All images are featured in the exhibition. Many thankx to the Schirn Kunsthalle for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) became known in Germany through his seminal work as a teacher at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau (1923-1928). His pioneering theories on art as a testing ground for new forms of expression and their application to all spheres of modern life are still of influence today. Presenting about 170 works – paintings, photographs and photograms, sculptures and films, as well as stage set designs and typographical projects – the retrospective encompasses all phases of his oeuvre. On the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the foundation of the Bauhaus, it offers a survey of the enormous range of Moholy-Nagy’s creative output to the public for the first time since the last major exhibition of his work in Kassel in 1991. Never having been built before 2009, the artist’s spatial design Raum der Gegenwart (Room of Today), which brings together many of his theories, will be realised in the context of the exhibition.
No other teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, nor nearly any other artist of the 1920s in Germany, an epoch rich in utopian designs, developed such a wide range of ideas and activities as László Moholy-Nagy, who was born in Bácsborsód in Southern Hungary in 1895. His oeuvre bears evidence to the fact that he considered painting and film, photography and sculpture, stage set design, drawing, and the photogram to be of equal importance. He continually fell back upon these means of expression, using them alternately, varying them, and taking them up again as parts of a universal concept whose pivot was the alert, curious, and unrestrained experimental mind of the “multimedia” artist himself. Long before people began to talk about “media design” and professional “marketing,” Moholy-Nagy worked in these fields, too – as a guiding intellectual force in terms of new technical, design and educational instruments. “All design areas of life are closely interlinked,” he wrote about 1925 and was, despite his motto insisting on “the unity of art and technology,” no uncritical admirer of the machine age, but rather a humanist who was open-minded about technology. His basic attitude as an artist, which exemplifies the idealistic and utopian thinking of an entire era, may be summed up as aimed at improving the quality of life, avoiding specialisation, and employing science and technology for the enrichment and heightening of human experience.
After having graduated from high school, Moholy-Nagy began to study law in Budapest in 1913, but was drafted in 1915. During the war, he made his first drawings on forces mail cards and began dedicating himself exclusively to art after having been discharged from the army in 1918. Moholy-Nagy moved to Vienna in 1919 and to Berlin the following year, kept in close contact with Kurt Schwitters, Raul Hausmann, Theo van Doesburg, and El Lissitzky, and immersed himself in Merzkunst, De Stijl, and Constructivism. He achieved successes as an artist with his solo presentation in the Berlin gallery “Der Sturm” (1922), for example. In spring 1923, he was offered the post of a Bauhaus master in Weimar by Walter Gropius. Taking responsibility for the preliminary course and the metal workshop, he decisively informed the Constructivist and social reorientation of the Bauhaus. Interlinking art, life, and technology and underscoring the visual and the material aspects in design were key issues of his work and resulted in a modern, technology-oriented language of forms. His didactic approaches as a Bauhaus teacher still present themselves as up-to-date as his work as an artist. For him, education had to be primarily aimed at bringing up people to become artistically political and creative beings: “Every healthy person has a deep capacity for bringing to development the creative energies found in his/her nature … and can give form to his/her emotions in any material (which is not synonymous with ‘art’),” he wrote in 1929.
In spite of his manifold activities and inventions in the sphere of so-called applied art, Moholy-Nagy by no means advocated abolishing free art. Before, during, and long after his years at the Bauhaus, he produced numerous paintings, drawings, collages, woodcuts, and linocuts, as well as photographs and films as autonomous works of art. Like his design solutions, his works in the classical arts, in painting and sculpture, also reveal his aesthetically and conceptually radical approach. His Telephone Pictures, whose execution he controlled by telephone, exemplify this dimension: using a special graph paper and a colour chart, he worked out the composition and colours of the pictures and had them realised according to his telephonic instructions by technical assistants. He also pursued new paths with his famous Light-Space Modulator of 1930, conceiving his gesamtkunstwerk [“total work of art”] composed of colour, light, and movement as an “apparatus for the demonstration of the effects of light and movement.” It was equally new territory he conquered in the fields of photography and film: considering his cameraless photography, his photograms, and his abstract films such as Light Play Black, White, Gray (1930), Moholy-Nagy must still be regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century photographers and key figures for today’s media theories.
Thanks to his experiments with photography and the photogram, László Moholy Nagy was one of the first typographers of the 1920s to recognise the new possibilities offered by the combination of typeface, surface design, and pictorial signs with recent photographic techniques. As a Bauhaus teacher for typography, he designed almost all of the 14 Bauhaus books published between 1925 and 1929 and – besides co-editing them with Walter Gropius – took care of the entire presentation of the books’ contents and the organisation of their production. With its dynamic cycles and bars and concentration on a few, clear colours, their design resembled the Constructivist artists’ paintings and drawings. While Moholy-Nagy’s early typographic works are frequently still characterised by hand-drawn typefaces, he later strove for a “mechanized graphic design” also suited for commercial advertising through their systematisation and standardisation. After he had left the Bauhaus in 1928, he founded his own office in Berlin, where he, among other things, developed advertising solutions for Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s designs for the Jena Glassworks. Faced with the Nazis’ seizure of power, Moholy-Nagy emigrated to the United States via Amsterdam and Great Britain and founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937 and, after it had been closed, the Chicago School (and later Institute) of Design in 1939, where he continued to champion an integration of art, science, and technology. László Moholy-Nagy died of leukaemia in Chicago on 24 November 1946.
The exhibition at the Schirn also presents the Raum der Gegenwart (Room of Today), which offers a concise summary of Moholy-Nagy’s work. The sketches for this environment, which assembles many of his theories, date back as far as 1930. Not having been built before 2009, the Raum der Gegenwart (Room of Today) is now realised in the Schirn on the occasion of the Bauhaus anniversary 2009.
Press release from the Schirn Kunsthalle website [Online] Cited 20/01/2010. No longer available online
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) Light Play Black, White, Gray 1930
The sculpture Light-Space Modulator is a key work in the history of kinetic art and even the art of new media and, therefore, one of the most important works of art of its time. Conceived initially by Moholy-Nagy at the beginning of the twenties of the last century and built between 1928 and 1930…
Light-Space Modulator was exhibited in 1930 in a show organised in Paris on the work of the German Werkbund. From the point of view of the object, it forms a complex as well as beautiful set of elements of metal, plastic and glass, many of them mobile by the action of an electric motor, surrounded by a series of coloured lights.
Moholy-Nagy used it to produce light shows that he photographed or filmed, as in the case of the film shown here. Although in black and white, the film manages to capture the kinetic brightness of the sculpture.
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) Photogramm No.II 1929 Silver gelatin photograph 95.5 x 68.5cm Courtesy Galerie Berinson, Berlin Photo: Friedhelm Hoffmann, Berlin
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) Marseille, Port View 1929 Silver gelatin photograph 48.7 x 37.9cm Courtesy Collection of George Eastman House
Many thankx to Sprüth Magers London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945) Untitled (Money can buy you love) 1983 Collage 19.5 x 17.5cm Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers London Berlin
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945) Untitled (Your misery loves company) 1985 Collage 18 x 17.3cm Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers London Berlin
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945) Untitled (Our prices are insane!) 1987 Collage Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers London Berlin
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945) Untitled (We will no longer be seen and not heard) 1985 17.8 x 18.5cm Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers London Berlin
Sprüth Magers London is delighted to present a survey of early work by acclaimed American artist Barbara Kruger. Using contrasting layers of text and image, Kruger’s work has for almost three decades probed the nature of a media-saturated society in late capitalism, and the significance of highly evolved cultures of consumerism and mass politics to the experience and making of social identities. In addition to offering acute, indeed often piquant cultural insights, Kruger’s work also presents a serious conceptual exploration into the relationship between language and image, and their dynamics as collaborators and antagonists in the bearing of meaning. The artist’s unique blend of conceptual sophistication and wry social commentary has made Kruger one of the most respected and admired artists of her generation, and this timely reappraisal of her early practice reveals the ingenuity and precision of her craft.
The early monochrome pre-digital works assembled in the exhibition, known professionally as ‘paste ups’, reveal the influence of the artist’s experience as a magazine editorial designer during her early career. These small scale works, the largest of which is 11 x 13 inches, are composed of altered found images, and texts either culled from the media or invented by the artist. A negative of each work was then produced and used to make enlarged versions of these initial ‘paste ups’. The influence of Kruger’s magazine publishing training extends far beyond technique however. The linguistic and typographic conventions of consumer culture, and an understanding of the inherent potential of a single image, are appropriated and subverted by Kruger, as the artist explores the power of the soundbite and the slogan, and the method and impact of ‘direct address’ on the consumer/viewer.
Although Kruger’s practice is embedded in the visual and political culture of mass media and advertising, the work moves beyond simple appropriation and the ironic meditation on consumerism which animated earlier movements such as Pop art. The emblazoned slogans are often slightly yet meaningfully adjusted clichés of common parlance and the commercial world, and are overlaid on contrasting images which range from the grotesque to the banal. The juxtaposition of pictorial and linguistic modes of communication on the same plane thereby begs conceptual questions of human understanding, and the means by which messages are transmitted and distorted, recognised and received.
Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945. She currently lives in both Los Angeles, California and New York and teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been the subject of many one-person exhibitions, including a comprehensive retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1999, which travelled to The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 2000. More recently, she has exhibited large-scale installations at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Tramway in Glasgow, Scotland, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, Australia, and at BCAM at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. She was honoured with the “Golden Lion” award for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2005.
Press release from the Sprüth Magers London website [Online] Cited 25/05/2019 no longer available online
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945) Untitled (We won’t be our own best enemy) 1986 Collage 18 x 22cm Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers London Berlin
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945) Untitled (Surveillance is their busywork) 1988 Collage 11.1 x 22cm Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers London Berlin
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945) Untitled (You are a very special person) 1995 Collage (colour) 13.6 x 19.1cm Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers London Berlin
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945) Don’t be a jerk 1984 Screenprint on vinyl 250 x 388.5cm Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers London Berlin
Many thankx to the Flo Peters Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
René Burri (Swiss, 1933-2014) Tae Soe Dong, Sud Korea 1961 Gelatin silver print
René Burri (Swiss, 1933-2014) Bilbao, Spain 1957 Gelatin silver print
René Burri (Swiss, 1933-2014) Training, Fort Lauderdale, Florida 1966 Gelatin silver print
René Burri (Swiss, 1933-2014) Two Monks, Kyoto, Japan 1961 Gelatin silver print
René Burri (Swiss, 1933-2014) Che Guevara, Havana 1963 Gelatin silver print
René Burri (Swiss, 1933-2014) Men On A Rooftop, Sao Paulo 1960 Gelatin silver print
René Burri likes to see his career as a series of happy accidents, which is often just another way of editing out all the downtime and boring bits, the months of no work. But you have to admit it did start with a bang. There he was, 24 years old, mooching around in northern Spain, when he read in a newspaper that Picasso was expected at a bullfight in Nimes the next day. He drove through the night, checked into a hotel early the next morning – and to his surprise was ushered straight into Picasso’s bedroom.
A party was in full swing, and the artist was sitting up in bed, directing a small group of musicians and friends. He nodded at Burri – yes, he could take pictures – and the result is a wonderfully vivid sequence of portraits, Picasso laughing and clapping and betraying not the tiniest sign that a private party has just been interrupted. Burri, of course, took it as a sign from God: with luck like this, he was a born photographer.
So, right from the start, he has had a knack for being in the right place at the right time – and for not making a nuisance of himself once he gets there. He photographed Che Guevara in Havana in 1963, just a few months before the revolutionary disappeared from public life. He got stuck in a lift with President Nasser of Egypt, and took a funny picture of him laughing while a bodyguard looks on murderously.
Of course, for every picture Burri took, there was another he didn’t. He is now 71 and semi-retired (photographers never stop), and says that you could fill volumes with the stories he didn’t get, the places he didn’t go.
The first time he was commissioned to go to Cuba, in 1958 at the height of the revolution, he got drunk the night before he was due to fly, cried off, and went skiing at home in Switzerland instead. He once saw Greta Garbo coming down the road towards him in New York, wearing dark glasses, and at the very last moment put away his camera; she was just too forbidding. In the desert in Egypt, he saw the blackened hand of a corpse reaching up through the sand, and he didn’t take that picture, either. Burri believes in a notion of tact, or what he calls dignity.
Other people might call it cowardice, but he feels strongly that there are some lines you just don’t cross. “I have incredible respect for [war photographers] Don McCullin and Larry Burrows, but you pay a price. What does Don photograph now? Landscapes, pictures of flowers.” This is partly a moral position – photographers can get addicted to war, he says, and he met a lot of them in Vietnam – but it is also a simple instinct for self-preservation. Three of Burri’s great mentors at Magnum – Robert Capa, Werner Bischof, Chim (David Seymour) – lived dangerously and died young, and he always felt it was a tremendous waste of their talent.
For all that, Burri has seen a lot of war. Since joining Magnum in 1959, he has covered conflicts in Cambodia, Korea, Vietnam, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and China. He says he prefers to photograph the build-up to war, or its aftermath, rather than the violence itself. One of the first big projects he undertook was a portrait of postwar Germany, starting in the bleak mid-1950s and published in book form in 1962.
Of all his photographs, those that most nearly capture the atmosphere of combat are, in fact, of a training exercise in the Swiss Jura. Burri undertook compulsory military service in the 1950s, while still at art school, but with the permission of his training officer ended up shooting more film than anything else; he developed the pictures in his bath tub at the end of the day. At the age of 21, he came to see the camera as a way of removing himself from actual conflict; it also, he says, forced him to look for metaphors about battle, rather than relying on the action picture. (This is a rule of his – don’t be too literal. He once saw Castro standing in a doorway underneath a big exit sign, which was tempting for a second, but then just too obvious.)
Burri’s most powerful war pictures are the ones with no one in them. During the Six Day War between Egypt and Israel in 1967, he took a series of stark, graphic photographs, many of them from the air, which said something about the conflict that any single explosion or corpse might not have. In one, the wreckage of an Egyptian helicopter lies sprawled on a concrete landing pad, looking like a bug squashed on patio paving; in another, a burned-out convoy snakes through the desert like a collection of children’s toys left out in a sand pit.
A third photograph, an extreme close-up of a helmeted soldier with helicopters swarming at his shoulder like mosquitoes, taken in 1974, after the Yom Kippur war, has someone in it, it’s true, but he is silhouetted and faceless – an emblematic soldier, not a real one. In person, Burri is not a man given to big political statements, but on film he has captured the futility of war, the mess and wastefulness of human aggression.
Burri now lives in Paris, which is currently honouring him with a retrospective, and on the opening weekend he rushes around the gallery with his publisher, a TV director, several friends, his wife and 11-year-old son in tow. (He has grown-up children from his first marriage to Rosellina Bischof, who died in 1986.) He is every inch the European photojournalist – battered black fedora, cravat, a thick cloud of cigar smoke; when we move to a cafe to talk and the Americans at the next table complain about the cigar, he points out, in a very genial way, that the pollution is marginally worse outside.
At art school in Zurich, Burri was initially more interested in film. He had a rather off-putting photography teacher who started class with gymnastics and breathing exercises, and was a keen proponent of the “new objectivity” – there was an emphasis on still lifes and form, and what Burri refers to as “coffee cups in light.”
The American photographer Edward Steichen once came to the school looking for work he might include in an exhibition, The Family Of Man, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York – where were the pictures of people, he wanted to know, and left disappointed. It wasn’t until after he graduated that Burri felt free to pursue the more spontaneous, subjective kind of photography that Steichen had come looking for. “I suddenly had to chase after my pictures … Pictures are like taxis during rush hour – if you’re not fast enough, someone else will get there first.”
He started in Paris, as everyone did in the 1950s. Henri Cartier-Bresson had just published his influential book The Decisive Moment, and Robert Doisneau and Willy Ronis were photographing the city’s streets and cafes. At Magnum, they took an interest in a story Burri had published about a school for deaf-mute children, selling it on to Life magazine. He was in – Cartier-Bresson approved, Capa was enthusiastic, so Burri became a part of the greatest photographers’ cooperative in the world.
For the next two decades, he travelled almost incessantly, working on commissions for the New York Times, Vogue, Paris-Match, Time, Der Stern. He has kept every boarding card and press pass; a cabinet in the Paris exhibition is full of them. But although Burri worked constantly throughout the 1950s and 1960s, his photographs were always considered the lesser part of a story; as far as magazine editors were concerned, it was the words that mattered. After Burri accompanied an American journalist on a two-hour interview with Che Guevara, Look magazine ran pages of dense text, cropping his extraordinary portraits and running them very small at the bottom of the page.
One of the chief pleasures of this retrospective stage in life, says Burri, is being able to go back through all that work and decide for himself what was important and what was not. In Phaidon’s new monograph of his work, the portrait of Che is not 2in square but blown up across two pages. He has hung magazine stories in the new exhibition, signing the uncredited ones in red crayon. And as well as the reportage, there are hundreds of portraits of artists and writers and architects – Patricia Highsmith, Alberto Giacometti, Le Corbusier – and of cities: Tokyo, Havana, New York in a blackout, Rio de Janeiro, São Paolo, Brasilia.
Burri fell in love with modern architecture as a student and went on to form close friendships with Le Corbusier, Luis Barragan and Oscar Niemeyer. Some of his best work draws on this innate feel for the form and volume of a building, and of a person’s place within it. A photograph called In The Ministry Of Health, Rio de Janeiro 1960, is so full of light and shadow, it looks at first like a street scene, two young women striding through thick bars of sunlight; in fact, the photograph was taken indoors, in the lobby of a building designed by two of Burri’s favourite architects, Niemeyer and Le Corbusier. Burri’s best known photograph, of four suited men crossing a rooftop in São Paolo, captures all the drama, glamour and vertigo of life in a giant city: the flat roof floats high above the street, dotted with tiny, improbable people.
When Burri left Zurich in the 1950s, he set out to discover the world and some sense of man’s smallness within it. Switzerland was landlocked, bordered by mountains; a camera was a way out. Even then, he worried about what he could do that was new – “when shutters rattle from morning to night in every corner of the world … when every continent is lit with the flash of cameras.” His job, he believes, has been to “trace the enormous social changes taking place in our age, conveying my thoughts and images of them.” And, more poetically, “to put the intensity that you yourself have experienced into the picture – otherwise it is just a document.” He retired from reporting once that intensity, that sense of the bigness of the world, was gone. In 1989, he went to Moscow to photograph Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, but so did 6,500 others, and in the scrum it seemed impossible to take a meaningful picture. He now prefers to paint and take pictures of his wife and son. Of course, he’d start all over again if the world ever became less crowded – if you could walk into Picasso’s bedroom at six in the morning, and be welcome.
Saturday February 7, 2004 The Guardian Text on the Art Daily website [Online] Cited 19/05/2019
René Burri (Swiss, 1933-2014) Four photographs from the series Blackout New York November 9, 1965 Gelatin silver print
Flo Peters Gallery Burchardstraße 13 Chilehaus C 20095 Hamburg, Germany
Here’s my pick of the twelve best exhibitions in Melbourne for 2009 that featured on Art Blart (in no particular order) – and a few honourable mentions that very nearly made the list!
1. The Water Hole by Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger at ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
Gerda Steiner (Swiss, b. 1967) and Jorg Lenzlinger (Swiss, b. 1964) The Water Hole 2009
“The most effective bed has a small meteorite suspended in a net bag above it. The viewer slides underneath the ‘rock’ placing the meteorite about a foot or so above your face. The meteorite is brown, dark and heavy, swinging slightly above your ‘third eye’. You feel its weight pressing down on your energy, on your life force and you feel how old this object is, how far it has traveled, how fragile and mortal you are. It is a sobering and enlightening experience but what an experience it is!”
This was a magical and poignant exhibition that was a joy for children and adults alike. Children love it running around exploring the environments. Adults love it for it’s magical, witty and intelligent response to the problems facing our planet and our lives. A truly enjoyable interplanetary collision.
2. Ocean Without A Shore video installation by Bill Viola at The National Gallery of Victoria
Installation photograph of Ocean Without A Shore at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
The resurrected are pensive, some wringing the hands, some staring into the light. One offers their hands to the viewer in supplication before the tips of the fingers touch the wall of water – the ends turning bright white as they push through the penumbrae of the interface. As they move forward the hands take on a stricken anguish, stretched out in rigour. Slowly the resurrected turn and return to the other side. We watch them as we watch our own mortality, life slipping away one day after another. Here is not the distraction of a commodified society, here is the fact of every human life: that we all pass.
The effect on the viewer is both sad but paradoxically uplifting. I cried …
These series of encounters at the intersection of life and death are worthy of the best work of this brilliant artist. He continues to astound with his prescience, addressing what is undeniable in the human condition. Long may he continue.
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Sweet lovers 1990
This was a wonderful exhibition. Gascoigne rightly commands a place in the pantheon of Australian stars. She has left us with a legacy of music that evokes the rhythms, the air, the spaces and colours of our country. As she herself said,
“Look at what we have: Space, skies. You can never have too much of nothing.”
Dale Frank (Australian, b. 1959) Ryan Gosling 2008/2009
The artist offered the viewer the ability to generate their own resonances with the painting, to use the imagination of ‘equivalence’ to suggest what these paintings stand for – and also what else they stand for. States of being, of transformation, wonder and joy emerged in the playfulness of these works.
Ryan Gosling was a tour de force. With the poetic structure of an oil spill, the varnish forms intricate slick upon slick contours that are almost topographical in their mapping. The black oozes light, becomes ‘plastic’ black before your eyes, like the black of Rembrandt’s backgrounds, illusive, illuminative and hard to pin down – perpetually hanging there in two dripping rows, fixed but fluid at one and the same time (you can just see the suspensions in the photograph above).
This painting was one of the most overwhelming syntheses of art and nature, of universal forces that I have seen in recent contemporary art. This exhibition was an electric pulsating universe of life, landscape and transformation. Magnificent!
5. So It Goes by Laith McGregor at Helen Gory Galerie
Laith McGregor (Australian, b. 1977) The Last Bastion (detail) 2009
Simply spectacular!
I had never seen such art made using a biro before: truly inspiring. Inventive, funny, poignant and outrageous this was a must see show of 2009.
Domenico de Clario (Australian born Italy, b. 1947) o (la grande maison blanche – snow clouds massing) 2008/09
Painted in a limited colour palette of ochres, greys and blacks the works vibrate with energy. Cezanne like spatial representations are abstracted and the paint bleeds across the canvas forming a maze of buildings. Walls and hedges loom darkly over roadways, emanations of heads and figures float in the picture plane and the highlight white of snow hovers like a spectral figure above buildings. These are elemental paintings where the shadow has become light and the light is shadow, meanderings of the soul in space.
de Clario feels the fluid relationship between substance and appearance; he understands that Utrillo is embedded in the position of each building and stone, in the cadences and rhymes of the paintings of Montmarte. de Clario interprets this knowledge in a Zen like rendition of shadow substance in his paintings. Everything has it’s place without possession of here and there, dark and light.
For my part it was my soul responding to the canvases. I was absorbed into their fabric. As in the dark night of the soul my outer shell gave way to an inner spirituality stripped of the distance between viewer and painting. I felt communion with this man, Utrillo, with this art, de Clario, that brought a sense of revelation in the immersion, like a baptism in the waters of dark light. For art this is a fantastic achievement.
These heterogeneous paintings were a knockout with their wonderful, layered presence – they really command the viewer to look at them and celebrate the characters within them. Whimsical, ironic and full of humour these phantasmagorical images of creatures cast adrift with the night sky as background are fabulous assemblages of colour, form and storytelling.
My friend and I really enjoyed this exhibition. We were captivated by these songs, going back to the work again and again to tease out the details, to feel connection to the work. These are not lonely isolated figures but sublime emanations of inner states of being expertly rendered in glorious colour. And they made us laugh – what more could you ask for!
8. Tacita Dean at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) Michael Hamburger [Still] 16mm colour anamorphic, optical sound 28 minutes 2007
“One can see echoes of Sebald’s work in that of Tacita Dean – the personal narratives accompanied by mythical and historical stories and pictures. The tactility of Hamburger’s voice and hands, his caressing of the apples with the summary justice of the tossing away of rotten apples to stop them ruining the rest of the crop is arresting and holds you transfixed. Old varieties and old hands mixed with the old technology of film make for a nostalgic combination … Dean implicitly understands how objects can be elegies for fleeting lives.”
Tacita Dean is a fantastic artist whose work examines the measure of things, the vibrations of spirit in the FLUX of experience. Her work has a trance-like quality that is heavy with nostalgia and memory and reflects the machine-ations of contemporary life. In her languorous and dense work Dean teases out the significance of insignificant actions/events and imparts meaning and life to them. This is no small achievement!
As an exhibition this was an intense and moving experience.
9. Ivy photographs by Jane Burton at Karen Woodbury Gallery
Jane Burton (Australian, b. 1966) Ivy #2 2009
I feel that in these photographs with their facelessness and the non-reflection of the mirror investigate notions of ‘Theoria’ – a Greek emphasis on the vision or contemplation of God where theoria is the lifting up of the individual out of time and space and created being and through contemplative prayer into the presence of God. In fact the whole series of photographs can be understood through this conceptualisation – not just remembrances of past time, not a blind contemplation on existence but a lifting up out of time and space into the an’other’ dark but enlightening presence.
The greatest wonder of this series is that the photographs magically reveal themselves again and again over time. Despite (or because of) the references to other artists, the beauty of Burton’s work is that she has made it her own. The photographs have her signature, her voice as an artist and it is an informed voice; this just makes the resonances, the vibrations of energy within the work all the more potent and absorbing. I loved them.
eX de Medici (Australia, b. 1959) Tooth and claw (detail) 2009
In other less skilled artist’s hands the subject matter could become cliched and trite but here de Medici balances the disparate elements in her compositions and brings the subject matter alive – sinuously jumping off the paper, entwining the viewer in their delicious ironies, all of us sweetly complicit in the terror war (send more meat, send more meat!), fighting tooth and nail to keep urban realities at arm’s length. The dark desires that these works contain possess an aesthetic beauty that swallows us up so that we, too, become ‘Barbarians All’.
The paintings were painted horizontally (like the painter Jackson Pollock who intuitively accessed the spiritual realm) and evidence a horizontal consciousness not a hierarchical one. Knowledge is not privileged over wisdom. There is a balance between knowledge and wisdom – the knowledge gained through a life well lived and the wisdom of ancient stories that represent the intimacy of living on this world. The patterns and diversities of life compliment each other, are in balance.
Wisdom comes from the Indo-European root verb weid, “to see,” the same root from which words like vision come. In this sense these are “Vedic” paintings in that they are ancient, sacred teachings, Veda meaning literally “I have seen.”
Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) Doubting Thomas (detail) 2008
Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) Doubting Thomas Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing, chair 2008
The terrains the Piccinini interrogates (nature and artifice, biogenetics, cloning, stem cell research, consumer culture) are a rematerialisation of the actual world through morphological ‘mapping’ onto the genomes of the future. Morphogenetic fields seem to surround the work with an intense aura; surrounded by this aura the animals and children become more spiritual in their silence. Experiencing this new world promotes an evolution in the way in which we conceive the future possibilities of life on this earth, this brave but mutably surreal new world.
This was truly one of the best exhibitions of the year in Melbourne.
Honorable mentions
~ Climbing the Walls and Other Actions by Clare Rae at the Centre for Contemporary Photography In these photographs action is opposed with stillness, danger opposed with suspension; the boundaries of space, both of the body and the environment, the interior and the exterior, memory and dream, are changed.
~ Johannes Kuhnen: a survey of innovation at RMIT Gallery We stood transfixed before this work, peering closely at it and gasping in appreciation of the beauty, technical proficiency and pure poetry of the pieces.
~ Double Infinitives by Marco Fusinato at Anna Schwartz Gallery The images are literally ripped from the matrix of time and space and become the dot dot dot of the addendum. What Fusinato does so excellently is to make us pause and stare, to recognize the flatness of these figures and the quietness of violence that surrounds us.
~ all about … blooming by JUNKO GO at Gallery 101 Go’s musings on the existential nature of our being are both full and empty at one and the same time and help us contemplate the link to the breath of the sublime.
~ Mood Bomb by Louise Paramor at Nellie Castan Gallery They are dream states that allow the viewer to create their own narrative with the title of the works offering gentle guides along the way. These are wonderfully evocative paintings.
~ New 09 at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) Finally you sit on the aluminium benches and contemplate in silence all that has come before and wonder what just hit you in a tidal wave of feelings, immediacies and emotions. The Doing and Undoing of Things.
~ My Jesus Lets Me Rub His Belly by Martin Smith at Sophie Gannon Gallery At the end of days, when all is said and done, the funny diatribes with their ambiguous photographs are homily and heretic and together form a more inclusive body of bliss: ‘And also with you and you and you and you’.
An interesting discussion of the life and work of Lisette Model (and her influence on Diane Arbus and vice versa) can be found on the AMERICANSUBURB X: THEORY website in an article by Elsa Dorfman titled “Ann Thomas on Lisette Model”. More photographs by Lisette Model can be found on the Masters of Photography website including some fabulous “Running Legs” images.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Fundacion MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“New images surround us everywhere. They are invisible only because of sterile routine convention and fear.”
“Photography starts with the projection of the photographer, his understanding of life and himself into the picture.”
“New images surround us everywhere. They are invisible only because of sterile routine convention and fear. To find these images is to dare to see, to be aware of what there is and how it is. The photographer not only gets information, he gives information about life.”
If Lisette Model took up photography as a way of earning a living, it is also true that she always fought for her own subjects, rather than simply carry out the assignments given by editors. She believed that for a photograph to be successful its subject had to be something that “hits you in the stomach.” This could be something familiar or something unfamiliar. For Model, the camera was an instrument for probing the world, a way of capturing aspects of a permanently changing reality that otherwise we would fail to see.
Model always said that she looked but did not judge. Yes, her photographs of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice were published by the left-wing journal Regards, in 1935, but she was not interested exclusively either in the rich or in the poor, and her images are much more about human relations. Her work evinces empathy, curiosity, compassion and admiration, and reflects the photographer’s attraction to voluminous forms, energy and liveliness, to emphatic gesture and expression: the world as stage. The critic Elizabeth McCausland has described Model’s camerawork as expressing “a subconscious revolt against the rules.”
This exhibition of some 120 of Lisette Model’s most representative photographs illustrates the very bold and direct approach to reality that made her one of the most singular proponents of street photography, the particular form of documentary photography that developed in New York during the 1940s, through the camerawork of such as Helen Levitt, Roy de Carava and Weegee.
Alongside the photographs, archive film and sound recordings of Lisette Model will evoke the photographer’s life, and there will be copies of magazines to which she contributed (Regards, Harper’s Bazaar, etc.).
Exhibition organised by Jeu de Paume and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.
Text from the Jeu de Paume website [Online] Cited 01/01/2010 no longer available online
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Philadelphia, 1963 1963 Gelatin silver print
The early photographs from the 1960’s are stupendous!
The pre-visualisation of the final photograph shows rare talent. The use of deep chiaroscuro is handled so adeptly, so confidently. The photographer is in full control of the modelling of the spaces and contours of the objects within the photographic frame. Metzker’s drawing with light surely comes from an enlightened mind. Magical. Wonderful.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Laurence Miller Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Philadelphia, 1963 1963 Gelatin silver print
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Philadelphia 1963 Gelatin silver print
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Philadelphia, 1964 1964 Gelatin silver print
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Chicago, 1958 1958 Gelatin silver print
From November 24 through January 9 Laurence Miller Gallery celebrates Ray K. Metzker: AutoMagic. This exhibition features over fifty black-and-white photographs taken by this 78-year old master photographer over the past fifty years in which the automobile plays a pivotal role in the contest between light and shadow. Forty of the photographs have never been exhibited before.
From his earliest street pictures taken under the El in Chicago’s Loop in the mid-Fifties, to his most recent highly abstract views of reflections on Philadelphia car windows, Ray K. Metzker brings an exuberance of vision rarely found among today’s photographers. In total control of his camera and craft, Metzker transforms the mundane in daily urban life into intense images that sizzle, and delight the eye.
In the darkest recesses of a parking garage, we discover a single shimmering tail fin of a late 50’s Cadillac. In a scene more Orson Wells than Woody Allen, we witness a menacing shadow figure approaching a parked car, intent unknown. In a blizzard, we join the photographer and a single figure as they look at one another wondering why each other is standing there in the cascading snow.
The show also reveals a more tender side of Metzker, as we peer into car windows to see folks uninhibited within their mobile shelters, including a sleeping man with a medallion, head resting on the door; a man reading at the wheel of his damaged white coupe; and a man at the end of long day, hand upon his head.
Metzker’s work of the last few years, fondly nicknamed Autowackies, are a brilliant extension of his earlier forays into abstraction, and are only made possible by the contours of our newest cars and SUV’s, which wildly warp the architecture and cloud formations reflected on their glossy surfaces.
Many thankx to the Frick Art and Historical Center for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Matthew Brady (American, 1823-1896) Prosper M. Wetmore 1857 Salted paper print from wet collodion negative 47 x 39.4cm (18 1/2 x 15 1/2 in.) CC0 1.0 Universal
A popular author, legislator, and general in the New York State militia, Wetmore, here at age 59, still resembles Edgar Allen Poe’s description of him from a decade earlier: “about five feet eight in height, slender, neat; with an air of military compactness.” Brady’s portrait studio, with branches in New York and Washington, DC, was the most important of its era in America, thanks in part to its success in photographing political, social, and cultural figures. These early celebrity portraits, such as those of the wedding of performer Tom Thumb (seen in the centre of the gallery), could sell thousands of copies. Brady is now best known for images of the Civil War, most taken by photographers he hired.
Text from The Cleveland Museum of Art website
Anne W. Brigman (American, 1869-1950) The Hamadryads c. 1910 Platinum print
Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965) Bucks County Barn 1915 Gelatin silver print 9 1/4 x 7 5/16″ (23.5 x 18.6cm)
Margaret Bourke-White (American 1904-1971) Terminal Tower 1928 13 1/4 x 10″ (33.7 x 25.4cm) Gelatin silver print
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Black and White Lilies III 1928 Gelatin silver print
Alfred Steiglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keefe 1933 Gelatin silver photograph
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Resident, Conway, Arkansas 1938 Gelatin silver print 11 15/16 x 9 1/2 in. (30.32 x 24.13cm)
On October 3, 2009, Icons of American Photography: A Century of Photographsfrom the Cleveland Museum of Art opens at The Frick Art Museum. This exhibition is composed of fifty-nine photographs from Cleveland’s extraordinary collection that chronicle the evolution of photography in America from a scientific curiosity in the 1850s to one of the most potent forms of artistic expression of the twentieth century.
Icons of American Photography presents some of the best work by masters of the medium, like Mathew Brady, William Henry Jackson, Eadweard Muybridge, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank, encompassing themes of portraiture, the Western landscape, Pictorialism, documentary photography, and abstraction.
The exhibition explores the technical developments of photography, starting with outstanding examples of daguerreotypes – a sheet of copper coated with light sensitive silver. The daguerreotype gave way to salt, albumen, and then gelatin silver prints. Technologies improved to accommodate larger sizes, easy reproduction of multiple prints from a single negative, and commercially available negative film and print papers. As we move into an increasingly digitised twenty-first century, the lure of the photographer’s magic and the mysteries of making photographic images appear on paper is still strong.
Icons of American Photography presents a remarkable chronicle of American life seen through the camera’s lens. The earliest days of photography saw a proliferation of portraiture – intimately personal and honest in composition. A rare multiple-exposure daguerreotype by Albert Southworth (1811-1894) and Josiah Hawes (1808-1901) presents the sitter in variety of poses and expressions, while the formal portrait of Prosper M. Wetmore, 1857, by Civil War-era photographer Mathew Brady (1823-1896) is more typical of early portraiture. The carefully staged daguerreotype, Dead Child on a Sofa, c. 1855, is an outstanding example of the postmortem portrait. The high rate of infant mortality throughout the 1800s made this variety of portraiture common, satisfying the emotional need of the parents to have a lasting memory of their loved one.
Advances in photographic processes allowed for a range of expressive qualities that were exploited by photographers with an artistic flair. In a style known as Pictorialism, works such as Hamadryads, 1910, by Anne Brigman (1869-1950) imitated the subject matter of painting. In Greek mythology a hamadryad is a nymph whose life begins and ends with that of a specific tree. In this work, two nudes representing wood nymphs were carefully placed among the flowing forms of an isolated tree in the High Sierra. The platinum print method used by Brigman allowed for a detailed, yet warm and evocative result. Edward Steichen’s Rodin the Thinker, 1902 (see below), was created from two different negatives printed together using the carbon print process. This non-silver process provided a continuous and delicate tonal range. For even greater richness, these prints were often toned, producing dense, glossy areas in either black or warm brown.
During the late nineteenth century, the U.S. Congress commissioned photographers to document the American West. Photographs by Timothy O’Sullivan (1840-1882) and William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) are the most celebrated from among this era. The exhibition includes O’Sullivan’s East Humbolt Mountains, Utah, 1868 (see below), and Jackson’s Mystic Lake, M.T., 1872 (see below), as well as Bridal Veil, Yosemite, c. 1866 (see below), by Carleton Watkins (1829-1916). Photographers carried large-format cameras with heavy glass negatives to precarious vantage points to create their sharply focused and detailed views. Decades later, Ansel Adams (1902-1984) carried on the intrepid tradition when he swerved to the side of the road and hauled his view camera to the roof of his car to make the famous image Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941.
Responding to the rapid growth of the twentieth century, many photographers shifted their attention from depictions of the natural world to the urban landscape. The power, energy, and romance of the city inspired varied approaches, from sweeping vistas to tight, close-up details and unusual camera angles. Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) established her reputation during the late 1920s by photographing industrial subjects in Cleveland. Her Terminal Tower, 1928, documents what was then the second tallest building in America. Berenice Abbot’s (1898-1991) New York, 1936 (see below), is one of many depictions of this vibrant metropolis. The human life of the city intrigued many photographers, including Helen Levitt (1913-2009) whose photographs of children are direct, unsentimental and artful; Weegee [Arthur Fellig] (1899-1968) who unflinchingly documented crime and accident scenes; and Gordon Parks (1912-2006) who chronicled the life of African Americans.
Exploiting the new medium, numerous photography projects were instituted as part of FDR’s New Deal. The most legendary was that of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) run by Roy Stryker, who hired such important photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein. One of the most iconic images of the New Deal was Dust Storm, Cimarron County, 1936 (see below), by Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985). In the spring of 1936, Rothstein made hundreds of photographs in Cimarron County in the Oklahoma panhandle, one of the worst wind-eroded areas in the United States. Out of that body of work came this gripping, unforgettable image. Dorothea Lange’s (1895-1965) work chronicled the human toll wrought by hardship in Resident, Conway, Arkansas, 1938.
As an art form, photography kept in step with formalist modern styles and an increasing trend toward abstraction. Known for his precisionist paintings, Charles Sheeler’s (1883-1965) Bucks County Barn, 1915, features a geometric composition, sharp focus, and subtle tonal range. In Black and White Lilies III, c. 1928 (see above), Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) combined the clarity and directness of Modernism with her long-held interest in botanical imagery. For two decades she created a remarkable group of close-up studies of plants and flowers that identified her as one of the most sophisticated and experimental photographers working in America.
Photographers such as Edward Weston (1886-1958) and Paul Strand (1890-1976) employed a straight-on clarity that highlighted the abstract design of everyday objects and the world around us. A completely abstract work by artist László Moholy-Nagy (1894-1946), Untitled, 1939 (see above), is a photogram made by laying objects onto light-sensitive photographic paper and exposing it to light. The objects partially block the light to create an abstract design on the paper.
By 1960, photography had attained a prominent place not only among the fine arts, but in popular culture as well, ushering in a new era of image-based communication that has profoundly affected the arts as well as everyday life.
Icons of American Photography: A Century of Photographs from the Cleveland Museum of Art is organised by the Cleveland Museum of Art. The exhibition is curated by Tom Hinson, Curator of Photography.
Press release from the The Frick Art and Historical Center website [Online] Cited 06/12/2009 no longer available online
Unknown photographer (American) Dead child on a sofa c. 1855 Quarter plate daguerreotype with applied colour
Carelton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Yosemite Valley from the Best General View No. 2 1866 Albumen silver print
Carleton Watkins had the ability to photograph a subject from the viewpoint that allowed the most information to be revealed about its contents. In this image, he captured what he considered the best features of Yosemite Valley: Bridal veil Falls, Cathedral Rock, Half Dome, and El Capitan. By positioning the camera so that the base of the slender tree appears to grow from the bottom edge of the picture, Watkins composed the photograph so that the canyon rim and the open space beyond it seem to intersect. Although he sacrificed the top of the tree, he was able to place the miniaturised Yosemite Falls at the visual centre of the picture. To alleviate the monotony of an empty sky, he added the clouds from a second negative. This image was taken while Watkins was working for the California Geological Survey. His two thousand pounds of equipment for the expedition, which included enough glass for over a hundred negatives, required a train of six mules.
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website [Online] Cited 14/05/2019
Eadweard J. Muybridge (American born England, 1830-1904) Valley of Yosemite, from Rocky Ford 1872 Albumen silver print
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) East Humboldt Mountains, Utah 1868 Albumen print from wet collodion negative Image: 19.7 x 27cm (7 3/4 x 10 5/8 in.) The Cleveland Museum of Art James Parmelee Fund
By nature and by experience gained during the Civil War, O’Sullivan was ideally suited for the physical and creative demands required of the official photographer for the geological exploration of the fortieth parallel, led by the enterprising Yale geologist Clarence King. The goal of the expedition was to survey the geological structure and natural resources of a swath of territory 100 miles wide, from the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains across the Great Basin to the Rocky Mountains. While on the expedition in 1867-1869 and 1872, O’Sullivan simultaneously pursued his own interest in perfecting a balanced, aesthetic style of landscape photography while providing a faithful record of the natural terrain. As typified in this print, he positioned the camera at a distance parallel to the majestic scenery, presenting a shallow, flattened depiction of space. The image describes in sharp detail the sheer beauty and rugged scale of this Western landscape.
Text from The Cleveland Museum of Art website
William Henry Jackson (American, 1843-1942) Mystic Lake, M.T. 1872 Albumen print from wet collodion negative Image: 23.3 x 50.7cm (9 3/16 x 19 15/16 in.) The Cleveland Museum of Art John L. Severance Fund
One of the best-known 19th-century landscape photographers of the American West, Jackson took thousands of negatives between 1870 and 1888 while working for the federal government and the railroads. Beginning in 1870, he began an eight-year assignment as official photographer to the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories led by Ferdinand V. Hayden. This beautiful view of Mystic Lake, located at the head of the East Gallatin River, is one of the most picturesque photographs of the mountainous American West. Jackson used for the first time 11-by-14-inch negatives that captured the scene’s rich textures, the brilliant play of light and shade, and the power and romance of this enthralling vista. Jackson described the scenic lake as “well stocked with most excellent trout, it is quite a pleasure-resort, despite the difficulties to encounter in reaching it.”
Text from The Cleveland Museum of Art website
Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) Rodin The Thinker 1902 Gum bichromate print
When Edward Steichen arrived in Paris in 1900, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was regarded not only as the finest living sculptor but also perhaps as the greatest artist of his time. Steichen visited him in his studio in Meudon in 1901 and Rodin, upon seeing the young photographer’s work, agreed to sit for his portrait. Steichen spent a year studying the sculptor among his works, finally choosing to show Rodin in front of the newly carved white marble of the “Monument to Victor Hugo,” facing the bronze of “The Thinker.” In his autobiography, Steichen describes the studio as being so crowded with marble blocks and works in clay, plaster, and bronze that he could not fit them together with the sculptor into a single negative. He therefore made two exposures, one of Rodin and the “Monument to Victor Hugo,” and another of “The Thinker.” Steichen first printed each image separately and, having mastered the difficulties of combining the two negatives, joined them later into a single picture, printing the negative showing Rodin in reverse.
“Rodin – The Thinker” is a remarkable demonstration of Steichen’s control of the gum bichromate process and the painterly effects it encouraged. It is also the most ambitious effort of any Pictorialist to emulate art in the grand tradition. The photograph portrays the sculptor in symbiotic relation to his work.
Suppressing the texture of the marble and bronze and thus emphasiSing the presence of the sculptures as living entities, Steichen was able to assimilate the artist into the heroic world of his creations. Posed in relief against his work, Rodin seems to contemplate in “The Thinker” his own alter ego, while the luminous figure of Victor Hugo suggests poetic inspiration as the source of his creativity. Recalling his response to a reproduction of Rodin’s “Balzac” in a Milwaukee newspaper, Steichen noted: “It was not just a statue of a man; it was the very embodiment of a tribute to genius.” Filled with enthusiasm and youthful self-confidence, Steichen wanted in this photograph to pay similar tribute to Rodin’s genius.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 14/05/2019
Arthur Rothstein (American, 1915-1985) Dust Storm, Cimarron County 1936 Gelatin silver photograph 40.4 × 39.6cm
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Columbus Circle 1936 Gelatin silver print Image: 24.6 x 19.6cm (9 11/16 x 7 11/16 in.) The Cleveland Museum of Art Sundry Purchase Fund
A native of Springfield, Ohio, Abbott studied art and photography in Paris. Arriving in New York in 1929, she was shocked by the past decade’s vertical building boom, and dedicated herself to documenting the city’s new structures and fast-disappearing historic ones. She made this image from the ninth floor of the General Motors building in New York while working for the Federal Art Project, a governmental agency that employed artists during the Depression. The statue of Columbus, at centre, is dwarfed by two advertising signs: one for Schenley rye whiskey and a landmark 80-x-50-foot display for Coca-Cola that required 3,000 incandescent bulbs.
Text from The Cleveland Museum of Art website
The Frick Art and Historical Center 7227 Reynolds Street Pittsburgh PA 15208
This is a strange survey exhibition of photographs by Malaysian-born Australian artist Simryn Gill at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne – photographs that form distinctive bodies of work that support the artist’s other conversations in art but do not form the main backbone to her practice. Perhaps this is part of the problem and part of the beauty of the work. While the work investigates the concepts of presence and absence, space, place and identity and the cultural inhabitation of nature there is a feeling that this is the work of an artist not used to putting images together in a sequence or body of work, not connecting the dots between ideas and image. Intrinsically there is nothing wrong with the conceptual ideas behind the photographs or the individual photographs themselves. The photographs don’t strike one as particularly memorable and they fail to mark the mind of the viewer in their multitudinous framings of reality.
In the series Forest (1996-1998, see photograph above and below) a selective vision of nature is invaded by cultural texts, torn pages of books mimicking natural forms such as roots, flowers and variegated leaves. The ‘natural’ context is inhabited by the cultural con-text to form a double inhabitation – “this strange hybrid nature before the paper rots away, suggestive of how nature is culturally inscribed and the futility of this attempt at containment.”1
This is a nice idea but the photographs fail to hold the attention of the viewer mainly because of the inability of the viewer to read the text that has been grafted onto the natural forms. I literally needed more from the work to hang my hat on and this is how I felt about much of this work presented here. This feeling persists with another series Vegetation (1999, see photographs below). Mundane landscapes are inhabited by faceless human beings, their absence/presence marking the landscape while at the same time nature marks them. A good idea that needed to be pushed much further.
The main body of work in the exhibition is the series Dalam (2001, see photographs below), a 258 strong series of colour photographs presented in the gallery space in gridded formation (Dalam, in Malay, can mean ‘inside’, ‘interior’ or ‘deep’). Featuring a photographic record of the interior of numerous Malaysian homes these clinical yet someone hobby-like photographs record the minutiae of domestica – the intimacy of the interior balanced by a sense of isolation and loneliness through the absence of human presence. Here, “the living room may be seen here as a cultural and social mask for its inhabitants. It’s the space into which others are welcomed on our own terms and onto which we project a portrayal of ourselves.”3 Although the work asks us “to rethink our concepts of spaces and domesticity in relation to various aspects such as socio-cultural identities, history and memory,” as presented in the gallery space the viewer is initially overwhelmed by the number, colour and construction of the interiors.
Personally I found that in the mundanity / individuality of the repetition I soon lost interest in looking intimately at the work. The photographs lack a certain spark, a certain clarity of vision in the actual taking of the images. None of the wonderful angles and intelligence of camera positioning of Eugene Atget here and maybe this is the point – the stifling ‘personality’ and banality of human habitation echoed in the photographs – but I would have rather have looked at a single monumentally intimate, magical image by Candida Hofer than all of these photographs put together!
Unfortunately in this survey exhibition there is only one photograph from what I regard as Simryn Gill’s best body of work, A small town at the turn of the century (1999-2000, see photograph below). Perhaps this was an oversight as this series would seem to bind the others more holistically together. Photographs of this excellent series can be viewed on the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery website and their presence in this exhibition would have certainly raised the bar in terms of the artist’s vision of nature, place and identity. The square colour format, the interior/exterior of the environments and naturalness of the photographs and their the fruitful bodies really have an eloquent power that most of the work at the Centre for Contemporary Photography seems to lack. Other than the last body of work, Inland (2009, see photograph below) that is.
In the smallest most intimate space at the CCP are some of the most intimate images of Australian place that you will ever see. Spread out on a table in small stacks of jewel-like black and white and Cibachrome images the viewer is asked to done white gloves (ah, the delicious irony of white hands on the Australian land!) to view the empty interiors, landscapes and (hands holding) rocks of the interior. These are beautifully seen and resolved images. The rocks are most poignant.
Gill digs beneath the surface of this thing called Australian-ness and exposes not the vast horizons, decorous landscapes or rugged people (as Naomi Cass states below) but small intimacies of space and place, identity and memory. In the ability to shuffle the deck of cards, to reorder the photographs to make their own narrative the viewer becomes as much the author of the story being told as the artist herself – an open-ended intertextual narrative guided by the artist that investigates the very root of what it is to be Australian on a personal level. I enjoyed this reordering, this subjective experience very much.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the CCP for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
2/ Gill, Simryn. “May 2006,” in Off the Edge, Merdeka 50 years issue no. 33, September 2007, p. 83
3/ Day, Kate. “After Image: Photography at the Fruit Market Gallery,” on Culture 24 website. [Online] Cited 6th December 2009 no longer available online
“Both populating and haunting the patches of now feral vegetation evoking a sense of foreign/alien source that has been strained, even lost in the act of transplantation. It also parodies the fear of rampant occupation that historically imbues aspects of Australian to Northern neighbours.”10
In Rampant Gill photographed outbursts of introduced plant species in the Australian landscape such as bamboo and sugar cane, which now grow wild and uncontrolled in subtropical northern New South Wales. Again Gill incorporates performative elements, interacting with nature through ‘dressing’ the plants in garments such as lungis and sarongs which were worn by immigrant workers who harvested these crops. Gill explores of the connections between botany, geography and the idea of plants as ‘humanised’ entities – seen in these strange single or groups of ‘figures’ appearing displaced within the Australian landscape.
Text from the education resource for the exhibition Simryn Gill: Inland at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy [Online] Cited 12/05/2019
Upon close inspection, this series of large scale black and white photographs of lush tropical plants reveal strips of paper and fragments of text which are embedded into tree trunks, covering leaf surfaces, transforming into aerial mangrove roots, weaving their way up walls and mimicking banana flowers.
The artist states: “I decided I needed to echo my situation in my art activities, and started making small interventions in the very rare wild places around where we lived, like gardens of unoccupied houses, roadside growths of tapioca and yam”.7
Returning from Australia to Singapore with her family, Gill went into overgrown gardens and open spaces she was familiar with to construct these site interventions, armed with glue and a range of books – some given to her by friends, others sourced from garage sales – including the colonial texts of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and an Indonesian version of the Hindu tale Ramayana. These works were explorations by Gill into her personal sense of place and history, as an outsider in Singapore. Works in the same series were created in other similar environments in countries such as Malaysia. Although they originate from specific locations, they can be read as anywhere in the tropics.
The process of entering these ‘little bits of jungle’ to construct these works was referred to by Gill as her ‘guerrilla activities’,8 and were temporary site specific interventions which she sought to document.
Her friend and fashion photographer Nicholas Leong, chose the camera and film which required long exposure, suiting Gill’s requirements to create large, dense flat tonal images. Together they documented the works before the paper was to rot away and return nature. This introduced Gill to analogue photography and its slow processing, which she values and continues to use.
Text from the education resource for the exhibition Simryn Gill: Inland at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy [Online] Cited 12/05/2019
… In these works which were begun at a residency at Artpace in Texas, Gill begins the process of masking and disguising, of naturalising human figures into the landscape (in this case herself) through obscuring their heads with fruit and vegetation, that was to be so important in her later bodies of work such as A small town at the turn of the century.
Curator Sharmini Pereira has written: “In this series of photographs, her self-portrait dominates but only as a stream of disguises involving plants in various geographic locations; tumbleweed and aloe in Texas, mangrove and black boy in Australia, and bird’s nest fern in Singapore. The images bear an uncanny resemblance to a sequence of B-movie stills, where vengeful alien-plant-people threaten to over run the planet. Many Hollywood films have of course played out such narratives as a projection of Cold War anxieties fearful about the threat of Communist contamination. But if Vegetation represents the future through some fear located in the past, it does so through a mimetic representation of the present… Vegetation parodies the camera’s framing of today’s culture contact.
Beyond their still pathos, the enchanting appeal of these photographs lies in their somersaulting between the mythical moment of first contact and its reversal, which the mimetic moment of secondary contact ushers forth. The artist, “unrecognisable” in her jeans and desert boots and wearing her new plant hairstyle, lampoons the power of mimicry as a means of being both alien and indigenous at one and the same time. In as much as Vegetation offers us the chance to poke fun at the natives, it is also an image of the new 21st-century native – able to deliver the laughs rather than be controlled by them. It is here that we observe the breadth of relief that resides in the welcome opportunity to view imitation as a way of moving beyond the imitated…”
in “Simryn Gill – Selected Work”, AGNSW, 2002
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website [Online] Cited 12/05/2019
“Nature becomes just another clichéd signifier of place and of localness, which one may adopt while passing through a ‘strange’ place, or migrating to a new place, or indeed as a cover for invasion.”9
In these small framed photographs, Gill is now the subject within the natural environment. The series was started in San Antonia, Texas in 1999 and was part of a two-month residency during which time she produced a new body of work. Gill was wondering if – in this mimicry of nature – she actually could ‘disappear into the landscape’. On field trips she collected a range of desert plant matter, including aloe and tumble weed and took this back to the studio to construct headdresses. Again, using Nicholas Leong as the photographer, Gill then went back to the location to shoot the series. She continued to work on the series in Singapore using the mangrove and in Australia, the grass tree occasionally referred to as a ‘black boy’. The series is closely related to A small town at the turn of the century in its playfulness and parody of ethnographic portraits.
Text from the education resource for the exhibition Simryn Gill: Inland at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy [Online] Cited 12/05/2019
Simryn Gill: Inland is a survey of photography and takes place in a photography gallery. It is important to declare at the outset, that while photography forms a significant and wondrous part of her practice, Simryn Gill does not consider herself a photographer; “For me, the taking of photographs is another tool in my bag of strategies, in that awkward pursuit of coherence we sometimes call art.”2 Simryn Gill: Inland embraces this conundrum as an entry point for considering Gill’s photography, and how photography might function more broadly as a way of engaging with the world.
Seven major series wind almost chronologically through the gallery – in this first survey of Gill’s photography – following a path, quite literally, from outside to inside, from found in nature to found in culture and back. Commencing with three series located outdoors, Forest (1996-1998), Rampant (1999) and Vegetation (1999), the survey moves to Gill’s sweeping interior series Dalam (2001). On the cusp of outside and inside is Power station (2004), which makes a curious and visceral analogy between the interior of her childhood home in Port Dickson, Malaysia and the interior of an adjacent power station. Like a medieval Book of Hours, the hand-sized concertina work Distance (2003-2009) is an attempt by Gill to convey the interior of her home in Marrickville, Sydney to someone residing outside Australia.
Gill’s most recent work Inland (2009), commissioned for this survey and photographed during a road trip from northern New South Wales to South Australia and across the bight to Western Australia, is at the heart of the exhibition. Gill’s only moving image work, Vessel (2004), commissioned for SBS Television, closes the exhibition’s journey with the almost imperceptible passage of a small fishing vessel across the horizon. To ground the exhibition, or perhaps to oversee our journey, one image is selected from Gill’s highly regarded series, A small town at the turn of the century (1999-2000).
Seeking an understanding of the politics of place informs her recent series. Inland confounds what is normally expected from photographs of Australia’s interior and eschews decorous landscapes, vast horizons or smiling rugged people, for modest interiors of homes. Indeed there are no people present, only the houses they have inhabited as evidence of their subjectivity.
Inland consists in piles of small jewel-like Cibachrome and black and white prints sitting on a table for viewers to peruse, heightening the provisional nature of its description, leaving open-ended the question of what can be known through photographic representation.
Naomi Cass, Exhibition Curator and Director Centre for Contemporary Photography
Dalam (Malay for ‘deep’, or ‘within’) is a suite of 260 photographic images, the result of Malaysian artist Simryn Gill’s sojourn across her home country over an eight-week period. She went up to the homes of complete strangers and asked to photograph their living spaces. Dalam is an expansive yet uncannily intimate survey of Malaysia at the turn of the century, a mélange of disparate ethnicities, religions, ideologies and allegiances. The title itself alludes to the depiction of interior spaces as signifiers of the individual lives that inhabit and activate them, but, even more importantly, it suggests an exploration of the social fabric of contemporary Malaysia. As the artist observes: “In conceiving the work I had wondered what the ‘inside’ of a place might look like. Do lots of people held together by geography add up to the idea of a nation or single unified group?” Dalam questions what historian Benedict Anderson famously dubbed “the imagined community”, or the various divergent structures that shape the modern nation-state.
Text from the Singapore Art Museum website [Online] Cited 12/05/2019
Dalam (Malay for deep; inside; interior), is a series of two hundred and sixty colour photographs arranged in grid formation on the gallery walls.
“Gill deliberately began Dalam with the intention to document the living rooms of residents of the Malay peninsula, and her focus in each photograph is to capture the sense of place conveyed by the living room of the occupants.”11
Accompanied by a close friend, Gill took these over an eight-week period as they travelled across the Malaysian Peninsula. In towns mainly outside the city regions she knocked on the doors of strangers and asked if she could enter their houses to photograph their living rooms. Surprisingly, almost everyone agreed, and the resulting series gives a fascinating insight into the character of the Malaysian Peninsula, made up of a broad mix of people from diverse cultural backgrounds. Gill was again exploring her conflicting experience of being both insider and outsider; raised in Malaysia but also having lived outside for a very long time.
Text from the education resource for the exhibition Simryn Gill: Inland at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy [Online] Cited 12/05/2019
How We Are in the World: The Photography of Simryn Gill
Simryn Gill: Inland is a survey of photography and takes place in a photography gallery. It is important to declare at the outset, that while photography forms a significant and wondrous part of her practice, Simryn Gill does not consider herself a photographer; “For me, the taking of photographs is another tool in my bag of strategies, in that awkward pursuit of coherence we sometimes call art”.1 Simryn Gill: Inland embraces this conundrum as an entry point for considering Gill’s photography, and how photography might function more broadly as a way of engaging with the world.
Seven major series wind almost chronologically through the gallery – in this first survey of Gill’s photography – following a path, quite literally, from outside to inside, from found in nature to found in culture and back. Commencing with three series located outdoors, Forest (1996-1998), Rampant (1999) and Vegetation (1999), the survey moves to Gill’s sweeping interior series Dalam (2001). On the cusp of outside and inside is Power station (2004), which makes a curious and visceral analogy between the interior of her childhood home in Port Dickson, Malaysia and the interior of an adjacent power station. Like a medieval Book of Hours, the hand-sized concertina work Distance (2003-2008) is an attempt by Gill to convey the interior of her home in Marrickville, Sydney to someone residing outside Australia. Gill’s most recent work Inland (2009), commissioned for this survey and photographed during a road trip from northern New South Wales to South Australia and across the bight to Western Australia, is at the heart of the exhibition. Gill’s only moving image work, Vessel (2004), screened on SBS Television, closes the exhibition’s journey with the almost imperceptible passage of a small fishing vessel across the horizon. To ground the exhibition, or perhaps to oversee our journey, one image is selected from Gill’s highly regarded series, A small town at the turn of the century (1999-2000).
Gill’s photography takes place within a broader practice that curator Russell Storer describes as “… subjecting found objects, books, local materials and sites – each of which carry specific meanings and histories – to a range of processes including photographing, collecting, erasing, casting, tearing, arranging, stitching, rubbing, wrapping and engraving”.2 Gill takes humble things in the world and shifts them; rearranges them with seemingly endless patience, craft and grace, to communicate something about how the object has come into being. This is not a matter of changing context to appreciate formal qualities as might a connoisseur, but rather a quest for understanding place.
Always evident in the found object is some kind of story that, as Gill gathers the item, is folded into the meaning of her work. The constituent parts of her installations – be they items found on the shore or collected from around her studios in Port Dickson or Sydney, or indeed a particular site Gill photographs – are gathered for their ability to evoke a history. Movement across the globe, of people and vegetation, both enforced and deliberate, if not the subject of her work is certainly a link. While not a unique story, resettlement is part of Gill’s individual and familial history. Her parents originally moved from India to Malaya prompted by the range of human predicaments, from political and economic upheaval, through to adventure and marriage. The displacement of objects echoes the journeys of people.
Naomi Cass Exhibition Curator and Director Centre for Contemporary Photography, extract from catalogue essay [Online] Cited 12/05/2019
A small town at the turn of the century 1999-2000 is a series of 40 type C photographs taken by Gill in the town the artist grew up in. The documentation of the people and place of ones past could be highly nostalgic. Added to this is the moment at which Gill chose to document – the turn of the 20th into the 21st century. Such references to time and memory, the past and the present are potent but Gill has covered each of her subjects’ heads with tropical fruit. Rather than being absurd or ironical the head coverings move the images away from being portraits and into the broader realm of context. The context however is not necessarily as revealing as the viewer might wish. There are numerous variations on dress, interiors, exteriors, pose, and accoutrements that suggest activities (whether work or play). While it is usually clear that the environment is tropical (because of the fruit and foliage) the images provoke a complex set of reactions to the possible messages. Faceless, Gill’s subjects are ciphers constructed by external objects, presented with affection.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website [Online] Cited 12/05/2019
Simryn Gill (Australian born Singapore, 1959) Distance 2003-2008 Artist book Installation views, Centre for Contemporary Photography
Distance (2003-2008)
Distance, an artist’s book of small colour photographs is produced as a hand-sized concertina work in an edition of just five. This beautiful work is “like a medieval Book of Hours”12 and is displayed in an elegant museum-like cabinet with a protective perspex covering. Distance was produced after many conversations Gill had with friends and family overseas and is an attempt to show them what her home is like. She took one hundred and thirty photographs, using a medium format camera, of everything in the interior of her home in Marrickville, Sydney; however the results seemed to fail in producing a truthful representation of her home, as Gill says, “the final result is almost like an incoherence, it’s too close, there is too much information”.13. Naomi Cass wrote with reference to this, ‘While Distance fails to communicate the gestalt of home, it is remarkable in its details and beauty’.14
Text from the education resource for the exhibition Simryn Gill: Inland at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy [Online] Cited 12/05/2019
Simryn Gill (Australian born Singapore, 1959) Inland 2009 Cibachrome and silver gelatin photographs Photographs (quantity variable) 13 x 13cm (each)
Inland (2009)
“Through an extraordinary ability to engage with strangers, Gill and her fellow traveller Mary Maguire photographed the living rooms of eighty homes ranging in geographical location, socio-economic and cultural background.”15
Inland (2009) is a new series, which was commissioned for this exhibition. Using the same process to produce Dalam, Gill photographed this series on a road trip; however this time in Australia, from northern New South Wales to South Australia and across the bight to Western Australia. The photographs include views of the horizon, skyscapes, interior still life compositions and close ups of stones collected by Gill during her travels. Inland is at the heart of the exhibition and the mode of presentation differs to all other series in the exhibition, as these precious handmade small scale colour and black and white images are assembled on a table in piles for the visitor to examine, with white gloves.
Text from the education resource for the exhibition Simryn Gill: Inland at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy [Online] Cited 12/05/2019
Centre for Contemporary Photography Level 2, Perry St Building Collingwood Yards, Collingwood Victoria 3066
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
There But For The Grace of You Go I
A body of work, There But For The Grace of You Go I (2009) is now online on my website.
There are twenty images in the series which can be viewed as a sequence, rising and falling like a piece of music. Below are a selection of images from the series. The work continues an exploration into the choices human beings make. The silhouettes and landscapes of planes are taken from found copyright free images; the people from my photographs captured as they crossed the intersection outside Flinders Street Station, Melbourne. Other images are paintings from the Renaissance and POW’s during World War II.
I have always been creative from a very early age, starting as a child prodigy playing the piano at the age of five and going on to get my degree as a concert pianist at the Royal College of Music in London. I have always felt the music and being creative has helped me cope with life, living with bipolar.
These days as I reach my early 50’s ego is much less a concern – about being successful, about having exhibitions. I just make the work because I love making it and the process gives me happiness – in the thinking, in the making. I can loose myself in my work.
When Andrew Denton asked Clive James what brings him joy, James replies “The arts,“ and then qualified his answer. “What I mean is creativity. When I get lost in something that’s been made, it doesn’t matter who it is by. It could be Marvin Gaye singing ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’ or it could be the adagio of the Ninth Symphony …”
What a wise man.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009 Digital colour photograph
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Dissolution 2006 From the Last Light series
One thing always struck me about Sue Ford’s work when I saw it. The work had integrity.
Whatever she produced it was always interesting, valid and had integrity. She followed her own path as we all do – and her voice was clear, focused and eloquent. I loved her series Shadow Portraits – an erudite investigation into the nature of Australian identity if ever there was one!
Vale Sue Ford.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on some of the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Silhouette 2006 From the Last Light series
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Apparition 2007 From the Last Light series
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Transparent 2007 From the Last Light series
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Shadow portraits (detail) 1994 Colour photocopies
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Shadow portraits (detail) 1994 Colour photocopies
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Shadow portraits (detail) 1994 Colour photocopies
For Shadow portraits, Ford, like numerous artists in this period, mined historical archives of photographs for her source material, decontextualising and reworking it. Her starting point was nineteenth-century studio portraits of settler Australians that were popular in colonial society. She exploded her previous practice and intense focus on the faces of individuals; in most cases the subjects of the original photographs used in Shadow portraits are unrecognisable. Their faces have been emptied out and replaced by Ford’s generic images of Australian foliage, especially fern fronds. All the details that define an individual, their character and appearance, have disappeared, just like the sitters themselves who have been dead for decades and exist only in ghosted form.
Individual works in Shadow portraits (above) rely on a dynamic relationship between historical and contemporary images to create something new. The original studio portrait is not intact, having undergone an extended process of transformation; being re-photographed, cut up and photocopied to eventually take the form of a large gridded image. Use of the grid – an obvious reference to European systems of containment and control – continues the experimentation evident in Yellowcake. Overlaps, like the doubled image of a stereoscopic card, are purposefully exploited. The aim is to destabilise a once-static historic image, to turn the small into big, the tones into colour, the positive into negative and so on. Through these means the colonial past is represented as having continuing reverberations: the loss of concreteness in the images and distortions of scale parallel the incompleteness, gaps and blow-outs characteristic of any historical narrative. As Zara Stanhope writes, Ford’s Shadow portraits ‘image the ongoing processes involved in the construction of histories, and the power to know and remember, that provides the opportunity to revisit or critique such accounts’.
Associate Professor Helen Ennis. “Sue Ford’s history,” in Art Journal 50, National Gallery of Victoria, 1 Jan 2013 [Online] Cited 11/05/2019
“I have always been interested in how actions taken in the past could affect and echo in peoples’ lives in the present. Most of my work is to do with thinking about human existence from this perspective.”
Sue Ford, “Project X’, in Helen Ennis & Virginia Fraser, Sue Ford: A Survey 1960-1995. Monash University Gallery, Clayton, 1995, p. 17
Until 1988 Ford was known principally for work that was motivated by feminist politics, that dealt with the lives of contemporary women and the politics of representation. She worked across media, using black and white photography, film and video. Her photography from the early 1960s onwards was based on what she regarded as photography’s objective capacity; in other words, she utilised the camera as a means of recording whatever she placed in front of it. This interest in ‘objectivity’ related more to the practices of conceptual art than to the heightened subjectivity, or subjective documentary that prevailed in art photography, especially during the seventies. Ford’s feminist photography can be regarded as objective but not as ‘documentary’ in the terms the latter is conventionally understood because there was nothing surreptitious or spontaneous about it. Her approach was non-exploitative and consensual in keeping with the politics of feminism and the counterculture. From the beginning of her career, her subjects were mostly friends and acquaintances; they knew they were being photographed and agreed to it. This consensual approach and its interrelated performative element were adopted by other feminist photographers, such as Carol Jerrems, Ponch Hawkes and Ruth Maddison, in their work during the 1970s.
In the 1970s and 80s Ford’s photography differed from mainstream practice in another fundamental way. It did not relate to the purist and fine art traditions that underpinned the case for photography’s acceptance as art. Her prints were grainy, rough and often very small. Ford conceived photography in radical terms, as a plastic medium that was entwined with other art practices. In an interview at the time she was awarded a scholarship to fund her studies at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1973-74, she emphasised her interest in artists’ use of photography: ‘Some artists are utilising phototechniques and are thinking in a photographic way. I want to use some of their techniques and materials to extend photography into other dimensions’.
Associate Professor Helen Ennis. “Sue Ford’s history,” in Art Journal 50, National Gallery of Victoria, 1 Jan 2013 [Online] Cited 11/05/2019
![Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Coney Island Bather, New York' [Baigneuse, Coney Island] c. 1939-1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/model-coney-island-bather-web.jpg "Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Coney Island Bather, New York' [Baigneuse, Coney Island] c. 1939-1941")
![Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Reflections' [Reflets] c. 1939-1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/model-reflections-new-york-web.jpg "Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Reflections' [Reflets] c. 1939-1945")
![Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Reflection' [Reflet] c. 1939-1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/model-reflection-web.jpg "Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) 'Reflection' [Reflet] c. 1939-1945")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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