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It is with much sadness that I note the death of respected Australian photographer and teacher Dr John Cato. Son of Australian photographer Jack Cato, who wrote one of the first histories of Australian photography (The Story of the Camera in Australia (1955), John was apprentice to his father before setting up a commercial studio with Athol Shmith that ran from 1950 – 1971. Dr Cato then joined Shmith at the fledgling Prahran College of Advanced Education photography course in 1974, becoming head of the course when Shmith retired in 1979, a position he held until John retired in 1991.
I was fortunate enough to get to know John and his vivacious wife Dawn. I worked with him and co-curatored his retrospective with William Heimerman, ‘…and his forms were without number’ at The Photographers Gallery, South Yarra, in 2002. My catalogue essay from this exhibition is reproduced below.
John was always generous with his time and advice. His photographs are sensitive, lyrical renditions of the Australian landscape. He had a wonderful ear for the land and for the word, a musical lyricism that was unusual in Australian photographers of the early 1970s. He understood how a person from European background could have connection to this land, this Australia, without being afraid to express this sense of belonging; he also imaged an Aboriginal philosophy (that all spirits have a physical presence and everything physical has a spiritual presence) tapping into one of the major themes of his personal work: the mirror held up to reveal an’other’ world – the language of ambiguity and ambivalence (the dichotomy of opposites e.g. black/white, masculine/feminine) speaking through the photographic print.
His contribution to the art of photography in Australia is outstanding. What are the precedents for a visual essay in Australian photography before John Cato? I ask the reader to consider this question.
It would be fantastic if the National Gallery of Victoria could organise a large exhibition and publication of his work, gathering photographs from collections across the land, much like the successful retrospective of the work of John Davis held in 2010. Cato’s work needs a greater appreciation throughout Australia because of it’s seminal nature, containing as it does the seeds of later development for Australian photographers. His educational contribution to the development of photography as an art form within Australia should also be acknowledged in separate essays for his influence was immense. His life, his teaching and his work deserves nothing less.
Marcus Bunyan
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‘… and his forms were without number’
John Cato: A Retrospective of the Photographic Work 1971 – 1991
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This writing on the photographic work of Dr. John Cato from 1971 – 1991 is the catalogue essay to a retrospective of his work held at The Photographers Gallery in Prahran, Melbourne in 2002. Dr. Cato forged his voice as a photographic artist in the early 1970s when photography was just starting to be taken seriously as an art form in Australia. He was a pioneer in the field, and became an educator in art photography. He is respected as one of Australia’s preeminent photographers of the last century.
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With the arrival of ‘The New Photography’1 from Europe in the early 1930′s, the formalist style of Modernism was increasingly adopted by photographers who sought to express through photography the new spirit of the age. In the formal construction of the images, the abstract geometry, the unusual camera angles and the use of strong lighting, the representation ‘of the thing in itself’2 was of prime importance. Subject matter often emphasised the monumentality of the factory, machine or body/landscape. The connection of the photographer with the object photographed was usually one of sensitivity and awareness to an external relationship that resulted in a formalist beauty.
Following the upheaval and devastation of the Second World War, photography in Australia was influenced by the ‘Documentary’ style. This “came to be understood as involved chiefly with creating aesthetic experiences … associated with investigation of the social and political environment.”3 This new movement of social realism, “… a human record intimately bound with a moment of perception,”4 was not dissimilar to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ (images a la sauvette) where existence and essence are in balance.5
The culmination of the ‘Documentary’ style of photography was ‘The Family of Man’ exhibition curated by Edward Steichen that toured Australia in 1959.6 This exhibition, seen many times by John Cato,7 had a theme of optimism in the unity and dignity of man. The structure of the images in ‘Documentary’ photography echoed those of the earlier ‘New Photography’.
Max Dupain “stressed the objective, impersonal and scientific character of the camera; the photographer could reveal truth by his prerogative of selection.”8 This may have been an objective truth, an external vocalising of a vision that concerned itself more with exterior influences rather than an internal meditation upon the subject matter.
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John Cato
‘Untitled’ from the series ‘Essay I, Landscapes in a Figure’
1971 – 1979
Silver gelatin photograph
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In 1971, John Cato’s personal photographic work was exhibited for the first time as part of the group show ‘Frontiers’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.9 ‘Earth Song’ emerged into an environment of social upheaval inflamed by Australian involvement in the Vietnam War. It provided a group of enthusiastic people who were beginning to be interested in photography as art, an opportunity to see the world, and photography, through a different lens. The 52 colour photographic prints in ‘Earth Song’, were shown in a sequence that used melodic line and symphonic form as its metaphoric basis, standing both as individual photographs and as part of a total concept.10
In the intensity of the holistic vision, in the connection to the subconscious, the images elucidate the photographers’ search for a perception of the world. This involved an attainment of a receptive state that allowed the cracks, creases and angles inherent in the blank slate of creation to become meaningful. The sequence contained images that can be seen as ‘acts of revelation’,11confirmed and expanded by supporting photographs, and they unearthed a new vocabulary for the discussion of spiritual and political issues by the viewer. They may be seen as a metaphor for life.
The use of sequence, internal meditation and ‘revelation’, although not revolutionary in world terms,12 were perhaps unique in the history of Australian photography at that time. During the production of ‘Earth Song’, John Cato was still running a commercial studio in partnership with the photographer Athol Shmith and much of his early personal work was undertaken during holidays and spare time away from the studio. Eventually he abandoned being a commercial photographer in favour of a new career as an educator, but found this left him with even less time to pursue his personal work.13
‘Earth Song’ (1970-1971) was followed by the black and white sequences:
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| ‘Tree – A Journey’ |
18 images
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1971 – 1973
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| ‘Petroglyphs’ |
14 images
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1971 – 1973
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| ‘Seawind’ |
14 images
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1971 – 1975
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| ‘Proteus’ |
18 images
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1974 – 1977
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| ‘Waterway’ |
16 images
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1974 – 1979
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Together they form the extensive series ‘Essay I, Landscapes in a Figure,’ parts of which are held in the permanent photography collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.14
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John Cato
‘Untitled’ from the series ‘Essay I, Landscapes in a Figure’
1971 – 1979
Silver gelatin photograph
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The inspiration for ‘Essay I’ and later personal work came from many sources. An indebtedness to his father, the photographer Jack Cato, is gratefully acknowledged. Cato also acknowledges the influence of literature: William Shakespeare (especially the Sonnets, and As You Like It), William Blake, Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking Glass), the Bible; and of music (symphonic form), the mythology of the Dreamtime and Aboriginal rock paintings.15 Each body of work in ‘Essay I’ was based on an expression of nature, the elements and the Creation. They can be seen as ‘Equivalents’16 of his most profound life experiences, his life philosophy illuminated in physical form.
John Cato was able to develop the vocabulary of his own inner landscape while leaving the interpretation of this landscape open to the imagination of the viewer. Seeing himself as a photographer rather than an artist, he used the camera as a tool to mediate between what he saw in his mind’s eye, the subjects he photographed and the surface of the photographic negative.17 Photographing ‘in attention’, much as recommended by the teacher and philosopher Krishnamurti,18 he hoped for a circular connection between the photographer and the subject photographed. He then looked for verification of this connection in the negative and, eventually, in the final print.
‘Essay II, Figures in a Landscape,’ had already been started before the completion of ‘Essay I’and it consists of three black and white sequences:
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| ‘Alcheringa’ |
11 images
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1978 – 1981
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| ‘Broken Spears’ |
11 images
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1978 – 1983
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| ‘Mantracks’ |
22 images in pairs
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1978 – 1983
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The photographs in ‘Essay II’ seem to express “the sublimation of Aboriginal culture by Europeans”19 and, as such, are of a more political nature. Although this is not obvious in the photographs of ‘Alcheringa’, the images in this sequence celebrating the duality of reality and reflection, substance and shadow, it is more insistent in the symbology of ‘Broken Spears’ and‘Mantracks’. Using the metaphor of the fence post (white man/black man in ‘Broken Spears’) and contrasting Aboriginal and European ‘sacred’ sites (in pairs of images in ‘Mantracks’), John Cato comments on the destruction of a culture and spirit that had existed for thousands of years living in harmony with the land.
In his imaging of an Aboriginal philosophy (that all spirits have a physical presence and everything physical has a spiritual presence) he again tapped one of the major themes of his personal work: the mirror held up to reveal an’other’ world. Cato saw that even as they are part of the whole, the duality of positive/negative, black/white, masculine/feminine are always in conflict.20 In the exploration of the conceptual richness buried within the dichotomy of opposites, Cato sought to enunciate the language of ambiguity and ambivalence,21 speaking through the photographic print.
The theme of duality was further expanded in his last main body of work, ‘Double Concerto: An Essay in Fiction’:
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| ‘Double Concerto’
(Pat Noone) |
30 images
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1984-1990
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| ‘Double Concerto’
(Chris Noone) |
19 images
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1985-1991
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‘Double Concerto’ may be seen as a critique of the power of witness and John Cato created two ‘other’ personas, Pat Noone and Chris Noone, to visualise alternative conditions within himself. The Essay explored the idea that if you send two people to the same location they will take photographs that are completely different from each other, that tell a distinct story about the location and their self:
“For the truth of the matter is that people have mixed feelings and confused opinions and are subject to contradictory expectations and outcomes, in every sphere of experience.”22
This slightly schizophrenic confusion between the two witnesses is further highlighted by Pat Noone using single black and white images in sequence. Chris Noone, on the other hand, uses multiple colour images joined together to form panoramic landscapes that feature two opposing horizons. The use of colour imagery in ‘Double Concerto’, with its link to the colour work of‘Earth Song’, can be seen to mark the closing of the circle in terms of John Cato’s personal work. In Another Way of Telling, John Berger states that …
“Photography, unlike drawing, does not possess a language. The photographic image is produced instantaneously by the reflection of light; its figuration is not impregnated by experience or consciousness.”23
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But in the personal work of John Cato it is a reflection of the psyche, not of light, that allows a consciousness to be present in the figuration of the photographic prints. The personal work is an expression of his self, his experience, his story and t(his) language, is our language, if we allow our imagination to speak.
Marcus Bunyan 2002
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Footnotes
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1 @
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Newton, Gael. Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988. Sydney: Australian National Gallery, William Collins, 1988, p.109.
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2 @
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Newton, Gael. Max Dupain. Sydney: David Ell Press,1980, p.34. |
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3 @
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Ibid., p.32.
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4 @
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Greenough, Sarah (et al). On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography. Boston: National Gallery of Art, Bullfinch Press, 1989. p.256. |
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5 @
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Ibid., p.256.
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6 @
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Newton, Gael. Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988. Sydney: Australian National Gallery, William Collins, 1988, p.131.
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7 @
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Ibid., p.131.
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8 @
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Newton, Gael. Max Dupain. Sydney: David Ell Press,1980, p.32.
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9 @
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Only the second exhibition by Australian photographers at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
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10 @
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Shmith, Athol. Light Vision No.1. Melbourne: Jean-Marc Le Pechoux (editor and publisher), Sept 1977, p.21.
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11 @
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Berger, John and Mohr, Jean. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon Books,1982, p.118.
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12 @
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Hall, James Baker. Minor White: Rites and Passages. New York: Aperture, 1978.
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13 @
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Conversation with the photographer 29/01/1997, Melbourne, Victoria.
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14 @
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Newton, Gael. Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988. Sydney: Australian National Gallery, William Collins, 1988, p.135, Footnote 7; p. 149.
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15 @
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Conversation with the photographer 22/01/1997, Melbourne, Victoria.
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16 @
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Norman, Dorothy. Alfred Stieglitz. New York: Aperture, 1976, p.5.
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17 @
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Ibid.,
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18 @
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Krishnamurti. Beginnings of Learning. London: Penguin, 1975, p.131.
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19 @
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Strong, Geoff. Review. The Age. Melbourne, 28/04/1982.
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20 @
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Conversation with the photographer 22/01/1997, Melbourne, Victoria.
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21 @
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The principal definition for ambiguity in Websters Third New International Dictionary is:
“admitting of two or more meanings … referring to two or more things at the same time.” That for ambivalence is “contradictory and oscillating subjective states.” Quoted in Davis, Fred. Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p.21. |
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22 @
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Levine, Donald. The Flight From Ambiguity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
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23 @
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Berger, John and Mohr, Jean. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon Books,1982, p.95. |
Review: ‘Time Machine: Sue Ford’ at Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Victoria
Tags: Australian photographer, Bliss at Yellow House King's Cros, feminist, ime Machine: Sue Ford, Monash Gallery of Art, Photographs of Women, Self-portrait with camera (1960–2006), Sue Ford, Sue Ford Archive, Sue Ford Bliss at Yellow House King's Cross, Sue Ford Carol Little Collins St studio, Sue Ford Lynne and Carol, Sue Ford Photographs of Women, Sue Ford Self-portrait 1968, Sue Ford Self-portrait 1974, Sue Ford Self-portrait 1976, Sue Ford Self-portrait 1986, Sue Ford Self-portrait with camera, Sue Ford Self-portrait with camera (1960–2006), Sue Ford St Kilda, Sue Ford Time, Time Machine
Exhibition dates: 7th April – 19th June 2011
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Many thankx to Mark Hislop for his help and the Monash Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
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Sue Ford (1943–2009)
Self-portrait 1968
1968
from the series Self-portrait with camera (1960–2006)
selenium toned gelatin silver, printed 2011
22.8 x 24 cm
courtesy Sue Ford Archive
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Sue Ford (1943–2009)
Self-portrait 1974
1974
from the series Self-portrait with camera (1960–2006)
selenium toned gelatin silver print, printed 2011
19.9 x 18 cm
courtesy Sue Ford Archive
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This is a solid exhibition of the work of beloved Australian photographer Sue Ford, essential looking for anyone wanting to have an overview of Australian photography.
The beautifully hung exhibition flows like music, interweaving up and down, the photographs framed in thin, black wood frames. It features examples of Ford’s black and white fashion and street photography; a selection of work from the famous black and white Time series (being bought for their collection by the Art Gallery of New South Wales) – small, snapshot size double portraits, the first portraits taken during the 1960′s, the second around 1974, formalist portraits in which the sitter is closely cropped around head and shoulders with the photographer using the camera as objectively as possible, the double portrait used to display changes in identity over time; a selection of Photographs of Women - modern prints from the Sue Ford archive that are wonderfully composed photographs with deep blacks that portray strong, independent, vulnerable, joyous women (see last four photographs below); and the most interesting work in the exhibition, the posthumous new series Self-portrait with camera (1960-2006) that evidence, through a 47 part investigation using colour prints from Polaroids, silver gelatin prints printed by the artist, prints made from original negatives and prints from scanned images where there was no negative available, a self-portrait of the artist in the process of ageing (see the two photographs above and below this review).
One of my favourite photographs in the exhibition was Margaret with Emma, Redcliffs, Queensland, 1971. The black and white photograph features a grandmother with her granddaughter, close to each other, both wearing floral dresses of different pattern, both staring intently out of the image at what is possibly a television with a weatherboard backdrop. A dark form hovers at the upper left of the photograph adding a disturbing note to the image but it is the look on the grandmother’s face – a look of shock, enthralment, blankness with eyes wide, that is matched by the intensity on the granddaughter’s face as she stares intently – that transcends the distance between photograph and viewer, between grandmother and granddaughter across time and space. The process of looking and ageing captured by the ‘time machine’, the camera, in one single image. The viewer understands this photograph for we all experience the evidence of our bodies, our mortality. We relate intimately to how the photograph reanimates in the present this moment from the past, the momenti mori of the photograph, the little death becoming our future death.
This notion is particularly poignant in the series Self-portrait with camera (1960-2006), a work that Sue Ford was actively engaged with before her death. Smaller colour prints from negatives and Polaroids are here interspersed with black and white photographs up to about 8″ x 10″ in size: the series contains 12 chromogenic photographs, 7 silver gelatin photographs, 6 dye fusion photographs and 22 selenium-toned photographs (printed 2011). In dark, contrasty prints the artist has photographed herself looking down into the camera shooting into a mirror, looking directly into the mirror with camera, with the camera on a timer, with the camera in/visible, being shot by other people with the camera pointed directly at her, with the camera perpendicular to the artist shot by someone else, with Ford behind a movie camera, with multiple refractions in mirrors. Sometimes Ford even becomes the camera (as in the 1986 self-portrait below: I am the camera, the camera is me).
Ford becomes the “one who looks” knowingly at herself, sometimes the author of that observation, sometimes oblivious to it (until later when she has collected these images). As Burke and Ennis note, these photographs of self-examination across the decades are as honest as one can ever be about oneself. This a deeply political but also deeply psychoanalytical investigation: not to “take care of yourself” as a form of knowing as in Greco-Roman antiquity but “knowing yourself” as the fundamental principle of understanding yourself: a procedure of objectification and subjection in which the photograph ‘marks’ our status and the passage of time, that makes us who we are – photographs as vital techniques in the constitution of the self as subject.3
The mirror is frequently used in these photographs to portray the self. While it is true that these are strong, intimate, unflinching and exacting images in the use of the mirror the im(pose)tures of life are singled/doubled/tripled – a reflection of the psyche that lead to discarded images of the self that are of little use in understanding the substance of our beginnings or the overall interpretation of the journey. What they do offer is cumulative evidence of a deep, personal conviction into the inquiry: who am I?
Rembrandt famously painted, drew and etched himself hundreds of times in the process of ageing; Ford has likewise done the same. If, as Victor Burgin observes, “An identity implies not only a location but a duration, a history,”4 then the nature of photography (including Ford’s self-reflexive project), concerned as it is with space and time, becomes the mirror in a search for identity. Photography as a mirror on the world constantly repeats moments of illumination in a re/vision of eternal recurrence, a performance that is a hybrid site: both a homogenous (the same “I”) and heterogenous (a different “I”) site of self-representation, different every time we look. To that end I would like you to look at the self-portrait from 1976 (below). The artist is completely absent, her shilouette, her dark shadow swallowed whole by the blank photographic plate on the left hand side of the image as though Ford, the camera and an image of infinite regress have become one, eternally engulfed by space-time but open to re/view at any time.
Whether looking down, looking toward or looking inward these fantastic photographs show a strong, independent women with a vital mind, an élan vital, a critical self-organisation and an understanding of the morphogenesis of things that will engage us for years to come. Essential looking.
Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog
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Sue Ford (1943–2009)
Self-portrait 1986
1986
from the series Self-portrait with camera (1960–2006)
gelatin silver print, printed 2011
8.4 x 6.5 cm
courtesy Sue Ford Archive
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Sue Ford (1943–2009)
Self-portrait 1976
1976
from the series Self-portrait with camera (1960–2006)
selenium toned gelatin silver print, printed 2011
24 x 18 cm
courtesy Sue Ford Archive
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“On 16 April 2011, the first major exhibition of the work of the late SUE FORD for two decades will open at Monash Gallery of Art.
Sue Ford (1943-2010) was one of Australia’s most important photographers and filmmakers. Ford studied photography at RMIT and in 1974 was the first Australian photographer to be given a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Ford passed away in 2009. Before her death, she was working with Monash Gallery of Art on an exhibition of her work which would feature her final major project Self-portrait with camera (1960–2006). This series of 47 photographs has never been shown before, and presents a compelling self-portrait of an artist. It underscores the central role the camera played in Ford’s life. Self-portrait with camera will be shown alongside a survey of Ford’s black-and-white photographs from the 1960s and 70s and examples of her most iconic work, Time series (1960s–1970s).
The exhibition describes a period when photography was charged with political and personal meaning. As photographic historian and contributor to the publication accompanying the exhibition Helen Ennis states: “Ford’s approach to art making has always been straightforward … She does not cultivate a mysterious artistic persona [since] … her art practice is purposeful; it is the outcome of her view of art as a political activity that is democratic, liberating and relevant to contemporary society.”
As MGA Director and curator of the exhibition Shaune Lakin states: “This exhibition provides a great opportunity for Australian audiences to reassess the work of this important photographer, whose work was always at once political, beautiful and elegiac. In an era when the photograph has become a highly disposable thing, it is important to acknowledge its role as an agent of change and memory.”
Press release from the Monash Gallery of Art
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Sue Ford (1943–2009)
Lynne and Carol
1962
selenium toned gelatin silver print, printed 2011
38.0 x 38.0 cm
courtesy Sue Ford Archive
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Sue Ford (1943–20
Carol, Little Collins St studio
1962
selenium toned gelatin silver print, printed 2011
37.9 x 38.1 cm
courtesy Sue Ford Archive
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Sue Ford (1943–2009)
St Kilda
1963
selenium toned gelatin silver print, printed 2011
38.0 x 38.0 cm
courtesy Sue Ford Archive
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Sue Ford (1943–2009)
Untitled [Bliss at Yellow House, King's Cross, Sydney]
c. 1972-3
selenium toned gelatin silver print, printed 2011
47.9 x 34.2 cm
courtesy Sue Ford Archive
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1. Burke, Janine. Self-portrait/self-image 1980-1981. Melbourne: Australian Directors’ Council, 1981. p.4 quoted in Ennis, Helen. “Faces are Maps: Sue Ford and Portraiture,” in Lakin, Shaune (ed.,). Sue Ford: Self-portrait with camera (1960-2006). Melbourne: Monash Gallery of Art, 2011, np.
2. Hutton, Patrick. “Foucault, Freud, and the Technologies of the Self,” in Martin, Luther and Gutman, Huck and Hutton, Patrick (eds.,). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock Publications, 1988, p.139.
3. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish, quoted in Gutman, Huck. “Rousseau’s Confessions: A Technology of the Self,” in Martin, Luther and Gutman, Huck and Hutton, Patrick (eds.,). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock Publications, 1988, p.99.
4. Burgin, Victor. In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p.36.
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Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill
Victoria 3150 Australia
T: + 61 3 8544 0500
Opening hours:
Tue-Fri: 10am-5pm
Sat-Sun: 12pm-5pm
Mon/public holidays: closed
Monash Gallery of Art website
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