Elizabeth Gertsakis (Australian, b. 1954) Children Playing (detail) 2017 Digital prints on metallic silver acrylic 39 x 163cm
Conquering Orientalism
A beautiful, sensitive, sensual even, exhibition by the wonderful Elizabeth Gertsakis at William Mora Galleries. The artist forms a living relationship with early images of women and children from the Prefecture of Florina – mostly taken from that most vernacular form of photograph, the postcard – something that was sold as souvenir to the tourist trade, or posted to loved ones overseas.
Gertsakis identifies with their ethnicities and beliefs and physical appearances, transmuting their identities and narratives by printing these ephemeral objects on steel, that most durable of substances, which makes them shine under the gallery lights. The photographs both transcend time and transcend the physicality of the actual photograph… making their hidden histories a precious, and contemporary, thing. Like their protagonists, the steel makes the images and the people in them hardy enough to survive the vicissitudes thrust upon these communal people.
Gertsakis observes, “My voice is in placing myself between the present and the past as it has been generated by the cameras of others.” Beautifully enunciated. With her deep familial roots in the area – one that endured nearly five hundred years of Islamic rule and culture, as well as multiple ethnic communities and religions; Christian Greeks, Slavs, Bulgarians, Jews, Turkic and Albanian Moslems, Vlachs and Gypsies – Gertsakis creates witness and testament to her own communal familial past.
The rare and unique costumes come from the artists personal collection and when I was in the gallery space there seemed to be this electricity flowing between the images and the cloth. It was almost as though the people in the photographs were dancing again, were speaking to us today of their trials and tribulations, of their energy to survive the turmoil of the first decades of the 20th century.
Elizabeth is first generation… her father and grandfather and grandmothers… were those people…. exactly as they appear. They survived the yoke of the oppressor and conquered Orientalism. These are their valuable, inspiring stories, beautifully told.
Installation view of the exhibition Girls In Our Town: Women in the Shadow of ‘The Magnificent Empire’ Florina Prefecture & Region, Macedonia Greece 1900-1917, 2017 by Elizabeth Gertsakis at William Mora Galleries, Richmond Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Elizabeth Gertsakis (Australian, b. 1954) Florina 2017 Digital prints on metallic silver acrylic 39 x 174cm
Elizabeth Gertsakis (Australian, b. 1954) Dancing Macedonian Girls 2017 Digital prints on metallic silver acrylic 39 x 136cm
Installation view of the exhibition Girls In Our Town: Women in the Shadow of ‘The Magnificent Empire’ Florina Prefecture & Region, Macedonia Greece 1900-1917, 2017 by Elizabeth Gertsakis at William Mora Galleries, Richmond Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Girls In Our Town: Women in the Shadow of ‘The Magnificent Empire’ Florina Prefecture & Region, Macedonia Greece 1900-1917, 2017 by Elizabeth Gertsakis at William Mora Galleries, Richmond Photo: Marcus Bunyan
I was born in the town of Florina, Macedonia, Greece. This town is in the top north western part of Greece adjacent to Albania, FYROM and Bulgaria. My family migrated to Australia in 1954 and I was educated in Australia
Florina was an oriental (ανατολικό) town belonging to the Ottoman Empire which controlled Greece from 1453 to 1922; the people of Florina were a mesh of multiple ethnic communities and religions; Christian Greeks, Slavs, Bulgarians, Jews, Turkic and Albanian Moslems, Vlachs and Gypsies. These religious groups lived and worked together in close proximity. Florina was a typical Balkan town in the later stages of the decline of Ottoman rule in the Balkans.
From 1903-1918, and including World War One (1914) and the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922 the entire northern territories of the Graeco-Balkan Peninsula (including Serbia) suffered great population losses through wars, cataclysmic population displacements (ethnic cleansing) and population exchanges. Refugee diaspora was moving in all directions, across from east to west in both directions. This vast political re-construction of Europe and the Balkans may have initially started from wars of revolutionary independence from the Ottomans, and subsequent internal Balkan expansionist claims to new territory, but it was the conflagration of the First World War that irreversibly rocked its cultural foundations for the future, beyond any political value in the creation of new national states in the Balkans and Asia Minor.
This history of diaspora and displacement laid down a new pattern for the twentieth century and into the twenty first century; a set of historical problems that had and continue to have irreversible impact on the function of community memory in relation to identity experienced by each succeeding wave of refugees and migrants who abandon everything in the simple need to escape and to survive.
I have chosen to highlight the consequences of cultural uprooting on memory and identity through the images of women from Florina, taken by various known and unknown photographers in the period from 1900-1918. These photographs were taken by people who may have had commercial or political intentions in the first instance but the resulting image does not always remain in the control of its original maker. Gender is important in this exhibition because it has been traditionally the female that carries the symbolic function of ritual and memory in relation to culture and identity, and ultimately, the idea and meaning of where belonging and home is. In other words the responsibility falls on the refugee and migrant woman if there is any question or ambivalence or sense of lack. This responsibility remains a constant memorial and cognitive challenge to the psyche of the female survivor, refugee and migrant.
I have used archival photographic images and reconfigured them to create a narrative representing difference. They have been extracted from their solitary sources from commercial photography, press photography and the archives of the Photographic Section of the French Army (Campaign d’Orient 1916-1918).
The installations invite entry into unknown individual histories and emphasis shared past communal lives even though there were multiple political differences and historical consequences. The original images were the result of various kinds of personal and spatial exploitation, both desired and undesired. Photography as a commercial technology played a profound role in the identification and changing of the global meaning of identity that resulted from death during war, disruption and the re-allocation of populations.
Today this usage of images of diaspora continues in the same way via 24/7 news and the internet. I feel it is important to examine female representation during times of crisis and trauma. My desire is that this exhibition encourages multiple narratives and a focus on recognition and justice for minorities internationally and in Australia, as well as the recognition and diversity of individual authenticity. Within the stereotype I look for authenticity, not for any kind of ethnic purity; and I know this is the case both within multicultural as well as the liberal concerns for justice and human rights issues in regard to minorities in contemporary art. As a woman it is the moment when, through my life in art, history and photography, that I accepted the bequest of my own historically difficult position as being the reality of my own identity.
Elizabeth Gertsakis, July 2017
Elizabeth Gertsakis (Australian, b. 1954) Lerinki 2017 Digital prints on metallic silver acrylic 39 x 72cm
Elizabeth Gertsakis (Australian, b. 1954) Beautiful Macedonians 2017 Digital prints on metallic silver acrylic 39 x 68cm
Elizabeth Gertsakis (Australian, b. 1954) Noli Me Tangere (Don’t Touch Me) 2017 Digital prints on metallic silver acrylic 60 x 91cm
William Mora Galleries 60 Tanner St, Richmond VIC 3121, Australia Phone: +61 3 9429 1199
Opening hours: Wednesday – Friday 10am – 4pm or by appointment
My hand is progressing slowly. A return to part-time work in the next couple of weeks, for which I will be grateful. It has been tough road dealing with this injury.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Antoine-Louis Barye (French, 1796-1875) Walking tiger Tigre qui marche c. 1841, cast 1900 Bronze National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest, 1927
John Armstrong (English, 1893-1973) Invocation 1938 Tempera on plywood National Gallery of Victoria Purchased with funds donated by Ian Hicks AM and Dorothy Hicks, 2006
Invocation is one of a series of paintings, which John Armstrong begun in the 1930’s as a direct statement against the rise of Fascism in Europe. John Armstrong observed Fascism in Italy at first hand and became an active left wing campaigner against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. He was commissioned as an official war artist, designing a cover for a leaflet in the 1945 election campaign and contributed occasional articles and poetry to left wing journals. In his painting Victory, he imagined the result of a nuclear holocaust, which attracted the attention at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1958.
Text from the Leicester Galleries website [Online] Cited 17/07/2017. No longer available online
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Eclipse 1911, printed 1956- early 1970s Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased, 1978
Surrogates and the Surreal
Atget’s photograph Pendant l’éclipse (During the eclipse) was featured on the cover of the seventh issue of the Parisian Surrealists’ publication La Révolution surréaliste, with the caption Les Dernières Conversions (The last converts), in June 1926. The picture was uncredited, as were the two additional photographs reproduced inside. Although Atget firmly resisted the association, his work – in particular his photographs of shop windows, mannequins, and the street fairs around Paris – had captured the attention of artists with decidedly avant-garde inclinations, such as Man Ray and Tristan Tzara. Man Ray lived on the same street as Atget, and the young American photographer Berenice Abbott (working as Man Ray’s studio assistant) learned of the French photographer and made his acquaintance in the mid-1920s – a relationship that ultimately brought the contents of Atget’s studio at the time of his death (in 1927) to The Museum of Modern Art almost forty years later.
Pierre Bonnard (France, 1867-1947) Siesta La Sieste 1900 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest, 1949
Eugène Boudin (French, 1824-1998) Low tide at Trouville Trouville, Mareé basse 1894 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest, 1939
John Brack (Australian, 1920-1999) Self-portrait 1955 Melbourne, Victoria Oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria Purchased with the assistance of the National Gallery Women’s Association, 2000
Striking in its candour, with its subject stripped of vanity and dressed in early-morning attire, Self portrait is a piercing study of a man engaged in the intimacy of shaving. Although images of women at their toilette have been frequently depicted by both male and female Australian artists, it is unusual for men to be shown or to show themselves in this context. Modest in scale, Brack’s image is conceived in a complex yet subtle colour scheme, applied with clarity and precision.
Geoffrey Smith. “John Brack’s Self Portrait,” on the National Gallery of Victoria website 4th June 2014 [Online] Cited 21/12/2021
Britains Ltd, London manufacturer (English, 1860-1997) Milk float and horse no. 45F from the Model home farm series 1921-1961 c. 1950 Painted lead alloy National Gallery of Victoria Presented by Miss Lucy Kerley and her nephew John Kerley, 1982
Jacques Callot (French, 1592-1635) The firing squad L’Arquebusade Plate 12 from Les Misères et les malheurs de la guerre The miseries and misfortunes of war series 1633 Etching, 2nd of 3 states National Gallery of Victoria Purchased, 1950
Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024) Nahant, Massachusetts 1965 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased with the assistance of the National Gallery Society of Victoria, 1977
Jean Charles Cazin (French, 1841-1901, lived in England 1871-1875) The rainbow L’Arc-en-ciel late 1880s Oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest, 1913
Marshall Claxton (English, 1813-1881, lived in Australia 1850-1854) An emigrant’s thoughts of home 1859 Oil on cardboard National Gallery of Victoria Presented by the National Gallery Women’s Association, 1974
Marshall Claxton’s painting An emigrant’s thoughts of home (1859) belongs to a clutch of works, both fine and popular, both pictorial and literary, that for an Australasian audience are perhaps the most resonant of the many products of Victorian culture. Emigration, a social and political phenomenon for mid-nineteenth-century Britain, and the essential lubricant of British imperialism, inspired a profusion of paintings, prints, novels, plays, poems, essays and letters that speak eloquently about the realities and myths of Victorian Britain and its role in the world, engaging concepts of the family, womanhood, the artist’s role and function and, indeed, the meaning of life.
Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003) Teacup ballet 1935, printed 1992 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992
Among Cotton’s most famous photographs, Teacup ballet has very humble origins. It was taken after hours in the Dupain studio and used a set of cheap cups and saucers Cotton had earlier bought from a Woolworths store for use around the studio. As she later recounted: ‘Their angular handles suggested to me the position of “arms akimbo” and that led to the idea of a dance pattern’. The picture uses a range of formal devices that became common to Cotton’s work, especially the strong backlighting used to create dramatic tonal contrasts and shadows. The picture achieved instant success, and was selected for exhibition in the London Salon of Photography for 1935.
Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003) The sleeper 1939, printed 1992 Gelatin silver photograph, ed. 4/25 National Gallery of Victoria Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992
The sleeper 1939, Olive Cotton’s graceful study of her friend Olga Sharp resting while on a bush picnic, made around the same time as Max Dupain’s Sunbaker, presents a different take upon the enjoyment of life in Australia. The woman is relaxed, nestled within the environment. The mood is one of secluded reverie.
Edward Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Kalóqutsuis – Qágyuhl 1914, printed 1915 Photogravure National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Ms Christine Godden, 1991
Not only was he one of the greatest ethnographic photographers of all time (as well as being an ethnographer recording more than 10,000 songs on a primitive wax cylinder, and writing down vocabularies and pronunciation guides for 75 languages) … he was also an aesthetic photographer. Looking at his photographs you can feel that he adhered to the principles of the nature and appreciation of beauty situated within the environment of the Native American cultures and peoples. He had a connection to the people and to the places he was photographing…
Curtis created a body of work unparrallleled in the annals of photography – an ethnographic study of an extant civilisation before it vanished (or so they thought at the time). Such a project stretched over thirty years, producing 45-50 thousand negatives “many of them on glass and some as large as fourteen by seventeen inches” of which 2,200 original photographs appeared in his magnum opus, The North American Indian…
While all great photographers have both technical skill and creative ability it is the dedication of this artist to his task over so many years that sets him apart. That dedication is critically coupled with his innate ability to capture the “spirit” of the Native American cultures and peoples, their humanity.
Frances Derham (Australian, 1894-1987) Building the bridge 1929 Colour linocut on Japanese paper National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Mr Richard Hodgson Derham, 1988
Kerry Dundas (Australian, b. 1931, lived in Europe 1958-1967) A girl is carried away under arrest From the Youth against the Bomb series 1961-1963 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1971
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Bondi 1939 Gelatin silver photograph 30.3 × 29.5cm National Gallery of Victoria Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board, 1976
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Hitchhikers, near Vicksburg, Mississippi 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1975
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Auto dump, near Easton, Pennsylvania 1935, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1975
William Frater (born Scotland 1890, arrived Australia 1913, died 1974) The blue nude c. 1934 Oil on canvas on cardboard National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Mrs Lina Bryans 1969
His contribution to art in Australia was, however, as a painter who introduced Post-Impressionist principles and challenged the notion that art was an imitation of nature.
Frater’s oeuvre developed between 1915 and 1920 towards a simplification of design, an interplay of massed lights and shadows, and sonorous low-keyed colour that reflected his interest in the classical seventeenth century painters in interaction with the analytical tonal theory of Max Meldrum. Notable examples of his predominantly figure and portrait paintings are ‘The artist’s wife reading’ (1915) and ‘Portrait of artist’s wife’ (1919). An experimental Colourist phase followed in the next decade. His first solo exhibition was held in May 1923 at the Athenaeum, Melbourne, and he exhibited with the Twenty Melbourne Painters from the late 1920s, and the Contemporary Group of Melbourne in the 1930s.
His approach in the 1930s was markedly indebted to Cézanne, especially in the portraits which predominated until his retirement… Frater gave aggressive leadership to the small group of modernists in the 1920s. His example, teaching, lecturing and crusty style of polemic did much to disrupt the academic style as the arbiter of pictorial values and to pioneer a change of taste in the community.
L. J. Course. “Frater, William (1890-1974),” on the Australian Dictionary of Biography website, published first in hardcopy 1981 [Online] Cited 23 December 2021
Emmanuel Frémiet (French, 1824-1910) Gorilla carrying off a woman Gorille enlevant une femme 1887 Bronze National Gallery of Victoria Gift of the artist 1907
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) Hillcrest, New York 1970, printed c. 1977 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1977
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) Mount Rushmore 1969, printed c. 1977 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1977
The ‘tourist gaze’
As Grundberg notes, Friedlander’s terse depiction shows both the sight and the tourists themselves, being brought into existence through the effects of looking, reflecting, framing and imaging. These, he adds, are all linked to the general project of culturally appropriating the natural world. ‘Natural site has become acculturated sight’ (Grundberg 1990: 15).
As the image makes clear, the ‘sight’ or the ‘site’ is a ‘seeing’ without a subject, for it pre-exists the arrival and activity of any individual tourist-photographer, who, once located there, is framed as much as framing. The sight is not so much an object to be viewers an already structured condition of seeing, a situation which places the sightseer even as he or she freely choose to look or shoot.
The effects of photography’s presence in the tourist system merely completed a process under way before photography’s birth. As tourists, even at the moment of photographing, even if touring cameraless, we are not so much looking as looking at images, or looking for images. Tourism provides us less with experience than with events to be seen, Or rather, events to look at. The privileging of the visual grants us separation from our own experience… We look on or look in through the distancing arrangements of the camera or through eyes educated to see with the same ontological remoteness. The world of the tourist is ‘over there’, in the past-present, in the exotic-ordinary. It is framed off, the object of imaging or description, in some spectacular distance, or set back as performance (Greenwood in Smith 1989).
Peter Osborne. Traveling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture. Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 81-82.
Barbara Hepworth (English, 1903-1975) Eidos 1947 Stone, synthetic polymer paint National Gallery of Victoria Purchased with the assistance of the Samuel E. Wills Bequest to commemorate the retirement of Dr E. Westbrook, Director of Arts for Victoria, 1981
Eidos a Greek term meaning “form” “essence”, “type” or “species”. The early Greek concept of form precedes attested philosophical usage and is represented by a number of words mainly having to do with vision, sight, and appearance. The words, εἶδος (eidos) and ἰδέα (idea) come from the Indo-European root *weid-, “see”.Eidos (though not idea) is already attested in texts of the Homeric era, the earliest Greek literature. This transliteration and the translation tradition of German and Latin lead to the expression “theory of Ideas.” The word is however not the English “idea,” which is a mental concept only.
The meaning of the term εἶδος (eidos), “visible form”, and related terms μορφή (morphē), “shape”, and φαινόμενα (phainomena), “appearances”, from φαίνω (phainō), “shine”, Indo-European *bhā-, remained stable over the centuries until the beginning of philosophy, when they became equivocal, acquiring additional specialised philosophic meanings.
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) Sam Pine, 8 year old truant newsboy who lives at 717 West California Street 1917 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1980
David Hockney (born England 1937, worked in United States 1964-1968, 1975- ) Reclining figure 1975 Etching and liftground etching, ed. 38/75 National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Margaret Toll 2006
Edmond-François Aman-Jean (French, 1860-1936) Woman resting La Femme couchée c. 1904 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest 1905
Max Klinger (German, 1857-1920) Cast of artist’s hands 1920 plaster National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Mrs Marcelle Osins, 1994
Fred Kruger (Australian born Germany, 1831-1888) Coast scene, Mordialloc Creek, near Cheltenham c. 1871 Albumen silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Mrs Beryl M. Curl, 1979
The best of the landscape photographs have nothing to do with Arcadian, pastoral life at all. For me, Kruger’s photographs only start to come alive when he is photographing gum trees against the sky. Anyone who has tried to photograph the Australian bush knows how difficult it is to evince a “feeling” for the bush and Kruger achieves this magnificently in a series of photographs of gum trees in semi-cleared land, such as Bush scene near Highton (c. 1879). These open ‘park-like’ landscapes are not sublime nor do they picture the spread of colonisation but isolate the gum trees against the sky. They rely on the thing itself to speak to the viewer, not a constructed posturing or placement of figures to achieve a sterile mise-en-scène.
Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934) No title (Couple with a cabinet photograph and ghost in background) 1880s Albumen silver photograph, colour dyes National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 2004
Kimbei Kusakabe arrived in Yokohama in 1856 and became Felice Beato’s pupil, hand-colouring his photographs until 1863. In 1881, he opened his own studio and promptly became one of the most prosperous and influential photographers of his generation, rivalling the Western artists that had until then dominated the market. With his coloured portraits, everyday scenes and landscapes, he is the purveyor of souvenir images for Westerners visiting Japan. Kimbei Kusakabe depicted men in serene social and economic contexts while women – his favourite subjects – were represented in romantic portraits as well as domestic and cultural scenes. The young mysterious and submissive geisha was particularly appealing to Western audiences and the Japanese photographer helped establish their visual identity as icons of feminine beauty and social etiquette. Kimbei Kusakabe’s rare images are a rich resource for the comprehension of a Japan that has now disappeared.
Text from The Red List website [Online] Cited 17/07/2017. No longer available online
Kusakabe Kimbei worked with Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried as a photographic colourist and assistant before opening his own workshop in Yokohama in 1881, in the Benten-dōri quarter, and from 1889 operating in the Honmachi quarter. He also opened a branch in the Ginza quarter of Tokyo. Around 1885, he acquired the negatives of Felice Beato and of Stillfried, as well as those of Uchida Kuichi. Kusakabe also acquired some of Ueno Hikoma’s negatives of Nagasaki. He stopped working as a photographer in 1912-1913.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Towards Los Angeles, California 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1975
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Ditched, stalled and stranded, San Joaquin Valley, California 1935, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1975
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Interlude, after watching the Fourth of July Parade, Vale, Oregon 1941, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1975
José López (born Cuba 1941, lived in United States c. 1961-1992, died United States 1992) Luis Medina (born Cuba 1942, lived in United States 1961-1985, died United States 1985) Boy asleep by the beach 1976 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1978
Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945) No title (Woman collecting a Christmas present from the car) from the Christmas Holidays with Bob’s Family, Mermaid Beach, Queensland series 1977-1978, printed 1979 Gelatin silver photograph, coloured pencils and fibre tipped pen, ed. 1/5 National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1980
This was a very hands on process, an observation confirmed by artist Ruth Maddison. “The process was like hand watering your garden, an intense exchange and engagement with the object. When I started I was completely untrained, but I loved the process. I just experimented in order to understand what medium does what on what paper surface. There was the beauty of its object and its physicality. I just loved the object.” Her series Christmas holiday with Bob’s family, Mermaid Beach, Queensland (1977-1978), photographed over Christmas Day and several days afterwards, evidences this magical transformation. Vernacular photographs of a typical Australia Christmas holiday become something else, transformed into beautiful, atypical representations of family, friendship, celebration and life.
Henri Matisse (France, 1869-1954) Reclining nude on a pink couch Nu couché sur canapé rose 1919 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest 1952
Amedeo Modigliani (born Italy 1884, lived in France 1906-1920, died France 1920) Nude resting c. 1916-1919 Pencil on buff paper; laid down National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest 1948
László Moholy-Nagy (born Hungary 1895, lived in Germany 1920-1934, lived in United States 1935-1937, United States 1937-1946, died United States 1946) Helsinki 1927, printed 1973 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1975
David Moore (Australian, 1927-2003) Migrants arriving in Sydney 1966 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1991
In this evocative image Moore condenses the anticipation and apprehension of immigrants into a tight frame as they arrive in Australia to begin a new life. The generational mix suggests family reconnections or individual courage as each face displays a different emotion.
Moore’s first colour image Faces mirroring their expectations of life in the land down under, passengers crowd the rail of the liner Galileo Galilei in Sydney Harbour was published in National Geographic in 1967.1 In that photograph the figures are positioned less formally and look cheerful. But it is this second image, probably taken seconds later, which Moore printed in black-and-white, that has become symbolic of national identity as it represents a time when Australia’s rapidly developing industrialised economy addressed its labour shortage through immigration. The strength of the horizontal composition of cropped figures underpinned by the ship’s rail is dramatised by the central figure raising her hand – an ambiguous gesture either reaching for a future or reconnecting with family. The complexity of the subject and the narrative the image implies ensured its public success, which resulted in a deconstruction of the original title, ‘European migrants’, by the passengers, four of whom it later emerged were Sydneysiders returning from holiday, alongside two migrants from Egypt and Lebanon.2 Unintentionally Moore’s iconic image has become an ‘historical fiction’, yet the passengers continue to represent an evolving Australian identity in relation to immigration.
1/ Max Dupain and associates: Accessed 17/06/2006. No longer available online 2/ Thomas D & Sayers A 2000, From face to face: portraits by David Moore, Chapter & Verse, Sydney
Henry Moore (English, 1898-1986) Reclining figure distorted – Sectional line 1979 Chalk, charcoal, wax crayon, ballpoint pen and watercolour over pencil National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Ginny Green, Sandra Bardas OAM family, Vicki Vidor OAM and Bindy Koadlow in memory of their parents Loti Smorgon AO and Victor Smorgon AC through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2014
William De Morgan & Co., London (manufacturer, England 1872-1911) William De Morgan (designer, England 1839-1917) Startled tigers, dish c. 1880 Earthenware National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest 1980
Helen Ogilvie (Australian, 1902-1993) (Four figures seated at a table listening to a phonograph through earpieces) Illustration to Flinders Lane: recollections of Alfred Felton by Russell Grimwade. Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1947 c. 1947 Wood-engraving on Japanese paper, proof National Gallery of Victoria
“What interested me I think were the English wood engravers. I would have seen them in reproductions in books … I think it appealed to me as an artistic expression because it was done so directly with the hand. I know that when a painter is painting the hand is connected with the brain. But with wood engraving it seemed to me it was almost more so. And I got very worked up about it, but I had no way of learning … I know how I got started. Eric Thake was the man who said to me, “I’ll show you how to use your tool.”‘
from Anne Ryan, ‘Australian etchings and engravings 1880s-1930s from the Gallery’s collection’, AGNSW, Sydney 2007
John Perceval (Australian, 1923-2000) Lover’s walk in the corn, summer, England 1964 Oil and toy mouse on canvas National Gallery of Victoria Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Fingal Pastoral Property Limited, Fellow, 1997
Peter Peryer (New Zealand, 1941-2018) Seeing 1989 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1996
G. B. Poletto (Italian, 1915-1988) No title (Ava Gardner in wardrobe still for On the beach: Street) 1957 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 2003
David Potts (Australian, 1926-2012, lived in England 1950-1955) Cat show, London 1953 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased through the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund 1975
August Sander (German, 1876-1964) Itinerant basket makers from the People of the Twentieth Century project 1929, printed 1973 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1974
Nomadism
In the literature on nomadism, there is considerable disagreement over the range of societies that should be designated as “nomadic,” but there is some consensus that at least three categories of mobile peoples should be recognised. The first category, to which many wish to restrict the term “nomadic,” is that of pastoral nomads… The second broad category of nomads is that of hunter-gatherers, whose mode of subsistence sets them apart from both pastoralists and sedentary farmers…
The third basic category is that of Gypsies, itinerant basket-makers, tinkers, weavers, mimes, magicians, musicians, horse dealers, nostrum traders, carnival people, circus performers, and so on. Characterised the variously as “service nomads,” “economic nomads,” “commercial nomads,” “craftsman nomads,” “non-food producing nomads,” “floating industrial populations,” “peripatetic tribes,” “peripatetic peoples” or plain “peripatetics,” these are spatially mobile peoples who primarily exploit resources in the social environment. They exploit what Berland and Salo call a distinct peripatetic niche: “the regular demand for specialised goods and/or services that more sedentary or pastoral communities cannot, or will not, support on a permanent basis.”
Ronald Bogue. Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics. London and New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 114-115.
Ben Shahn (born Lithuania 1898, lived in United States c. 1925-1969, died United States 1969) A deputy with a gun on his hip during the September 1935 strike in Morgantown, West Virginia 1935, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased, 1975
Athol Shmith (Australian, 1914-1990) Misses Mary and Rae Plotkin, bridesmaids at the wedding of Mrs Edith Sheezel 1940 Hand-coloured gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Mary Lipshut through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gift’s Program, 2012
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911, lived throughout Europe and Asia 1871-1910) No title (Tattooed bettōs, porters) c. 1875, printed c. 1877-1880 Albumen silver photograph, colour dyes National Gallery of Victoria Purchased through the NGV Foundation with the assistance of The Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 2001
“There are two employments which I have mentioned among those of domestic servants because they would be so classed by us, but which in Japan rank among the trades. The jinrikisha man and the groom belong, as a rule, to a certain class at the bottom of the social ladder, and no samurai would think of entering either of these occupations, except under stress of severest poverty. The bettōs, or grooms, are a hereditary class and a regular guild, and have a reputation, among both Japanese and foreigners, as a betting, gambling, cheating, good-for-nothing lot. An honest bettō is a rare phenomenon.”
Alice Mabel Bacon. Japanese Girls and Women. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company The Riverside Press, 1891, p. 319.
Hiroshi Sugimoto (born Japan 1948, lived in United States and Japan 1976- ) Winnetka Drive-In, Pb aramount 1993 Gelatin silver photograph, ed. 8/25 National Gallery of Victoria Bowness Family Fund for Contemporary Photography, 2009
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s famous series Theaters is represented in the exhibition by the work Winnetka Drive-In, Paramount (1993) where Sugimoto “photographs auditoriums of American movie theaters, and drive-in movies, during showings. The exposure time used for the photograph corresponds with the projection time of the film. This allows him to save the duration of the entire film in a single shot. What remains visible of the film’s time-compressed, individual images is the bright screen of the movie theater, which illuminates the architecture of the space. That its content retreats into the background makes the actual film a piece of information, manifesting itself in the (movie theater) space. As a result, instead of a content-related event, film presents itself here as the relationship between time and spatial perception.”3
If we think of the camera lens as being fully open, like an eye without blinking, for the duration of the length of the film then the shutter of the lens has to be set on “B” for Bulb which allows for long exposure times under the direct control of the photographer. “The term bulb is a reference to old-style pneumatically actuated shutters; squeezing an air bulb would open the shutter and releasing the bulb would close it… It appears that when instantaneous shutters were introduced, they included a B setting so that the familiar bulb behaviour could be duplicated with a cable release.”4 In other words light waves, reflecting from the surface of objects, are controlled by the photographer over an indefinite period (not the short “snap” of the freeze frame / the decisive moment), accumulating light from thousands of years in the past through the lens of the camera onto the focal plane, coalescing into a single image, controlled and constructed by the photographer.
Dr Marcus Bunyan from a review of the NGV exhibition Light Works 2012
3/ Kellein, Thomas and Sugimoto, Hiroshi. Time Exposed. Thames & Hudson, First edition, 1995, p. 91, quoted in Heike Helfert. “Hiroshi Sugimoto “Theaters”,” on the Media Art Net website Nd [Online] Cited 08/09/2012. 4/ Anonymous. “Bulb (photography),” on the Wikipedia website Nd [Online] Cited 08/09/2012.
James Thomas (English, 1854-1921, lived in Italy 1889-1906) Thyrsis 1914 Bronze, patina National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest, 1915
Joseph Turner (active in Australia 1856-1880s) No title (Laying the foundation stone of the Geelong clock tower) 1856 Daguerreotype leather, wood, silk, gilt metal and glass (case) National Gallery of Victoria Purchased, 1974
Market Square was a town square located in the centre of Geelong, Victoria, Australia. Consisting of eight acres (2.9 hectares) of land, the area was reserved by Governor Sir George Gipps as a town square during the initial surveying of Geelong. The area later became a produce market, before being progressively built upon. Today the Market Square Shopping Centre occupies the site, having been opened in 1985 by the City of Geelong…
A clock tower was built in the centre of the square in 1856. It was the idea of the second mayor of Geelong James Austin, who offered to pay for a clock tower in Geelong to mark his term as mayor. The clock was featured in The Illustrated London News in March 1855. Components for the clock arrived in Geelong on November 13, 1855 from England, but the location for the clock had yet to be decided. Suggestions of high ground at top of Moorabool, Yarra or Gheringhap Streets were put forward at the time, the indecision lasting into early 1856. In July 1857 a decision was made, and the foundation stone was finally laid in the Market Square…
The clock tower remained until October 1923 when it was demolished to make way for the CML Building. There was a public outcry, and no one was willing to demolish it. However, it was deemed too impractical to move intact, and was brought down by steel cables attached to traction engine. The site of the clock tower is marked by a plaque in the Market Square Shopping Centre.
This project has been supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria
PLEASE NOTE: I am still recovering from my hand operation which is going to take longer than expected. All of the text has been constructed using a dictation programme and corrected using only my right hand – a tedious process. I have to keep my mental faculties together, otherwise this hand will drive me to distraction… Marcus
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Black gum 1-3 2007 From the series Australian graffiti C-type prints Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Photo: Andrew Curtis
Still singing, still Dreaming, still loving… not dying.
This is a strong survey exhibition of the work of contemporary Australian Indigenous artist and Bidjara man exploring the world, Christian Thompson. As with any survey exhibition, it can only give us a glimpse into the long standing development of the artist’s work, inviting the viewer to then research more fully the themes, conceptual acts and bodies (of work) that have led the artist to this point in his artistic development. Having said that the exhibition, together with its insightful catalogue essays and additional images that do not appear in the exhibition, allow the viewer to be challenged intellectually, aesthetically and most importantly … spiritually. And to be somewhat conflicted by the art as well, it has to be said.
Thompson’s “multidisciplinary practice explores notions of cultural hybridity, along with identity and history, creating works that transcend cultural boundaries.” His self-reflexive and self-referential bodies of work, often with the artist using his body as an “armature for his characters, costumes and various props,” are intuitive and imaginative in how they relate Aboriginal and Australian/European history, taking past time into present time which influences future time. Time, memory, history, space, landscape are conflated into one point, enunciated through acts of ritual intimacy. These ritual intimacies, these performative acts, are enabled through an understanding of a regularised and constrained repetition of norms (in this case, the declarative power of colonialism), where the taking of a photograph of an Aboriginal person (for example), is “a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production…” (Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 95).
What is so heartening to see in this exhibition is a contemporary Indigenous artist not relying on re-animating colonial images of past injustices, but re-imagining these images to produce a spiritual connection to Country, to place, to people in the present moment. As Charlotte Day, Director, MUMA and Hetti Perkins, guest curator observe in the wall text at the beginning of the exhibition, “Rather than appropriating or restaging problematic ethnographic images of indigenous ancestors held in the Museum’s photographic collection, Thompson has chosen to spend significant periods of time with these images, absorbing their ‘aura’ and developing a personal artistic and deferential response that is decisively empowered.” As Marina Warner states in her excellent catalogue essay “Magical Aesthetics”, these ritual intimacies are a “magical re-animation and adopt time-honoured processes of making holy – of hallowing. Adornment is central to ritual and a prime way of glorifying and consecration.” What Thompson is doing is not quoting but translating the source-text into new material. As Mary Jacobus notes of the work of the painter Cy Twombly, “Quotation involves the repurposing of an existing text: translation requires a swerve from the source-text as it finds new directions and enters unknown terrain.” (Mary Jacobus. Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016, p. 7).
This auto-ethnographic exploration and adornment leads to a deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of time in a heterotopic space, juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites of contestation – Thompson’s travels and research from around the world, the embodiment in his own culture and that of contemporary Australia, pop culture, fashion, music and language – where, as Hetti Perkins says, “the unknowable is a lovely thing” and where Thompson can affect and influence “the Zeitgeist through more subversive means.” These spaces of ritualised production overlaid with memory, imagination, desire, and nostalgia, these fragmented images, become a process and a performance in which Thompson seeks to ameliorate the objects aura through a process of ‘spiritual repatriation’. Thompson’s performativity is where the ritual of production and meaning is never fully predetermined at any stage of production and reception.
Here, in terms of ‘aura’ and ‘spirit’, I am interested in the word “repatriation”. Repatriation means to send (someone) back to their own country – from the verb repatriare, from re- ‘back’ + Latin patria ‘native land’. It has an etymological link to the word “patriot” – from late Latin patriota ‘fellow countryman’, from Greek patriōtēs, from patrios ‘of one’s fathers’, from patris ‘fatherland’ – and all the imperial connotations that are associated with the word. So, to send someone back (against their own will? by force?) or to be patriotic, as belonging to or coming from, the fatherland. A land that is father, farther away. Therefore, it is with regard to a centralised, monolithic body and its materialities (for the body is usually centrally placed in Thompson’s work) in Thompson’s instinctive works, that relations of discourse and power will always produce hierarchies and overlappings which are going to be contested. As Judith Butler notes,
“That each of those categories [body and materiality] have a history and a historicity, that each of them is constituted through the boundary lines that distinguish them and, hence, by what they exclude, that relations of discourse and power produce hierarchies and overlappings among them and challenge those boundaries, implies that these are both persistent and contested regions.” (Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 66-67)
Thus performativity is the power of discourse, the politicisation of abjection, and the ritual of being.
This is where I become conflicted by much of this work. Intellectually and conceptually I fully understand the instinctive, intuitive elements behind the work (crystals, flowers, maps, butterflies, dreams) but aesthetically I feel little ‘aura’ emanating from the photographs. Thompson’s “peripatetic life and your bowerbird, magpie-like fascination” (p. 107) lead to all sorts of influences emerging in the work – orange from The Netherlands, Morris dancers from England, Jewish heritage, Aboriginal and Australian heritage, fashion, pop culture, music, language – all evidenced through “acts of concealment in his self-portraits.” (p. 75). Now there’s the rub!
In Thompson’s ritual intimacies the intimacy is performed only once, for the camera. It is not didactic, but it is interior and hidden, leaving much to the feelings of the viewer, looking. The re-presentation of that intimacy is performed by the viewer every time they look at the art. I think of the work of one of my favourite performance artists, Claude Cahun, where the artist inhabits her personas, adorning her androgynous face with costume after costume to become something that she wants to become – a buddha, a double, a harpy, a lunatic or a doll with equal ease. Cahun is always and emphatically herself, undermining a certain authority… and she produces indelible images that sear the mind.
I don’t get that from Thompson. I don’t know who he really is. Does it matter? Yes it does. In supposedly his most autobiographic work (according to Hetti Perkins), the video Heat (2010, below) the work emerges out of Thompson’s memories of growing up in the desert surrounding Barcaldine in central west Queensland where “heat captures the sensation that he associates with being on his country: the dry wind blowing through his hair.” Perhaps for him or someone from the desert country like Hetti Perkins (as she states in the catalogue), but not for me. I feel no ‘heat’ from these three beautiful woman standing in a contextless background with a wind machine blowing their hair. The only ‘heat’ I felt was perhaps the metaphoric heat of colonisation, violence and abuse thrust on a vulnerable culture.
Talking of vulnerable cultures, in the work Polari (2014, below) Thompson invokes the history of languages in an intimate ritual “as he seeks to reanimate and repossess vanishing knowledge. Polari is a private language … a kind of code used by sailors, circus and fairground folk, and in gay circles. … Thompson’s Polari series warns us that the artist has a language of his own, which we can overhear but not fully understand: something is withheld, in contrast to the imposed and implacable exposure which the subjects of scientific collections were made to suffer in the past.” (Warner, p. 74) But why is he using Polari specifically, a language that is strongly associated with the libertine gay culture of the 1950s-70s? Does he have a right to use this word and its linguistic heritage because he is gay? It is never stated, again another thing left hidden, concealed and unresolved.
Although no culture can ever fully own its language (language is a construct after all) … if Thompson is not gay, then I would take exception to his invoking the Polari language, just as an Indigenous artist would take exception to me using Bidjara language in an art work of my own. I remember coming out in London in 1975 and speaking Polari myself when it was still being used in pubs and clubs such as the A + B club in Soho. It was not being used as a language of resistance, far from it, but as a language of desire. It was a language used to inculcate that desire. As a video on YouTube observes of speaking Polari, “you didn’t think, oh God I’m so oppressed I can never speak about myself, you just did it, you just slipped into it without thinking.” It was your own language, like a comfortable pair of slippers. Does Thompson understand how using that word to title a body of work could be as offensive to some people as he finds the denaturing of his own culture? For me this is where the work really becomes problematic, when an artist does not enunciate these connections, where things, like sexuality, remain hidden. Similarly, with historical photographs of Indigenous people taken for ethnographic study, Thompson fails to acknowledge the work of academics such as Jane Lydon and her important books Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (2005) and Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (2016) where she unpacks the historical baggage of the images and notes that the photographs were not solely a tool of colonial exploitation. Lydon articulates an understanding in Eye Contact that the residents of Coranderrk, an Aboriginal settlement near Healsville, Melbourne, “had a sophisticated understanding of how they were portrayed, and they became adept at manipulating their representations.” Again, there is more than meets the eye, more than just ‘spiritual repatriation’ of aura.
For me, the magic of this exhibition arrives when Thompson lets go all obfuscation, let’s go all actions that make something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible. Where his ritual intimacies become grounded in language, earth and spirit. This happens in the video works, Desert slippers (2006, below), Refuge (2014, below), Gamu Mambu (Blood Song) (2011) and Dhagunyilangu (Brother) (2011, below). In these videos, the Other’s gaze disintegrates and we are left with poignant, heart felt words and actions that engage history, emotion, family and Country.
The video Desert slippers “features a Bidjara ritual in which a father and son transfer sweat. The desert slipper is a native cactus that symbolises the transferal of the spirit back to earth as the plant grows.” It is simple, eloquent, powerful, present. The other videos feature two baroque singers from Europe and Thompson singing in his native tongue Bidjara (Bidyara, Pitjara), a language that Wikipedia states “is an extinct Australian Aboriginal language. In 1980 it was spoken by twenty elders in Queensland, between Tambo and Augathella, Warrego and Langlo rivers.” Spelt out in black and white. Extinct. To hear Thompson sing a berceuse (French, from bercer ‘to rock’), or lullaby in his native language, a language taught to him by his father, is the most emotional of experiences. The work “combines evocative chanting and electronic elements to invoke the cultural experiences and narratives of his Bidjara culture,” and “is premised on the notion that if one word of Bidjara is spoken, or sung in this case, it remains a living language.” Amen to that.
This is the real hallowing, not the dress ups or the concealments. It is in these videos that the raw material of his and his cultures experience is transmuted into living, breathing stories, in an alchemical transmutation, a magical re-animation of past time into present and future time. My transfiguration into a more spiritual state was complete when listening in quiet contemplation. For I was given, if only for a very brief moment, access to the pain of our First Peoples and a vision of hope for their future healing.
Still singing, still Dreaming, still loving… and certainly not dying.
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Black gum 1 (installation view) 2007 From the series Australian graffiti C-type print Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Black gum 2 (installation view) C-type print 2007 From the series Australian graffiti Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“While I’m interested in portraiture – I don’t consider my work as portraiture because that suggests that I’m trying to portray myself, my own visage, my own image. I employ images, icons, materials, metaphors to capture and idea and moment in time. There are many different things at play; taking a picture of myself is really the last thing that’s on my mind.”
Christian Thompson in conversation with Hetti Perkins, catalogue extract
“I’m interested in simple aesthetic gestures that can say something … something quite profound about the world that we live in. I tend to build images how I create a sculpture. I borrow from the world around me.”
On being away from home: “You’re able to remove yourself from the local discourse, and romanticise home. When you’re displaced you tend to gravitate towards certain memories … But this is who I am. It would be weird not to express that somehow. I combine memories of my past with my lived experience and an idea of where I’d like to be … it’s all montaged into one.”
“But Thompson makes things up. His ‘We bury our own’ does not let us see the early daguerreotype but improvises a series of fugues on its spiritual essence. This is the crucial step that Thompson has taken: if you repeat the spectacle you cannot escape the past. But if you, a spiritual descendant, transmogrify yourself in keeping with the aura of the image’s subject, during the prolonged period of encounter and immersion, you can ‘repatriate’ that forebear. Or so he desires.”
“Through these conjurings of the language his people spoke before colonisation set out to strip them of their culture as well as their land, Christian Thompson performs private ceremonies – to reach beyond visual statements of personal presence and reawaken the knowledge of his forebears, and allow us, his listeners and viewers, into their living story.”
Marina Warner. “Magical Aesthetics,” extracts from the catalogue essay
“At the heart of my practice is a concern with aura: what it is, how it can be photographed and how it can be repatriated.”
Christian Thompson
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 Photo: Andrew Curtis
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Untitled #6 2010 From the series King Billy C-type print Image courtesy of the artist, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, and Michael Reid, Sydney and Berlin
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring stills from the video Berceuse (2017) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Berceuse (extract installation view) 2017 Three-channel digital colour video, sound 5.47 minutes Sound design: Duane Morrison
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Berceuse 2017 Three-channel digital colour video, sound 5.47 minutes Sound design: Duane Morrison
In this newly commissioned work, Thompson sings a berceuse – a cradle song or lullaby – that combines evocative chanting and electronic elements to invoke the cultural experiences and narratives of his Bidjara culture. Intended as a gesture of re-imagining his traditional Bidjara language, which is been categorised as extinct, the work is premised on the notion that if one word of Bidjara is spoken, or sung in this case, it remains a living language.
Thompson makes subtle reference to his maternal Sephardic Jewish roots by ruminating in this work on the lullaby Nani Nani:
Lullaby, lullaby The boy wants a lullaby, The mother’s son, Who although small will grow.
Oh, oh my lady open, Open the door, I come home tired, From ploughing the fields.
Oh, I won’t open them, You don’t come home tired, You’ve just come back, From seeing your new lover.
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring the series Museum of Others (2016) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of Museum of Others (Othering the Ethnologist, Augustus Pitt Rivers) 2016 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Museum of Others (Othering the Anthropologist, Walter Baldwin Spencer) 2016 From the series Museum of Others C-type print
Installation view of Museum of Others (Othering the Explorer, James Cook) 2016 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Museum of Others (Othering the Explorer, James Cook) 2016 From the series Museum of Others C-type print
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Equilibrium 2016 From the series Museum of Others C-type print
Museum of others is Thompson’s most recent photographic series and continues to reflect on his time at the University of Oxford. It features several ‘dead white males’ from the pantheon of British and Australian culture. The explorer, the ethnologist and the anthropologist all had roles in the process of colonisation in Australia but the art critic is particular to Thompson; Ruskin was the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at University of Oxford, just as Thompson was one of its first Australian Aboriginal students. Thompson explains his motivation for the series:
“Historically, it was the western gaze that was projected onto the ethnic other and I thought I’ll create a ‘museum of others’ and I’ll be the one othering, so to speak. ‘Equilibrium’ is based around the idea that the vessel is the equaliser. The vessel is the cradle of all civilisations. We all have that in common.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring photographs from the series We bury our own 2010 (C-type prints) Photos: Andrew Curtis
We bury our own is a body of work that was developed in response to the historic collection of photography, featuring Aboriginal people from the late nineteenth century, at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Thompson noted in 2012 that these early images “have permeated my work over the last year. They have remained at the forefront of every artistic experiment and they have pushed me into new territory, they have travelled with me… I was drawn to elements of opulence, ritual, homage, fragility, melancholy, strength and even a sense of play operating in the photographs…”
Each of Thompson’s lyrical photographic images from We bury our own and Pagan sun feature himself partially disguised with props and costumes. The works are virtually monochromatic with elements highlighted in full colour, and his eyes, or face, are partially concealed or painted. The use of votive objects is explained in his equally lyrical 2012 statement: “I lamented the passing of the flowers at the meadow, I lit candles and offered blood to the ancestral beings, looked into the black sparkling sea, donned the Oxford garb, visited the water by fire light and bowed at the knees of the old father ghost gum.”
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Energy Matter 2010 From the series We bury our own C-type print
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Lamenting the flowers 2010 From the series We bury our own C-type print
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Forgiveness of Land 2010 From the series We bury our own C-type print
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Down Under World 2010 From the series We bury our own C-type print
I conceived the We Bury Our Own series in 2010 after curator Christopher Morton invited me to develop a body of work that would be inspired by and in dialogue with the Australian photographic collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum…
The archival images have permeated my work over the last year. They have remained at the forefront of every artistic experiment and pushed me into new territory; they have travelled with me to residencies at the Fonderie Darling in Montreal and Greene Street Studio, New York. I was drawn to elements of opulence, ritual, homage, fragility, melancholy, strength and even a sense of play operating in the photographs. The simplicity of a monochrome and sepia palette, the frayed delicate edges and the cracks on the surface like a dry desert floor that reminded me of the salt plains of my own traditional lands.
I wanted to generate an aura around this series, a meditative space that was focused on freeing oneself of hurt, employing crystals and other votive objects that emit frequencies that can heal, ward off negative energies, psychic attack, geopathic stress and electro magnetic fields, and, importantly, transmit ideas.
I lamented the passing of the flowers at the meadow, I lit candles and offered blood to the ancestral beings, looked into the black sparkling sea, donned the Oxford garb, visited the water by fire light and bowed at the knees of the old father ghost gum. I asked the photographs in the Pitt Rivers Museum to be catalysts and waited patiently to see what ideas and images would surface in the work, I think with surprising results. Perhaps this is what art is able to do, perform a ‘spiritual repatriation’ rather than a physical one, fragment the historical narrative and traverse time and place to establish a new realm in the cosmos, set something free, allow it to embody the past and be intrinsically connected to the present?
I heard a story many years ago from some old men, they told me about a ceremony where young warriors would make incisions through the flesh exposing the joints, they would insert gems between the bones to emulate the creator spirits, often enduring infection and agonising pain or resulting in death. The story has stuck with me for many years, one that suggests immense pain fused with intoxicating beauty. The idea of aspiring to embody the creators, to transgress the physical body by offering to our gods our spiritual heart, freeing ourselves of suffering by inducing a kind of excruciating decadent torture. This was something that played on my mind during the production of this series of photos and video work. The deliverance of the spirit back to land – the notion that art could be the vehicle for such a passage, the aspiration to occupy a space that belongs to something higher than one’s physical self.
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring Ship of dreams, Ancient bloom, Death’s second self, and Gods and kings from the series Imperial relic 2015 (C-type prints) and a still from the video dead tongue 2015 Photo: Andrew Curtis
In Dead tongue Thompson continues to interrogate the implications of England’s empirical quest on the former colonies of the British Empire through the threat to or loss of Indigenous languages. In works such as this, Thompson actively challenges the perception that Aboriginal culture has become reduced to a captured trophy of Empire.
Wall text from the exhibition
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring Ship of dreams, Ancient bloom, Death’s second self, and Gods and kings from the series Imperial relic 2015 (C-type prints) Photo: Andrew Curtis
In … Imperial relic, he continues to use himself as the ‘armature for his characters, costumes and various props’. Drawing on his background in sculpture, he has created ‘wearable sculptures’ including a trumpet shaped shirt collar, an eruption of white flowers from a union jack hoodie, and an armature of maps. In each his face is partially or fully obscured again. “I’m interested in ideas of submission and domination,” he says. “So the trumpet headpiece is beautiful, but it also potentially muffles or silences the voice. The same thing with maps: they are purporting different kinds of historical narrative, depending who is telling the story. One is about the history of Indigenous people, one is about the history of white colonisers and then one is about the idea of charting the land and of discovery. I’m wearing it as an armature over my own body: that’s part of my own history but also of Australian history.”
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Ancient bloom 2015 From the series Imperial relic C-type print on fuji pearl metallic paper 100 x 100cm Image courtesy of the artist, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, and Michael Reid, Sydney and Berlin
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Ship of dreams 2015 From the series Imperial relic C-type print on fuji pearl metallic paper 100 x 100 cm Image courtesy of the artist, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, and Michael Reid, Sydney and Berlin
The series title Imperial relic, summarises the fundamental philosophy underpinning the colonial occupation of Australia. Like the nearby series We bury our own, it is closely connected to Thompson’s studies in the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum and shares with the Australian graffiti series Thomson’s physical presence is standing in for the Australian landscape.
The work Ancient bloom alludes to the phonograph horn out which might be heard the voice of Fanny Cochran Smith, who’s wax cylinder recordings of songs are the only historical audio recordings of any of the Tasmanian Aboriginal languages. Is also represents a Victorian-era shirt collar – a motif that has appeared in Thompson’s work since his Emotional striptease series of 2003 – but here is exaggerated into a soft-sculptural form that both projects and stifles the voice.
In Death’s second self the artist’s face is uncovered but distorted by make up and digital postproduction effects.The title quotes William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73:
As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In God and Kings Thompson is cloaked with a map of Aboriginal language groups like a coat of armour. In the Ship of dreams he reprises the motif of Australian flora obscuring his face but here his hoodie is stitched together from several flags: the red ensign (flown by British registered ships), the RAAF flag and the Australian flag.
“I’m interested in ideas of submission and domination … So the trumpet headpiece is beautiful, but it also potentially muffles or silences the voice. The same thing with maps: they are purporting different kinds of historical narrative, depending who is telling the story. One is about the history of Indigenous people, one is about the history of white colonisers and then one is about the idea of charting the land and of discovery. I’m wearing it as an armature over my own body: that’s part of my own history but also of Australian history.”
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring Isabella kept her dignity, I’m not going anywhere without you, Dead as a door nail and Hannah’s diary from the series Lost together 2009 (C-type prints) Photo: Andrew Curtis
On 13 February 2008 then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made an official apology to Aboriginal Australians for the Stolen Generations – the children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families between 1910 and 1970 under the respective Federal and State government policies of assimilation. At the time, Thompson was preparing to leave Australia for further studies aboard and felt this historic gesture allowed him to proudly take his culture and history with him as he ventured into the world.
Thompson photographed the series Lost together in the Netherlands while studying at the DasArts Academy of Theatre and Dance at Amsterdam University. The theme of the orange throughout the series is a reference to the national colour of the Netherlands, while the tartan patterning refers to early clan societies in the United Kingdom. The combination of these different styles is based on counter-cultural aesthetics – particularly punk collage of 1970s London.
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Hannah’s Diary 2009 From the series Lost Together C-type print Image courtesy of the artist, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, and Michael Reid, Sydney and Berlin
MUMA | Monash University Museum of Art is proud to announce the first major survey exhibition of the work of Bidjara artist, Christian Thompson, one of Australia’s leading and most intriguing contemporary artists.
Thompson works across photography, video, sculpture, performance and sound, interweaving themes of identity, race and history with his lived experience. His work is held in the collections of major state and national art museums in Australia and internationally.
Thompson made history as one of the first two Aboriginal Australians to be accepted into the University of Oxford as a Charlie Perkins Scholar, where he completed his Doctorate of Philosophy (Fine Art) in 2016. Christian Thompson: Ritual Intimacy opens as the artist looks forward to the graduation ceremony in July, when he will be conferred his degree.
Featuring a major new commission created for this exhibition, Christian Thompson: Ritual Intimacy will survey Thompson’s diverse practice, spanning fifteen years, and will also be accompanied by the publication of the first monograph on the artist’s career and work, including essays by Brian Catling RA and Professor Dame Marina Warner DBE, CBE, FBA, FRSL.
The specially commissioned installation will be an ambitious multichannel composition, developing the sonic experimentation that is a signature of Thompson’s work. Incorporating Bidjara language, it will invite viewers into an immersive space of wall-to-wall imagery and sound:
“Bidjara is officially an endangered language but my work is motivated by the simple yet profound idea that if even one word of an endangered language is spoken it continues to be a living language,” Thompson says.
Christian Thompson: Ritual Intimacy explores the unique perspective and breadth of Thompson’s practice from the fashioning of identity through to his ongoing interest in Indigenous language as the expression of cultural survival. The new multichannel work will develop musical ideas Thompson has previously explored.
“It will be a much more ambitious iteration of a song in Bidjara. At one stage I’m singing on one screen and then other versions of me appear singing the melodies. I really see it as an opportunity to do something that’s more complex musically, more textured sonically – I also want it to be more intricate with my use of language,” the artist says.
Ritual Intimacy is curated by MUMA director Charlotte Day and guest curator Hetti Perkins. Day explains that the exhibition is part of MUMA’s Australian artist series, which affords the opportunity to look at each artist’s practice in depth. “Christian’s exhibition traces a particularly productive period of research and development, from early well-known works such as the Australian Graffiti series to more recent experiments with language in sound and song works,” Day says.
A long-time curatorial collaborator with Thompson, Perkins is the writer and presenter of art + soul, the ABC’s acclaimed television series about contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. Thompson was accepted to Oxford University on an inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholarship, set up to honour Hetti Perkins’s famous father – a leader, activist and the first Aboriginal Australian to graduate from university. Perkins says the MUMA exhibition is well-earned recognition for Thompson’s work, which she featured in the second series of art + soul.
“Christian has spent periods of his adult life, as a practicing artist, away from home, but there is a common thread in his work, and it’s this connection to home or Country,” Perkins says. “In terms of the rituals or rites of the exhibition title, he is constantly reiterating that connection to home – through words, through performance, through his art, through ideas and writing,” she says.
Alongside performance and ritual, Thompson’s concept of “spiritual repatriation” is central to his work. Working with the Australian collection at famed ethnographic storehouse the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, the artist was offered copies of colonial photographs of Aboriginal people but preferred not to work this way. Instead, he chose to spend significant periods of time with these ancestral images, absorbing their “aura” in order to then make his own artistic response that did not reproduce those original problematic images.
Dr Christian Thompson is a Bidjara contemporary artist whose work explores notions of identity, cultural hybridity, and history; often referring to the relationships between these concepts and the environment. Formally trained as a sculptor, Thompson’s multidisciplinary practice engages mediums such as photography, video, sculpture, performance, and sound. His work focuses on the exploration of identity, sexuality, gender, race, and memory. In his live performances and conceptual anti-portraits he inhabits a range of personas achieved through handcrafted sculptures and carefully orchestrated poses and backdrops.
Press release from MUMA
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring the series Polari (2014) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
‘Polari’ is a form of cant or cryptic slang that evolved over several centuries from the various languages that converged in London’s theatres, circuses and fairgrounds, the merchant navy and criminal circles. It came to be associated with gay subculture, as many gay men worked in theatrical entertainment or joined ocean liners as waiters, stewards and entertainers at a time when homosexual activity was illegal. This slang rendered the speaker unintelligible to hostile outsiders, such as policeman, but fell out of use after the Sexual Offences Act (1967) effectively decriminalised homosexuality in the United Kingdom. Attracted to the theatricality and defiant nature of Polari (which he likens to the situation of Australian Indigenous languages under assimilationist policies), Thompson borrowed its name for the series which examines how subcultures express themselves.
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Siren 2014 From the series Polari C-type print Image courtesy of the artist, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, and Michael Reid, Sydney and Berlin
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Trinity II 2014 From the series Polari C-type print Image courtesy of the artist, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, and Michael Reid, Sydney and Berlin
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Trinity III 2014 From the series Polari C-type print Image courtesy of the artist, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, and Michael Reid, Sydney and Berlin
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Ariel 2014 From the series Polari C-type print Image courtesy of the artist, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, and Michael Reid, Sydney and Berlin
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 showing at left, Ellipse (2014, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Ellipse 2014 From the series Polari C-type print Image courtesy of the artist, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, and Michael Reid, Sydney and Berlin
Putting on the Dish – A short film in Polari
Polari was a form of slang used by gay men in Britain prior to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, used primarily as a coded way for them to discuss their experiences. It quickly fell out of use in the 70s, although several words entered mainstream English and are still used today. For more about Polari see Wikipedia.
Polari – The Story of Britain’s Gay Slang
Author and academic Paul Baker of Lancaster University discusses a form of gay slang known as Polari that was spoken in Britain. It was a secret type of language used mainly by gay men and some lesbians and members of the trans, drag and other communities in the United Kingdom in the 20th century until it largely died out by the early 1970s.
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Refuge 2014 Video and sound 4 mins 18 secs
Refuge is a video work by contemporary Australian artist Christian Thompson. Thompson sings in the endangered Bidjara language of his heritage. A collaboration with James Young formerly of ‘Nico’ and recorded the original track in Oxford, United Kingdom.
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring stills from the video Heat (2010) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Heat (extract) 2010 Three-channel digital colour video, sound 5.52 minutes
Like the Australian graffiti photographs [see photographs below], Heat come out of Thompson’s memories of growing up in the desert surrounding Barcaldine in central west Queensland. Barcaldine is famous for its role in the foundation organised labor in Queensland and ultimately the formation of the Australian Labor Party. It also holds historical significance for Thompson’s family as it is where his great-great-grandfather, Charlie Thompson, surreptitiously bought a block of land before Aboriginal people could legally buy land, creating a safe haven for his family and other Aboriginal families at the time when Aboriginal people had few legal rights. For Thompson, heat captures the sensation that he associates with being on his country: the dry wind blowing through his hair. It features the three granddaughters of Aboriginal rights pioneer Charlie Perkins, who are the daughters of Thompson’s Long time collaborator Hetti Perkins.
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring photographs from the series Australian graffiti (2007) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Untitled (blue gum) 2007 From the series Australian graffiti C-type print Image courtesy of the artist, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, and Michael Reid, Sydney and Berlin
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Untitled (banksia) 2007 From the series Australian graffiti C-type print Monash University Collection
Australian graffiti was the last work that Thompson made before leaving Australia for Europe. It connects with his memories of growing up in the outback and its desert flowers, which he perceives to be both fragile and immensely powerful. I adorning himself with garlands of these flowers and flamboyant garments of the 1980s and 1990s – the period in which he grew up – Thompson juxtaposes these elements against his own Bidjara masculinity. By wearing native flora he also stands in for the landscape, invoking an Indigenous understanding of the landscape as a corporeal, living ancestral being.
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Desert slippers (extract) 2006 Single-channel digital colour video, sound 34 seconds
Desert slippers was made at the time the Northern Territory government commissioned research into allegations of the abuse of children in Aboriginal communities. When the ‘Little Children are Sacred’ report was tabled the following year, the federal government under John Howard staged the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), which quickly became known as ‘the intervention’. This action was enacted without consultation with Indigenous people and ignored the substantive recommendations of the report to which it was allegedly responding.
Thompson made this video, involving his father, and the ceremonial aspects of their daily lives, during this period. Desert slippers features a Bidjara ritual in which a father and son transfer sweat. The desert slipper is a native cactus that symbolises the transferal of the spirit back to earth as the plant grows.
Christian Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Dhagunyilangu (Brother) (extract installation view) 2011 Single-channel digital colour video, sound, subtitled 2.19 minutes
Christian Thompson Dhagunyilangu (Brother) 2011 Single-channel digital colour video, sound, subtitled 2.19 minutes
Gamu Mambu (Blood Song) and Dhagunyilangu (Brother) were made in England and in the Netherlands respectively. While studying at the DasArts Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam, a centre for the study of early musical styles such as the baroque, Thompson realised that his own Bidjara language could be interpreted through the matrix of another cultural context and sphere. He undertook operatic training with this in mind, choosing in the end to work with specialist singers Sonja Gruys and Jeremy Vinogradov to realise the two works.
Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) Ground Floor, Building F, Monash University Caulfield campus, 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East, VIC 3145 Phone: 61 3 9905 4217
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Valley 2015-2016 Silver gelatin print
It is such a pleasure to be able to walk into a gallery – in this case, one located in the recently restored Young Husband Wool Store in Kensington: a building originally built in the late 1800s which is now home to a vibrant community of artists, musicians, designers and makers – to view strong, fibre-based analogue black and white photographs printed by the artist from medium format negatives. No worrying about crappy, digital ink-jet prints which don’t do the tableau justice. Just the pure pleasure of looking at the wondrous landscape.
Goldner is working in the formalist way of modernist photographers and in a long tradition of mountain photography – a combination of travel, mountaineering and fine-art photography. As the text from the recent exhibition at the Musée de l’Elysée Vertical No Limit: Mountain Photography observes: “… photography invented the mountain landscape by revealing it to the eyes of the world. Photography is heir to a certain idea of the mountains and of the sublime, closely linked to pictorial romanticism.” In Goldner’s work, this romanticism is subdued but still present: reflection in lake, mist over treetop, and the capture of human figures in the landscape to give scale to the great beyond, a feature of Victorian landscape photography, mountain or otherwise.
However, the photographs contain a certain innocence: not the romantic, isn’t the world grand BUT this is the world. Goldner celebrates photography by allowing the camera to do what it does best – capture reality. He takes things as they are. There is no waiting for a particularly dramatic sky, the artist just takes what he sees. In this sense his everyday skies undercut the dramatic romanticism of place by allowing the possibility that these images (or variations of them) could be taken day after day, year after year. This is the natural state of being of these places and he pushes no further.
This is where the title of the exhibition and words supporting it are confusing. There is nothing transitional, transnational, or transient about these images – no movement from one state to another as in a “passage” – and certainly no discernible difference from one year to the next. Goldner’s photographs show the everyday, just how it is. That is their glorious strength: their clarity of vision, their ability to celebrate the here and now, which can be witnessed every day in the passes and peaks around the Mont Blanc regions of France, Italy and Switzerland. And then I ask, is that innocence enough?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Tom Goldner for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Passage 2015-2016 Silver gelatin print
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Lake 2015-2016 Silver gelatin print
The world around us is perpetually changing – ice melts, glaciers shift, weather changes and time passes. Nowhere stays the same, and neither do we.
Passage captures a transitional time in Tom Goldner’s photography practice. In 2015 and 2016, Tom made two physical expeditions around the Mont Blanc regions of France, Italy and Switzerland. Ever-conscious of the changing nature of the landscape – the fact that you could stand in the same spot one year later and find everything had changed – he shot fleeting moments on medium format film.
Back in Melbourne, Tom painstakingly developed and printed each photograph by hand in his darkroom. The experience reawakened his love of manual photography, and he saw parallels between the physical exertion of actually taking the pictures and the intense concentration needed in producing the series of atmospheric silver gelatin prints.
Artist’s statement
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Pines 2015-2016 Silver gelatin print
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Rocks 2015-2016 Silver gelatin print
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Window (a) 2015-2016 Silver gelatin print
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Window (b) 2015-2016 Silver gelatin print
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Hill 2015-2016 Silver gelatin print
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Col de la Seigne 2015-2016 Silver gelatin print
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Aiguille du Midi 2015-2016 Silver gelatin print
Exhibition dates: 10th November, 2016 – 7th May, 2017
Curators: Shoair Mavlian with Simon Baker and Newell Harbin, Director of The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Wall Street, New York 1915 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection
Many thankx to Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see one of the world’s greatest private collections of photography, drawn from the classic modernist period of the 1920s-50s. An incredible group of Man Ray portraits are exhibited together for the first time, having been brought together by Sir Elton John over the past twenty-five years, including portraits of Matisse, Picasso, and Breton. With over 70 artists and nearly 150 rare vintage prints on show from seminal figures including Brassai, Imogen Cunningham, André Kertész, Dorothea Lange, Tina Modotti, and Aleksandr Rodchenko, this is a chance to take a peek inside Elton John’s home and delight in seeing such masterpieces of photography.”
Text from the Tate Modern website
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) White Door, Hornitos, California 1940 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection
Tate Modern presents a major new exhibition, The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection, drawn from one of the world’s greatest private collections of photography. This unrivalled selection of classic modernist images from the 1920s to the 1950s features almost 200 works from more than 60 artists, including seminal figures such as Berenice Abbott, André Kertész, Man Ray, Alexandr Rodchenko and Edward Steichen among many others. The exhibition consists entirely of rare vintage prints, all created by the artists themselves, offering a unique opportunity to see remarkable works up close. The quality and depth of the collection allows the exhibition to tell the story of modernist photography in this way for the first time in the UK. It also marks the beginning of a long term relationship between Tate and The Sir Elton John Collection, as part of which Sir Elton and David Furnish have agreed to give important works to the nation.
The Radical Eye introduces a crucial moment in the history of photography – an exciting rupture often referred to as the ‘coming of age’ of the medium, when artists used photography as a tool through which they could redefine and transform visions of the modern world. Technological advancements gave artists the freedom to experiment and test the limits of the medium and present the world through a new, distinctly modern visual language. This exhibition reveals how the timeless genres of the portrait, nude and still life were reimagined through the camera during this period, also exploring photography’s unique ability to capture street life and architecture from a new perspective.
Featuring portraits of great cultural figures of the 20th century, including Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston by Tina Modotti, Jean Cocteau by Berenice Abbott and Igor Stravinsky by Edward Weston, the exhibition gives insight into the relationships and inner circles of the avant-garde. An incredible group of Man Ray portraits are exhibited together for the first time, having been brought together by Sir Elton John over the past twenty-five years, depicting key surrealist figures such as Andre Breton and Max Ernst alongside artists including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar. Ground-breaking experimentation both in the darkroom and on the surface of the print, such as Herbert Bayer’s photomontage and Maurice Tabard’s solarisation, examine how artists pushed the accepted conventions of portraiture.
As life underwent rapid changes in the 20th century, photography offered a new means to communicate and represent the world. Alexandr Rodchenko, László Moholy-Nagy and Margaret Bourke-White employed the ‘worm’s eye’ and ‘bird’s eye’ views to create new perspectives of the modern metropolis – techniques associated with constructivism and the Bauhaus. The move towards abstraction is also explored, from isolated architectural elements to camera-less photography such as Man Ray’s rayographs and Harry Callahan’s light abstractions.
A dedicated section of the exhibition looks at the new approaches that emerged in capturing the human form, highlighted in rare masterpieces such as André Kertész’s Underwater Swimmer, Hungary 1917, while Imogen Cunningham’s Magnolia Blossom, Tower of Jewels 1925 and Tina Modotti’s Bandelier, Corn and Sickle 1927 feature in a large presentation dedicated to the Still Life. The important role of documentary photography as a tool of mass communication is demonstrated in Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother 1936 and Walker Evans’ Floyde Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama 1936, from the Farm Security Administration project.
The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection is at Tate Modern from 10 November 2016 until 7 May 2017. It is curated by Shoair Mavlian with Simon Baker and Newell Harbin, Director of The Sir Elton John Photography Collection. The exhibition is accompanied by an exclusive audio tour of the exhibition featuring commentary from Sir Elton John, and a major new catalogue from Tate Publishing including an interview with Sir Elton John by Jane Jackson.
Press release from Tate Modern
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Sunbaker 1937 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection
“We possess an extraordinary instrument for reproduction. But photography is much more than that. Today it is … bringing something entirely new into the world.”
László Moholy-Nagy, 1932
Artists in the modernist period explored what the camera could do that the human eye alone could not, and how this could be harnessed to present a new modern perspective on the world. Artist and theorist László Moholy-Nagy proclaimed that photography could radically change not just what, but how we see. He called this the ‘new vision’. Rather than emulating other art forms, photography began to embrace qualities unique to itself, from its ability to reproduce the world in sharp detail to its capacity to create new realities through the manipulation of light, chemicals and paper.
This re-evaluation of photography coincided with a period of upheaval. War, revolution and economic depression led to mass movements of people and great social change. The idea of the avant-garde took hold and dada and surrealism emerged, challenging both the art and social norms that had come before. At the same time, new art schools such as the Bauhaus in Germany and Vkhutemas in Russia fostered the role of the professional artist and challenged divisions between art and design.
The Radical Eye is arranged thematically and charts a changing emphasis from the subject of an image to the visual qualities of the photograph itself, irrespective of what it represents. The many vintage prints in this exhibition – made soon after the photographs were taken – give a rare insight into the artists’ processes and creative decisions, and foreground the photograph as a physical object. All works are shown in the frames in which they are displayed in the home of Sir Elton John and David Furnish.
Together, the works in this exhibition show how photography pushed the boundaries of the possible, changing the world through the ways in which it was seen and understood. ‘Knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterates of the future will be ignorant of the use of camera and pen alike,’ wrote Moholy-Nagy in 1927, foreseeing the cultural dominance of the photographic image. This extraordinary period still impacts how we, the photo-literate future, read and create images today.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe 1922 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection
“They collect themselves. Carefully, as if tying a cravat, they compose their features. Insolent, serious and conscious of their looks they turn around to face the world.”
From ‘Men before the Mirror’, published alongside portraits by Man Ray, 1934
Portraits
Modernist portraiture harnessed photography’s capacity to render an accurate likeness in clear, sharp focus and detail. But at the same time, artists and sitters pushed the conventions of portraiture with innovations in pose, composition and cropping.
Many of the portraits in this room are of artists, writers and musicians, giving a cross section of key cultural players of the time. Issues of control and collaboration arise particularly when the subject is an artist, raising the question of who is responsible for conveying the sitter’s persona. The modernist period also saw a boom of the illustrated press. Magazines reproduced photographic portraits of well-known figures which were instrumental in shaping their public images.
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) Nusch Éluard 1928 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photography Collection Photograph: Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016
Nusch Éluard (born Maria Benz; June 21, 1906 – November 28, 1946) was a French performer, model and surrealist artist…
Nusch arrived in France as a stage performer, variously described as a small-time actress, a traveling acrobat, and a “hypnotist’s stooge”. She met Paul Éluard in 1930 working as a model, married him in 1934, produced surrealist photomontage and other work, and is the subject of “Facile,” a collection of Éluard’s poetry published as a photogravure book, illustrated with Man Ray’s nude photographs of her.
She was also the subject of several cubist portraits and sketches by Pablo Picasso in the late 1930s, and is said to have had an affair with him. Nusch worked for the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. She died in 1946 in Paris, collapsing in the street due to a massive stroke.
Adolph de Meyer (European / American, 1868-1946) For Elizabeth Arden (The Wax Head) 1931 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Irving Penn (American, 1917-2009) Salvador Dali in New York 1947 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photography Collection Photograph: The Irving Penn Foundation
“The enemy of photography is convention, the fixed rules ‘how to do’. The salvation of photography comes from the experiment.”
László Moholy-Nagy, c. 1940
Experiments
This was not a period of discovery but of rediscovery. Artists were rewriting the preceding century’s rules of photographic technique, harnessing ‘mistakes’ such as distortions and double exposures, or physically manipulating the printed image, cutting, marking and recombining photographs. These interventions could occur at any point in the process, from taking the image to the final print.
Used in portraiture, such experiments allowed for more psychologically charged representations. However, the transformative power of a particular technique often becomes much more important than the particular subject of the image. Above all, the rich creative possibilities of the photographic process come to the fore. While artists were seriously investigating the medium, the results are often surprising and playful.
Josef Breitenbach (German, 1896-1984) Patricia, New York c. 1942 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photography Collection Photograph: Josef and Yaye Breitenbach Charitable Foundation, Courtesy Gitterman Gallery
“The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.”
Edward Weston, 1924
Bodies
Experimental approaches to shooting, cropping and framing could transform the human body into something unfamiliar. Photographers started to focus on individual parts of the body, their unconventional crops drawing attention to shape and form, accentuating curves and angles. Fragmented limbs and flesh were depersonalised and could be treated like a landscape or still life, dissolving distinctions between different genres. Thanks to faster shutter speeds and new celluloid roll film, photographers could also freeze the body in motion outside of the studio for the first time, capturing dancers and swimmers with a clarity impossible for the naked eye.
Rudolph Koppitz (Austrian, 1884-1936) Movement Study 1925 Gelatin silver print The Sir Elton John Photography Collection Photograph: ADAGP, Paris and DACS London 2016
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) Noire et Blanche 1926 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photography Collection Photograph: Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Nude 1936 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photography Collection Photograph: 1981 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) Dora Maar 1936 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photography Collection Photograph: Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016
Nino Migliori (Italian, b. 1926) Il Tuffatore (The Diver) 1951 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
“The documentary photographer is trying to speak to you in terms of everyone’s experience.”
Dorothea Lange, 1934
Documents
During the 1930s, photographers refined the formula for what we now know as social documentary. To compel the public to look at less palatable aspects of contemporary society they married creative manipulation with an appeal to viewers’ trust in the photograph as an objective visual record. This combination proved itself uniquely capable of eliciting empathy but is fraught with artistic and ethical complexity. These works highlight the vexed position of documentary photographs: historical evidence, instruments of propaganda and, latterly, works of art.
The development of new technology – particularly the portable camera and roll film – allowed photographers to capture spontaneous moments unfolding in the everyday world. Taking viewers into neighbourhoods where they might never set foot, street photography and documentary opened up new perspectives socially as much as visually.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Migrant Mother 1936 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Floyde Burroughs, a cotton sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama 1936 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) A young girl living in a shack town near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 1936 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Christ or Chaos? 1946 Gelatin silver print The Sir Elton John Photography Collection Photograph: Walker Evans Archives, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
“Contradictions of perspective. Contrasts of light. Contrasts of form. Points of view impossible to achieve in drawing and painting.”
Aleksandr Rodchenko, 1920s
Objects, Perspectives, Abstractions
The subjects and approaches of modernist photography vary widely, but are united by a fascination with the medium itself. Every image asks what photography is capable of and how it can be pushed further. This final room brings together three interlinked approaches. It shows the still life genre reimagined by photographers who used the technical capabilities of the camera to reveal the beauty of everyday things. Objects captured at unconventional angles or extreme close-up become strange, even unrecognisable.
A similar effect of defamiliarisation was accomplished by taking photographs from radically new perspectives, positioning a camera at the point of view of the ‘worm’s eye’ or ‘bird’s eye’. This created extreme foreshortening that transformed photographs from descriptive images of things into energetic compositions hovering between abstraction and representation.
Abstraction pushes against photography’s innate ability to record objectively. Radical techniques such as cameraless image-making simplified the medium to the point of capturing the play of light on photosensitive paper. By stripping it back to its most basic components, artists celebrated photography, not as a tool for reproduction, but as a creative medium capable of producing new imagery.
Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) A Bee on a Sunflower c. 1920 Gelatin silver print The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) “Rayograph” 1923 Silver gelatin print The Sir Elton John Photography Collection Photograph: Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016
There was hardly standing room at the opening of Beyond Eden: Polixeni Papapetrou at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne. As for car parking, I had to park the car on the grass out the back of the gallery it was so full. Inside, it was great to see Poli and the appreciative crowd really enjoyed her work.
It was the usual fair from the exhibition Glamour stakes: Martin Parr, a whirl of movement, colour, intensity – in the frenetic construction of the picture plane; in the feverish nature of encounter between camera and subject – and obnoxious detail in photographs from the series Luxury (2003-2009). Low depth of field, flash photography, fabulous hats, and vibrant colours feature in images that ‘document leisure and consumption and highlight the unintentional, awkward and often ugly sides of beauty, fashion and wealth’. Sadly, after a time it all becomes a bit too predictable and repetitive.
The pick of the bunch in the exhibition Dutch masters of light: Hendrik Kerstens & Erwin Olaf was the work of Hendrik Kerstens. Simple, elegant portrait compositions that feature, and subvert, the aesthetics of 17th-century Dutch master paintings. I love the humour and disruption in the a/historical account, “the différance [which] simultaneously contains within its neo-graphism the activities of differing and deferring, a distancing acted out temporally as well as spatially.” (Geoffrey Batchen)
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to 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.
It’s all about me comprises five photographs of the artist’s daughter wearing doll-like masks and sporting a series of T-shirts bearing sassy slogans. As in much of Papapetrou’s work, the aesthetic of role-playing is used to suggest an awkward relationship between social appearances and an authentic self. These works specifically explore the complex world that contemporary teenage live in and the way identities are created and manipulated through fashion, social media and the internet. In this respect, the gauche quality of the photographs reflects the awkward self-importance of teenagers reaching for adulthood.
Polixeni Papapetrou is a Melbourne-based photographic artist. She first began taking photographs in the 1980s, creating documentary-style portraits of drag queens, body builders and Elvis fans. Soon after the birth of her first child, Papapetrou’s artistic practice began to focus on projects that employed her children, Olympia and Solomon, as models. She is now known nationally and internationally for her staged images that show her children dressed in costumes and masks while performing in front of real and imaginary backgrounds.
This exhibition brings together three recent bodies of work by Papapetrou: Lost psyche (2014), It’s all about me (2016) and Eden (2016). Each of these studio-based series explores themes that have been central to Papapetrou’s practice for the past 30 years. In particular, they highlight her long-term interest in social identity being elaborated through the processes of role-playing and performance.
It is important to note that Papapetrou composes her photographs using a range of historical and contemporary references, thereby embedding these staged performances in a network of competing forces. As a result, there is often a purposefully awkward style to the images, which suggests that identity is continually being inherited, negotiated and perpetuated through the history of representation.
As with much of Papapetrou’s work, the series included in this exhibition either partly or wholly feature the artist’s children, who are now in their late teenage years. By photographing her children and at the same time concealing their identities, Papapetrou is able to create portraits that are grounded in her personal experience of parenting but reflect on more universal themes of childhood innocence and the transience of life.
Text from the Monash Gallery of Art website
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Flora 2016 From the series Eden Pigment print 127.3 x 85cm Courtesy of the artist and STILLS Gallery, Sydney
In Roman mythology, Flora (Latin: Flōra) was a Sabine-derived goddess of flowers and of the season of spring – a symbol for nature and flowers (especially the may-flower). While she was otherwise a relatively minor figure in Roman mythology, being one among several fertility goddesses, her association with the spring gave her particular importance at the coming of springtime, as did her role as goddess of youth. Her name is derived from the Latin word “flos” which means “flower”. In modern English, “Flora” also means the plants of a particular region or period.
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Blinded 2016 From the series Eden Pigment print 127.3 x 85cm Courtesy of the artist and STILLS Gallery, Sydney
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Eden 2016 From the series Eden Pigment print 127.3 x 85cm Courtesy of the artist and STILLS Gallery, Sydney
Dutch masters of light: Hendrik Kerstens and Erwin Olaf
This exhibition features work by the internationally acclaimed Dutch photographers, Hendrik Kerstens and Erwin Olaf. These photographers both create images that reflect an interest in paintings by Dutch Masters such as Rembrandt (1606-1669) and Vermeer (1632-1675). This is particularly evident in their manipulation of light and shade and also in their poetic use of everyday subject matter. Drawing on aesthetics of the past while also incorporating aspects of the present, these photographers create emotionally charged portraits that draw attention to the liminal nature of contemporary life.
Hendrik Kerstens took up photography in 1995 and has since been creating portraits of his daughter, Paula. His photographs began as documents and reflections on the fleeting nature of childhood. He later introduced the aesthetics of 17th-century Dutch master paintings to his portraits, creating a dialogue between painting and photography and between the past and the present.
Erwin Olaf is a multidisciplinary artist who is best known for his highly polished staged photographs that draw on his experiences of everyday life. His refined style and meticulous technique relate his background as a commercial photographer; and his use of light is inspired by painting. The subjects of his Keyhole series turn their gaze away from the camera in a way that evokes feelings of shame and humility.
Dutch masters of light: Hendrik Kerstens and Erwin Olaf is part of a series of events that mark the 400th anniversary of the first Dutch contact with Western Australia. On 25 October 1616, Dirk Hartog made landfall with his ship the Eendracht at Dirk Hartog Island, in the Shark Bay area.
Text from the Monash Gallery of Art website
Hendrik Kerstens (Dutch, b. 1956) Bag 2007 Ink-jet print 62.5 x 50.0cm Collection of the artist
Hendrik Kerstens (Dutch, b. 1956) Cosy 2012 Ink-jet print 62.5 x 50.0cm Collection of the artist
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) Australia, Melbourne 2008 From the series Luxury Pigment ink-jet print 50.8 x 76.2cm Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries (Melbourne)
Martin Parr was born in Surrey in the United Kingdom in 1952. He studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic from 1970-73 and held his first exhibition the following year. He has since developed an international reputation as a photographer, filmmaker and curator and has been a full member of Magnum Photos since 1994.
Parr is known for his satirical social documentary photography. Focusing on particular aspects of contemporary consumer culture, he produces images that are a combination of the mundane and the bizarre. He uses the language of commercial photography, creating an aesthetic that is bright, colourful and seductive. However, his images often inspire viewers to cringe or laugh.
Glamour stakes: Martin Parr shows a selection of works from Parr’s Luxury series. This series is comprised of images taken predominantly between 2003 and 2009 in multiple destinations around the world. While creating Luxury, Parr photographed what he describes as ‘situations where people are comfortable showing off their wealth’, such as art fairs, car shows and horse races. The series is indicative of Parr’s practice in that the images document leisure and consumption and highlight the unintentional, awkward and often ugly sides of beauty, fashion and wealth.
The images in this series are not only documents but also critical and humorous reflections on contemporary society. By turning his camera to the world of luxury, Parr invites viewers to consider the sustainability of a culture that constantly demands the latest styles in fashion and the newest luxury items. This exhibition focuses specifically on Parr’s images of horse-racing events, particularly those taken in Melbourne in 2008.
Text from the Monash Gallery of Art website
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) Australia, Melbourne 2008 From the series Luxury Pigment ink-jet print 50.8 x 76.2cm Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries (Melbourne)
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) Australia, Melbourne 2008 From the series Luxury Pigment ink-jet print 50.8 x 76.2cm Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries (Melbourne)
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) Australia, Melbourne 2008 From the series Luxury Pigment ink-jet print 50.8 x 76.2cm Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries (Melbourne)
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) Australia, Melbourne 2008 From the series Luxury Pigment ink-jet print 50.8 x 76.2cm Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries (Melbourne)
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) Australia, Melbourne 2008 From the series Luxury Pigment ink-jet print 50.8 x 76.2cm Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries (Melbourne)
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) South Africa, Durban 2005 From the series Luxury Pigment ink-jet print 101.6 x 152.4cm Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries (Melbourne)
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) England, Ascot 2003 From the series Luxury Pigment ink-jet print 101.6 x 152.4cm Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries (Melbourne)
Monash Gallery of Art 860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150 Australia Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500
Their Royal Highnesses, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York, May 1901 National Library of Australia
Souvenir card of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York with moveable ribbon with printed numbers
I have spent hours digitally cleaning these stereocards that I borrowed from my friend Ellie Young and undertaking the research for this posting. And the hours were well worth it. These 3D photographs really give you a feeling of what it would have been like to live in Australia in the first decade of the 20th century, the spectacle of the country. I also love the colour postcards, with their depictions of kangaroos and Australia surrounded by the red of China and the United States – vulnerable and all on her own!
George Rose (1861-1942), was a Melbourne photographer started his photographic career around 1880 producing three-dimensional images. He called his business ‘The Rose Stereograph Company’. He toured the world with his 3-D camera, producing stereographs for the home and overseas markets. Most notable in this posting are the stereocards of the visit of the American Fleet, also known as the Great White Fleet, to Australia in 1908. The visit included the U.S.S. Ohio, U.S.S. Wisconsin, U.S.S. Louisiana, U.S.S. Kansas, U.S.S. Vermont, U.S.S. Kearsarge and U.S.S. Kentucky amongst others. The sixteen warships were painted white to denote peace. The flagship of the fleet was the U.S.S. Connecticut. As detailed below, the visit caused quite a stir in the relationship between nascent Australian nationalism and the mother country Great Britain, as no British battleship, let alone a modern fleet, had ever entered Australasian waters.
In these stereocards it is interesting to observe:
1/ How few Australian flags are flying (the Australian flag was only created following Federation in 1901), the British flag in prominence at the reviews in Centennial Park, Sydney and Flemington Racecourse, Melbourne. An Australian flag can be observed at the very bottom of the Children’s Flag Drill, Public Schools’ Demonstration, Sydney, 1908 photograph and flying alternatively between the American flag in the review at Flemington Racecourse.
2/ How militarised the society seems to be, with huge turn out of spectators to the parades and reviews – just look at the crowds in Marines Marching through Martin Place, Sydney, 1908 and packing the stands at Flemington in Military Review, Flemington. The Admiral, the Governor, the Prime Minister, &c., (1908). It comes as a surprise, then, that just eight and nine years later, at the height of the First World War, two referendums were held in which compulsory conscription was defeated by popular vote.
3/ How many people – men, women and children – are all wearing hats. Royal Visit to Melbourne, May 1901 (detail below) is almost a bourgeois Dickensian scene of merriment, with all the men and women wearing de rigueur hats. The four women at the front are especially impressive. The crowd is pressed up against the barrier and stacked high behind to get the best view, causing a flattening of the picture plane, the bodies and attitudes of “the people” almost becoming a picture puzzle.
Other points of interest include:
~ A comparison between the horizontal point of view of 2nd Victorian Contingent. Horses Going Aboard (1900, below) replete with geometric shapes and forms; and the structure of Steigltiz’s The Steerage, 1907 with its closer cropping, stronger geometric elements and split horizontal and downward gaze.
~ Also notice the photographer in cap up a very narrow ladder at left in Jack Tars at the Military Review, on the Flemington Racecourse, Melbourne (1908, detail), just about to be passed a dark slide for his plate camera that is mounted on top of the ladder.
~ The Jack Tars make an interesting group of men, marching along with their rifles. I wonder what they thought of Australia at the turn of the century?
Please make sure you enlarge the photographs to see all of the details.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Ellie Young for lending me the stereocards in this posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Rose’s Stereoscopic Views George Rose (Publisher), Windsor, Melbourne 2nd Victorian Contingent. Horses Going Aboard Melbourne, Boer War embarkation, 1900 Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
1900-01-13. ONLOOKERS WATCH THE HORSES OF THE 2ND VICTORIAN CONTINGENT TO THE BOER WAR BEING PUT ABOARD THE STEAMSHIP “EURYALUS”, BOUND FOR SOUTH AFRICA. THE SECOND VICTORIAN CONTINGENT CONSISTED ENTIRELY OF MOUNTED RIFLES.
Departed Melbourne: SS Euryalus 13 January 1900.
Raised predominantly on the Mounted Rifle Regiment, formed by Lt-Col Tom Price in 1885, and Victorian Rangers, Militia including the battalions of the Infantry Brigade and some from the Royal Australian Artillery. Colonel Price was initially made CO of the Hanover Road Field Force, including one battalion of Lancashire Militia, two companies of Prince Albert’s Guards and Tasmanians. Price was the only Australian Colonial Officer placed in command of British units during the Boer War.
A seminal moment in the Boer War was the capture of Pretoria in 1900 by British commander, Lord Roberts. The Victorian 2nd (Mounted Rifles) Contingent was the first unit to enter the city. A large number of this unit were invalided back to Victoria, having experienced starvation and extreme exhaustion on some treks.
Strength: 265 Service period: Feb 1900 – Dec 1900.
Text from the Defending Victoria website. No longer available online
As part of the British Empire, the Australian colonies offered troops for the war in South Africa. Australians served in contingents raised by the six colonies or, from 1901, by the new Australian Commonwealth. For a variety of reasons many Australians also joined British or South African colonial units in South Africa: some were already in South Africa when the war broke out; others either made their own way to the Cape or joined local units after their enlistment in an Australian contingent ended. Recruiting was also done in Australia for units which already existed in South Africa, such as the Scottish Horse.
Australians served mostly in mounted units formed in each colony before despatch, or in South Africa itself. The Australian contribution took the form of five “waves”. The first were the contingents raised by the Australian colonies in response to the outbreak of war in 1899, which often drew heavily on the men in the militia of the colonial forces. The second were the “bushmen” contingents, which were recruited from more diverse sources and paid for by public subscription or the military philanthropy of wealthy individuals. The third were the “imperial bushmen” contingents, which were raised in ways similar to the preceding contingents, but paid for by the imperial government in London. Then were then the “draft contingents”, which were raised by the state governments after Federation on behalf of the new Commonwealth government, which was as yet unable to do so. Finally, after Federation, and close to the end of the war, the Australian Commonwealth Horse contingents were raised by the new Federal government. These contingents fought in both the British counter-offensive of 1900, which resulted in the capture of the Boer capitals, and in the long, weary guerrilla phases of the war which lasted until 1902. Colonial troops were valued for their ability to “shoot and ride”, and in many ways performed well in the open war on the veldt. There were significant problems, however, with the relatively poor training of Australian officers, with contingents generally arriving without having undergone much training and being sent on campaign immediately. These and other problems faced many of the hastily raised contingents sent from around the empire, however, and were by no means restricted to those from Australia…
The Australians at home initially supported the war, but became disenchanted as the conflict dragged on, especially as the effects on Boer civilians became known…
Conditions for both soldiers and horses were harsh. Without time to acclimatise to the severe environment and in an army with a greatly over-strained logistic system, the horses fared badly. Many died, not just in battle but of disease, while others succumbed to exhaustion and starvation on the long treks across the veld. Quarantine regulations in Australia ensured that even those which did survive could not return home. In the early stages of the war Australian soldier losses were so high through illness that components of the first and second contingents ceased to exist as viable units after a few months of service.
Rose’s Stereoscopic Views George Ross (Publisher), Windsor, Melbourne 2nd Victorian Contingent. Horses Going Aboard (detail) Melbourne, Boer War embarkation, 1899-1900 Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
Columbia Stereoscopic Company Royal Visit to Melbourne, May 1901 1901 Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
Columbia Stereoscopic Company Royal Visit to Melbourne, May 1901 (detail) 1901 Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
Columbia Stereoscopic Company Royal Visit to Melbourne, May 1901 (detail) 1901 Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The visit to Australia by the Duke of York in 1901 was the first by a British heir-apparent, and it was the occasion of a frenzy of social activity, in which the Duke and Duchess were feted in parades, reviews, balls, dinners, concerts and a range of ceremonies. The royal visit became, in the minds of many, a much larger event than that which was the purpose of the visit; namely, the opening of the first Commonwealth Parliament.
Members of the royal party travelled to Australia on the royal yacht Ophir, which departed from Portsmouth on 16 March. They formally arrived in Melbourne on St Kilda pier at 2.00pm on 6 May, and immediately afterwards took part in a grand procession which travelled along St Kilda Road to the centre of Melbourne, past the front of Parliament House, and to Government House. Mounted troops from all Australian states and New Zealand participated in the procession, which was almost two kilometres long and took two hours to pass some points of the seven kilometre route.
The streets of Melbourne were lined with half a million spectators, many of whom had bought tickets to sit in wooden stands erected two or three stories high. People spilled from every window, step and vantage-point, waving flags and cheering. Thirty-five thousand school children waved union jacks and sang ‘God save the King’ and ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’ from the slopes of the Domain.
The Rose Stereographs In Sydney Harbour. A view from the heights overlooking Neutral Bay 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The fleet was given a tremendous welcome. Thursday 20 August 1908 was a public holiday and a week long celebration followed. Fleet Week celebrations and entertainments included the Official Landing and Public Reception, a review at Centennial Park, parades, luncheons, dinners, balls, concerts, theatre parties, sporting events such as boxing, football and baseball matches, a gymkhana including a tug-of-war and a regatta. Buildings and streets were decorated and illuminated at night. There were daylight and night time fireworks displays. Excursions were arranged for the Americans to visit Manly, Parramatta, Newcastle, The National Park, the Illawarra and the Blue Mountains. The fleet stayed in Sydney until its departure for Melbourne on 27 August 1908.
The Rose Stereographs In Sydney Harbour. A view from the heights overlooking Neutral Bay (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Three fine U.S. battleships in Sydney Harbour, viewed from Cremorne Heights 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
“Hail Columbia” Australia Greets her American Cousins In God We Trust 1908 Postcard
Harry T. Weston (publisher) Souvenir of the American Fleet’s Visit to the Commonwealth of Australia. 1908 1908 Postcard
The Rose Stereographs The U.S.S. Georgia at anchor off Bradley’s Head, Sydney Harbour 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs The U.S.S. Georgia at anchor off Bradley’s Head, Sydney Harbour (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
On 20 August 1908 well over half a million Sydneysiders turned out to watch the arrival of the United States (US) Navy’s ‘Great White Fleet’. For a city population of around 600,000 this was no mean achievement. The largest gathering yet seen in Australia, it far exceeded the numbers that had celebrated the foundation of the Commonwealth just seven years before. Indeed, the warm reception accorded the crews of the 16 white-painted battleships during ‘Fleet Week’, was generally regarded as the most overwhelming of any of the ports visited during the 14 month and 45,000 mile global circumnavigation. The NSW Government declared two public holidays, business came to a standstill and the unbroken succession of civic events and all pervading carnival spirit encountered in Sydney (followed by Melbourne and Albany) severely tested the endurance of the American sailors…
One man undoubtedly well pleased with the visit’s success was Australia’s then Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin, who had not only initiated the invitation to US President Theodore Roosevelt, but had persisted in the face of resistance from both the British Admiralty and the Foreign Office. By making his initial request directly to American diplomats rather than through imperial authorities Deakin had defied protocol, but he was also taking one of the first steps in asserting Australia’s post-colonial independence. His motives for doing so were complex. He was, after all, a strong advocate for the British Empire and Australia’s place within it, but he also wished to send a clear message to Whitehall that Australians were unhappy with Britain’s apparent strategic neglect.
The security of the nascent Commonwealth might still ultimately depend on the Royal Navy’s global reach, but the ships of the small, rarely seen and somewhat obsolescent Imperial Squadron based in Sydney did not inspire confidence. As an officer in the US flagship, observed during the visit: ‘These vessels were, with the exception of the Powerful [the British flagship], small and unimportant … Among British Officers this is known as the Society Station and by tacit consent little work is done’…
Feeling both isolated and vulnerable, it was easy for the small Australian population to believe that Britain was ignoring its antipodean responsibilities. The 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance (renewed in 1905), which had allowed the Royal Navy to reduce its Pacific presence, did little to alleviate these fears. Remote from the British Empire’s European centre, Australians had no confidence that their interests, and in particular their determination to prevent Asiatic settlement, would be accommodated in imperial foreign policy. Japan’s evident desire for territorial expansion, its decisive naval victory over the Russians at Tsushima in 1905, and its natural expectation of equal treatment for its citizens all seemed to reinforce the need for Australia to explore alternative security strategies.
Staunchly Anglophile, Deakin was not necessarily seeking to establish direct defence ties with the United States, but more than a few elements in Australian society were prepared to see in America the obvious replacement for Britain’s waning regional power. A new and evidently growing presence in the Pacific, the United States possessed a similar cultural heritage and traditions, and as even Deakin took care to note in his letter of invitation: ‘No other Federation in the world possesses so many features [in common with] the United States as does the Commonwealth of Australia’…
No British battleship, let alone a modern fleet, had ever entered Australasian waters. So with the arrival of the American vessels locals were treated to the greatest display of sea power they had even seen. While the public admired the spectacle’s grandeur, for those interested in defence and naval affairs it was an inspiration. This too was a part of Deakin’s plan, for although he was a firm believer in Australia’s maritime destiny, where defence was concerned national priorities still tended towards the completion of land rather than maritime protection. The Prime Minister’s own scheme for an effective local navy was making slow progress, and like Roosevelt he recognised the need to rouse popular support.
In this, the visit of the Great White Fleet played a crucial role, for it necessarily brought broader issues of naval defence to the fore, and made very plain the links between sea power and national development. Americans clearly had a real sense of patriotism and national mission. Having been tested and hardened in a long and bitter civil war they were confident that the United States was predestined to play a great part in the world. Australians, on the other hand, still saw Federation as a novelty and their first allegiance as state-based. One English traveller captured well the prevailing mood. ‘Australia’, he wrote, ‘presents a paradox. There is a breezy buoyant Imperial spirit. But the national spirit, as it is understood elsewhere, is practically non-existent’.
Extracts from Dr David Stevens. “The Great White Fleet’s 1908 Visit To Australia,” on the Royal Australian Navy website [Online] Cited 11/11/2106. No longer available online
Sydney, Australia
20 August 1908
28 August 1908
Melbourne, Australia
29 August 1908
5 September 1908
Albany, Australia
11 September 1908
18 September 1908
The Fleet, First Squadron, and First Division were commanded by Rear Admiral Charles S. Sperry. First Division consisted of Connecticut, the Fleet’s flagship, Captain Hugo Osterhaus, Kansas, Captain Charles E. Vreeland, Minnesota, Captain John Hubbard, and Vermont, Captain William P. Potter.
Second Division consisted of Georgia, the Division flagship, Captain Edward F. Qualtrough, Nebraska, Captain Reginald F. Nicholson, New Jersey, Captain William H.H. Southerland, and Rhode Island, Captain Joseph B. Murdock.
The Second Squadron and Third Division were commanded by Rear Admiral William H. Emory. Third Division consisted of Louisiana, the Squadron flagship, Captain Kossuth Niles, Virginia, Captain Alexander Sharp, Missouri, Captain Robert M. Doyle, and Ohio, Captain Thomas B. Howard.
Fourth Division was commanded by Rear Admiral Seaton Schroeder. Fourth Division consisted of Wisconsin, the Division flagship, Captain Frank E. Beatty, Illinois, Captain John M. Bowyer, Kearsarge, Captain Hamilton Hutchins, and Kentucky, Captain Walter C. Cowles.”
F.H. Boone & Co Untitled [Wicker chair supplied to the American Fleet during their visit] 1908 NRS 905, Chief Secretary, Letters Received, 1908 [5/6990]
Note the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes on the back of the chair.
The Rose Stereographs A magnificent view of the fine battleship U.S.S. Ohio 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs A magnificent view of the fine battleship U.S.S. Ohio (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
Semco Series American Fleet Souvenir Post Card (front and verso) 1908 Postcard
C.B & Co. S Australia Welcomes The American Fleet 1908 Postcard
The Rose Stereographs The March Past of the Navy at the Review, Centennial Park, Sydney 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs The March Past of the Navy at the Review, Centennial Park, Sydney (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs New South Wales mounted infantry at the review, Centennial Park, Sydney 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs New South Wales mounted infantry at the review, Centennial Park, Sydney (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Procession of Metropolitan and Country Fire Brigades, Sydney 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Procession of Metropolitan and Country Fire Brigades, Sydney (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Marines Marching through Martin Place, Sydney 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Marines Marching through Martin Place, Sydney (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Great Naval Parade of American Sailors at Sydney, Australia, August 23, 1908 1908 Postcard
The Rose Stereographs Procession in Sydney. The Admiral’s Carriage turning out of Martin Place 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Procession in Sydney. The Admiral’s Carriage turning out of Martin Place (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Children’s Flag Drill, Public Schools’ Demonstration, Sydney 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Children’s Flag Drill, Public Schools’ Demonstration, Sydney (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Inside Port Phillip Heads, en route to Hobson’s Bay, Victoria 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
Victoria pulled out all the stops for ‘Fleet Week’, and records held at Public Record Office Victoria (PROV) show the scale and scope of the welcome: newspaper reporters waxing lyrical about the ‘Turner-esque’ picture of the ships steaming past Dromana; sixteen thousand copies of maps, guide books, railway schedules and souvenir programs printed and distributed to the ships’ crews to guide them around Australia’s biggest city; hundreds of thousands of extra train travellers swarming into Williamstown to see the Fleet, and into Melbourne to meet the sailors; young cadets marching five days from Ballarat to take part in the welcome parade; and of course sailors ‘with a girl on each arm’.
Melburnians laid out the red, white and blue welcome mat for the new Pacific sea power. The records describe months of preparations by state and city officials to celebrate the visit. Suppliers of bunting and decorations rushed to offer their wares, and scores of Victorian town councils, as well as public and private clubs and societies, wrote to beg the State Cabinet American Fleet Reception Committee to consider them when scheduling the official program of events. The Victorian Railways offered cheap excursion trains from country centres, and free travel to the sailors, and carried record numbers of passengers during Fleet Week. Victorians and Americans mingled, as thousands visited the Royal Agricultural Show, where they saw dumbbell and wand exercises by state school students, and flocked to the racing at Flemington, where the Washington Steeplechase and Fleet Trotting Cup were run. The Zoo, the Aquarium and ‘Glacarium’ all offered free entry to visiting sailors.
While country Victoria travelled into the city to meet the sailors, the sailors journeyed out to see the country. At the invitation of a local American citizen, some sailors made the long trip to Mirboo North in East Gippsland, where they saw wood chopping and ‘Aboriginal boomerang throwing’ and took part in foot races (a handsome silver-mounted emu-egg trophy was carried home by the victor) and a tug-of-war. Others travelled to Bendigo and to Ballarat, watching Australian Rules Football and visiting the mines.
In such a flurry of welcome and activity, there were problems, both comic and tragic. The failure of an American officer to pass on an invitation meant that only seven sailors turned up to a reception and dinner at the Exhibition Buildings, where catering had been laid on for 2,800. Two sailors died in train-related accidents, with newspapers quoting a comrade as saying ‘we lose a few in every port’. Spruiking of the state’s liveability was also in evidence. Visitors were proudly told that, in Victoria, ‘All railways … and supplies of water are state-owned’ and that we had ‘Factories Acts and Wage Boards, Pure Food Laws, Compulsory Vaccinations’ and ‘Manhood Suffrage’ – the Fleet had arrived just three months shy of Victoria awarding the vote to women.
This combination of attractions no doubt contributed to the sailors’ view that Melbourne was the ‘best port of call’ in their 14-month, 20-port call, round-the-world voyage. So convinced were the visitors of Victoria’s, and Australia’s, attractions that 221 deserters jumped ship in Melbourne. The USS Kansas stayed on for a number of days after the rest of the Fleet departed for Albany, Western Australia, in part to wait for a mail steamer, but also to collect stragglers. A reward of $10 was advertised for the successful return of each deserter to his ship, but the conditions of the reward were so difficult to meet that no money was ever paid. By the time the Kansas finally weighed anchor and bade farewell to Melbourne, more than half the deserters had been recovered, but about a hundred men remained behind to start a new life.
Anonymous text. “Great White Fleet – 105 years on,” on the Public Records of Victoria website [Online] Cited 11/11/2016. No longer available online
The Rose Stereographs Inside Port Phillip Heads, en route to Hobson’s Bay, Victoria (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Steaming up Port Phillip Bay, in the direction of Port Melbourne 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Steaming up Port Phillip Bay, in the direction of Port Melbourne (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
Wellman & Co., St Kilda (Publisher) The People of the Southern Cross Offer Greetings to their Kinsmen of the Stars & Stripes 1908 Postcard
Visit of the United States Fleet To Melbourne Australia, Sep 1908 1908 Postcard
The Rose Stereographs The two 12-inch guns, ‘Ben’ and ‘Jim,’ on the U.S. battleship Louisiana 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs The two 12-inch guns, ‘Ben’ and ‘Jim,’ on the U.S. battleship Louisiana 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Rear-Admiral Sperry at St. Kilda Pier. Inspection of Naval Brigade 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Rear-Admiral Sperry at St. Kilda Pier. Inspection of Naval Brigade (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Military Review, Flemington. The Admiral, the Governor, the Prime Minister, &c. 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Military Review, Flemington. The Admiral, the Governor, the Prime Minister, &c. (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
Proprietors of “Punch”, Melbourne Australia (publishers) Souvenir and Official Programme, American Fleet Reception, Victoria 1908 1908
The Rose Stereographs Jack Tars at the Military Review, on the Flemington Racecourse, Melbourne 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
The Rose Stereographs Jack Tars at the Military Review, on the Flemington Racecourse, Melbourne (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
Jack Tar
Jack Tar (also Jacktar, Jack-tar or Tar) was a common English term originally used to refer to seamen of the Merchant or Royal Navy, particularly during the period of the British Empire. By World War I the term was used as a nickname for those in the U.S. Navy.Both members of the public, and seafarers themselves, made use of the name in identifying those who went to sea. It was not used as a pejorative and sailors were happy to use the term to label themselves.
The Rose Stereographs Jack Tars at the Military Review, on the Flemington Racecourse, Melbourne (detail) 1908 From the series The American Fleet in Australia Stereocard Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Studies taken at Newport railway workshops, Melbourne in 1994 with my Mamiya RZ67.
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
Please remember these are just straight scans of the prints, all full frame, no cropping!
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Jim Black, artist 1994 from the series Études Silver gelatin print
To be frank, this handsomely installed exhibition of the work of Australian fashion photographer Henry Talbot is a bit of a let down. The images look terribly dated, and while historically they have some significance in terms of the time and context from which they emerged – the movement towards en plein air photography, taking the model from the studio to the street – most of the photographs are not very good. The prints are either commercial vintage prints with all their faults (dust, scratches, poor printing, over exposure, lack of burning in etc.) evidencing a lack of care and attention to detail, or modern inkjet reproductions from original negatives and even then some of the printing is poor: for example, the hair of the model in Fashion illustration for Blunden Wool, models Joan Crellin and Bruce Anderson (1961, below) is completely blown out with no detail retained in the highlights. Some of the angles in his images (the positioning of the figure) are just off, the cropping of the negatives (the space above and below the figure) often does not work and framing of the prints is also less than exemplary. But we must remember Talbot was a commercial photographer from the 1960s and that’s just what these photographs are: commercial fashion photographs that fulfil a client brief.
Talbot was no experimenter. Too often his images are really basic, a basic visualisation, and he has a fixed idea for a shot and goes with that idea and variations of it, even when it is evident that the photograph is not working. Any photographer worth their salt would recognise such a situation and be flexible enough to change it up but with Talbot this does not happen. Positioning his model centrally, he usually uses low depth of field so that everything falls out of focus behind. In this sense he still seems to possess a studio mindset. While professing his love of free-moving fashion, his photographs seem stilted and conformist, even as they are taken out of doors. His proof sheets are evidence of a “team” oriented focus in order to fulfil a client brief, but in these very proof sheets we see uneven exposures and severe cropping into the frame to get the final image. And while he was more romantic than the hard edged Helmut Newton, his photographs only ever project a surface and rarely show any true emotion. Without doubt his best two photographs are Fashion illustration for Fibremakers, model Maggi Eckardt (1966, below) taken at the Altona Petrochemical Company. The photographs are a symphony of form, movement and light. They possess a “feeling” a lot of his other photographs simply cannot, and do not, contain.
There is no catalogue to the exhibition so this posting will have to serve historically to document the exhibition and Talbot’s work. Thus, there is an in depth interview included with Australian curator, artist and photography collector Joyce Evans who ran Church Street Photographic Centre in Melbourne from 1976 and who showed Talbot’s work in her gallery. It is all very well that I have an opinion on the work but what I write needs to be an informed opinion, and the interview with Joyce provides valuable background with regard to the people, the era and the context from which these photographs emerged. One thing noted in the conversation is that Talbot photographed strong, independent women like Janice Wakeley and Maggie Taberer… something that is not mentioned at all in the wall text and press release that accompanies the exhibition. I would have thought it vital that a curator would have linked the presence of these independent women in fashion photography to the work of art photographers such as Australian artist Carol Jerrems who published her seminal book A Book About Australian Women in 1975.
Another insight into the times is provided by a friend Ian Lobb who knew Talbot:
“People said he was good, and he charged enough, but he just thought he was having fun, fun with a certain quality. I don’t think he had any grand ideas about his talent, but he was quite prepared to sell a print or sell his time if someone wanted to pay. Henry knew the fun he was having wasn’t going to last beyond his life. And now, it is weird and very country town that his work should be regurgitated. His work looks poor because people are making him into something he wasn’t.
There is a seminal incident that can help with the context of the Henry Talbot, Athol Shmith and Helmut Newton generation. Athol Shmith was giving a print critique at Prahran, and someone had left a glass of fixer on the shelf of the room. Athol finished his critique and drank it. Rushed to hospital of course. But think of that from all its angles. The world in which these photographers worked and the stories from those times reveal a world that was flying by the seat of its pants – just.”
Talbot is a solid photographer, no more. While the exhibition gives some sense of depth to the quality of work that was coming out of Melbourne at that time, perhaps it would have been best to let sleeping dogs lie.
In conversation with Australian curator, artist and photography collector Joyce Evans about the Australian photographer Henry Talbot
17/07/2016
MB: Just before we started this conversation you said to me Joyce that Talbot was a gentle man. Can you explain what you meant by that please?
JE: I use the word gentle in comparison to his one-time partner Helmut Newton, who I found to be an aggressive man.
MB: So they were in partnership together before Newton left for Europe
JE: Yes
MB: So Talbot was intelligent, he knew his field and understood the history of the genre that he was working in, he could speak well, and was well liked both by clients, models and the society in which he worked.
JE: Well, he was not a superficial person. When he spoke he researched things properly, he had the depth of knowledge which came from a sort of European intellect. This intellect was broadly read, and he was also a person that listened.
MB: And he was also a good teacher as well…
JE: In his commercial work, Henry photographed his women (as far as I could see), with the idea of having a client, and he was displaying clothes on the women, which was part of the old tradition. In an environment where, if you wanted to make a living, that’s what you had to do. If he had been, however, in a place like New York – which was avant-garde as compared to Melbourne, which was not avant-garde – he may well have gone the same way as Helmut Newton. The very big difference, though, is in the personality of the two men.
Helmut Newton went out and he was an aggressive man. He had charm, but it was an aggressive charm, it wasn’t a gentle charm. He had intelligence and he knew how to handle his women so that he got aggression out of his women, that’s what he wanted.
MB: Whereas Talbot was doing it for a job?
JE: Talbot A was doing it for a job and B, he had a gentle nature. He was not an aggressive man and actually if you look at those photographs you can see that he liked the women that he photographed and he lived in an environment where fashion was still, fairly soft, in many ways. You can see in things like the swimwear industry and the sports industry there was quite a lot of Australian independence, but he, combined with Athol Shmith in Melbourne, took his models out into the street, they interacted with the environment, and he did not depend on the studio.
MB: When I look at his photographs they are quite modernist, they are quite clean, but his vision seems to me to be quite limited… in the sense that he uses a central female figure (sometimes two central figures), low depth of field, out of focus background. And then you look at the proof sheets and you can see that he is not an experimenter. From shot to shot there is a slight change in angle of a hand or the tilt of a head but he really doesn’t push the boundaries of what he is trying to say with the image. He has his set idea (for the shot, for the location) and then he does slight variants in the proof sheet towards that idea. Very rarely do you get a feeling, a sense of atmosphere in his images – of the outdoors in the sense of the outdoors enveloping the model. The models seem to be isolated within their environment…
JE: But who does what is asked of him, at that time? You can compare him to Avedon or Athol Shmith, but you cannot compare him to today. You cannot ask someone to work outside of his own time. You can ask him to lead in his own time and the leading that occurred at that time, by both Shmith and Talbot, was that they took models out into the city and the environment and away from the studio. This was something that Avedon did and these two photographers did also. The big argument is, did Talbot do it effectively? Who chose his proofs? Which ones got published?
MB: But also, a quite organised and restricted view of the world, even though he was pushing the boundaries by taking fashion photography outdoors, he still seems to be in a studio mindset when he was outside.
JE: What you did in those days, is that you would do the shoot, you would come in with your proof sheets, and the art director would go over it with the red crayon with the team – it tended often to be team work. So he’s working to a brief …. and you are the instrument of the team. The art director sets everything up and you do the shoot. Now, when you get a name like Talbot had, you could start to begin to influence what the art director was doing. Now, how much and when and at what time and what effect – I really don’t know.
MB: Did he photograph strong women? You mentioned Maggie Taberer and Janice Wakeley.
JE: Maggie Taberer and Janice Wakeley – both educated women, well read women – Talbot would have chosen his own models and they were two of his favourites. Or been offered models, depending on the control of the art director and what they desired.
MB: Today, all we can do is try and understand the history of these photographs, and the time and context from which they emerged. From today’s standpoint they look rather dated and stilted.
JE: You have to see them from a decade earlier, looking at fashion photography in Australia from the 1930s and 1940s to see what was happening. The 1930s fashion stuff was very very largely in the studio. Very little of it was en plein air.
MB: But that doesn’t negate his aesthetic choices to shoot with so low a depth of field that the context of the outdoors becomes more or less irrelevant. Yes, you have the images of the oil refinery behind with the movement of the women, in my opinion some of his best photographs, that are more romantic in feel… and these tend to work better than other more prosaic shots.
JE: He was more of a romantic than Newton was. Newton was very hard edged and he managed to get that extra particular something out of his women…
MB: Even in his Melbourne images?
JE: Well, we don’t know Newton’s Melbourne images, because he has denied them all.
MB: Yes exactly, that’s the thing.
JE: Thinking about Talbot, he was part of a movement. He wasn’t the leader of it or the only one, but he was part of the early evolution of the movement.
MB: Does that mean his photographs stand up to scrutiny today?
JE: I have this feeling that when you only look at the top of the cake, you don’t know what the cake is all about. I don’t know whether I would put him as the fairy on top of the cake or one of the really nice pieces of icing. I think that Athol Shmith is a stronger photographer.
MB: What about the Australian photographer Bruno Benini? I find him incredibly strong in terms of his style, his lighting.
JE: My understanding of Bruno is that he is a decade younger that Talbot…
MB: So 1950s?
JE: Yes I think so
MB: So he has a more classical influence…
JE: It’s not that, he’s like John Eaton is to Pictorialism, he’s a very good photographer – but he’s not a groundbreaker, he’s not of the beginning of Pictorialism. I think Benini is a very good fashion photographer and I think he is working on other people’s shoulders. I think Athol Shmith is stronger and if I had a choice about having to show one, but I like the fact that we have shown Talbot, because it gives some sense of depth to the quality of work that was coming out of Melbourne. Places like Sportscraft were exceptionally good at encouraging talent, both in design and in photography.
MB: All I can do is understand the history and the context and what was going on at the time and then, as I was thinking the other day, all I can write is what I see.
JE: Compare this… Athol Shmith had Bambi. Bambi was the most exquisite women you would ever find in your whole life. I remember her when I was a teenager, me and my girlfriend were both sitting in a room and she was there, both in our late teens / early 20s, and I remember saying to my friend that I feel as though I have ten feet – and I am so clumsy when I look at her. She is so beautiful. Now Janice Wakeley was also a stunning looking women as was Maggie Taberer. But the number one model with Athol was Bambi and then there were really other top people that he had. And he, I think, had a much broader base to work with – not only his models, but his clientele was broader. Talbot was predominantly clothing as compared to Shmith who did a whole stack of things other than fashion. His love of music, he did a lot of musicians, he did some amazing portraiture. Shmith did H.G. Wells etc…
MB: His breadth was greater than Talbot. My concern with Talbot is 1/ the dating of the images, and 2/ his aesthetic choices when taking those photographs which may be a team decision but, the fact that he didn’t experiment that much. When looking at his proof sheets there are only slight changes to the positioning of the model…
JE: He’s got an idea and he goes for it.
MB: And that just really shows a lack of flexibility in his vision.
JE: No, I don’t think so I just think that it shows that he knows what he wants and that’s it.
MB: I think that is where we differ.
JE: He is very professional. How many shots of a person do you make at a time?
MB: I work on a ratio of 10 to 1, so if you take 10 shots you will get one, possibly two excellent shots. Talbot must have been thinking I need one good shot and he kept shooting and shooting, even though some of his exposures are poor, even though he radically crops the full frame image to get the final shot. It shows he was not as confident as you think about getting the shot, because he is hedging his bets with his in camera framing, relying on cropping later.
JE: He knows he wants her getting this feeling, and he goes bang, bang, bang, head turned slightly, arm down slightly and that’s it… and he knew what he wanted at the beginning and then he just saw the variations to fine tune it. And that’s what every photographer tends to do.
MB: And that’s where I really think there is a problem with his photography. Most of his images don’t really work – and yet he never recognised that fact at the time, when he was taking or setting up the shot, that it was not working. Any good photographer worth his salt, worth his previsualisation of the shot, must know how to adapt and be flexible enough to change on the run. He didn’t recognise that they weren’t working and change the idea. That’s the problem I have with him. It shows a fixed mindset in terms of not being able to see through the viewfinder when a shot is not working.
JE: That’s another story…
MB: Let’s leave it there. Thank you Joyce so very much for your thoughts.
“Well man, this is 1966 and in this game you have to be open to, and live, contemporary influences to a certain degree. The younger generation is very strong in fashion – very much in command. They’re spending a great deal of money in the garment industry, so fashion is geared to the young. There is, of course, in this “with it” idea itself, certain conformity to non-conformity, to a non-conformity standard. But, as a photographer, you must accept this idea as far as you can and that probably reflects to some extent in your own behaviour and dress.”
Henry Talbot, 1966
“I always tried to show models in a free-moving fashion. I avoided stiff poses and I tried to keep up with what the great fashion photographers overseas were doing”
Henry Talbot (Germany 1920 – Australia 1999, Australia from 1940) No title (Fashion illustration for Blunden Wool, models Joan Crellin and Bruce Anderson) (installation view) 1961, printed 2016 Photographed on location at the National Gallery of Victoria Inkjet print Henry Talbot Fashion Photography Archive
Henry Talbot (Germany 1920 – Australia 1999, Australia from 1940) No title (Fashion illustration for Blunden Wool, models Joan Crellin and Bruce Anderson) (installation view) 1961, printed 2016 Photographed on location at the National Gallery of Victoria Inkjet print Henry Talbot Fashion Photography Archive
Henry Talbot (Germany 1920 – Australia 1999, Australia from 1940) No title (Fashion illustration for Blunden Wool, models Joan Crellin and Bruce Anderson) (installation view) 1961, printed 2016 Photographed on location at the National Gallery of Victoria Inkjet print Henry Talbot Fashion Photography Archive
Henry Talbot (Germany 1920 – Australia 1999, Australia from 1940) No title (Fashion illustration for Watersun ski wear) (installation view) 1970, printed 2016 Inkjet print Henry Talbot Fashion Photography Archive
Henry Talbot (Germany 1920 – Australia 1999, Australia from 1940) No title (Fashion illustration for Watersun ski wear) (installation view) 1970, printed 2016 Inkjet print Henry Talbot Fashion Photography Archive
Henry Talbot (Germany 1920 – Australia 1999, Australia from 1940) No title (Fashion illustration for Watersun ski wear) (installation view) 1970, printed 2016 Inkjet print Henry Talbot Fashion Photography Archive
“There is little an Australian fashion photographer can do that has not been done overseas, and often better. But one thing they do not have is our Australian environment. I use it a great deal because the idea makes it possible to come up with something uniquely different.”
Henry Talbot 1966
“The striking and youthful fashion of 1960s Melbourne is the starring subject of more than eighty photographs by fashion photographer Henry Talbot, many of which have never been exhibited before. Showcasing the shifting face of fashion from a time that has captured popular imagination, many of the images have never been seen since their original publication 50 years ago and offer an insight into the styles and attitudes of the 1960s. The photographs on display have been carefully selected from an extraordinary archive of 35,000 negatives that Talbot gifted to the NGV in the 1980s.
“Henry Talbot’s photography captures the exuberance and changing times of a generation. His modern photographs depict an emerging youth culture and offer an insider’s look into a thriving cultural scene during the 1960s,” said Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV.
A European émigré artist from Germany, Talbot brought an invigorating internationalism to Australian photography and partnered with Helmut Newton. Their Flinders Lane studio was very successful enterprise and secured major clients including the Australian Wool Board and Sportscraft. It was during the 1960s that Talbot established his place as a dynamic force in Australian fashion photography and his work was regularly published in Australian Vogue.
The exhibition includes some of Talbot’s beautiful fashion spreads from 1960s Australian Vogue, providing a visual history that chronicles the magazine’s first decade in Australia. The photographs will be presented alongside a display of early edition Australian Vogue magazines, including those in which Talbot’s photographs originally appeared, offering an insight into the aspirational fashion and lifestyle choices of Australians living in this era. Talbot’s photography also highlights the public’s affinity with uniquely Australian brands, such as Qantas and Holden. Fast cars and air travel were aspirational luxury experiences in the 1960s and, as a result, airports, planes and brand new cars were the glamorous setting for many of Talbot’s photographs, demonstrating his astute understanding of current trends and consumer culture.
From an outback sheep station, to lamp-lit streets of Melbourne, Australian cityscapes and landscapes also provided the backdrop to some of Talbot’s most arresting photographs. Shot on location around Melbourne, these photographs showcase Talbot’s adventurous style and ability to transform 1960s Melbourne into scenes that looked like Paris, London, New York – a testament to his ‘international eye’. A photographer with an astute vision, Talbot also ingeniously transformed Altona Petrochemical Company into an intergalactic, futuristic setting that captured the public’s fascination with space travel during the ‘space race’ of the 1960s. This exciting suite of images demonstrates the ways in which space travel permeated popular culture, including space-age fashion trends.
The exhibition will open during the NGV’s landmark 200 Years of Australian Fashion exhibition and together, these two exhibitions will offer a comprehensive and fresh new look at Australian fashion in the 1960s.”
Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria
Henry Talbot (Australian born Germany, 1920-1999)
Henry Talbot was born in Germany in 1920. As a young man he studied graphic design and photography in Berlin and Birmingham. After leaving Germany in 1939, he arrived in Australia in 1940. Following a period of internment, Talbot then served in the Australian army. In the postwar years he left Australia, travelling to South America and Europe, before returning to Melbourne in 1950. At the time Melbourne was the most important centre of fashion in Australia because of the abundance of textile and garment manufacturing in Flinders Lane; boutiques in the Paris End of Collins Street, and major department stores around the city.
Talbot worked in some of the leading Melbourne photographic studios and quickly established a reputation as a major fashion photographer in Melbourne. In 1956 he was invited to go into partnership with Helmut Newton. Newton was already renowned for his innovate fashion images and this partnership offered Talbot recognition for his talent in this field. In 1973 Talbot closed his studio, and ten years later presented the NGV with what is now known as the Henry Talbot Fashion Photography Archive. Works in this exhibition at taken from this remarkable collection, comprising 35,000 black-and-white negatives, photographs and contact prints.
Wall text
Installation view of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Henry Talbot: 1960s Fashion Photographer exhibition at NGV Australia at Federation Square with at left, No title (Fashion illustration, model Janice Wakely) (1961, below) (installation view) Photo: Brooke Holm
Working with the right model was as important to the success of Talbot’s images as choosing the right location. Like most photographers he had his favourite models, and often worked with Janice Wakely, Maggie Tabberer, Helen Homewood, Maggi Eckardt and Margot McKendry.
Talbot’s philosophy was simple, as he explained it in 1995: “I’ve always held that if you can establish a definite emotional rapport with a model you’re halfway toward producing good photographs. My own favourite method of fashion working is to explain roughly what I am after then leave the model more or less free to interpret the garment she’s to show. A good model will absorb and become part of what she is wearing almost completely. Whilst shooting away I may suggest minor changes, the model senses what I’m after, and then really good shots happen.”
‘Forsaking city airs for cool country breezes, she previews the three day event at Oaklands Hunt Club which will finish the Melbourne Cup season, wearing a three-quarter oat of palest blue pearl lamb.’
Descriptive caption, 1966
Installation view of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Henry Talbot: 1960s Fashion Photographer exhibition at NGV Australia at Federation Square
The locations used by Talbot were an important aspect of his image making; they played a significant role in the implicit narratives he constructed in his fashion photography. Talbot’s work, like most fashion photographs, presents an aspirational ideal. In his case a picture of the modern woman – at an opening night; arriving at the airport; on the streets of London; visiting an art gallery; or in a beatnik coffee bar – who looks effortlessly up to date and glamorous because she has bought the perfect garment.
Despite Talbot’s assertion that using Australian settings gave his work an edge, some of his most successful photographs artfully disguise the familiar streets of Melbourne. The streets of the city are transformed in Talbot’s photographs to look like Fifth Avenue, New York or Hyde Park in London.
The 1960s was a period of social turbulence, when youth-led movements changed the world. In Australia it was a time of prosperity: employment rates were high and, for many, the opportunities seemed boundless. The fashions of the day, including mini skirts and hipster pants, reflected the “youthquake” that was shaking up the status quo. Photography studios made the transition to the 1960s by creating images with a fresh, contemporary edge, and increasingly worked on location rather than in the studio.
Henry Talbot began to work in fashion photography in the 1950s, but it was in the 1960s that he established himself as a leading force in Melbourne’s fashion industry. He worked for designers and manufacturers, department stores and boutiques, as well as on the job for the Australian Wool Bureau, taking photographs that showed Australian fashion to the world.
‘The magic carpet revisited: Classweave takes to the air. Classweave deny weaving the magic carpet, but [the] chic three disagree, find Classweave fabrics magic. Feel like flying,and choose Qantas.’
Advertising copy, Australian Vogue, 1963
Installation view of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Henry Talbot: 1960s Fashion Photographer exhibition at NGV Australia at Federation Square Photo: Brooke Holm
‘They’re going places, the Pelaco Pair – and riding the crest all the way. They live their life with a style and carefree assurance that many envy. They know and demand the best this modern world has to offer, a personal formula for success that shows in everything they do. You can see it in the clothes they wear (he doesn’t own a shirt that isn’t Pelaco; she collects Lady Pelaco, secretly feels they were created especially for her). You can see it in the cars they drive – always, a trim, taut, terrific Falcon.’
Advertising copy, Vogue Australia, April/May 1963
Murray Rose (Australian, 1939-2012)
Iain Murray Rose, AM (6 January 1939 – 15 April 2012) was an Australian swimmer, actor, sports commentator and marketing executive. He was a six-time Olympic medalist (four gold, one silver, one bronze), and at one time held the world records in the 400-metre, 800-metre, and 1500-metre freestyle (long course). He made his Olympic debut at the 1956 Summer Olympics as a 17-year-old and won three Olympic medals, all gold. Four years later, as a 21-year-old, he won three Olympic medals (one gold, one silver, one bronze) at the 1960 Summer Olympics.
At the age of 17, Rose participated in the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne. He won the 400-metre and 1500-metre freestyle races and was a member of the winning team in the 4×200-metre freestyle relay. Winning three gold medals in his home country immediately made him a national hero. He was the youngest Olympian to be awarded three gold medals in one Olympic Games. Afterwards, Rose moved to the United States to accept an athletic scholarship at the University of Southern California where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business/Communications.
He continued competing while at USC, and graduated in 1962. At the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, Italy, Rose again won an Olympic gold medal in the 400m freestyle, as well as a silver in the 1500m freestyle and a bronze in the 4 x 200m freestyle relay, bringing his haul to six Olympic medals. In addition to his Olympic medals, he won four gold medals at the 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth, Australia. He eventually set 15 world records, including the world record in the 800-metre freestyle in 1962, which was not broken until Semyon Belits-Geiman set a new record in 1966. Rose continued to compete as a masters swimmer. During the 1960s, he also pursued an acting career, starring in two Hollywood films and making guest appearances on television shows.
In addition, Rose worked as an Australian sports commentator for the Nine Network, plus each of the major US networks, participating in seven consecutive Olympic Games.
Installation views of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Henry Talbot: 1960s Fashion Photographer exhibition at NGV Australia at Federation Square Photos: Brooke Holm
Maggie Tabberer AM (also known as Maggie T; born 11 December 1936 – died 6 December 2024) is a dual Gold Logie-winning Australian fashion, publishing and media / television personality. Maggie’s first modelling job was a one-off assignment at the age of 14, after a photographer spotted her at her sister’s wedding. She attended a modelling school in her early twenties, and at the age of 23 was discovered by photographer Helmut Newton, who mentored her and launched a highly successful modelling career. While living in Melbourne in 1960, she won ‘Model of the Year’, and moved to Sydney to take advantage of the modelling opportunities there, but she chose to end her modelling career at the age of 25 after she began to lose her slim figure.
Tabberer stayed well connected to the fashion industry, however. In 1967 she started a public relations company, Maggie Tabberer & Associates, which took on many fashion-related clients and assignments. In 1981, she launched a plus-size clothing label called Maggie T. A portrait of her by Australian artist Paul Newton was a finalist in the 1999 Archibald Prize.
Publishing work
Tabberer began working in publishing when she wrote a fashion column, “Maggie Says”, for Sydney’s Daily Mirror newspaper in 1963. She remained with the paper for sixteen years, until billionaire Kerry Packer asked her to become fashion editor of Australian Women’s Weekly magazine in 1981, and she soon became the public face of the magazine, frequently appearing on its cover and television advertising. Tabberer stayed with Women’s Weekly for fifteen years until 1996.
Television work
Tabberer began appearing on television in 1964, as the “beauty” on panel talk show Beauty and the Beast (the “beast” being the show’s host: Eric Baume until 1965, and then Stuart Wagstaff). Tabberer’s appearances on Beauty and the Beast made her a household name, and she began hosting her own daily chat show, Maggie, for which she won two consecutive Gold Logies, in 1970 and 1971. She was the first person to win back-to-back awards, although Graham Kennedy had already won three non-consecutive Gold Logies by 1970.
Since 2005, she has hosted her own television interview show, Maggie… At Home With on Australian pay TV channel Bio. (formerly The Biography Channel). On her show she “visits the homes of various Australian celebrities and elites to discuss their lives, careers, tragedies, and triumphs.”
“Fibres for fashions future. Its theme was fibres for the present and the future … pictures taken by Melbourne photographer Henry Talbot – a man who is as sophisticated as James Bond and always a jump ahead of ‘now’. The visiting ‘Venusians’ in Mr Talbot’s photographs (Maggi Eckardt and Jackie Holme) are gyrating at the Altona Petrochemical Company in Victoria.”
Maggi had been brought up on Sydney’s northern beaches and went to a ladies’ college in Manly. She had the proud, sultry looks of a flamenco dancer. Her distinctive appearance limited her potential in Australian modelling but she was heaven-sent for elegant Parisian designers such as Balenciaga and Givenchy and was transformed through the worshipping lens of American photographer Richard Avedon into an international icon. After seven years overseas, Maggi returned to Sydney in 1972 to be embraced as a TV personality and high-profile fashion adviser to David Jones.
Text from Gerald Stone. “The six wives of Singo,” on The Sydney Morning Herald website July 27, 2002 [Online] Cited 09/10/2021
During the 1960s Maggi Eckhardt was one of the world’s most sought after models. Her modelling career began in 1958 when she was selected to model for celebrated British designer Norman Hartnell. He offered her a job in his London salon and she never looked back. The brunette beauty rapidly shot to international fame modelling top designer brands including Dior and Balenciaga. She posed for a string of famous photographers such as Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton and graced the covers of Australian and French Vogue.
Text from “Australia’s 25 top models named” on the News.com.au website [Online] Cited 17/08/2016. No longer available online
Henry Talbot (Germany 1920 – Australia 1999, Australia from 1940) No title (Fashion illustration for Blunden Wool, models Joan Crellin and Bruce Anderson) (installation view) 1961, printed 2016 Photographed on location at the National Gallery of Victoria Inkjet print Henry Talbot Fashion Photography Archive
Henry Talbot (Germany 1920 – Australia 1999, Australia from 1940) No title (Fashion illustration for Blunden Wool, models Joan Crellin and Bruce Anderson) (installation view) 1961, printed 2016 Photographed on location at the National Gallery of Victoria Inkjet print Henry Talbot Fashion Photography Archive
Henry Talbot (Germany 1920 – Australia 1999, Australia from 1940) No title (Fashion illustration for Blunden Wool, models Joan Crellin and Bruce Anderson) (installation view) 1961, printed 2016 Photographed on location at the National Gallery of Victoria Inkjet print Henry Talbot Fashion Photography Archive
‘Discovering the hidden charms of New Guinea in the obvious attributes of Swiss cotton… she wears a cropped top and lean slack in sunny yellow, embroidered in diamond panels of white.’ Descriptive caption, 1966
‘Town and country, sport and travel are words enough to place this American style coat in the all-purpose group, and its colour is the outstanding feature – honey bamboo saddle stitched with white. Loose and casual it has fly-away cuffs on sleeves, hip, and breast pockets, and a tailored revere collar. By Stella Ricks.’ Descriptive caption, 1960s
Janice Wakely, fashion model and photographer, graduated from Sydney’s Mannequin Academy in 1952 and began her modelling career in Melbourne two years later. Dismissed as ‘too thin’ by various Australian agencies after working on a Department of Trade-sponsored fashion tour to New Zealand in 1956, she decamped for London. Within ten days, Wakely snared a shoot with Marie Claire in Paris and St Tropez; soon, she was dubbed ‘The Girl of the Moment’ with ‘The Look of 1958’.
The Australian Women’s Weekly reported that, in the competitive English market, her “fragile but tough and oh, so carefully casual” look had set her apart – for the time being – from “the thousands from Commonwealth countries who invade Britain each year to see something of the world before they settle down to marriage and the building of a home and family.”
Returning to Australia in 1958, Wakely commandeered the camera herself, proceeding to capture photographers such as Helmut Newton, Athol Shmith and Henry Talbot while they worked with models on location. During this time, Wakely maintained a strong presence in front of the camera. Photographed by Terence Donovan in London in 1960, in 1961 and 1962, she starred in the All-Australian Fashion Parades, was featured on the cover of The Women’s Weekly, was Model of the Year and wore the Gown of the Year.
Then, in 1963, she stepped down from the catwalk, establishing the Penthouse modelling agency and photographic studio in Flinders Lane, Melbourne with co-model Helen Homewood. After an overseas tour in 1965, Wakely returned to Melbourne and set up a studio with fashion photographer Bruno Benini, who, according to People magazine, had “given many other girls a helping hand up the ladder to success”.
Wakely commented in 1968 that “the Australian sense of fashion is appalling”.
Extract from “Treasure Trove: Janice Wakely, fashion icon,” on the ABC Canberra website 11 October, 2012 [Online] Cited 30/07/2016. No longer available online
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia Federation Square Corner of Russell and Flinders Streets, Melbourne
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
This is how best a contemporary art exhibition can show the work to advantage. Just gorgeous!
The well curated, comprehensive content is complemented by a beautifully paced hang nestled within stunning contemporary art spaces. Labels are not just plonked on the wall, but are discretely displayed on horizontal shelves next to the work – accessible but so as not to interrupt the flow of the work. Coloured walls add to the ambience of the installation and act as an adjunct to the colours of the art. Beautiful modernist contemporary display cabinets keep the spaces fresh and vibrant.
Many thankx to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All images are photographed by Bryan James.
“Exploring the art of cameraless photography, encompassing historical, modern and contemporary works. Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph is the first comprehensive survey of cameraless photography held anywhere in the world, presenting more than 200 examples, from 1839 – when photography’s invention was announced – through to contemporary artists. We present the most complete study of cameraless photography to date, focusing on the cameraless mode from the 1830s through to today and offering a global perspective on this way of working.
The theme of the exhibition is inspired by artist Len Lye’s cameraless photographs from 1930 and 1947, and it’s the first time all 52 of Lye’s photograms have been seen together. Emanations is an opportunity to put Lye’s photographic work in a suitably global context, surrounded by his predecessors, contemporaries and successors. Emanations includes many masterpieces of photographic art and showcases the talents of some of the world’s leading contemporary photographic artists.
The exhibition has work by photographic pioneers William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins, important modernist photographers Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, and many of today’s most significant photographic artists including Walead Beshty, Marco Breuer, Liz Deschenes, Joan Fontcuberta, Christian Marclay, Thomas Ruff, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Emanations also includes work by both senior and emerging Australian and New Zealand artists, from Anne Noble and Anne Ferran to Andrew Beck and Justine Varga.
The exhibition presents artwork by more than 50 artists hailing from New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, England, Canada and the United States. Almost every photographic process is included in the exhibition – photogenic drawings, calotypes, daguerreotypes, and tintypes, as well as gelatin silver, chromogenic and ink-jet photographic prints, photocopies, verifax and thermal prints.
The exhibition is accompanied by a major book by the same name and on the same theme, co-published by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and DelMonico Books/Prestel, based in New York and Munich. The book contains 184 full-page colour plates and a 25,000 word essay by Geoffrey Batchen. The Govett-Brewster is also publishing another book reproducing all the cameraless photographs by Len Lye, along with an essay by Wystan Curnow.
Emanations is curated by Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of Art History at Victoria University of Wellington, and a world-renowned historian and curator of photography.”
Text from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery website
Installation views of Andrew Beck (New Zealand, b. 1987) Double Screen 2016 Glass, acrylic paint, gelatin silver photographs
In the 1930s, László Moholy-Nagy made art that combined a cameraless photograph, plexiglass and paint. New Zealand artist Andrew Beck works in a similar way to produce sculptural installations that complicate our expectations of the relationship between light and shadow, the natural and the artificial, images and objects, art and reality. He forces us to look very closely at what we are seeing, and even to critically reflect on the act of seeing itself.
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Anne Ferran and at right, Joyce Campbell
Installation view of Joyce Campbell (New Zealand, b. 1971) LA Bloom 2002 Cibachrome photographs Courtesy of the artist, Auckland
In 2002 the New Zealand photographer Joyce Campbell decided to conduct a microbial survey of Los Angeles, a city in which she lives for part of each year. She swabbed the surfaces of plants and soil from twenty-seven locations chosen out of her Thomas Guide to the city. She then transferred each sample onto a sterilised plexiglass plate of agar and allowed it to grow as a living culture. The Cibachrome positive colour contact prints she subsequently made from these plates resemble abstract paintings and yet also offer a critical mapping of the relative fertility of this particular urban landscape, revealing its dependence on the politics of water distribution.
Although raised in Italy, Aldo Tambellini was working in New York in 1969 when he manipulated the cathode ray tube of a TV set into the shape of a spiral (for this artist, a universal sign of energy) and exposed sheets of light-sensitive paper by laying them over its screen. The calligraphic inscriptions that resulted made his paper look as if it had been scorched from the inside out. These ‘videograms,’ as Tambellini called them, highlight the chaos and chance operations that lurk just beneath the surface of technology’s apparent rationality.
Installation views of Shaun Waugh (New Zealand, b. 1982) ΔE2000 1.1 2014 24 Agfa boxes with mounted solid colour inkjet photographs
This work by New Zealand artist Shaun Waugh began with the purchase of empty boxes that once held Agfa photographic paper. Waugh then took readings of all four sides of the inside lip of each box lid using a spectrophotometer, employing this data and Photoshop to generate a solid orange-red inkjet print. The box lid is used to frame a two-dimensional version of itself, bringing analogue and digital printing into an uncomfortably close proximity to create a memorial to a kind of photography that is now defunct. Hung salon style, like so many small paintings, Waugh’s work manages to turn the photograph inside out, and thus into something other than itself.
Wall text from the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Anne Ferran and at right, Adam Fuss
In 1998 Australian artist Anne Ferran was offered an artist-in-resident’s position at an historic homestead not far from Sydney that had been occupied by successive generations of the same family since 1813. Ferran spent six months systematically making contact prints using the dresses, bodices, skirts, petticoats, and collars still contained in the house. Hovering in a surrounding darkness, softly radiating an inner light, the ghostly traces of these translucent garments now act as residual filaments for a century of absorbed sunshine. Many of them have been patched over the years and their signs of wear and repair are made clear. This allows us to witness a history of the use of each piece of clothing, seeing inside them to those small and skilful acts of home economy – the labour of women – usually kept hidden from a public gaze.
Anne Ferran (Australian, b. 1949) Untitled (baby’s bonnet) 1998 Unique gelatin silver photograph
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Adam Fuss and at right, Lisa Clunie
Installation view of Adam Fuss (UK/Australia/US) Caduceus 2010 (left) and Untitled 1991 (right)
Born in England, raised in Australia, and resident in New York, Adam Fuss has produced a diverse range of large cameraless photographs since the 1980s, asking his light-sensitive paper to respond to the physical presence of such phenomena as light, water, a slithering snake, flocks of birds, and sunflowers.
Adam Fuss (British, b. 1961) Untitled 1991 Type C photograph
Lisa Clunie (New Zealand) Fold I 2014 Silver gelatin photograph
The work of New Zealand artist Lisa Clunie looks back to the work of pioneer modernist László Moholy-Nagy in order to manifest the idea that our lives are shaped by a continual play of forces. Like Moholy, she wets her photographic paper and then tightly folds it, before moving the paper back and forth under her enlarger, selectively exposing these folds to the ‘force’ of light. The resulting work reminds us that a photograph has weight, surface, texture, tension and edges.
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at right, the work of Robert L. Buelteman
Installation view of Robert L. Buelteman (American, b. 1954) Cannabis sativa (left) 2002 Digital chromogenic development photograph
Robert L. Buelteman (American, b. 1954) Eucalyptus polyanthemos (right) 2002 Digital chromogenic development photograph
The San-Franciscan artist Robert Buelteman takes his leaves and other botanical specimens and slices them into paper-thin sections, before charging them, in a complicated and dangerous process, with a pulse of 40,000 volts of electricity. This leaves behind a colorised trace on his photographic paper, a photogram in which these plants appear to be aflame, as if emitting an energy all their own. Hovering between life and death, this is a nature that seems to be on the cusp of its transmutation into something else entirely.
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at centre, Robert Owen and at right, Joan Fontcuberta
Robert Owen (Australian, b. 1937) Endings (Rothko died today) – Kodachrome 64, No. 21, 26/02/1970 2009 Pigment ink-jet print
The photographic work of Australian artist Robert Owen is part of a broader tendency on the part of contemporary artists to reflect in morbid terms on aspects of photography’s past. Owen has been collecting film stubs since 1968. Although better known as a painter and sculptor, he recently decided to print these end strips of film as a series of large colour photographs, paying homage to this residue of the Kodak era in a chronological sequence of readymade chromatic fields. This one was collected on the day that the American abstract painter Mark Rothko killed himself.
Adam Fuss (British, b. 1961) Untitled (from the series My Ghost) 2001 Unique gelatin silver photograph
In his series, titled My Ghost, Adam Fuss put together a body of contact photographs of such things as plumes of smoke, patterns of light, a butterfly, a swan and a baptism dress. As his title suggests, Fuss’s work aims to evoke rather than describe; for all their evident tactility, these photographs are meant as metaphors, as prayers, perhaps even as poems.
Installation view of Adam Fuss (British, b. 1961) Untitled 1989 Cibachrome photograph
Adam Fuss (British, b. 1961) Untitled 1989 Cibachrome photograph
Installation views of Joan Fontcuberta (Spanish, b. 1955) MN 62: OPHIUCUS (NGC 6266), AR 17 h. 01,2 min. / D -30º 07′ (left) LAMBDA CORONAE AUSTRALIS (Mags 5,1/9,7 Sepn 29,2″ AP 214º), AR 18 h 43,8 min. / D -38º 19′ (right) both 1993 From the Constellations series Cibachrome photographs
Photographs from the Constellations series by Spanish artist Joan Fontcuberta come filled with fields of sparkling blackness, their speckled surfaces redolent of infinite space and twinkling stars. Their titles imply we are looking upwards towards the heavens. But this artist’s prints actually record dust, crushed insects and other debris deposited on the windscreen of his car, a trace of the evidence of his own rapid passage through terrestrial space and time. The artist applied sheets of 8-by-10-inch film directly onto the glass windscreen and shone a light through, creating photograms which were then made into glossy Cibachrome prints.
Installation views and detail of Paul Hartigan (New Zealand, b. 1939) Colourwords 1980-1981 Colour photocopy
Consistently defined by a subversive edge and a darkly witty humour, the work of New Zealand artist Paul Hartigan is often subtly permeated by astute social and political perceptions. Shortly after they were introduced into New Zealand in 1980, Hartigan explored the creative possibilities of a colour photocopying machine, making a series of images in which words and found objects ironically refer to each other in an endless loop. With the objects arranged to spell out their own colour, each picture offers an oscillation of word and meaning, flatness and dimension, art and detritus.
Installation view of Gavin Hipkins (left) and Lucinda Eva-May (right) as part of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Installation view of Gavin Hipkins (New Zealand, b. 1968) The Coil 1998 Silver gelatin photographs
Inspired by the kinetic films of Len Lye, in the 1990s Gavin Hipkins made a series of cameraless photographs that play with sequence and implied movement. The 32 images that make up The Coil were made by resting polystyrene rings on sheets of photographic paper and then exposing them to light.
Installation view of Lucinda Eva-May (Australia) Unity in light #6, 2012 (left) Unity in light #9, 2012 (right) C-type prints
Australian artist Lucinda Kennedy has sought to capture a phenomenological representation of the feelings and sensations of sexual intercourse through the direct imprint on sheets of photographic paper of this most primal of human interactions. Turned into a single blurred organism by the extended duration of the exposure, the artist and her partner become an abstraction, thereby aptly conjuring an experience that has always been beyond the capacity of mere description.
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Thomas Ruff, and at right, Justine Varga
Installation views of Thomas Ruff (Germany, b. 1958) r.phg.07_II 2013 Chromogenic print
Thomas Ruff (Germany, b. 1958) r.phg.07_II 2013 Chromogenic print
German artist Thomas Ruff uses his computers to construct virtual objects with simulated surfaces and to calculate the lights and shadows they might cast in different compositions. He then prints the results, in colour and at very large scale. Combining variations of spheres, curves, zig-zags and sharp edges, all set within richly coloured surrounds, Ruff’s images are both untethered abstractions and historical ciphers. Although referred to by the artist as photograms, the final prints are perhaps better conceived as being about the photogram, studiously replaying an analogue process in digital terms so as to make a spectacle of its logic.
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Shimpei Takeda and at right, Justine Varga
Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984) Desklamp 2011-2012 Chromogenic photograph
Australian artist Justine Varga creates photographic works from an intimate and often prolonged exchange between a strip of film and the world that comes to be inscribed on it. Desklamp involved the year-long exposure of a large format negative placed on top of the artist’s desk lamp. Exit was derived from a similar piece of film that was scarred and weathered during a three-month exposure on her windowsill during a residency in London. Both were then turned into luscious colour photographs in the darkroom via various printing procedures.
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre Queen St, New Plymouth, New Zealand Phone: +64 6 759 6060 Email:info@govettbrewster.com
![F.H. Boone & Co., 'Untitled [Wicker chair supplied to the American Fleet during their visit]' 1908](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/photo-of-one-of-the-wicker-chairs-web.jpg "F.H. Boone & Co., 'Untitled [Wicker chair supplied to the American Fleet during their visit]' 1908")
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