Exhibition dates: 17th November – 27th November 2011
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) I hear the River

2009
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm
Congratulations to David-Ashley Kerr on his first solo exhibition: the photographs and concept are very interesting.
Marcus
Many thankx to David for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs to see a larger version of the image.
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) I hear the Sea
2010
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) I hear the Wind
2010
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm
Although rückenfigur is popularly associated with the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, its appearances in art very much pre-date his time. Early forms of it were attributed to Giotto but it became a more substantial style in the 15th century, creeping into the works of painters such as Jan van Eyck and later with Allaert van Everdingen and Jan Luiken.
Often these uses were simply to direct the viewer to behold the landscape in the scene. Friedrich’s approach transfigured this into a different concept, sometimes referred to as “the halted traveller”, where the lonely wanderer has appeared to have been “stopped” by the view of the landscape. This implies to us as a viewer that there is perhaps more to the landscape than we see, but those thoughts may remain unknown to us… privately contained in the mind of the rückenfigur in the scene.
It appears to me that in looking at rückenfigur art, there are two distinct thematic conveyances. The first is the aforementioned “halted traveller” lost in the contemplation of the landscape. In gazing upon the landscape, the rückenfigur is quite separate from the scene being viewed. Although s/he is anonymous and without identity, there is still a distinct identity from that of the landscape.
The second appears, to me at least, to be quite the opposite. Another form of rückenfigur seems to be where the figure(s) are distantly placed deep within the landscape itself. You’ve still got “back figures” in contemplation, but the composition makes them part of the landscape rather than separate. While we still identify with them as a viewer, the identity of the figures are very much subsumed into the grandeur of the landscape, maybe even biblically so.
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) I hear Them
2010
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) Territory
2010
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm
David Ashley Kerr is a Melbourne based visual artist working with large-format photography. This is his first Australian solo show, a selection of landscape studies completed since 2009 that began as a photographic investigation of the Rückenfigur, or back figure. This visual device is commonly associated with German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. It involves depicting a human figure that does not engage the viewer, introspectively contemplating the natural world or landscape before them.
David Ashley Kerr’s photographic practice is a visual inquiry into the relationship between cultural identity and physical environment, site, or place. He currently investigates the use of a staged lone figure in contemporary landscape photography, attempting a symbolic representation of belonging to ‘place’ in a national context, in relation to both indigenous and non-indigenous Australian ownership and connection to land.
David Ashley Kerr completed a Bachelor of Contemporary Art at Deakin University (2009) and a Master of Fine Art at RMIT University (2010). He is currently undertaking a PhD at Monash University on an Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship, his research inquiring into place theory through photography, investigating the visual relationship between Australian cultural identity and physical environment.
Text from the Dear Patti Smith website
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) Ore
2010
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) Trash
2010
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) Game
2009
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm
Murray Fredericks (Australian, b. 1970) Salt 271
2011
150 x 120cm
Pigment print on cotton rag
“Photographers tell me what I already know. The recognition of the beautiful, bizarre, or boring (the three photographic B’s) is not the problem. You would have to be a refrigerator not to be moved by the beauty of Yosemite. The problem is to deal with one’s total experience, emotionally as well as visually. Photographers should tell me what I don’t know.”
Duane Michals Real Dreams1
“While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.”
Minor White
Fredericks new infrared panoramic works show the strength of nature at it’s finest (9 out of 10 to nature especially when see through this type of filtration), excellent technical skills and good printing but somehow any revelation of spirit in the sublime has been lost in these photographs.
The photographer does not take me anywhere, there is no new space to step into, another view of the world that I want to spend time with. The relationship between the two series is also nebulous, the critical ice / fire space between the works adding little frisson to the exhibition.
I ask: Is it sufficient to use a digital scientific infrared back, if for no other reason that it is there? Is it sufficient to know that these climatic conditions take place in the same area each day, at the same time, place the camera down and just capture the scene? Is there really a non-decisive moment in these photographs, a poetic insight, or is this just what was, literally, hanging around so to speak?
The answer to all three questions I leave up to the reader.
Personally, I need photography to push the boundaries of elusiveness through an understanding in revelation, not just through an understanding of space and form, light and colour. I believe that conventional patterns of perception are there to be broken in ways that disrupt the technologies of the self – the self-regulating of our senses, the conventions of cultural capital – but too what do we open ourselves up to?
As Minor White says: ‘The sound of one hand clapping’.
While the photographs have the weight of serious equipment and professional acumen behind them after the initial awe on viewing they fall to earth, like the rainstorms they portray. As with my earlier review of Salt they seem to be more about the photographer than any revelation of the thing being photographed.
Duane Michals observes that, “The best artists give themselves in their work” but this giving is ego-less, the dropping away of the bells and whistles to let an’other’ emerge: in this sense I do not feel the total experience, emotionally as well as visually.
Paul Strand said that it took him 10 years to start to become an artist, to let go of ego in his work; paradoxically after this the work became more his own.
For me, these photographs never become a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject being photographed.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Michals, Duane. Real Dreams 1976 [Online] Cited 08/06/2011, on longer available online.
Many thankx to Angela Connor for her help and to Arc One Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Murray Fredericks (Australian, b. 1970) Salt 272
2010
Pigment print on cotton rag
150 x 120cm
Murray Fredericks (Australian, b. 1970) Salt 273
2011
Pigment print on cotton rag
150 x 120cm
Salt began in 2003 and is a series of photographs of vast empty landscapes. Each image in the series is connected by the placement of the horizon running across the lower third of the frame. The horizon is the only referential form, breaking the void and providing the viewer with an element that paradoxically ‘defines’ the space. These new works add another dimension to Salt, with the water from last year’s rains now creating scenes diametrically opposed to the work occupying the adjacent walls as Hector.
Hector draws its title from an affectionately name atmospheric phenomenon that produces some of the world’s biggest thunderstorms. These new black and white works employ Murray’s methodical consistency of composition with distinctly different outcomes to the Zen-like vistas of Salt. In these works the expanse of the storm is consciously contained and forced into a barometric battle with the invisible air at its limits for the place of subject within the photograph…
By juxtaposing these series, each viewer is at once placed outside the containers which harbour these landscapes of remote territories – one calm and one facing the eye of the storm – and at the same time place in the centre of Murray’s minimal, ethereal representations of these places. In this way we can trace his exploration into these subjects – capturing the moment is our witness to a reverence to land and country.
Text from Arc One Gallery
Joseph Mallord William Turner (English, 1775-1851) Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche, and Thunderstorm
1836/37
Oil on canvas
36 1/4 x 48 in. (92.2 x 123cm)
The Art Institute of Chicago: Frederick T. Haskell Collection
Murray Fredericks (Australian, b. 1970) Hector 10
2011
220 x 120cm
Pigment print on cotton rag
Murray Fredericks (Australian, b. 1970) Hector 11
2011
204 x 120cm
Pigment print on cotton rag
Arc One Gallery
45 Flinders Lane
Melbourne, 3000 Phone:Â (03) 9650 0589
Hot on the heels of my reviews of Stormy Weather: Contemporary Landscape Photography at NGV Australia and Sidney Nolan: Drought Photographs at Australian Galleries, Melbourne comes the exhibition Photography & place: Australian landscape photography, 1970s until now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. An insightful, eloquent text by Vigen Galstyan (Assistant curator, photographs, AGNSW) accompanies the posting.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Susanne Briggs for her help and to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs and the text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Australian born and American based photographer Douglas Holleley has experimented with many aberrant photographic techniques over the course of his career. Holleley received a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology in 1971 at Macquarie University before relocating to America to undertake a Master of Fine Arts, studying at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York between 1974 and 1976. Founded by Nathan Lyons in 1969 and affiliated with important photographers including Minor White and Frederick Sommers, the Visual Studies Workshop was a bedrock institution that fostered innovative photographic practice from the 1970s onwards. It was here that Holleley received tutelage from Ansel Adams in 1975. His early photographic output includes hand coloured black and white photographs as well as photograms and gridded arrangements of Polaroids. He later began experimenting with digital photography, applying the same principles of the photogram to his experiments with a flatbed scanner.
During the time spent studying photography in America in the 1970s Holleley became interested in Polaroid technology. When he returned to Australia in 1979, before later relocating permanently to America, Holleley commenced an extensive photographic project of documenting the Australian bush with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, effectively becoming one of the first professional practitioners of the medium in the country. The resulting images were presented as a series and published as a book – Visions of Australia – in 1980. Employing a refined formalist vocabulary, Holleley produced photographic mosaics by arranging his Polaroids into gridded compositions.
Dissected, disassembled and then collated within the pictorial frame, the landscape in Holleley’s works becomes slightly unnatural and detached. These works negate linear single point perspective by focusing on the ground and reducing the scene to a formal composite. Here, the expanse of the view and the horizon does not dominate the space of the image. The tessellating images produce a ‘whole’ that is slightly misaligned and unsettled. In some works, the photographer’s shadow is visible. It asserts itself as an ambivalent presence that is not tethered to the scene. This spectral form heightens the sense of disquiet that pervades the images.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website [Online] Cited 16/01/2020
Ian North is an Adjunct Professor of Visual Arts at both the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia. He is a photographer, painter and writer, and was the founding curator of photography at the National Gallery of Australia 1980-1984. Throughout his career, he has been concerned with the legacy of Australian landscape, the impact of colonial narratives and their established visual conventions and, as a consequence, the politics of representing the subject. …
North’s methodology is concerned with the processes of vision and interaction as they have shaped the landscape. In Canberra Suite North presents an encyclopaedic record of Walter Burley Griffin’s intricately designed city, exploring the spatial interface between nature and humanity. The works are absent of human life – reminiscent of Ed Ruscha’s Twenty-six Gasoline Stations. The emotional ambivalence of the images is reflected in their use of colour, like that of postcards. As one of the first instances of larger format colour art photography in Australia, the images topographically map space as a depersonalised, banal subject. Yet their colour, like that of landscape painting, highlights flora, revealing the number of non-native plants included in Canberra’s design. As such, these artefacts of North’s private wanderings and systemic mode of looking are able to subtly critique colonialism.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website [Online] Cited 16/01/2020
EARTH SCANS AND BUSH RELEVANCES: Photography & place in Australia, 1970s till now
For many of us, landscape is a noun. A view from the window or the balcony, a strange immaterial ‘thing’ that makes people exclaim in awe, point to in pride, recall nostalgically, pose in front of or be used to bump up real estate prices. If one is an urban dweller, which most Australians are, then the landscape exists essentially as a mirage, something to create in the backyard, occasionally look at on holidays or hang on the walls. However, noted American cultural theorist and art historian W. J. T. Mitchell has proposed that we should think of landscape as a verb: an act of creation on our part that engenders cultural constructs, national identities and shared mythologies.
Photography & place is an exhibition that investigates this process of ‘landscaping’ through the work of 18 Australian photographers between the 1970s and now. Their significant contribution to representation of landscape broke new ground in what has always been a confounding topic. Indeed, as Judy Annear has pointed out in a 2008 essay in Broadsheet magazine, the practice of documenting and interpreting the notion of ‘place’ in Australian photography has been fragmentary in comparison to traditions in America, Europe or New Zealand. This reluctance to focus on the natural environment is perhaps a residue of the ‘terra nullius’ polemic, which shifted the attention of many photographers on the building of colonial Australia. Photography from the mid 19th to the early 20th century by photographers such as Charles Bayliss and Nicholas Caire actively documented the conquest of nature by white settlers, or presented views of untouched wilderness as epitomes of the picturesque: endless waterfalls, lakes, forests in twilights, enigmatic caves and an occasional nymph like creature prancing. Despite Bayliss’ efforts to show the indigenous people on their land, they are, as Helen Ennis observed in her 2007 book Photography and Australia, conspicuous by their absence: the land that we see surrounding them in early Australian photography by the likes of J.W. Lindt is often a mass-produced painted studio backdrop.
The advent of modernism in the 1930s only served to entrench the photographers deeper into the urban space. ‘Place’ is the city and it is here that industry, progress and culture shapes the Australian identity. It is still difficult to dislodge the iconic images of Max Dupain and David Moore as epitomes of Australianness, promulgated as they were through countless renditions in mass media and consumer culture. But as post-modern anxiety started to seep through the patchwork of the Australian dream, it was landscape that many critically informed photographers turned to as a tool for analysis and revision.
A number of factors conflated in the mid 1970s, engendering a radical shift in perspectives. One of the primary forces that began to reshape the approaches to landscape in Australian photography was the awareness of new artistic movements taking place in USA and Europe. The enormously influential exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape held in 1975 at the George Eastman House, Rochester, consolidated the spread of minimalist and conceptually informed photography which was avidly embraced by a younger generation of Australian photographers. One can also cite the rise of the Australian greens movement in Tasmania, the increasing awareness of Indigenous cultures and rights and not the least, the phenomenon of university-educated photographers as key milestones during this decade.
Lynn Silverman, Douglas Holleley, Jon Rhodes, Wes Stacey and Marion Marrison were among the practitioners who pointed their lenses out of the city, often exploring the fringes of human settlement and sometimes as in the case of Silverman, Stacey and Holleley, venturing into the desert. The element that collectively stamps their work is the ostensible fragmentation of the landscape. Instead of the holistic, positivist postcard views of Australia, we get something resembling a lunar vista. The palpable sense of alienation in American expatriate Lynn Silverman’s striking Horizons series from 1979 echoes in the disorienting grid-based Polaroid assemblages by Holleley conjuring up a space that appears hostile and to a degree indifferent to our presence. The foreignness of these landscapes is not necessarily a malevolent force as was customary to show in a slate of Australian New Wave films of the 70s and 80s. Rather a much more meditative stance is taken in regards to our relationship to a place which has been claimed without being understood or in many ways respected. Ingeborg Tyssen’s photographs hint at existing presences, forms and phenomena which are full of life and meaning that remain perpetually unresolved to an outsider. The imported paradigms of Western culture can not take root in this environment. One could easily define the landscape photography of this period in Lynn Silverman’s words as “an orienting experience” and a belated attempt at a proper reconnaissance of the land.
The coolly detached outlook that underlines the investigative drive of most of these photographers is magnified by their adoption of serial or multi-panel formats. It was certainly a way to expand and collapse the accepted faculties of the pictorial field, challenging and questioning the accepted notions of photographic ‘truth’. Jon Rhodes demonstrates the inherent power of this simple device in his cinematically sequential Gurkawey, Trial Bay, NT 1974, which transforms a seemingly wild and uninhabitable swamp into a joyful playground of an Aboriginal child.
In some instances the photographic approach is more concerned with elucidating the nature of the photographic image itself and the way it can influence and control our perception. As Arnold Hauser has lucidly described in his groundbreaking Social History of Art, images have always been used to secure and infer political power. As such, the metamorphosis of a visual representation into an iconographic one carries within it an element of danger as images begin to seduce the viewer away from objectivity. Indeed, images of Australia have been the most relentlessly and carefully used signifiers in promoting a (colonial) national consciousness by political, commercial and cultural institutions. In this light, it is not difficult to see the works of Wes Stacey and Ian North as acts of iconoclasm. Stacey’s droll and gently parodic series The road 1973-1975, charts a snapshot journey that goes nowhere. Seemingly random, half-glimpsed shots of empty dirt roads, sunburnt grass mounds and endless highways emanate a sense of rootlessness and displacement, negating any possibility of objectification or identification with the landscape. Instead of epic grandeur and jingoism we get something that is confronting, uncomfortably real and in no way ‘advertisable’.
‘The Real’ is even more startling in Ian North’s subversive Canberra suite 1980-81, where the utopian dream capital has been reduced to banal ‘documents’ of depopulated, custom-made suburbia. The hyperreal concreteness of North’s Canberra gives the city an aura of a De Chiricoesque waking nightmare. In line with the set practices of conceptual photography of the period, North has distilled his images from any sign of formal mediation, forcing the viewer to focus on the raw content. It is through this forensic directness that the strange incongruity of human intervention within the landscape becomes ostensible.
Daniel Palmer has noted that North’s images “are highly prescient of much photography produced by artists in Australia today”. Certainly by the 1980s photographers became more actively engaged in analysing the nature / culture median. Strongly influenced by feminist and post-colonial theory, a number of practitioners used photography as a medium to document ideas rather than objective reality. Anne Ferran and Simryn Gill are particularly notable in this regard. Both artists are concerned with the historical and political dimensions of the locations they chose to photograph, resulting in multi-layered and complex strategies that require more involved intellectual interaction from the audience. Gill’s ‘staged’ photographs relate to us the agency of nature and time upon the cultural environment. Synthesis and amalgamation of outwardly irreconcilable elements – imported plants, Australian bush, cotton shirts – slowly, but surely melt into new, as yet unknown entities in Rampant 1999. The force of inevitable decay is absolute yet imbued with generative power as well. Exploring the constantly shifting certainties of what constitutes a ‘place’ the artist draws the audience into questioning its own role in this transformative process.
Ferran takes a more archaeological position in relation to her subject matter. Her eerie surveys of rather ordinary grass mounds in the series Lost to worlds 2008 become evocative paeans to obliterated lives, once we learn that the mounds are all that remain of the factories where convict women were sent to work. Looking at these shimmering ghost worlds one is reminded of Walter Benjamin’s essay The Ruin where the writer analyses the capacity of ruins to reveal the “philosophical truth content”. It is through this allegorical device that Ferran achieves a degree of rehabilitation for the absent histories she photographs.
History, in its manifold and troubling guises, is directly ‘exposed’ in the landscapes of Ricky Maynard, Michael Riley and Rosemary Laing. As Indigenous photographers, Maynard and Riley have played an important role in translating the cultural and political status of Aboriginal peoples into a ‘language’ that is universally understood. Their work remains firmly rooted in the traditions of contemporary art, yet the heavily symbolical slant shows a more ardent and personal engagement with the Australian landscape. Riley’s expressionistic series flyblown 1998 sums up in a few strategically juxtaposed metaphors the spiritual dimension of the landscape, while simultaneously revealing the diverging connotations of Australia’s fundamentally divided identity. The colonial legacy is shown as one of conquest and domination that clashes with the artist’s engagement with country. Maynard’s Portrait of a distant land 2005, explores the same dichotomy in more site specific terms. After permanently settling in Flinders Island, Maynard decided to return to the portrayal of Tasmanian Aborigines, taking a more collaborative approach. He sees this as a way of bypassing the propensity of the photographic image “to subjugate its subjects”. The resulting series is a profoundly poetic treatment that rises above social documentation to suggest the wider implications of historical change and disclose the ability of people to overcome what the artist has described as victimisation through a deeply compassionate relationship with the land. Ultimately Maynard gives us an edifying testimony to the affirmative power of the landscape as collective memory.
Interest in the political aspects of landscape photography has continued unabated into the 21st century. Yet a more philosophically inclined thread has become evident in the last two decades. No longer is it enough to deconstruct and pull apart ideas about landscape’s relationship to identity and nationhood. What photographers like Bill Henson, David Stephenson, Simone Douglas and Rosemary Laing question is the very possibility (or impossibility) of seeing itself. If positioning oneself in relation to nature seems like a distinct, albeit problematic proposition in the 1970s and 80s, the later works in the exhibition are resolutely ambivalent on the subject.
What can one grab onto when faced with the endless expanses of white in Stephenson’s The ice 1992, the terrifying darkness of Henson’s night scenes or the infuriating haze of Douglas’s twilight worlds? Perhaps the only recourse is to dissolve into the beckoning ‘forever’ of the vanishing point in Laing’s To walk on a sea of salt 2004. This void is not a boundary point between nature and culture – it is where culture ends and an entirely new state of consciousness begins: the realm of the sublime and the imagination. As history seems no longer to be trustworthy, ‘place’ can only be constructed as a metaphysical entity. It is a curious turnabout in some ways that echoes some of the early, turn-of-the-century encounters with the Australian landscape by photographers such as John Paine and Norman C. Deck. The sense of fear and awe towards the unfamiliar environment permeates their images, transcending the merely investigative / didactic motives of most colonial photography. What has eventuated from walking into this environment? Subjugation? Destruction? Incomprehension? Indifference? By going back to the point zero of the void and the sublime, contemporary photography negotiates a second attempt at engagement with nature through a renewed and deeper understanding of humanity’s symbiotic relationship with this life-giving force.
Vigen Galstyan Assistant curator, photographs1
1/ Galstyan, Vigen. “EARTH SCANS AND BUSH RELEVANCES: Photography & place in Australia, 1970s till now,” in Look gallery magazine. Sydney: Art Gallery Society of New South Wales, 2011, pp. 25-29.
Riley’s fine art photography began in black and white but he quickly progressed to large-scale colour, a format that also expanded the cinematic qualities of his images, no doubt reflecting the influence film and video were having upon the artist as he worked simultaneously with these media. He produced, for example, the documentaries Blacktracker and Tent boxers for ABC television in the late nineties.
The photographic series flyblown bears a close relationship to the film Empire which Riley created in 1997. Like the film, these photographs give expression to the artist’s concern with the impact of European culture upon that of Australia’s Indigenous population, specifically, as he described it, the ‘sacrifices Aboriginal people made to be Christian’ (Avril Quaill, ‘Marking our times: selected works of art from the Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Collection at the National Gallery of Australia’, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 1996 p. 66).
Christian iconography looms large in the series, as it has across much of Riley’s work. In flyblown, an imposing reflective cross is raised in the sky. Repeated in red, gold and blue its presence is inescapable. A symbol capable of inspiring awe, fear, devotion, Riley also engages with its elegiac qualities so that it functions as memorial marker. Another image depicting a bible floating face down in water conceptualises the missionary deluge, perhaps; submersion and loss through baptism, definitely.
flyblown reverberates with a subtle ominous hum – the quiet tension that precedes a storm. The parched earth beneath a dead galah seems to ache for the rain and water promised in the other images of clouds and dark skies. The nourishment Christianity offered and the inadvertent drowning of traditional culture that often followed is implied.
Visually linking the natural environment with religious symbolism Riley articulates Indigenous spirituality’s connections to country and widens his examination beyond to examine the sustained environmental damage. The negative side effects of pastoralist Australia are indicated by contrasting images of the long grass of cattle pastures with that of drought and wildlife death.
Riley’s success in articulating these issues and complexities, incorporating religious iconography so laden by history and meaning is a testament to his sensitivity and subtlety. Allowing room for ambiguity, Riley provides space for the mixed emotions of the subject and its history.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website [Online] Cited 16/01/2020
In Rampant, Simryn Gill turned her eye once more on Australia ‘… to see if I could find friends among the local flora’. This series of photographs was shot in sub-tropical northern New South Wales and shows unnerving images of trees and plants dressed up in clothes. In the photographs these ghostly forms are seen lingering in groves of introduced plants such as bamboo, bananas, sugar cane and camphor laurels. The plants are dressed in lungis and sarongs, generic clothing from South and South- East Asia, where many of these plants originate. Rampant is a form of memento mori, a record of the aspirations that saw plants only too successfully introduced into a pristine terrain which was unable to offer any resistance to their feral ways.
French philosopher Gaston Bachelard condenses his complex thinking on creativity and the human imagination into the metaphor of a tree, with its living, evolving growth and the simultaneity of being earth bound and heaven reaching, symbolising both the real and ideal.1 However, what happens when that tree is a camphor laurel, an admirable thing in its native land but out of place and wrecking havoc along the creeks of rural New South Wales?
Many once-useful species are now noxious weeds and over-successful colonisers, despised for their commonness, their success, their over-familiarity, and for being where we feel they should not be. They disrupt the order we would like to impose and remind us of our fallibility when attempting to play god and create our own earthly Edens. The language of natural purity that we use to protect our landscape also resonates with the nationalist rhetoric used to police our borders and to decide who are acceptable new arrivals and who are illegal aliens, often determined through scales of economic and social usefulness.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website [Online] Cited 16/01/2020
1/ Gaston Bachelard, ‘The totality of the root image’, On poetic imagination and reverie, editor and translator Colette Graudin, Spring Publications, Quebec, 1987, p. 85.
“In the meantime the landscape presents scenes of desolation which mark the memory of all who see it. Thousands of carcasses are strewn on the baked and cracked plains. There is a brooding air of almost Biblical intensity over millions of acres which bear no trace of surface waters. The dry astringent air extracts every drop of moisture from the grass, leaving it so brittle that it breaks under foot with the tinkling of thin glass.”
Sidney Nolan. Epic Drought in Australia 1952
“Peering into the pantry, which held a particular fascination for me, my eye was caught by several jars of preserved fruit that stood on the otherwise empty shelves and by a few dozen diminutive crimson apples on the sill of the window darkened by the yew tree outside. And as I looked on these apples which shone through the half-light … the quite outlandish thought crossed my mind that these things … had all outlasted me …”
W.G. Sebald. The Rings of Saturn 1988
This is a superb exhibition of 61 black and white photographs by Sidney Nolan. The photographs were shot using a medium format camera and are printed in square format from the original 1952 negatives. They were taken near the Birdsville Track in Queensland and were commissioned at the time by the Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail. Although not intended to be studies for the later ‘Drought paintings’ they have become, were the beginning of, can be seen as, preparatory ideas pre sketching and painting.
There are two proof sets of the Drought Photographs (including the one displayed on the gallery wall) that are printed on a cool-toned Type C photographic paper (analogue to digital to analogue) at about 8″ square. These are the less successful of the prints for the “beauty is in the box.” The more impressive prints are the edition of 10 that is for sale, either as individual prints or as a whole folio, that are printed at approximately 10″ square on a slightly warm-toned Canson Infinity 310 gsm archival inkjet paper (analogue to digital). These are the knockout prints with lots of mid-toned hues – for the warm tone of the paper more closely matches the feel of the dusty Outback. They possess a very “inky” atmosphere and wonderful light. Make sure that you get the gallery staff to show you some of these prints!
The work itself is a joy to behold. The photographs hang together like a symphony, rising and falling, with shape emphasising aspects of form. The images flow from one to another. The formal composition of the mummified carcasses is exemplary, the resurrected animals (a horse, for example, propped up on a fifth leg) and emaciated corpses like contemporary sculpture. Here I am reminded of some of the work of Henry Moore.
The handling of the tenuous aspects of human existence in this uniquely Australian landscape is also a joy to behold. Through an intimate understanding of how to tension the space between objects within the frame Nolan’s seemingly simple but complex photographs of the landscape are previsualised by the artist in the mind’s eye before he even puts the camera to his face. Unfortunately I don’t have any photographs to show you of these works but for me they were one of the highlights of the exhibition, rivalling any of the work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers photographing in the American Dustbowl during the 1930s. Finally, some great Australian landscape photographs!!
As the curator Damian Smith notes of both strands, “Throughout the series emphasis shifts from detached observation to intimate contemplation – between the forces of the outer landscape to the darkness of the animals’ inner being.”
I would not say the landscapes are ‘detached observation’. Both forms require intimate contemplation.
 Let us investigate the presence of these images further.
“Barthes mentions the apparently “universal” experiences of birth and death, experiences that, he points out, are in fact always mediated by historical and thus political circumstances. Echoing a famous remark by Bertolt Brecht, he contends that “the failure of photography seems to me to be flagrant in this connection: to reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing.””1
“To reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing.” Hence, you could argue, through an appeal to nostalgia for a mythology of the Australian bush we are held at the surface of an identity. Drought, desolation, despair, death. But these photographs go beyond the reproduction of death, go beyond mere nostalgia, by pushing the prick of consciousness, Barthes punctum, into a sense of spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority – an experience Barthes “sums up as the “having-been-there” that is the basis of every photograph’s sense of witness.”2
The new punctum becomes other than the detail – no longer of form but of intensity, of Time: conjuring past, present and future in a single image.3 We, the viewer, bring our own associations to the image, our knowledge of drought in this big land – the knowledge that this drought has happened, it did happen and it will happen again and again and again in the future, probably with more frequency than it does now. The photograph becomes an active, mental representation of the material world. It becomes the world’s ‘essence’.
The photographs stand for something else, some other state of being, much as this work can be seen as one small aspect of Nolan’s art that stands for the whole – a close examination of a small part of something that represents the whole, like a sail represents a yacht, a metonymic resonance. They tell us something through time, of life and death. As the great author W. G. Sebald eloquently observes in his quotation at the top of this posting these things outlast us – in our imagination.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
 1/ Batchen, Geoffrey. “Palinode: An Introduction to Photography Degree Zero,” in Batchen, Geoffrey (ed.,). Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, p. 6 2/ Ibid., pp. 8-9 3/ Ibid., p. 13
Many thankx to Ingrid Oosterhuis (General Manager Melbourne) for her help and to Australian Galleries for allowing me to publish the text and the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (calf carcass in tree) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
In 1952 Sidney Nolan was commissioned by the Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail to travel through far northern Queensland to record his impressions of one of the worst droughts in Australia’s history. Throughout this journey Nolan took numerous black and white photographs using a medium format camera, resulting in a host of startling and memorable images. Focusing on both the macabre spectre of the many animal carcasses strewn across the landscape and on the singular dwellings announcing a tenuous human presence, Nolan created numerous iconic images.
Having returned to Australia after an extended period traveling in Europe, Nolan commented that the animal carcasses reminded him of the petrified bodies he had seen at Pompeii. Throughout the series emphasis shifts from detached observation to intimate contemplation – between the forces of the outer landscape to the darkness of the animals’ inner being. With their carefully composed compositions the photographs represent a dramatic shift from the artist’s earlier photographic experiments. In place of a prior spontaneity, drought-stricken animal carcases are framed in formally rigorous compositions, the moment seemingly trapped in time.
For the first time this exhibition includes the complete and unabridged series of Sidney Nolan’s Drought Photographs, including images previously unavailable for public exhibition.
Damian Smith Archivist for the Nolan Estate 1996-1999
Australia has not a very long history, but it is long enough to indicate that she must expect a major drought once every decade. Even so the present drought which the north and west of the continent is enduring, is by far the worst in living memory.
Rivers which have not been dry for over a century are now beds of hot sand, and even the aborigines can find no parallel in their mythology for a drought of this magnitude.
To cattle raising areas, failure of the annual monsoonal rains spells near tragedy. Of a total of 11.4 million beef cattle 1.5million have already perished.
The position is complicated by the lack of a railway connecting the North-centre of Australia with the eastern seaboard. Had such a railway been in existence many thousands of cattle could have been shifted to agistment areas and saved. As it is, the cattle must survive journeys from 500 to 1500 miles on stock routes, and this is generally impossible owing to the weakened positions of the animals. Thus cattle men must face the prospect of watching their herds dwindle until at least the end of the year when there is the probability of early summer storms bringing relief.
In the meantime the landscape presents scenes of desolation which mark the memory of all who see it. Thousands of carcasses are strewn on the baked and cracked plains. There is a brooding air of almost Biblical intensity over millions of acres which bear no trace of surface waters. The dry astringent air extracts every drop of moisture from the grass, leaving it so brittle that it breaks under foot with the tinkling of thin glass.
Death takes on a curiously abstract patter under these arid conditions. Carcasses of animals are preserved in strange shapes which have often a kind of beauty, or even grim elegance.
Over the whole country there is a silence in which men and animals bring forth the qualities necessary for survival. Patience, endurance – and for many Australians, a bitter and salty attitude of irony.
Sidney Nolan, August 1952
Text from the Australian Galleries website [Online] Cited 18/03/2011 no longer available online
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (cow in tree) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (Brian the stockman mounting dead horse) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
Australian Galleries is delighted to present this fascinating exhibition of selected photographs by Sidney Nolan curated by Damian Smith, Archivist for the Nolan Estate 1996-1999.
Smith states in the accompanying exhibition catalogue:
“In 1952 Sidney Nolan was commissioned by the Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail to travel through far northern Queensland to record his impressions of one of the worst droughts in Australia’s history. Throughout this journey Nolan took numerous black and white photographs using a medium format camera, resulting in a host of startling and memorable images. Focusing on both the macabre spectre of the many animal carcasses strewn across the landscape and on the singular dwellings announcing a tenuous human presence, Nolan created numerous iconic images. This exhibition includes the complete and unabridged series of Sidney Nolan’s Drought Photographs, including images previously unavailable for public exhibition.”
In his 1952 essay Epic Drought in Australia Sidney Nolan remarked on the poignancy of the images, noting the following:
“Death takes on a curiously abstract patter under these arid conditions. Carcasses of animals are preserved in strange shapes which have often a kind of beauty, or even grim elegance.”
To coincide with the exhibition Drought Photographs, Australian Galleries will be showing a selection of Drought Drawings by Sidney Nolan that include works previously exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria, in it’s landmark survey of Nolan’s work Desert Drought in 2003.
Sidney Nolan Drought Photographs Curated by Damian Smith
In 2010 Damian Smith established Words For Art, a consultancy specialising in art writing and curatorial projects.
Damian has always had a strong interest in Nolan’s work, he was appointed the inaugural archivist for the estate of Sidney Nolan in 1996. Since that time he has curated numerous Nolan exhibitions including a major exhibition, Unmasked: Sidney Nolan and Ned Kelly 1950-1990 for the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2006.
Building up to the Heide exhibition, Damian was based at Sidney Nolan’s home ‘The Rodd’ at Herefordshire, a 16th Century manor on the border of England and Wales. During that research period he developed an interest in Nolan’s life-long engagement with photography. He discovered vintage prints of Nolan’s photographs of outback Australia and the devastating drought in far northern Queensland, which were included in the landmark survey Sidney Nolan: Desert and Drought, at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2003. The exhibition included previously unseen photographic images from 1949 to 1952.
In the NGV exhibition, numerous small-scale contact prints showing Nolan’s ‘Drought animals’ were featured, as were larger black and white prints from the same series. Additional small-scale prints were sourced as well through Nolan’s step-daughter Jinx Nolan. Of note was Nolan’s now famous Untitled (Brian the stockman mounting a dead horse at Wave Hill Station), 1952, a startling image that first featured in the 1961 Thames & Hudson monograph Sidney Nolan, where it appeared titled Desert.
Having researched and written about these images, Damian recognised that Nolan had spent many hours studying the images, notating them and ultimately using them in the development of his now famous Drought paintings. Nolan offered the photographs to Life Magazine, New York in a bid to bring this extraordinary series to public attention. This bid was unsuccessful.
After all of the years since these photographs were taken, Damian made the decision to resurrect Nolan’s photographs working closely with Sidney Nolan’s widow Mary Nolan, nee Boyd. The result being this exhibition at Australian Galleries, Melbourne in 2011.
Keen to preserve the artist’s vision, the photographs have been produced to a scale consistent with the vintage prints and all are printed from the original negatives which were discovered at ‘The Rodd’.
Text from Australian Galleries Melbourne
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (cow carcass and cow skull) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (cow and calf carcass covered in dirt I) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
Australian Galleries 35 Derby Street [PO Box 1183] Collingwood 3066 Phone: +61 3 9417 4303
Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959) Jim 2010 From the series Leak C Type photograph Large image size 110 x 238cm Framed size 127 x 255cm Edition of 8
You have just got to love these!
A wonderful suite of five panoramic photographs, framed in white, inhabit the beautiful space of Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne. The photographs, different angles of the same bleached bone inverted skeleton of a house that was constructed by five builders in the Australian landscape around Cooma, New South Wales (no Photoshop tricks here!) have a subdued colour palette of misty greys and greens – all except one that has a vibrant blue sky with clouds, a man with his sheep dogs and a flock of sheep. Two of the photographs are framed upside down, one photograph a closer study from the same angle.
The house on the hill is surrounded by wondrous light gently highlighting the wooden bones of the building embedded into the landscape in a context that is soon to become another suburban housing estate. The skeleton rises up (and falls into the sky) like a foundering ship amongst mysterious gum trees, surrounded by broken stumps and littered branches. The best photograph (top, below) has the effect of the bones being lit up like a giant puzzle.
Examining ‘the encroachment of suburban development and the socio-economic and environmental pressures on the Australian landscape’ these photographs, named after the characters from Patrick White’s novel The Twyborn Affair, are ecologically aware and politically astute, as well as being fine photographs. The title of the exhibition, leak, perfectly sums up the osmotic nature of the encroachment of human habitation upon the ‘natural’ environment, which is already a mediated landscape due to European farming techniques and clearance of the landscape. But this is not a one way discourse; what do we call the ‘new’ Australian bush? What if the humpy invaded suburbia and pushed back the tide?
I would love to see different types of houses in different contexts. I want to see more these are so good!
Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959) Prowse 2010 From the series Leak C Type photograph Large image size 110 x 247cm Framed size 127 x 264cm Edition of 8
Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959) Aristide 2010 From the series Leak C Type photograph 60 x 122cm Edition of 8
Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959) Eddie 2010 From the series Leak Type C photograph Framed 127.0 x 274.6cm Edition of 8
Tolarno Galleries Level 4 104 Exhibition Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia Phone: 61 3 9654 6000
“It is this irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is all the nature we have.”
Simon Schama. Landscape and Memory 1
“The term “landscape” can be ambiguous and is often used to describe a creative interpretation of the land by an artist and the terrain itself. But there is a clear distinction: the land is shaped by natural forces while the artist’s act of framing a piece of external reality involves exerting creative control. The terms of this ‘control’ have be theorised since the Renaissance and, while representations of nature have changed over the centuries, a landscape is essentially a mediated view of nature.”
Dr Isobel Crombie 2
“And, finally, what of the vexed, interrelated matter of non-Aboriginal Australians’ sense of belonging? While the Australian historian Manning Clark speculated that European settlers were eternal outsiders who could never know ‘heart’s ease in a foreign land, because … there live foreign ancestral spirits’, it now seems plausible that non-Aboriginal Australians are developing their own form of attachment, not to land as such, but to place. Indeed, it has recently been argued that for contemporary non-Aboriginal Australians, belonging may have no connection with land at all. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why art photographs of the natural landscape have lost their currency and are now far outnumbered by photographs of urban and suburban environments – after all, it is ‘here’ that most Australians live and ‘there’ that the tourist industry beckons them to escape.”
Helen Ennis. Photography and Australia 3
This review took a lot of research, reading, thinking and writing, all good stuff – I hope you enjoy it!
Heavy Weather: Photography and the Australian Land(e)scape
There is nothing fresh about the work in this exhibition. If feels like all the oxygen has been sucked out of the term ‘landscape’, the land itself gasping for air, for life. What the exhibition does evince is an “undercurrent of disruption and contradiction that suggests that all is not as it may appear” (wall text) – and on this evidence the process of photographing the Australian landscape seems to have become an escape from the land, a fragmented and dislocated scoping, mapping and photographing of mental aspects of the land that have little to do with the landscape itself. Landscape as a site of psychological performance. In this sense, the title Stormy Weather should perhaps have been Heavy Weather for contemporary photographic artists seem to make heavy going of photographing our sense of belonging to land, to place.
Is it the artists or the curators that seek to name this work ‘landscape photography’ for it is about everything but the landscape – an escape from the land, perhaps even a denial of it’s very existence. I believe it is the framing of landscape and its imaging in terms of another subject matter. While I am not going to critique individual works in the exhibition, what I am interested in is this framing of the work as ‘landscape photography’.
Since colonial settlement there has been a rich history of photographing the Australian landscape. In the early colonial period the emphasis was on documenting the building of new cities and communities through realist photography and later more picturesque and panoramic vistas of the Australian land as settlers sought comfort in familiar surroundings and a sense of ‘belonging’ to the land (for example day trippers and photographers travelling to the Blue Mountains). Photographers rarely accompanied expeditions into the interior, unlike the exploration and mapping of the land from the East Coast to the West Coast in the United States. Unlike America there has been little tradition of photographing sublime places in Australia because they are not of the same scale as in the USA. It is very difficult to photograph the vast horizon line of the Australian outback and make it sublime. Photographing the landscape then ventured through Pictorialism in the interwar years, Modernism after WWII through to the emergence of art photography in the 1970s (for example see my posting on Dr John Cato), wilderness and tourist photography. An excellent book to begin to understand the history of photography in Australia is Photography and Australia by Helen Ennis (London: Reaktion Books, 2007) that contains the chapter “Land and Landscape.” As Ennis comments in this chapter, “… landscape photography has been the practice of settler Australians and the expression of a settler-colonial culture … The viewpoint in landscape photography has therefore been almost exclusively European”4 although this culture has been changing in recent years with the emergence of Indigenous photographers.
Ennis observes that contemporary landscape photographers embrace internationalist styles, showing a distaste for totalising nationalist narratives and a rejection of essentialist or absolutist viewpoints, noting that an overarching framework like multiculturalism has lost its currency in favour of transnationalism (which is a social movement grown out of the heightened interconnectivity between people and the loosening of boundaries between countries) that does not disavow colonial inequalities and asymmetrical relations between countries and continents.5 Photographers have developed a “photographic language that allows for the expression of the contradictions inherent in contemporary settler Australians’ relations with the land,”6 whilst offering visual artists a “non-linear, non-didactic way of dealing with the complexities of Australia history and experience, and the relationship between past and present.”7
This much then is a given. Let us now look at the framing of the work in the exhibition as ‘landscape photography’.
Simon Schama in his erudite book Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1996) believes that there can never be a natural or neutral landscape (even the brilliant meadow-floor [at Yosemite] which suggested to its first eulogists a pristine Eden was in fact the result of regular fire-clearances by its Ahwahneechee Indian occupants) and that it is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape. There was also a recognition that ‘nature’ was neither neutral nor beyond ideology during the 1970s-1980s. Hence there is a double mediation – by both nature and the artist.
Despite the rejection of essentialist or absolutist viewpoints by contemporary photographers and an acknowledgment of the mediated view by/of nature one can say that there is not a single photograph in this exhibition that is just a ‘landscape’. Even the most sublime photographs in the exhibition, David Stephenson’s (Self-portrait), Reflected moon, Tasmania (1985) is cut up into a grid, or Murray Fredericks Salt photographs (2005, see below) where the photographer has waited agonisingly for weeks for just the right weather conditions to take his photographs which the general public, when visiting Lake Eyre, would have no chance of ever seeing. Through this mediation there seems to have emerged an abrogation or denial of landscape by the artists and curators conceptualisation of it, as though they are performing a particular condition, a style; working out a plan of what to do and say. Is it just a denial or is it an artistic strategy?
I believe that these are strategies that limit artists, not strategies that enable them. The curators are equally implicated in these strategies by their naming of these works ‘landscapes’. What purpose does this naming serve, in terms of the development of a sense of place, not nation, that people living in Australia seek to have? We can ask the question: Where do you stand in relationship to the landscape both philosophically and geographically?
After Butler, we can also ask: What forms of cultural myth making are “embedded” in the framing of landscape by the curators, the naming of such work as ‘landscape photography’?
Rarely is the framing recognised for what it is, when it is the viewer interpreting the interpretation that has been imposed upon us, that limits the visual discourse, producing a view of Australian landscape as fragmented norms enacted through visual narrative frames – that in this case efface the representation of land and place. This conceptual framing of what the work is about limits the grounds for discourse for a frame excludes as much as it corrals. The curators form an interpretative matrix of what is seen (or not seen, or withheld), reinforcing notions of landscape photography, the ‘landscape photography’ “that requires a certain kind of subject that actually institutes that conceptual requirement as part of its description and diagnosis.”8 In other words the description ‘landscape photography’ established by the curators becomes a limiting, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Personally, I think the problem with a landscape exhibition is that this is virtually an inane topic. Somehow “documentary” works as a topic because it is about a mental discipline. But “landscape” is no longer really a topic – it used to be a topic when landscape painters wanted to show the landscape (!) but does anyone really want to show this today? Even when the landscape painters wanted to show the sublime, the landscape was always treated with deference. No-one thinks of Minor White as a landscape photographer for he was a metaphysical photographer. And that’s what this exhibition needs – another word to give sense to a photographers efforts.
This is difficult subject matter. While artists may reject essentialist or absolutist viewpoints what has been substituted in their place is a framing, a definition that is post-nature, that undermines any sense of belonging to land, to place. The dissolutive pendulum has swung too far the other way; we look to theory to be inclusive and sometimes stand on our heads to achieve this to our detriment.
As of this moment we are not at the point where we can look back with some certainty and see that we have reached the beginning of the path of understanding. What I would propose to any artist is a photography that is broadly based, cumulative, offering a layered body of work that builds and refers back to an original body of work, much like the photographs of Robert Adams – photographs that do not make claims but ask questions and hint at a more responsive engagement with the landscape.
My hope is that a more broadly based view of place and our sense of belonging to the land emerges, one that challenges our contemporary understanding of the landscape, a viewpoint and line of sight that calm our troubled sense of reality. Robert Adams has written eloquently about photography and the art of seeing. Here is a quote from his seminal book Why People Photograph (Aperture Foundation, 1994) that aptly concludes this review.
“At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect – a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.”9
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jemma Altmeier and the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Addendum
Further to my argument above there is a session ‘Australian Identity: Australian Bio-diversity and the Landscape of the Imagination’ at the Festival of Ideas, Friday June 17th 2011 at the University of Melbourne where, in the details of the upcoming session, Ian Burn has been quoted about the loss of the landscape:
Details of the session: ‘The connection between landscape and national identity figures prominently in discussions of Australian experience. Recently the pairing of the two has taken a melancholic turn; artist Ian Burn has remarked that ‘A commitment to representing the landscape has come to be about the “loss” of the landscape’. Has the landscape that once supported the Australian legend disappeared? The landscape is represented not only in art but also through science, law and commerce. Are new landscapes and new identities now being imagined and discovered?’
Quotation: “The idea of landscape does not just invoke rival institutional discourses, but today attracts wider and more urgent reflections. A commitment to representing the landscape has become about the ‘loss’ of landscape in the twentieth century … that is about its necessity and impossibility at the same time. Seeing a landscape means focusing on a picture, implicating language in our seeing of the landscape.”
Burn, Ian quoted in Stephen, Ann (ed.,). Artists think: the late works of Ian Burn. Sydney: Power Publications in association with Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, 1996, p. 8.
Footnotes
1/ Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage, 1996, p. 7
2/ Crombie, Isobel. Stormy Weather. Contemporary Landscape Photography (exhibition catalogue). Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2010, p. 15
3/ Clark, Manning quoted by Peter Read in “A Haunted Land No Longer? Changing Relationships to a Spiritualised Australia,” in Australian Book Review CCLXV (October 2004) pp. 28-33 in Ennis, Helen. “Land and Landscape,” in Photography and Australia. London: Reaktion Books, 2007, pp. 71-72
4/ Ennis, Helen. “Land and Landscape,” in Photography and Australia. London: Reaktion Books, 2007, pp. 51-52
5/ Ennis, Helen. “Land and Landscape,” in Photography and Australia. London: Reaktion Books, 2007, p. 123, p. 133
6/ Ibid., “Land and Landscape,” pp. 71-72
7/ Ibid., “Localism and Internationalism,” p. 128
8/ Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2010, p. 161
9/ Adams, Robert. Why People Photograph. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1994, p. 179
The work of the contemporary Australian photographers highlighted in this exhibition comes from a profound engagement with the lived landscape around them. The quiet intensity of their work comes from their close and sustained relationship to particular environments. These photographers may use that lived observation to reveal the layers of history in a landscape; to provoke ecological concerns; as the place for site specific performances; or to use the specific poetics of light to reveal the beauty of a place. However for all of them, the real world is the starting point for images of particularity.
Photographers’ interest in the landscape has increased in the last few years. Perhaps as a result of heightened environmental awareness, or an evolution in our engagement with Australian history, practitioners are again turning to the natural world as a site for critical practice and inspiration.
Drawn from the permanent collection the National Gallery of Victoria, the selected photographers in this exhibition have a particular focus that comes from their active relationship to various environments. The artists displayed here reveal history in a landscape; provoke ecological concerns; use the landscape as a site of performance; or reveal the distinctive beauty of a place.
Frequently underpinning these works of quiet intensity and considerable beauty is an undercurrent of disruption and contradiction that suggests all is not as it may first appear.
Text from the National Gallery of Victoria website [Online] Cited 26/02/2011 no longer available online
It is with much sadness that I note the death of respected Australian photographer and teacher Dr John Cato (1926-2011). Son of Australian photographer Jack Cato, who wrote one of the first histories of Australian photography (The Story of the Camera in Australia (1955)), John was apprentice to his father before setting up a commercial studio with Athol Shmith that ran from 1950-1971. Dr Cato then joined Shmith at the fledgling Prahran College of Advanced Education photography course in 1974, becoming head of the course when Shmith retired in 1979, a position he held until John retired in 1991.
I was fortunate enough to get to know John and his vivacious wife Dawn. I worked with him and co-curatored his retrospective with William Heimerman, ‘…and his forms were without number’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, South Yarra, in 2002. My catalogue essay from this exhibition is reproduced below.
John was always generous with his time and advice. His photographs are sensitive, lyrical renditions of the Australian landscape. He had a wonderful ear for the land and for the word, a musical lyricism that was unusual in Australian photographers of the early 1970s. He understood how a person from European background could have connection to this land, this Australia, without being afraid to express this sense of belonging; he also imaged an Aboriginal philosophy (that all spirits have a physical presence and everything physical has a spiritual presence) tapping into one of the major themes of his personal work: the mirror held up to reveal an’other’ world – the language of ambiguity and ambivalence (the dichotomy of opposites e.g. black / white, masculine / feminine) speaking through the photographic print.
His contribution to the art of photography in Australia is outstanding. What are the precedents for a visual essay in Australian photography before John Cato? I ask the reader to consider this question.
It would be fantastic if the National Gallery of Victoria could organise a large exhibition and publication of his work, gathering photographs from collections across the land, much like the successful retrospective of the work of John Davis held in 2010. Cato’s work needs a greater appreciation throughout Australia because of it’s seminal nature, containing as it does the seeds of later development for Australian photographers. His educational contribution to the development of photography as an art form within Australia should also be acknowledged in separate essays for his influence was immense. His life, his teaching and his work deserves nothing less.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
‘… and his forms were without number’
John Cato: A Retrospective of the Photographic Work 1971-1991
This writing on the photographic work of Dr John Cato from 1971-1991 is the catalogue essay to a retrospective of his work held at The Photographers’ Gallery in Prahran, Melbourne in 2002. Dr Cato forged his voice as a photographic artist in the early 1970s when photography was just starting to be taken seriously as an art form in Australia. He was a pioneer in the field, and became an educator in art photography. He is respected as one of Australia’s preeminent photographers of the last century.
With the arrival of ‘The New Photography’1 from Europe in the early 1930’s, the formalist style of Modernism was increasingly adopted by photographers who sought to express through photography the new spirit of the age. In the formal construction of the images, the abstract geometry, the unusual camera angles and the use of strong lighting, the representation ‘of the thing in itself’2 was of prime importance. Subject matter often emphasised the monumentality of the factory, machine or body/landscape. The connection of the photographer with the object photographed was usually one of sensitivity and awareness to an external relationship that resulted in a formalist beauty.
Following the upheaval and devastation of the Second World War, photography in Australia was influenced by the ‘Documentary’ style. This “came to be understood as involved chiefly with creating aesthetic experiences … associated with investigation of the social and political environment.”3 This new movement of social realism, “… a human record intimately bound with a moment of perception,”4 was not dissimilar to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ (images a la sauvette) where existence and essence are in balance.5
The culmination of the ‘Documentary’ style of photography was The Family of Man exhibition curated by Edward Steichen that toured Australia in 1959.6 This exhibition, seen many times by John Cato,7 had a theme of optimism in the unity and dignity of man. The structure of the images in ‘Documentary’ photography echoed those of the earlier ‘New Photography’.
Max Dupain “stressed the objective, impersonal and scientific character of the camera; the photographer could reveal truth by his prerogative of selection.”8 This may have been an objective truth, an external vocalising of a vision that concerned itself more with exterior influences rather than an internal meditation upon the subject matter.
John Cato (Australian, 1926-2011) Untitled from the series Essay I, Landscapes in a Figure 1971-1979 Silver gelatin photograph
In 1971, John Cato’s personal photographic work was exhibited for the first time as part of the group show Frontiers at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.9 Earth Song emerged into an environment of social upheaval inflamed by Australian involvement in the Vietnam War. It provided a group of enthusiastic people who were beginning to be interested in photography as art, an opportunity to see the world, and photography, through a different lens. The 52 colour photographic prints in Earth Song, were shown in a sequence that used melodic line and symphonic form as its metaphoric basis, standing both as individual photographs and as part of a total concept.10
In the intensity of the holistic vision, in the connection to the subconscious, the images elucidate the photographers’ search for a perception of the world. This involved an attainment of a receptive state that allowed the cracks, creases and angles inherent in the blank slate of creation to become meaningful. The sequence contained images that can be seen as ‘acts of revelation’,11confirmed and expanded by supporting photographs, and they unearthed a new vocabulary for the discussion of spiritual and political issues by the viewer. They may be seen as a metaphor for life.
The use of sequence, internal meditation and ‘revelation’, although not revolutionary in world terms,12 were perhaps unique in the history of Australian photography at that time. During the production of Earth Song, John Cato was still running a commercial studio in partnership with the photographer Athol Shmith and much of his early personal work was undertaken during holidays and spare time away from the studio. Eventually he abandoned being a commercial photographer in favour of a new career as an educator, but found this left him with even less time to pursue his personal work.13
Earth Song (1970-1971) was followed by the black and white sequences:
Tree – A Journey
18 images
1971-1973
Petroglyphs
14 images
1971-1973
Seawind
14 images
1971-1975
Proteus
18 images
1974-1977
Waterway
16 images
1974-1979
Together they form the extensive series Essay I, Landscapes in a Figure, parts of which are held in the permanent photography collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.14
John Cato (Australian, 1926-2011) Untitled from the series Essay I, Landscapes in a Figure 1971-1979 Silver gelatin photograph
The inspiration for Essay I and later personal work came from many sources. An indebtedness to his father, the photographer Jack Cato, is gratefully acknowledged. Cato also acknowledges the influence of literature: William Shakespeare (especially the Sonnets, and As You Like It), William Blake, Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking Glass), the Bible; and of music (symphonic form), the mythology of the Dreamtime and Aboriginal rock paintings.15 Each body of work in Essay I was based on an expression of nature, the elements and the Creation. They can be seen as Equivalents16 of his most profound life experiences, his life philosophy illuminated in physical form.
John Cato was able to develop the vocabulary of his own inner landscape while leaving the interpretation of this landscape open to the imagination of the viewer. Seeing himself as a photographer rather than an artist, he used the camera as a tool to mediate between what he saw in his mind’s eye, the subjects he photographed and the surface of the photographic negative.17 Photographing ‘in attention’, much as recommended by the teacher and philosopher Krishnamurti,18 he hoped for a circular connection between the photographer and the subject photographed. He then looked for verification of this connection in the negative and, eventually, in the final print.
Essay II, Figures in a Landscape, had already been started before the completion of Essay I and it consists of three black and white sequences:
Alcheringa
11 images
1978-1981
Broken Spears
11 images
1978-1983
Mantracks
22 images in pairs
1978-1983
The photographs in Essay II seem to express “the sublimation of Aboriginal culture by Europeans”19 and, as such, are of a more political nature. Although this is not obvious in the photographs of Alcheringa, the images in this sequence celebrating the duality of reality and reflection, substance and shadow, it is more insistent in the symbology of Broken Spears and Mantracks. Using the metaphor of the fence post (white man / black man in Broken Spears) and contrasting Aboriginal and European ‘sacred’ sites (in pairs of images in Mantracks), John Cato comments on the destruction of a culture and spirit that had existed for thousands of years living in harmony with the land.
In his imaging of an Aboriginal philosophy (that all spirits have a physical presence and everything physical has a spiritual presence) he again tapped one of the major themes of his personal work: the mirror held up to reveal an’other’ world. Cato saw that even as they are part of the whole, the duality of positive / negative, black / white, masculine / feminine are always in conflict.20 In the exploration of the conceptual richness buried within the dichotomy of opposites, Cato sought to enunciate the language of ambiguity and ambivalence,21 speaking through the photographic print.
The theme of duality was further expanded in his last main body of work, Double Concerto: An Essay in Fiction:
Double Concerto (Pat Noone)
30 images
1984-1990
Double Concerto (Chris Noone)
19 images
1985-1991
Double Concerto may be seen as a critique of the power of witness and John Cato created two ‘other’ personas, Pat Noone and Chris Noone, to visualise alternative conditions within himself. The Essay explored the idea that if you send two people to the same location they will take photographs that are completely different from each other, that tell a distinct story about the location and their self:
“For the truth of the matter is that people have mixed feelings and confused opinions and are subject to contradictory expectations and outcomes, in every sphere of experience.”22
This slightly schizophrenic confusion between the two witnesses is further highlighted by Pat Noone using single black and white images in sequence. Chris Noone, on the other hand, uses multiple colour images joined together to form panoramic landscapes that feature two opposing horizons. The use of colour imagery in Double Concerto, with its link to the colour work of Earth Song, can be seen to mark the closing of the circle in terms of John Cato’s personal work. In Another Way of Telling, John Berger states that …
“Photography, unlike drawing, does not possess a language. The photographic image is produced instantaneously by the reflection of light; its figuration is not impregnated by experience or consciousness.”23
But in the personal work of John Cato it is a reflection of the psyche, not of light, that allows a consciousness to be present in the figuration of the photographic prints. The personal work is an expression of his self, his experience, his story and t(his) language, is our language, if we allow our imagination to speak.
Dr Marcus Bunyan 2002
Footnotes
1/ Newton, Gael. Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988. Sydney: Australian National Gallery, William Collins, 1988, p. 109
2/ Newton, Gael. Max Dupain. Sydney: David Ell Press,1980, p. 34
3/ Ibid., p. 32
4/ Greenough, Sarah (et al). On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography. Boston: National Gallery of Art, Bullfinch Press, 1989, p. 256
5/ Ibid., p. 256
6/ Newton, Gael. Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988. Sydney: Australian National Gallery, William Collins, 1988, p. 131
7/ Ibid., p. 131
8/ Newton, Gael. Max Dupain. Sydney: David Ell Press, 1980, p. 32
9/ Only the second exhibition by Australian photographers at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
10/ Shmith, Athol. Light Vision No.1. Melbourne: Jean-Marc Le Pechoux (editor and publisher), Sept 1977, p. 21
11/ Berger, John and Mohr, Jean. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, p. 118
12/ Hall, James Baker. Minor White: Rites and Passages. New York: Aperture, 1978
13/ Conversation with the photographer 29/01/1997, Melbourne, Victoria
14/ Newton, Gael. Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988. Sydney: Australian National Gallery, William Collins, 1988, p. 135, Footnote 7; p. 149
15/ Conversation with the photographer 22/01/1997, Melbourne, Victoria
16/ Norman, Dorothy. Alfred Stieglitz. New York: Aperture, 1976, p. 5
17/ Ibid.,
18/ Krishnamurti. Beginnings of Learning. London: Penguin, 1975, p. 131
19/ Strong, Geoff. Review. The Age. Melbourne, 28/04/1982
20/ Conversation with the photographer 22/01/1997, Melbourne, Victoria
21/ The principal definition for ambiguity in Websters Third New International Dictionary is: “admitting of two or more meanings … referring to two or more things at the same time.” That for ambivalence is “contradictory and oscillating subjective states.” Quoted in Davis, Fred. Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 21.
22/ Levine, Donald. The Flight From Ambiguity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985
23/ Berger, John and Mohr, Jean. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, p. 95
Artists: Justine Khamara, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, Imants Tillers, Sam Shmith, Janet Laurence, Murray Fredericks and Huang Xu
Janet Laurence (Australian, b. 1947) Carbon Vein (installation view) 2008 Duraclear, oil pigment on acrylic 235 x 100cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This is an excellent group exhibition at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne. Together the works form a satisfying whole; individually there are some visually exciting works. There are two insightful paintings by Imants Tillers, Nature Speaks: BP (2009) and Blossoming 21 (2010), a digitally constructed landscape by Sam Shmith, Untitled (Passenger)Â (2010, below) that the online image doesn’t really do justice to, a large photographic landscape of a storm over Lake Eyre Salt 304Â (2009, below) by Murray Fredericks and two layered transcapes by Janet Laurence (see image above) that just confirm the talent of this artist after the exciting installation of her work at the Melbourne Art Fair (I call them transcapes because they seem to inhabit a layered in-between space existing between dream and reality).
For me the three outstanding works were the large horizontal photograph Hair No.2 (2009, below) by Huang Xu, in which hair hangs like a delicate cloud on a dark background and his photograph Flower No. 1 (2008, below) in which the white petals of the chrysanthemum, symbol of death or lamentation and grief in some Western and Eastern countries in the world, seemingly turn to marble in the photographic print (you can see this online in the enlarged version of the image below). What a magnificent photograph this is – make sure that you don’t miss it because it is tucked away in the small gallery off the main gallery in the Arc One space. The third outstanding work is the sculpture you are a glorious, desolate prospect (2010) by Justine Khamara (see photographs below), a glorious magical mountain, twinkling in the light, all shards of reflectiveness, cool as ice. I would have loved to have seen this work without it’s protective case – in one sense the case works conceptually to trap the speaking of the mountain but in another it blocks access to the language of this work, the reflection of the light of the gallery, the light of the world bouncing off it’s surfaces.
This is not, of course, how nature speaks but how humans speak for nature – through image-ining and seeking to control and order the elemental forces that surround us. This construction of reality has a long tradition in the history of art, the mediation of the world through the hands, eyes and mind of the artist offering to the viewer, for however brief a moment, that sense of awakening to the possibilities of the world in which we all live.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Angela and all at Arc One Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Justine Khamara (Australian, b. 1971) you are a glorious, desolate prospect (installation view) 2010 Mirror, perspex, plinth 80 x 186cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Justine Khamara (Australian, b. 1971) you are a glorious, desolate prospect (installation view detail) 2010 Mirror, perspex, plinth 80 x 186cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1961) Galatea Point 2005 Digital photograph on duraclear film edition of 5 112 x 112cm
Huang Xu (Chinese, b. 1968) Hair No.2 2009 Type C Photograph 120 x 245cm
Huang Xu (Chinese, b. 1968) Flower No.1 2008 Type C photograph 120 x 120cm
Huang Xu (Chinese, b. 1968) Flower No.2 2008 Type C Photograph 120 x 120cm
Murray Fredericks (Australian, b. 1970) Salt 304 2009 Pigment print on cotton rag 244 x 88cm
Sam Shmith (Australian, b. 1980) Untitled (Passenger) 2010 pigment print on archival rag 180 x 108cm
Arc One Gallery 45 Flinders Lane Melbourne, 3000 Phone: (03) 9650 0589
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
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
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
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Gunnai man land 2008
A handsome group of large photographs in crisp white frames is displayed in the large space of Gallerysmith, Melbourne. Undoubtably they are well taken and printed photographs but conceptually their thematic development is confused. The photographs purport to investigate how industrialisation has changed the Gippsland landscape since colonisation whilst referencing human interactions that ‘are sometimes’ associated with Western art.
Gunnai land man (above) is very effective in this quest juxtaposing as it does an Indigenous Australian and fallen tree on a bare track with a smoke billowing power station (symbolic of the industrialisation of the area) looming in the background. Other photographs are less successful. What a man flying a kite has to do with the pre-colonial Gippsland landscape is beyond me and the juxtapositional incongruity sought by the artist simply does not work, despite the presence of the power station on the plains in the distance. The symbology has more to do with Japanese art than it has to do with Western art.
The conceptual narrative of the photograph Moe Madonna (below) works only partially as well. The destruction of the landscape has been caused by pastoralisation not industrialisation. In the image that Hayes is referencing the Madonna is front and centre set in an idyllic landscape. In the work by Hayes the incongruity has to be explained, has to be verbalised in text for the association to be didactically made. The interpretation leaves no room for personal reflection and when I looked at this image, the mother and child were so small in the landscape, the placement so obviously constructed that there incongruity turned to disbelief: namely that I simply did not believe the mise en scène being created.
Other narratives are equally confusing. In Paper bag lovers (below) I had to ask the gallery director what was going on in the photograph because the bodies where so small in the landscape (in fact it looks like one body) and you can’t really see the paper bags on their heads because the bodies are just an amorphous mass containing no detail at all (you can just see the body in the photograph below in the mid distance just below the large central tree). Why paper bags anyway? If something intentionally odd and incongruous is sought to be portrayed in the landscape perhaps Hayes should look at the work of Eugene Meatyard (see below) to see a real subversion of the body/landscape dichotomy.
The one standout photograph of the exhibition is Plein air explorers (below). This is confirmed in the sales of the show as all six prints of this photograph have been sold. One can see why!
The title is perfect, the construction of the image faultless. The naked white man stands proudly surveying his conquered domain, the land, whilst around him artists (reminding me of the dilettantes of the Victorian age going on day trips), hunker down into the ground with their easels oblivious to the desiccated trees around them. Here the photographer just observes, doesn’t construct, the incongruity of it all. The artists draw the white man based on direct observation of him and not on their conceptions or conventional images or memories of him while ignoring their surroundings. Here is the paradox, the ironic perfect storm that the artist was conceptually seeking: the representation of landscape based upon direct observation “in the open air” ignored for a perfect white arse while on the horizon smoke stacks of a power station stand in silent witness to the present and imminent destruction of the world. What a photograph! Can I have one now please?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Gallerysmith for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Moe Madonna 2008
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Kite 2008
Raphael (Italian, 1483-1520) Madonna of the Goldfinch 1505-1506 Oil on panel 107 x 77cm Galleria degli Uffizi
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Paper Bag Lovers 2008
I have predominantly focused on the parts of the Gippsland landscape that have been impacted by white settlement. I have composed various human interactions that are sometimes associated with Western art and its construction. For example, Moe Madonna references Raphael’s Goldfinch Madonna. The narratives are intentionally odd and incongruous with the surrounding location. My son and I seem out-of-place in a barren paddock while the autumn mist shrouds distant gum trees and electricity pylons. The soil here has been compacted beyond repair by cattle hooves – an inappropriate animal in Australia’s delicate ecosystems. As we sit on this barren plain, I read to Oliver from a European pre-schooler book titled Autumn, creating an interesting juxtaposition with the antipodean equivalent season.
The work in this exhibition considers the pre-colonial Gippsland landscape and how industrial ‘progress’ has altered it. Hopefully it provides pause for thought.
Siri Hayes exhibition notes. March 2009
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Plein air explorers 2008
Gallerysmith 170-174 Abbotsford St, North Melbourne, Victoria, 3051 Australia
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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