because they are all organised along similar lines, the open prizes seem to be taking similar snapshots of the photographic scene. For instance last year the Bowness Prize, which I saw at the Monash Gallery of Art, wasn’t substantially different in terms of entrants, styles and themes, to the show I had selected and judged at the Gold Coast City Gallery for the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award.

Sometimes I wonder what the opportunity costs are for the worthy efforts photographers, galleries, and sponsors put into prizes. Everybody would agree that they are no substitute for a curated, researched and contextualized show, or a strategic collection policy, and of course from the point of view of individual institutions their prizes are thought of as complementing, rather than replacing, their other stirling curatorial work.  But perhaps the looming presence of prizes in the consciousness of photographers and viewers alike is beginning to cast a corrosively aleatory temper over the whole scene?

Martyn Jolly

Dr Martyn Jolly is Head of Photomedia at the Australian National University School of Art.  He judged the National Photography Purchase Award at the  Albury City Regional Art Gallery in 1985 and the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award at the Gold Coast City Gallery in 2007.

Australian Centre for Photography, Encyclopedia Entry, 2001

The Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

The Australian Centre for Photography (ACP) is a publicly funded gallery curating exhibitions of Australian and international photography, combined with a workshop offering courses to the public and access to photographic facilities. It also publishes the magazine Photofile.

The ACP opened in 1974 and it was very much a child of its time. Interest in photography as a creative art was booming in Australia in the early 1970s. Art museums were establishing departments to collect and exhibit international and Australian photography, art schools were establishing photography departments to turn out graduates in what was then regarded as the hottest new medium to be in to, entrepreneurial individuals were opening (mostly short lived) private photography galleries, and magazine and book publishers were experimenting with (mostly short lived) publications devoted to the new art form. The boom took off first in Melbourne, but spread to other capital cities. Australia was undergoing a general cultural and social renaissance during this period because in 1972 a progressive federal government had been elected which greatly increased arts funding.

In this climate a small group, led by the important Australian documentary photographer David Moore, successfully applied to the government for funds to set up a ‘Foundation’ for photography. Their initial plans were wildly grand: they  conceived of it having a populist, social role (somewhat akin to Edward Steichen gathering to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the millions of photographs from which he selected the Family of Man exhibition) as well as a professional role in supporting individual photographers — from giving them direct grants and commissions to collecting their work. But within a year or two of its opening it had settled into a mode of exhibiting curated shows of photography to an art audience on a gallery/museum model, occasionally touring exhibitions, and offering facilities and courses to the general public in a Workshop which was established in 1976.

The ACP has always suffered an uneasy relationship with its shifting and fractious constituency. In its formative years it was resented by some for draining scarce funds away from the other artist-run photography spaces, quasi-commercial photography galleries, and small photography magazines that were springing up and struggling to survive right across Australia. A single institution, located in the heart of Australia’s largest and wealthiest city, was always going to be subject to accusations of elitism and being out of touch with ‘real’ photography — whatever that was, since the term covered a constantly changing and expanding range of practices.

The ACP came into its own under the aegis of American museum based formalism. In its formative years the ACP imported exhibitions by American masters, such as Diane Arbus; and American masters themselves, such as the then Director of the Photography Department of the Museum of Modern Art New York, John Szarkowski, in 1974, and the photographer Lee Friedlander in 1977.  However the ACP also began to exhibit and support the first generation of Australian art school graduates, for instance Carol Jerrems, Bill Henson and Max Pam. It also began to bring important aspects of Australia’s photographic heritage to light, for instance by giving Australia’s most important photographer, Max Dupain, his first retrospective in 1977. Olive Cotton, now one of Australia’s most loved photographers, was virtually unknown when she held her first retrospective at the ACP in 1984.

Between 1978 and 1982 its director, the US trained Christine Godden, established a new level of museum professionalism in the gallery, and succeeded in moving the ACP to its present location in a busy and fashionable shopping precinct. But during this period the ACP was criticised for institutionally perpetuating an increasingly marginalised formalist photo ghetto, when camera images were exponentially increasing in quantity, proliferating in format, becoming the central theoretical object of postmodern theories of representation, and forming the lingua franca of contemporary art in general.

From 1982, with Tamara Winikoff as director, the ACP deliberately tried to broaden and connect itself to a wider variety of communities. In 1983 it began to publish Photofile, which contained reviews and longer historical, critical and theoretical articles.  The gallery program now often featured community based and issue oriented exhibitions exemplified by the ‘suitcase shows’ it toured, which were inspired by the radical socially aware practices of British photographers like Jo Spence.

Photofile was particularly exciting in the mid 1980s, with the critic Geoffrey Batchen as editor, because by then a whole range of sophisticated discourses had taken the photograph as their principal subject, and a new generation of theoretically savvy art school graduates placed the photographic image — if not the idea of photography as an autonomous, historicised, fine art medium — at centre stage in Australian art.

During the 1990s, with Denise Robinson as director, this new wave of art school graduates, such as Tracey Moffatt, Anne Zahalka or Robin Stacey, were all featured in the gallery, which also became an important Sydney Biennale and Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardis Gras venue. At the same time, however, the Workshop was languishing, Photofile was disappearing under a miasma of thick prose and arch imagery, and the ACP was falling into debt.

Much of the tenure of the next director Deborah Ely, appointed in 1992, was involved with successfully negotiating the re-financing and extension of the ACP’s building, as well as upgrading and updating the Workshop and revitalising Photofile. The gallery, although closed for refurbishment for long periods, continued the trend of exhibiting work in photographically related, particularly digital, media.

The current director, Alasdair Foster faces an entirely different climate from the one into which the ACP was born. Photography is no longer a young medium impatiently knocking on the doors of art. As an art practice its edges have long since dissolved into digital media, film, performance and installation. It is now a pervasive cultural and psychological phenomena. The ACP is no longer the sole ‘foundation’ for photography in Australia, it is now just a small part of a vibrant and well established matrix of museums, libraries, galleries, magazines, and art schools right across the continent.

Martyn Jolly

Further Reading

Ely, Deborah, “The Australian Centre for Photography”, in The History of Photography (Australia issue), 23, no. 2, (1999)

French, Blair, editor, Photo Files,  Sydney: The Australian Centre for Photography and Power Publications, 1999

Newton, Gael, Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988, Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1988

Willis, Anne-Marie, Picturing Australia: A History of Photography, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1988

What has the Australian Centre for Photography ever done for me?

‘What has the Australian Centre for Photography ever done for me?’, Art Monthly, September, 1999

This year is the Australian Centre for Photography’s twenty fifth birthday as an exhibiting gallery. It was a child of the ‘photography boom’ of the 1970s, but since then the ACP has not only been a major player in the appropriational use of photography 1980s, but it has also successfully accommodated the dispersal of media categories in the 1990s to now be in a stable financial position, secure in its own building, and with a new director with an international reputation.

But nonetheless, throughout its history, there has always seemed to have been something wrong with the ACP. And there’s always been somebody willing to point it out. Its problems were right there in its name. How could a gallery and workshop in Sydney’s Paddington  service the needs of photographers Australia wide? And what exactly did it mean by ‘photography’ anyway? Who were the photographers the ACP was set up to enfranchise? And through what means could a ‘Centre’ constitute them as a community in Australia’s limited funding environment and against a rapidly changing technological and cultural landscape? Any photographer anywhere in Australia could legitimately ask ‘what has the ACP done for me?’, and not get much of an answer.

The ACP has always suffered an uneasy, mutually suspicious relationship with its shifting and fractious constituency. It has never wholly escaped the manner of its birth: in 1973 it had been established as a ‘Foundation’ for photography, by decree of the Australia Council, after the successful lobbying of a small group of well connected men.  Since then it has seemed to be always already there, burdened by an accumulation of prior ambitions and allegiances, and perpetually  trying to reinvent its role for a mutating constituency.

But the fact that there was always something wrong with the ACP is what makes its history so fascinating. The ACP has never, in fact, been central to Australian photography. It was always one, albeit better funded and more stable, player amongst the many artist run spaces, quasi-commercial galleries, dealer galleries, small magazines, art school departments and art museum departments which all sprang up in response to the new interest in photography in Australia. By and large the ACP worked cooperatively and supportively with all these other players. But throughout it all it also managed to hang on to the lion’s share of public funding for photography, so that the quarter-century saga of the its internal coup d’états,  public self-flagellations, and internecine snipings are the only thread which runs consistently through recent Australian photography.

The ACP came into its own under the aegis of American museum based formalism. The grandly wild ambition of its founding fathers had conceived of it having an inclusive, populist, social role (somewhat akin to Edward Steichen’s papal role in gathering to the Museum of Modern Art the millions of photographs from which he selected the Family of Man exhibition), as well as an extensive role in supporting individual photographers — from giving them direct grants and commissions to collecting their work. But within a year or two of its opening it had settled into a mode of exhibiting curated shows of art photography to an art audience on a hybrid gallery/museum model — a model which persists to this day.

The personalities of its various directors have always defined the ambience of the ACP. During the tenure of some directors it seemed as though the place had a distinct chill that came from more than just its air conditioning. However directorial style and personality were also a lightning rod for various external disgruntlements. However it must be said that no director lacked vision or courage, and under each the ACP either expanded or consolidated itself as an institution. Nor did any director preside over an entirely homogenous exhibition program. Looking back over the ACP’s archival scrapbooks it is clear that although there were distinct directorial agendas, each director also attempted to answer the demands of the ACP’s rumbustious constituency — they programmed plenty of exceptions to my generalisations below. Nonetheless the succession of ACP directors is a convenient way of periodising the ACP’s style and direction.

In the formative years from 1973 to 1978, under Graham Howe and Bronwyn Thomas, the ACP established an educational workshop and imported American master shows, such as Diane Arbus, and American masters themselves, such as Lee Friedlander. After 1978 Christine Godden consolidated the gallery with an emphasis on professionalism, quality and presentation. Anybody who worked at the ACP during the 70s and 80s will remember its storeroom full of stacked aluminium frames in standard sizes: twelve by sixteen inches, sixteen by twenty inches, and twenty by twenty four images. The walls of the carpeted gallery were clad in sheet steel and wrapped in beige cloth, and the frames were attached in regular rows with industrial strength magnets. The problem was that the kind of photography that this unique hanging system was devoted to —the isolated fine print — was already problematic. The ACP was institutionally perpetuating an increasingly marginalised art ghetto when camera images were proliferating in quantity, dispersing in format, becoming the central theoretical object of postmodern theories of representation, and forming the lingua franca of contemporary art in general. Godden received much criticism from critics such as Anne-Marie Willis. But she was also responsible for moving the ACP from its cramped terrace buildings to a prime Oxford Street location. And she did program agenda-setting non ‘fine art’ shows such as Giorgio Colombo’s exhibition of criminological photography ‘A Suspect Image’, and the conceptual/political work of the Canadians Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge.

From 1982, with Tamara Winikoff as director, the ACP deliberately tried to broaden and connect itself to a wide variety of communities. It began to publish a tabloid format magazine — Photofile; lectures, talks and forums became more regular; the smaller gallery became ‘Viewpoints’ which was devoted to young and emerging photographers selected by a curatorium; and the Workshop became more sophisticated and elaborate in the courses it offered. The gallery program itself swung away from fine art and towards a British, community based, pedagogic model exemplified by the ‘suitcase shows’ it toured. Although this did tap into the expanding number of government grant categories, some found this style of exhibition uninteresting, politically exhausted and theoretically out of date as an art practice. However during this period the ACP also supported ambitious multi media installations such as Dennis Del Favero’s “Quegli Ultimi Momenti” of 1984.

Photofile was particularly exciting in the mid 1980s, after it moved to a magazine format with Geoffrey Batchen as editor. By then a whole range of sophisticated discourses had taken the photograph as their principal subject, and a new generation of relatively theoretically savvy art school graduates placed the photographic image — if not the idea of photography as an autonomous, historicised, fine art medium — at centre stage in Australian art.

Denise Robinson, coming well credentialled from Melbourne’s hip and up-to-date Ewing and George Paton Gallery in 1986, imposed a theoretically driven style that attempted to bring the ACP to the cutting edge of contemporary Australian art, but which many found tendentious, pretentious, cliquish, visually unsatisfying and ultimately alienating.  But during the late 1980s staff discovered that they could paint the beige cloth walls white, they could drive nails through the sheet metal and even pull the carpet up for installations (although, come the early 1990s, the sheet metal walls finally defeated the new de rigour fashion for punctiliously pinning elegantly curled prints to the wall). The new wave of art school graduates were featured in the galleries, which also became important Sydney Biennale and Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardis Gras venues. However, whilst successful projects such as the 1990 billboard project ADD MAGIC were being staged, the Workshop was languishing, Photofile was disappearing under a miasma of thick prose and arch imagery, and the ACP was falling into debt.

Much of the tenure of the next director Deborah Ely, appointed in 1992, was involved with successfully negotiating the re-financing and extension of the ACP’s building in an epic legal, political and financial battle. However she also got Photofile back on the rails and revamped the Workshop into a technologically relevant professional education provider. The gallery, although closed for long periods, continued the trend of incorporating work of photographically related, particularly digital, media.

The current director, Alasdair Foster, who comes to the ACP from Britain after establishing the internationally successful photography festival Fotofeis, faces an entirely different climate from the one into which the ACP was born twenty five years ago. Photography is no longer a young medium impatiently knocking on the doors of art. As an art practice its edges have long since dissolved into digital media, performance and installation. As a cultural phenomena photography is no longer constituted by the simple accumulation of all the individual photographs published in the media and pasted into our family albums, now photography is a temporal-spatial ‘effect’ which haunts all art. Photography is no longer just a cultural presence, it has become culture’s central nervous system. To Foster this makes the role of the ACP, an institution whose gravitational centre will remain photo-based art, more vital than ever.

Standing in the cavernous, Gyprocked white cube of the ACP’s new gallery, trying to ignore the echoing clatter of cutlery and crockery from the La Mensa cafe at the front of the building and the roar of traffic from Oxford Street, it certainly seems that in one sense the ACP has come a long way from its original cramped terrace-house rooms. In another sense it is in exactly the same position as it has always been: needing to justify itself to sceptical funding bodies, sponsors, and an undefinable constituency of photo-based artists who will be always asking “what has the ACP done for me?”

Martyn Jolly was a student intern at the ACP in 1981, worked as a curator there between 1985 and 1987, had one person shows there in 1988 and 1998, and  has served on various ACP committees and sub-committees since 1982. He still tries to visit whenever he is in Sydney.

Max Dupain’s Sunbaker

‘Sunbaker: The making of an icon’, in the catalogue to Signature Works, Australian Centre for Photography, May, 1999. 

Few images in Australia today are as recognisable as Max Dupain’s Sunbaker, 1937. Certainly no other Australian image, be it a painting, graphic or photograph, is as often parodied, pastiched or quoted. Perhaps only monuments such as the Opera House, Harbour Bridge or Uluru have a greater presence within Australia’s repertoire of national icons.

The sunbaker represents the Australian nation as a whole, but he also sensuously embodies each of our own individual relationships to Australia as a place: our fond memories of its summers, its beaches, its ‘lifestyle’. And, of course, he is a gendered icon: the sunbaker’s Australia is a place for the autochthonic pleasures of men. The sunbaker’s iconicity is splendidly conflicted: is the sun beneficent or carcinogenic, is he at rest or in a stupor, will he ever share the beach that he claims with others?

At the end of his life Dupain was heartily sick of the Sunbaker. He realised that the manifold meanings it was generating were drawing it out from under the mantle of his authorship. He was bemused that it had slipped into visual domains other than his own, for instance that it was even gaining currency within an emerging gay sensibility.

The Sunbaker has been Dupain’s image since 1937, when he quickly made two negatives of his close friend Harold Salvage during a holiday to the South Coast. It has only really been Australia’s image since 1975, when it began its rapid ascent into national iconicity as Dupain himself was suddenly produced onto the Australian cultural stage as a major modernist artist. It was on the poster of his first retrospective at the Australian Centre for Photography, it was subsequently published by two photography magazines and by the National Gallery of Australia on the back cover of a 1979 exhibition catalogue, and it was central to the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ 1980 retrospective curated by Gael Newton.

Prior to 1975 the two negatives had sat untouched in Dupain’s negative files for thirty years. A print from the other negative was published in Dupain’s relatively obscure monograph of 1948. That print was darker, and its composition more grounded, stolid and heavy than the high tensile form suspended in the bright grey field with which we are familiar from the 1970s prints. Ironically this second negative, and its print, have now been lost. Previous to this monograph the image only existed as a contact print amongst other snapshots in a personal album assembled for his friends as a souvenir of their coast holiday.

The Sunbaker has come a long way, yet it remains simultaneously a private snapshot and public icon. The sunbaker is still embedded in time, but his time is now a multiple exposure of a changing Australia.

References:

Gael Newton, ‘”It was a simple affair”: Max Dupain Sunbaker’ in Lynne Seear and Julie Ewington, eds. Australian Art Brought to Light 1850-1965 from the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, Queensland Art Gallery , Brisbane: 1998 pp142-7.

Geoffrey Batchen, “Creative Actuality; The photography of Max Dupain”, Art Monthly, pp2-5

The Returned: Memory and History in Classic Australian Photographs

Media International Australia,  No. 78, November, 1995

In early 1992 the State Library of New South Wales mounted Sydney Exposures: Through the Eyes of Sam Hood & His Studio. The exhibition was the result of its curator, Alan Davies’, almost superhuman labour of cataloguing the 33,000 photographs left to the Library by the studio. The Library’s publicity department chose one of those, The boys on the beach, Bondi, 10 October 1932, to spearhead its publicity campaign. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald preview to the show related how Alan Davies was able to date the photograph to the day by looking with a magnifying glass at a crumpled newspaper lying in the sand in a corner of the photograph, and then going through the Library’s microfilm copies of that newspaper until he found the edition with that front page.(Summer Agenda, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 January 1992, 8)

A few days later, in an article headed ‘Bondi beach boys regroup on a wave of nostalgia’ the paper tells how a Mr Finn had seen himself in the photograph when it was reproduced in the SMH. He first rang up the paper, then three of his mates who were also in the photograph. They all visited the exhibition and were photographed in front of the image.

[…] “I didn’t think my past would ever catch up with me” retired solicitor John Hickey joked.
[…] Mr Hickey’s past has caught up with, and overtaken, him.
The image chosen by the State Library to promote its new exhibition is one called The Boys on the Beach. It appears on posters, handbills, and on the back on many State Transit Buses.
Sam Hood, […] snapped this group of 14 bronzed Aussies […] on Bondi Beach. He recorded it simply as ‘Beach Scene’, […].
[…] Looking straight at the camera, third from left, is John Hickey, who, like the other surviving members of the group, is in his 70s. (Three are dead.)
Four of the beach boys were reunited last week for a tour of Sydney Exposures: Mr Hickey, retired pharmacist Greg Williams (fourth from the right) retired publican Tom Moody (the group’s only blond) and CJ. Finn, who has “Done a bit of everything: (far right).
[…] Oddly enough, none of the four can remember the photographic session which produced this quintessential Sydney image.
They do, however, vividly remember those endless, carefree summers on Bondi Beach.
[…] They were there on February 6, 1938, the notorious Black Sunday, when nearly 200 people were swept off a sandbank at Bondi, and five drowned. “People were being pulled [out of the water] by the hair,” Mr Finn recalled.
Studying the Library’s huge blowups of the photograph, they identified most of the participants, […].
However the group disputes Mr Davies’s dating of the photograph, suggesting that it was probably taken in 1937, when they were 15 to 16 years old.”(Sydney Morning Herald, 18 January 1992, 22)

Oddly enough, none of the four can remember the photographic session which produced this quintessential Sydney image because they weren’t there. The photograph was taken in 1932 and it is not of them. Alan Davies was away on leave at the time, and was unable to defend his forensic method of dating the photograph, which had used the full scientific arsenal of the Library’s archival systems, against the organic, corporeal testimony of the men’s memories. Eventually a total of forty-eight people came forward claiming to be in the photograph, and Alan Davies has now, through proper curatorial verification, been able to positively identify each of the fourteen participants.

Mr Finn and his mates had hallucinated themselves into this quintessential image. The completeness and extent of their hallucination is extraordinary, identifying ‘most’ of the participants in the photograph. The SMH, also, was an active participant in this consensual hallucination, asking its readers, in the face of the evidence of the photograph itself, to believe that the young men in the photograph are only 15 or 16 years old.

What historic and mnemonic processes are at work to cause this mass hallucination? What is it about photography itself which has recently generated the slew of similar stories both in Australia and overseas, all of which involve the unlikely ‘return’ of participants out of classic historical photographs? I have collected ten of these stories from Australia alone.

A classic photograph has a lot in common with a classic painting. They both circulate endlessly throughout our visual culture: on stamps, postcards or T-shirts. They are both displayed as important works of art, or parodied by cheeky young artists and advertisers. They are both associated with art, skill and genius, which is seen to have somehow condensed and embodied a mythic aspect of nation, race or history.

But there are also important differences between a classic painting and a classic photograph. As they grow more famous both the classic painting and the classic photograph grow in power as public testaments. In the classic painting this testamentary power resides more and more in the very painting itself: the fibres of the canvas, the facture of the paint, and the patina of the grime grow in density as history impacts into them and compacts them down. Their aura as artefacts grows. However in a classic photograph the power of the photograph as auratic object increases only slightly (photographs are still no where near getting the same price at auction as paintings) but the power and focus of its referentiality becomes more acute as it becomes more famous. A classic photograph is able to suddenly swoop us down into a direct, personal experience of history, whereas a classic painting never can.

A good example of this occurred on a front page of the Weekend Australian in 1989 where two photographs appear under the heading ‘Snapshot of a Suburb’s Soul Revisited’. The larger photograph was of a woman standing in front of a terrace house with a tower block of flats behind, the smaller was David Moore’s classic Redfern Interior. The caption reads ‘Mrs Dawes Yesterday […] and, below, in bed with her child in the classic 1949 David Moore photograph’.

It is 1949 and a young mother lies in bed cradling her newborn, her husband’s belt hangs in reach “in case the kids muck up” and a hand-made hessian basinet stands alongside.
An old and worried woman stares intently into the future as she leans on the base of a rickety wooden bed while a mop-haired toddler sits at her feet clutching a doll.
The old woman was one of Redfern’s most familiar faces, Mrs Annie Plumber, and the blonde poppet with a dirty face was her grand daughter, Carol Stanley.
The young mother captured forever on film is Mrs Eileen Dawes and her story is a living sculpture of Australian suburban life.
She was born in Redfern—once Sydney’s quintessential Australian Suburb, now famous for its Aboriginal ghetto—in 1915, just weeks before Gallipoli forged the ideal of Australian nationhood.
She was a mother when crime queens Tilley Devine and Kate Leigh fought for influence in Sydney’s underworld.
In the austere post war environment of derelict inner city tenements and rutted narrow lanes, Eileen Dawes gave birth to a baby—one of 16 pregnancies—and  a stranger entered her life.
The stranger was an anonymous photographer brought to the crowded terrace to capture a classic scene of Australian life.
Forty years later Mrs Dawes was to learn that the visitor was a man named David Moore, now one of Australia’s best known photographers, and that her picture had become famous.
[…] Regularly republished in books and magazines the photograph Redfern Interior 1949, has hung on the walls of the world’s great art galleries and the scene has come to epitomise an Australia that is forever lost.
Months of searching for the photograph’s unknown subjects took The Weekend Australian back to within metres of where it had originally been shot so many years ago.
Hours spent scouring yellowing minutes and eviction notices from the now defunct Redfern Council, days of door knocking and false leads were eventually rewarded when Annie Plumber’s daughter, Celie, identified her mother.
[…] This week we went back to Redfern and back to Eileen Dawes, now 74. And the story of her life since the day this picture was taken is a tale of a battler who made it.
Mrs Dawes—nanna to 31 grandchildren and great nan to 16—said: “I remember the photo being taken. I had just had the baby and my neighbour came in and said there was a man who wanted to take my photo.
“I had nothing to lose, but when my Billy came home he went bloody crook for having a man in the bedroom.
“Poor old Mrs Plumber was there too, she had a hard life you know. But then, they were hard times.
“She was a great friend of my mother and her husband, Bert, used to sell rabbits during the depression.”
[…] It is many years since Eileen Butler walked up the cobbled back lane to marry William Dawes at St Pauls Church of England on January 18, 1933, and memories are blurred.
All the Dawes children have left, as has Carol Stanley, the child at the foot of the bed.
Now Mrs Townsend, Carol, 43, is married to a railway worker, has children of her own, and lives in Dapto on the NSW south coast. (Weekend Australian, 17 June 1989, 1)

This, like all of the other ‘returned’ articles, is rich with historiographic intertextuality. A massive historical span is measured in the trajectory from Gallipoli to a contemporary ‘aboriginal ghetto’. The incipient reference to the Nativity present in the original photograph is picked up by the journalist who enlists the photographer himself to play the part of the Three Wise Men as a ‘stranger’ who was ‘brought to her terrace’ and ‘entered her life’. Her nationalistic maternity is played off against the alternative, larrikin femininity of underworld crime queens. Labyrinthine slums are evoked by Dickensian cobbled back lanes, rutted narrow lanes, and tenements.

But what is of interest to me, more than the journalistic poetics, is the elaborate lengths to which the article goes to establish the simultaneous obscure privacy and public iconicity of the participants. Mrs Dawes is only found after an elaborate search by the Weekend Australian. She would have been lost to us entirely except for the chance recognition of a random door knock. She remained ignorant of her fame, and went on to personally spin a web of contingent anecdote around herself—tediously elaborated in the article with names, ages, and dates—whilst at the same time her image was congealing into an icon on the walls of the world’s greatest galleries. Yet the two processes seem related, and to affirm and reinforce each other. Although the classic photograph cannot accrete to itself the artefactual aura of the painting, in this case it has been able to discursively generate an aura around its participants. Their memories and bodies measured and recorded an epic time span as they slowly turned into living sculptures whilst their image was elsewhere, simultaneously turning into an icon.

But this mutual exchange between photograph and participant is not always stable. As it drifts further away from the moment when it was taken a classic photograph’s symbolic and iconic reference to an entire national collectivity becomes broader and more inclusive. However at the same time its testamentary and contingent reference to a local moment becomes narrower and more particular. The resultant tension between the classic photograph’s personally mnemonic power and its historically iconic power often leads to a scandal within our complacent assumptions about photography’s historical truth. For instance a few days after the death of Max Dupain in 1992 the Sydney Morning Herald carried a front page article, ‘Exposed: Max’s bronzed Aussie Sunbaker was a lilywhite Pom’, in which Australia’s top corporeal icon is revealed to have been not only palely English, but cultured as well.

It was taken on some empty south coast beach, where a group of friends was camping one summer weekend.
One, glistening from the surf, flung himself on the sand, pillowed his head on a forearm and slept in the sun.
Another of the group, the 26-year-old Max Dupain, photographed him as he lay, and the ensuing image Sunbaker 1937  became an Australian icon.
[…] It was an early example of the photographer’s gift for what friend and colleague David Moore once described as his “rigorous discipline of selection [which] honed the statements to a precise edge”
Its universality and power as icon bestowed anonymity on the Sunbaker —until this week, that is, when the death of Max Dupain 55 summers later brought what is possibly his most widely-known image to the fore.
On 2GB’s breakfast program on Thursday the question was asked: Who was the Sunbaker? A neighbour of John Salvage phoned him at work. “They’re asking about your father,” she said. Yesterday, after an interview at the station, John Salvage repeated the unlikely truth. The classic Australian image was indeed of his father—an English migrant, Harold Cyril Salvage by name. So English was he, his son recalls, that “until the day he died [in 1990], he remained an Englishman. He had a beautiful English accent which used to amaze my friends; but all the ladies used to love him. He had a great love of the arts and of classical music—he was very cultured.”
[…] It was on one of those idyllic prewar weekends that the photographs […] were taken.
[…] The war put paid to the close knit activities of the group. After war’s end, their ways struck out at different tangents, though they remained in contact all their lives.
Harold Salvage went on to become an architectural engineer with the Department of Works, […].
Max Dupain, however, stayed with photography, shaping his images, capturing the fall of light, perfecting his passion for form and the moment.
But more than one million negatives later, Sunbaker remains a quintessential Dupain photograph. (Sydney Morning Herald, 1 August 1992, 1)

The compulsion to spend several days of one’s time searching yellowing council files for Redfern Interior, or to ask ‘who was the Sunbaker’, seems intimately associated with the nature of photography itself. Asking similar questions of classic paintings, like ‘who was Shearing the Rams?’ or ‘is the Victory Girl a grandma now?’ doesn’t have the same imperative. Obviously the ontological nature of the photograph, its celebrated optical and chemical causality, allowed 2GB to ask the question. It is only a classic of Australian photography that can be commemorative on both an iconic and an evidential, a connotational and a denotational, a semiotic and a material, level. But even if photography allows such questions, why do they appear to be compelled? What is it about history and memory which demands those questions of the photograph?

Throughout Modernity, history and memory have increasingly come to be defined in dialectically oppositional terms to each other. For instance in ‘The Storyteller’ Walter Benjamin complained about the loss of traditional, ‘organic’ memory within Modernity. To Benjamin the experience of past and distant events which was once passed collectively, “mouth to mouth”, was being transformed by the technological dissemination of information. This was replacing the epic story with the commodified novel, experience and wisdom were being replaced by information and reportage, collective memory was losing way to explanatory history.(Benjamin 1973, 83-109)

On one level these newspaper stories take simple delight in reasserting the popularly mnemonic in the face of the institutionally historic. This leads to the tongue in cheek, but nonetheless triumphal, ‘exposing’ of a mnemonic scandal within historic iconicity. Mostly, however, both photographer and subject are presented as unwitting innocents equally caught up in the whirl of the past. For instance in a 1993 the SMH, under the heading ‘A ‘sticky beak’ seeks out the man who shot her in Corfu St’, three photographs appear: one of Henry Talbot’s Woolloomooloo Girl, taken in the 1950s, and two of its subject, Miss Janet Barlow, with the photographer forty years later.

Janet Barlow’s face has aged, but there is still that direct gaze which caught the eye of the photographer Henry Talbot 40 years ago and became a classic Australian image.
The photograph, Woolloomooloo Girl, can be found in the National and NSW Galleries: a snapshot of a young girl, aged 9 or 10, leaning over a fence on Corfu Street and staring down at the camera unabashed.
[…] The photograph became Talbot’s best known and one of his most cherished, although he never knew the girl’s name.
That is, until this week when, after 40 years, Janet Barlow and Henry Talbot came back to Corfu Street.
Their meeting was prompted after Miss Barlow’s niece received a birthday card with the Talbot photograph on it and recognised her aunt as the Woolloomooloo girl. […]
[I]t took only a search of the phone books by Miss Barlow before photographer and subject agreed to return to the scene.
Soon they were recalling how that photograph happened.
[…] “we went walking, looking for good photographs” […] “I saw the girl lean over the fence, thought that would make a nice picture and snap snap…”
For Miss Barlow, a neo-natal nurse from Russell Lea who turns 50 this year, the memory is even clearer.
“It would have been a Sunday because we washed our hair Sundays after we went down to the Domain to hear the soap box speakers,” she said. “I was getting my hair washed and I heard someone was taking pictures and just stuck my head up [over the fence].”
“It was just a sticky beak and I was the biggest sticky beak around.”
[…] Mr Talbot always thought the Woolloomooloo Girl was a photograph from 1956, but Miss Barlow said her family left Corfu Street in 1954 when she was 11, putting the photograph at ‘52 or ‘53. Either way, the photo, like their memories, essentially is timeless.(Sydney Morning Herald, 28 August 1993, 3).

The memories of photographer and subject are not commensurate, but any possible scandal is averted by them both accepting equally serendipitous roles in what are presented as the larger workings of time, history and the medium. Their lives briefly came together with the lightest of touches and then parted, only to meet again as if by fate when the infinitely complex historic and mnemonic interactions of the mass distribution of birthday cards and the sharp eyes of nieces inevitably intermeshed. They now willingly submit their memories to the “timeless” hegemony of history.

An important element in all of these stories is the crucial role of a media institution, either a radio station or a newspaper or magazine, as a mediator between memory and history. The media’s panopticism, its ubiquitous presence across time and space, is what completes the circuit and allows individuals to ‘return’ to the realm of lived memory from their iconic imprisonment in history. The front page newsworthiness of such transubstantiations lies as much in the newspaper’s celebration of its own power and custodianship over memory and history, as in the event of the coincidence itself. The SMH  obviously has a stake in implicating itself into the very substance of this memory/history fortuity. Although these stories could be seen as mere puff pieces, through them and similar faits divers (which in fact take up a large proportion of the paper) it may well be constructing itself as an ancient, capillary, historical and mnemonic presence in all our lives.

One plausible explanation of these stories is that the press is preparing its readers for a crisis in faith in its photographs brought on by computer digitalisation. In a future where the photograph, previously regarded as ontologically ‘truthful’, is realised as a infinitely mutable file of mathematical data, the newspaper’s curatorial process of archiving and publishing will become more important to a photograph’s ultimate authority than its diminished denotational power. Each of the stories emphasises the discursive nature of the classic photograph: analysing the nature of the photographer’s genius, performing sophisticated semiotic readings of its connotational procedures, and charting its role in our visual culture. These stories could therefore be encouraging us to invest faith not in the ultimate ontological authority of the photographic image, but in the ubiquitous systems of recuperation and transmittal represented by a new kind of social contract between the newspaper’s archive and its readership. For instance after the recent Papal tour the SMH, in an ad headed ‘Were you photographed with the Pope?’, invited its readers to come in to the Fairfax Photo Library and view the photographs taken by its journalists on the off chance that they had captured an accidental souvenir. Their photo libraries are one authoritive advantage the press still maintains over TV. TV uses ephemeral video tape, its news programming valorises instantaneity and brutal denotational effect, and the rest of its scheduling displays a notorious disregard for the orderly progression of time and the temporal particularity of events. To TV, the past can only be recalled in generalised, experiential, and imagistic terms.

In the article “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” the French historian Pierre Nora elaborates on Benjamin’s originally ambivalent complaint by claiming that as a result of modernity there is now an unprecedented rupture of the present from the past. Modernity is obsessed with memory, but in a commodified, localised form. Because of the media we now ‘know’ more about recent and current events. But this has replaced a memory entwined in the intimacy of a collective heritage with an ephemeral, filmic knowledge. Memory which was once organic, natural and ubiquitous, must now be preserved in lieux de mémoire  which are “sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.”(Nora 1989, 7) Because there is no longer natural, spontaneous memory, we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organise celebrations, and pronounce eulogies. Since our connectivity to the past can no longer be experienced from the inside it has to be experienced from the outside, via its outward signs. Memory is absorbed and reconstituted in the archive which becomes a prosthesis-memory. Because this new historical memory is no longer a collective practice we tend to interiorise and individuate it. Everyone goes in search of their own memory, or that of their ethnic, class, or professional group—hence the recent boom in genealogy. The past becomes a skein of jealously maintained genealogies rather than a nurturing environment in which we all live. Memory also tends to become retinal, televisual, cinematic and narrativised because this is how we understand the present. In present day Australia the conjunction of the genealogical and the retinal is attaining its epiphany when nieces recognise aunts and sons recognise fathers in classic photographs.

Although not always seen in the apocalyptic terms of Nora, the memory history dialectic has been a key talking point within recent historiography. (Hamilton 1994, 9-32) Oral historians are well aware that history affects and changes memory, bending and mutating it to fit in with itself. Researchers into the experiences of Australian women on the Home Front during WW11 are confidently told by their subjects that they will learn every thing they need to know from watching The Sullivans. (Darian-Smith 1994, 137-157) Alistair Thomson’s book Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend chronicles the often traumatic reorganisation of memory under the rule of mythic history.

[T]he apparently private process of composing safe memories is in fact very public. Our memories are risky and painful if they do not fit the public myths, so we try to compose our memories to ensure they do fit with what is publicly acceptable. Just as we seek the affirmation of our personal identities within the publics in which we live, we also seek affirmation of our memories. […] [O]ur memories need the sustenance of public recognition, and are composed so that they will be recognised and affirmed.(Thomson 1994, 11).

At the same time, of course, popular memory does constitute a relatively autonomous form of history; and history itself is constantly maintaining and refreshing itself with strategic injections of memory. However, even if there is a cross infection of memory and history, it is still useful to think of individual memory and institutional history as fundamentally mutually opposed terms. In this light these stories can be seen as attempts by newspapers to establish themselves as Lieux de mémoire, as mediators between the combative forces of history and memory.

The other sites where such a mediation is required are in public processes of national commemoration and monumentalisation. The task of monuments and commemorative ceremonies is precisely to reconcile personal memory with public history. The builders of monuments, like newspaper journalists, also see benefits in searching for nuggets of memory in the mullock of history. In 1990 a small article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald headed ‘Search for image to typify Vietnam War’:

In an attic or in a garage, among cherished papers or letters, could be the photograph that captures in one frozen image the essence of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. A search is under way to find it and use it as the central figure of the new Australian Vietnam Forces National Memorial in Canberra. The photograph should evoke Australians in Vietnam, just as cameraman Damien Parer’s image of a wounded digger with bandaged eyes, leaning on his mate and crossing a New Guinea river, caught Australians in World War Two.[…] “It will be a tall order but I believe that between what is available in Canberra[…] and what is stored, probably in someone’s keepsakes, we will find something.” The committee is looking at photographs from the Australian War Memorial but is hoping that veterans, their families or other members of the public will submit photographs never before seen. “It could be a picture taken by a soldier hurt and killed in combat that only the parents or loved ones have that fits the bill.(Sydney Morning Herald,18 July 1990).

As it turned out, the mnemonic forces ritually invoked by this article didn’t work, no quintessential photograph manifested itself in a shoe box, or an attic, or a garage. The committee had to sift thorough an official collection to find the photograph they eventually used—a Kodachrome slide taken by an official photographer which had been part of the displays in the Memorial itself at least since the early 1980s.

Photographs are not only playing an increasing role in physical monuments and memorials, they are also becoming the set pieces in rituals and festivals of remembrance and commemoration. A SMH article, headed ‘Time to embrace a great moment of love over death’, about the photograph chosen to be the logo for the ‘Australia Remembers’ celebrations commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War 11, had all of the elements discussed above.(Sydney Morning Herald , 31 December, 3.) But now, rather than being a newsworthy ‘scandal’ discovered within history, contingent memories were explicitly invoked in order to be institutionally re-colonised by history. In The Women’s Weekly of April 1995 another ‘found!’ article appeared, in this case also linked to the 50th anniversary celebrations of the end of WW11

Found! The dancing man. After a fleeting but unforgettable encounter on the day World War 11 ended, Freda Osborne and mystery man Ern Hill have been re-united at last.
[…] Ern, 67 […] was the young man pictured doffing his hat and whirling past two bemused young women, one of whom was Freda, and two soldiers.
That image of the “dancing man”, more than any other, symbolised the outpouring of joy which gripped Australia on August 15, 1945.
But although footage of the young man’s uninhibited display has been shown hundreds of times, his identity was unknown until The Women’s Weekly reproduced the picture as part of its “Australia Remembers” tribute to World War 11 last month.
[…] The Department of Veteran’s Affairs wanted to find the “dancing man” to help promote  the “Australia Remembers” celebrations […] It asked various service organisations for help, but without success. It was even thought that the “dancing man” could be dead.
[…] When Sydneysider Sue Butterfield saw the photograph she instantly recognised her father, Ern Hill, as the famous “dancing man”. Ern, now retired, reluctantly agreed that indeed he was the man in the picture.
[…] In last month’s issue, Freda Osborne told how she was with her friend Clarrie, when the “dancing man” twirled past. Then, when The Women’s Weekly told Freda that the “dancing man” had been found, she said she would “just love” to meet him.
[…] She told him that, as he whirled past her that afternoon, he shouted: “Come on luv, the War’s over so let’s dance.” Then she said Ern asked for a kiss. She remember laughing and telling him he was “a cheeky devil”.
“Strewth, I don’t remember the kiss bit,” Ern said. “But anything could have happened that day. Even though I hadn’t had a drink, we were all pretty much out of it.” […](Australian Women’s Weekly, April 1995, 18-19)

Again we have the triumphal, but somehow inevitable rescue of sticky mnemonic contingency from sublime historical symbolism. And again we have The Women’s Weekly, surely a much greater institution in any case, succeeding where the Department of Veterans’ Affairs had failed. Subsequently this article produced its own scandal when two other claimants—Patrick Blackall, who has taken out a statutory declaration saying “I’m the genuine dancing man”, and Mr Frank McAlary QC—came forward to challenge Ern’s right to his iconic memory. (Sydney Morning Herald, 29 July 1995, 3)

In all these accounts we have the strange figure of the return of the lost identity from some kind of incarceration in history, as though they were POWs finally released from History. These released Prisoners of History stumble out in a confused, jostling rush. They bring with them not only extra news and further poignant details from their memories—which may occasionally contradict, but generally reinforce our historical knowledge—they also bring the material testimony of their own selves, their weathered bodies and tangled pasts. But, just as glorious, contingent, unmotivated memory is liberated from history it is re-imprisoned to serve history once more. Just as memory fades under the retinal rule of modern history it is recuperated to be used once more to cast a final, auratic glow back onto that which is extinguishing it.

Benjamin, Walter 1973, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Illuminations, Fontana, 83-109.

Darian-Smith, Kate 1994, ‘War Stories: Remembering the Australian Home Front During the Second World War’, in Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia, ed. Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 137-157.

Hamilton, Paula 1994, ‘The Knife Edge, Debates about Memory and History’, in Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia, 9-32.

Nora, Pierre 1989, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26, Spring, 7.

Thomson, Alistair 1994, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend , Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 11.