My apologies to Chris Round that I did not get this posting up during the short run of the exhibition. It was a bit of a crowded time with the exhibition Out of the closets and Nite Art on.
The work, shown in the small black gallery at Edmund Pearce, had great presence and beauty. The backgrounds had a luminous pastel affect, much more so than in the reproductions shown here. The objects seemed to float off the paper. This is experimental work for Round (vis a vis his landscape practice) but the influences for the work can be seen in the two landscape photographs that I have included here.
I really enjoyed the beauty, serenity and context of these metaphorical landscapes.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Edmund Pearce Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Inversion marks a departure from my normal landscape based work and in to experimental still life. This series is an investigation into form and visual illusion using functional, mass-produced objects. By removing context – using a reflective surface that’s not immediately apparent and at times changing colours – I’m interrogating the duality of the real and the imagined, the prosaic and the beautiful. I’m also exploring the physicality of depth and space, re-evaluating both utilitarian aesthetic and function simultaneously.
Artists represented:Â Philip Potter, John Storey, John Englart, Barbara Creed, Ponch Hawkes, Rennie Ellis
Curators: Dr Marcus Bunyan and Nicholas Henderson
LAST DAY TOMORROW = MAKE SURE YOU DON’T MISS IT IF YOU ARE IN MELBOURNE!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to all the artists for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Curator Dr Marcus Bunyan talks about the exhibition Out of the closets, into the streets: Gay Liberation photography 1971-73 at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne July 2014
John Storey was a self-taught photographer who ran his own commercial photography business from 1979 until his move into academia in 1985. As a free-lance photographer, he documented the Gay Liberation Movement in Sydney as well as contributing photography to several publications including Peter Spearitt’s Sydney since the Twenties (1978); Waterfront Sydney 1860-1920, (1984, 1991) co-authored with Graeme Applin; and Anne Richter’s 1994 publication, Arts and Crafts of Indonesia, (1994). Photographs by John Storey are also included in Peter Spearitt’s history: The Sydney Harbour Bridge: a life (2007, 2011).
John took-up a part-time lecturer’s position in Photography at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga in 1985 where he also established a film society and camera club. In 1986 he accepted a position as Lecturer in Photography at RMIT, where he worked until 2004, by which time he was Associate Professor and Post Graduate Coordinator in the School of Creative Arts. John’s commitment to practice based PhDs and the intersection between the creative and the scholarly was critical to the establishment of that programme. His Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong in 2992 entitled Journals of a Stranger: documents of a life, brings together image and text in a discontinuous narrative using photography, creative and exegetical writing.
As an artist, John’s work was exhibited both nationally and internationally, and he curated a number of exhibitions that reflected his interests in social justice, urban landscape, gender and intimacy for hospitals and old people’s homes. He was a member of the Stills Art Co-operative Melbourne and sat on the Board of Directors at Melbourne’s Centre of Contemporary Photography.
Dogged by ill health for many years, Dr John Storey is remembered as a committed, tenacious and caring teacher, artist and researcher. Charming, witty and a rigorous and progressive thinker, he is greatly missed by his family, friends and colleagues.
Anonymous text. “Obituary: Dr John Storey (1950-2019),” on the Non | Traditional Research Outcomes website April 18, 2019 [Online] Cited 02/11/2022. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Gays held a picnic in the Botannical Gardens, Melbourne during Gay Pride Week. They decided to play spin the bottle after forming a circle – the bottle can be seen at bottom left – and much kissing ensued. Lots of straights stopped to watch and laugh. Someone called the cops and the confrontation occurred that can be seen in the photograph below. Apparently, they were breaking some council by law about not playing games in the gardens, even though families were kicking footballs right next to them on the lawn.
Anonymous photographers Graffiti on Melbourne streets 1971-1973
Phillip Potter Portraits for CAMP Ink magazine 1973
Gay activist Lex Watson is the person in the bottom photograph. Lex sadly died very recently.
Installation photographs
Around the room, surrounded by colour and movement with elements of stillness
Title of the exhibition and opening images
Title of the exhibition with Barbara Creed’s three 35mm black and white photographs
Phillip Potter and John Storey photographs of the first ever Gay Liberation protest in Sydney in 1971 to the right; then Ponch Hawkes four photographs followed by three photographs by Rennie Ellis
Phillip Potter and John Storey photographs of the first ever Gay Liberation protest in Sydney in 1971.
From a series of photographs of the very first gay rights demonstration which attracts 70 people outside NSW Liberal Party headquarters in support of the pre-selection of Tom Hughes against a right wing challenge following his support for homosexual law reform.
John Englart’s five photographs of Sydney Gay Pride Week march 1973 in the centre with Rennie Ellis at right of these
Phillip Potter portraits for CAMP Ink magazine 1973 at left with Graffiti in Melbourne 1971-73 at right
Graffiti in Melbourne 1971-73
Stills from a super 8mm Women’s Liberation march by Barbara Creed, 1973, at left with Phillip Potter portraits for CAMP Ink magazine 1973 at right
Barbara Creed (Australian, b. 1943) Stills from a Super 8mm film of a Women’s Liberation march Melbourne, 1973, printed 2014
Sponsored by
For photographic services in Australia, Art Blart highly recommends CPL Digital (03) 8376 8376 cpldigital.com.au
Dr Marcus Bunyan and the best photography archive in Australia sponsor this event artblart.com
The Archives actively collects and preserves lesbian and gay material from across Australia queerarchives.org.au
Supported by
Rennie Ellis is an award winning photographer and writer (03) 9525 3862 www.rennieellis.com.au
Artists include: Sean Barrett, Danica Chappell, Kim Demuth, Jackson Eaton, Mike Gray, Megan Jenkinson, Benjamin Lichtenstein, Phuong Ngo, Izabela Pluta, Kate Robertson, Jo Scicluna, Vivian Cooper Smith, Melanie Jayne Taylor and Justine Varga
Installation view of the exhibition View from the Window at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014 showing at right the work of Justine Varga including Morning and Evening from the series Sounding Silence (both 2014, below)
Photography can be anything your heart desires (or so they say)…
Another stimulating exhibition at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne.
My personal favourites are the works of Jo Scicluna and the two large “sculptural” photographs by Kim Demuth, but every artist in the exhibition had something interesting to offer.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Edmund Pearce Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984) Morning from the series Sounding Silence 2014 Type C print 77 x 61cm Edition of 6 + 1AP Images courtesy of the artist, Stills Gallery, Sydney and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide
Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984) Evening from the series Sounding Silence 2014 Type C print 47 x 38.5cm Edition of 6 + 1AP Images courtesy of the artist, Stills Gallery, Sydney and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide
Izabela Pluta (Australian born Poland, b. 1979) Left:Study for a sham ruin #7, pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012 (installation view) Right:Study for a sham ruin #8, acrylic on pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012 (installation view) Images courtesy of the artist, Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne and Galerie pompom, Sydney
Izabela Pluta (Australian born Poland, b. 1979) Left: Study for a sham ruin #7, pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012 Right: Study for a sham ruin #8, acrylic on pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012 Images courtesy of the artist, Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne and Galerie pompom, Sydney
Megan Jenkinson (New Zealand, b. 1958) Promise – Morrell’s Islands 2009 Type lenticular 22.6 x 38cm Edition of 5 Image courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney
Megan Jenkinson (New Zealand, b. 1958) Solace – Morrell’s Islands 2009 Type lenticular 21.7 x 38cm Edition of 5 Image courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney
View from the Window presents current thinking around photography (if we can even talk of something called photography any more).
With the ubiquity of the modern photographic image View from the Window attempts to highlight the need for considered reflection upon the place and value of current photographic practices. The artists respond to this by considering what ‘photography’ is, and in doing so re-shape, re-imagine, expand and break it down. They explore new thinking with traditional techniques and invent new methods of image making. The work is digital and analogue, flat and sculptural, conceptual and experiential, whole and fragmented. Despite all this, the photographic ‘idea’ remains – reshaping the way we see the world.
Press release from the Edmund Pearce Gallery website
Installation view of the exhibition View from the Window at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014 showing in the background works by Jo Scicluna
Jo Scicluna (Australian, b. 1969) Where A Circle Meets A Line (#4) (installation view) 2014 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag, victorian ash timber, tinted acrylic 37.5 x 37.5cm Edition of 5 Image courtesy of the artist
Jo Scicluna (Australian, b. 1969) Where I Have Always Been (An Island) (detail) 2014 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag, Victorian Ash timber, acrylic 45 x 45cm Edition of 5 Image courtesy of the artist
Extracts from the catalogue essay View from the Window
As these artists’ works demonstrate, the field of contemporary photography is fundamentally multifarious, constantly eluding attempts to delimit and define it. Despite the diversity of these practices, they share a sense of critical inquiry. Whether working with analogue photographs in darkrooms or digital images in post-production, building physical objects or emphasising the immaterial, these artists all foreground the capacity for photography to interrogate our understanding of the world. Consequently these practices recall art historian Bernd Stiegler’s vision of photography as a ‘reflective medium’.5 By this term Stiegler refers to the inextricable link between photography and realism, but importantly not a form of realism understood as naïve mimesis. Rather, for Stiegler, photography reflects upon the structures and assumptions through which we perceive the world, it ‘plumbs the conditions and limits of our understanding of reality’.6 More than a veridical document or hollow simulacrum, photography thus exists as image, object and process, potentially all simultaneously.
The complexity of these works signals a second common element: the investment of time. All these artists expend considerable time and effort in producing their work, as do any dedicated artists. However, the relevance of this observation is that this temporal investment differentiates such work from the overwhelming glut of photographic images that circulate through the electronic networks of globalised society. Although it would be disingenuous and insensitive to claim that tourist snaps of well-travelled monuments are only meaningless ephemera or signs of globalised homogeneity,7 the near ubiquity of photographic images highlights the need for considered reflection upon the place and value of photographic practices. Committed to extended periods of observation and experimentation, these artists display the patience and persistence to interrogate the problems and possibilities of photography. At their gentle request we repay this dedication through our own extended viewing, for without the time to look we might lose the time to think.
Christopher Williams-Wynn 2014
Christopher Williams-Wynn is an art history honours graduate of The University of Melbourne, and co-founder and co-editor of Dissect Journal.
5/ Bernd Stiegler, “Photography as the Medium of Reflection,” in Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (eds), The Meaning of Photography. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008, pp. 194-197 6/ Ibid., p. 197 7/ John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: SAGE Publications, 2011, pp. 155-187
Kim Demuth (Australian born England) 12.16am 18.02.2009 2012 Sculptural photography 110 x 92 x 6.5cm Edition of 3 Image courtesy of the artist
Kim Demuth (Australian born England) 9.55am 11.06.2008 2012 Sculptural photography 110 x 88 x 6.5cm Edition of 3 Image courtesy of the artist
Sean Barrett Cool Aether 2014 Duratrans on blackwood lightbox 80 x 60cm Edition of 3 Image courtesy of the artist
Sean Barrett Bright Swarm 2014 Duratrans on blackwood lightbox 80 x 60cm Edition of 3 Image courtesy of the artist
Sean Barrett Dual Aurora 2014 Duratrans on blackwood lightbox 80 x 60cm Edition of 3 Image courtesy of the artist
Artists:Â Marcus Bunyan, Penny Byrne, Ray Cook, Deborah Kelly, Peter Lambropoulos, Salote Tawale Curated by: Angela Bailey and Nick Henderson
Nite Art Melbourne: Wednesday 23rd July 6 – 11pm
Short and sharp – on the hour, every hour – featuring artists and curator talks, music and performance. As part of the Nite Art CBD program Blindside is one of many galleries staying open late.
Queering the Archive panel discussion: Saturday 12th July 2.30 – 4pm
A panel discussion on GLBTQI representation in collections and its interpretations with: Susan Long (Artist and SLV Librarian); Nick Henderson (Archivist, AQuA Committee Member); Peter Lambropoulos (Vital Signs Artist). All welcome.
Penny Byrne (Australian) Badge of Honour (installation view detail) 2014
Vital Signs presents a unique opportunity for contemporary artists to engage with and creatively interpret the collection of the Australian Queer Archives (AQuA). Each of the artists have a rich art practise that considers social justice, activism and GLBTQI cultures and will engage with different aspects of the collection to inform their work.
The Archives (until 2020 the Australian Gay and Lesbian Archives) were established in 1978 and for the last 35 years has actively collected and preserved GLBTQI material from across Australia and actively sought to educate a wider audience about Australian GLBTQI history. The Archives is a community-orientated organisation committed to preserving and sharing the rich and diverse histories of the GLBTQI communities for future generations. The exhibition is presented as part of the Cultural Program of the 2014 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne and considers the shared histories of the GLBTQI and HIV communities in a contemporary representation.
Press release from the Blindside website. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Peter Lambropoulos (Australian) Side A (video still) 2014 Duration 31 minutes Digital video on iPad (continuous loop)
Peter Lambropoulos (Australian) Side A, Side B and Master (still) 2014 Digital video on iPad (continuous loop)
Salote Tawale (Australian born Fiji) Pocari Sweat (video still) 2014 Video
Ray Cook (Australian, b. 1962) Arm 2009 Photograph 80 x 80cm Image courtesy the artist
Ray Cook (Australian, b. 1962) Untitled from the series Conversations with Ancestors 2014 (Lottie, Melbourne 1960’s from the ALGA collection) Digital photograph
Deborah Kelly (Australian, b. 1962) Acting up (in memory of the Floral Clock action, 1991) 2014 Paper collage on Stonehenge cotton paper with pigment ink 56 x 76.5cm
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Deep Water 2014 Digital photograph on archival rag paper 70 x 97cm
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Deep Water 2014 Digital photograph on archival rag paper 70 x 97cm
Blindside Level 7, Room 14, Nicholas Building 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia Phone: (+61 3) 9650 0093
Opening hours: Wednesday to Saturday, 12 – 6pm (during exhibition program) Closed on public holidays
Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024) The Paper, Monday 2013 C Type photograph 110 x 214cm Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
I always look forward to new work by the incomparable Rosemary Laing with great anticipation. I have never been disappointed. This magnificent group of five images is no exception, one of the photographic highlights so far this year in Melbourne.
These large, Type-C analogue landscape format photographs feature decomposing newspapers literally (being words) carpeting the forest floor. These site-specific interventions feature no digital manipulation and, as the erudite catalogue essay by George Alexander observes below, investigate the replacement of our daily newspaper by online information bytes, “the graphic graphic newsprint breaking down like typographic stew,” the “transmigration of matter from one form to another,” “a meditation on time,” recycling, deforestation, information overload. These concepts build on earlier fragments from work by the artist (such as groundspeed, 2001) into something transformational, transnational and, even, otherworldly.
These entropic panoramas, which hang mysteriously between words and worlds, are indeed meditations on time and space. As Annette Hughes states,
“Laing’s pictorial space, like that of cinema, is generally art-directed, constructed, rehearsed, performed and shot in physical time and space, and though it could easily be Photoshopped these days, that’s not the point. The art object is only the end product of the making of these images. Being able to see the many human hours devoted to their execution is also a way of building duration back into the photograph.”1
Here’s my tuppence worth on Laing’s new work.
This suite of photographs has a panoramic immersiveness. The viewer feels as though time has stood still when looking at these photographs, where the newspapers are analogous to snow upon the ground, imparting something of a dream-like existence to the images. There is a talismanic quality to the images, like a standing stone circle that is believed to have magic powers and cause good things to happen. And they are full of symbols, such as arrows, to mark the way (see The Paper, Wednesday, earlier, 2013, below).
These are not unquiet images, suspended midway between fantasy and reality, but (un)quiet images – a subtle but pivotal difference. They possess the quietness of the forest but also the isolation and loneliness. They are based on a harmonic instability, like a minor chord at the beginning of a Beethoven symphony, which is then eventually resolved in the major. These images are the journey of that resolution. The words, the flesh of the textural body, has been pulped: that immersive instability of the fecund body laying down in the soil of mother earth.
The viewer is disorientated. We have no idea where we are, the paper (the word and world) creating for the body this foggy, dream-like atmosphere. As in all of Laing’s work, there is an inquiring instability here, one that seeks the resolution of stability through the love of the human body and of our existence. I stand still before them.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Hughes, Annette. “ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU Rosemary Laing,” Review on The Newtown Review of Books website 3th July 2012 [Online] Cited 27th April 2014. No longer available online
Many thankx to Tolarno Galleries for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024) The Paper, Tuesday 2013 C Type photograph 110 x 209cm Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024) The Paper, Wednesday, earlier 2013 C Type photograph 110 x 203cm Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Rosemary Laing
The Paper
A forest is carpeted with truckloads of newspapers. A cacophony of printed voices layers the soil horizon of the ground. The former surface litter of loose and partly decayed organic matter is overlaid with pulped tree product. The 21st century cultural carpet of current events and mercenary babble is already time-lined by weathering, which is fast-tracking the decomposition of the worded pages. The graphic of newsprint is breaking down like typographic stew, falling apart like old lacework, dissolving like paint – it’s losing its imprint as fallen branches and leaves scatter over it. It seems to expect that over time it will disappear beneath what comes after, what fresh coats some future century will lay over it.
For this undertaking, Rosemary Laing located her activity among the woodlands of Bundanon, a casuarina forest peppered with eucalyptus and Burrawang. Located in the Shoalhaven of southern New South Wales, the site was originally the land of the Wodi Wodi people of the Yuin nation. Layered with subsequent occupations since the early 19th century, in 1993 the properties were gifted by Arthur and Yvonne Boyd and became the Bundanon Trust – a place for artists of all disciplines to work and a place for all people to draw inspiration.
Two unique opportunities here were made possible by the Trust to Rosemary Laing. The opportunity to develop and consider her actions unhindered by a time frame; together with access to the Bundanon collection of the influential gnarled ceramics that Arthur’s father Merric Boyd (1888-1959) made with their blue and green underglazes and swaying lines of treescapes on clay.
As it happened, while making this work, the place was inundated with floodwaters. Natural disaster has often enclosed her work, as in swanfires (2002-2004), with its incinerated sheds and buildings, following bushfires in the Sussex Inlet area – also part of the Shoalhaven. Destruction sculpts and re-sculpts the world, and Laing joins the material cycle, the perpetual transmigration of matter from one form to another. A “terrible beauty”, as a friend remarked.
This series is called The Paper, for the daily newspaper – our long time companion and a primary fix for information of the world – that is swiftly being superseded by the new material technologies of our times. If the overwhelming flood of data and culture and spin is hitting us with some 500,000 discrete bits of information at any time, then we may be faced with inabilities to absorb that Total Noise. We probably missed the 25 bits that were important. The latest innovations of the Infosphere replay confections of overstimulation and boredom, sugar-hits of overload followed by emotional numbness.
Yet the covering of the ground that we saw in 2001 with groundspeed – not far geographically from this site – isn’t the same as here in the series The Paper. The point of loungeroom carpets in groundspeed was as an index of the latecomer’s sense of belonging. A kind of comfort zone for the non-indigenous, bridging old world and new. The carpeting this time – as she writes in her notes – “seems to be composting the present as a past about to happen; taking a once-upon- a-time not-that-long-ago standard as the ground-amendment-of- tomorrow already.” It is, among other things, a meditation on time.
Every new presentation of Laing’s work is also a running commentary on her previous corpus of work. The Paper explores themes touched upon in – Natural Disasters (1988), groundspeed (2001) with its patterned loungeroom carpets out in the ‘wild’ and in 2006, weather with its cyclone of newspaper shreds – while constantly replenishing what had remained surplus to that work. And this compost of earlier fragments, that are dismembered and scattered and gathered again, expands her material formation on this site.
From top to bottom the planet is being transfigured. Something essential is changing now and forever. The “global” has become everyone’s “local”. The human race is going through things it has never experienced before – as we are forced to join the caravan of this moment in time.
Hellish or heavenly? Promised Land or Wasteland? Take your pick. You do get the sense – with the dramatic shiny green of the ancient Burrrawang palms scattered about – of human impermanence against the bedrock temporal dimensions of the primitive Gondawan rainforest margins. As anyone who has spent time slogging through genuine bushland, and sensing the century’s long pulse of trees: we’ve fallen out of tune with the eternal present of the animal world, we’ve fallen into Time with its past and future, the chopped-up time of daily newspapers.
Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones … wrote Shakespeare (As You Like It, 2.1). The quote recalls the medieval idea of the Book of Nature that we are here to read, whose infinite pages unfold enormous landscapes: some see good, some evil, some both, some neither. Laing’s art takes root in a fissure, in that crack in the covenant between word and world, and the historical moment is right: we are in the age of the “trans-book” with the rise of the Kindle and iGoogle, and with it the end of newspapers, the demise of print and the retrenchment of journalists.
So as you enter the space, walk around the room with the suite of images – named for the days of the week – there’s an entropic feel with their grubby matte and muted beauty. Underfoot, things fall apart, the riggings of the page disintegrate into tissue, print naturalises into leaf mould, and words on paper are composted back into wood pulp and waste slurry. Accordingly, to make the images this time around, she put her dalliances with digital cameras and print-output machines aside, in favour of analogue, for all the lovely limitations and imperfections of light on cellulose triacetate, and the physical shadings of Laing’s printer in the darkroom.
The curving earth is a body, and these lacework landscapes show off the marks of ageing. The woods are a damp chamber, with a thick carpet of newspapers, and many doors open to the wind and faraway light. The images enclose you in brushwork of soft jade while the soggy colours of disintegration make time tangible.
There’s nothing said about the world here (recycling, deforestation, information overload) that you couldn’t find more reliably elsewhere. It’s rather Laing’s process of invention, through the hinterlands of her material imagination, that communicates her unexpected vision, tells her story of an imagined afterwards of along-the-way. There’s a stand of trees in these pictures still growing inside the shellacking and composting of our times.
George Alexander September 2013
Published with permission
Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024) The Paper, Wednesday 2013 C Type photograph 110 x 197.5cm Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024) The Paper, Thursday 2013 C Type photograph 110 x 207cm Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024) The Paper, Friday 2013 C Type photograph 110 x 196.3cm Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Tolarno Galleries Level 4 104 Exhibition Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia Phone:Â 61 3 9654 6000
Artists: Jane Brown, Ponch Hawkes, Siri Hayes, Ruth Maddison, Lloyd Stubber, David Tatnall, Claudia Terstappen
Emmet Gowin printing mask for The Hint That Is a Garden: Siena, Italy 1975 (below)
A Vocabulary of Printing and the Syntax of the Image
“No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.”
“One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.”
Minor White
As an artist who originally trained in the alchemical, analogue art of photography, the magic of this process will always hold sway in my heart. No matter how many excellent digital photographs I see, there is always a longing for silver – that indescribable feeling of looking at a master printers work, an image that literally takes your breath away. I hardly ever get that in a digital print. For me, it’s the difference between the fidelity of a CD and the aura of an LP, with all its scratches and pops, hisses and, yes, atmosphere.
Minor White, that guru of enlightenment, knew how difficult it was to capture spirit in a photograph. To make a connection between photographer and object, back through a glass lens and a metal box onto a piece of plastic or glass (completing a Zen circle), then printed onto a piece of paper. There are three ways it goes: you see something (you previsualise it) and you don’t capture it in the negative; you don’t see it, and the negative surprises you; but, best of all, you see it and you capture it – the object of your attention reveals itself to you. Then all you have to do is print it – easier said than done. Much testing and assessing, dodging and burning to balance the print knowing that, as MW says, each negative is like a dragon that an image has to be wrenched from.
No longer for ears …: sound which like a deeper ear, hears us, who only seem to be hearing. Reversal of spaces.
Extract from Rainer Maria Rilke Gong 1925
When you do the analogue printing yourself (or when assessing a digital test print at a lab such as CPL Digital), the most important thing is to understand the vocabulary of printing. In both analogue and digital printing it all starts from the negative/file. If you don’t understand your negative or digital file, what hope have you of attaining a good end result? You must study the negative to understand its pushes and pulls, what needs to be held back, what other areas brought forward in the image. You have to feel the balance within the negative/file in the sensibility of the print. Darren from CPL observes that he has a lot of photographers and students come in and say, “I don’t want it to be like that,” but then they can’t explain what they do want it to be like or how they can get there. They have no vocabulary of printing or how to get the “feel” that they want from the print. I believe this is where training in the analogue darkroom can stand digital photographers in good stead.
What photographers need to understand is the syntax of an image, “the system of organization used in putting lines together to form pictures that can stand as representations of particular objects,”1 where they is a clear association between the structure of photographic prints and the linguistic structure that makes verbal communication possible. Photographers are the Keepers of Light and photography broke the boundaries of the visual field that had been delimited by etchings and prints, to allow human beings to see far beyond the physical field of view, to have photographic power over space and time which fundamentally changed the scope of human consciousness.2 Photography makes drawing unnecessary in the physical sense, but through previsualisation photography is predicated on mental drawing (with light) and through the physical form of the photograph, the print, photography has a syntactical basis – which comes from the languages of the photographer inherent in human consciousness and the chemical, optical and mechanical relationships that make photography possible. Both feeling and technology.
I believe that these two things go hand in hand and when photographers have no language, no vocabulary to describe what they want from a photographic print, then they are basically coming up against the limitations of their feelings, technologies and the machine. “Genius is constantly frustrated – and tempered – by the machine.”3 As William Crawford observes, “You simply cannot look at photographs as if they were ends without means. Each is the culmination of a process in which the photographer makes his decisions and discoveries within a technological framework.”4 “Each step in the photographic process plays a syntactical role to the degree that it affects the way the information, the sentiment, the surprises, and the frozen moments found in photographs actually meet the eye.”5 In the case of the photographic print, this means understanding the emotional linguistic vocabulary of printing through the syntax of the image.
With these thoughts in mind, the two standouts in this delightful group exhibition are Claudia Terstappen and Ponch Hawkes. Terstappen’s Brazilian rainforest photographs are as well seen and exquisitely printed as ever but this time they are slightly let down by the nearness of the frame and the colour of the moulding, both of which seen to limit the breathe of the image. Hawkes’ photographs are sublime (especially the two reproduced below), the best silver gelatin photographs that I have seen by an Australian artist in since Terstappen’s last solo exhibition In the Shadow of Change at Monash Gallery of Art. They have wonderful tonality and presence, and a quietness that really lets you contemplate the image through the beauty of the print – and a snip at only $800 each framed!
Other artists in the exhibition have singular images that are interesting (pictured below), but the major disappointment are the prints of Jane Brown. When I first saw the images of Brown’s Australian Gothic at Edmund Pearce Gallery in 2012 I said that they were, “small, darkly hewn, traditionally printed silver gelatin photographs… surrealist tinged, film noir-ish mise-en-scènes, the ones that emphasise the metaphorical darkness of the elements gathered upon the stage. Photographs such as Big Trout, The Female Factory, Adelong, New South Wales and Captain’s Flat Hotel, New South Wales really invoke a feeling of unhomely (or unheimlich), where nature is out of kilter. These images unsettle our idea of Oztraliana, our perceived sense of Self and our place in the world. They disrupt normal transmission; they transmutate the seen environment, transforming appearance, nature and form.”6 This was again the feeling that I got when I saw the series at a later exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography.
Not this time. The prints shown here are much darker and have become almost ungrammatical; where the syntax of the image has broken down so that the linguistic structure of the image makes communication nearly impossible. It is not enough just to make prints darker and darker, hoping for some mystery to magically appear in the image because it won’t. This is a case of overprinting the negative, forcing the vocabulary of the image through a wish to impart something emphatic, some condition of being from the negative that has been imperfectly understood. Is this because this is Edition 2 out of 7, a different printer and a different size? I don’t know the answer to those questions, but Brown really needs to go back to the negatives and reassess the results, especially as these nearly incomprehensible prints are selling for an overinflated $2,000 each framed.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ Crawford, William. “Photographic Syntax,” in Crawford, William. The Keepers of Light: A History and Working Guide to Early Photographic Processes. Morgan and Morgan, 1979, p. 2
Many thankx to Strange Neighbour for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941) The Hint That Is a Garden: Siena, Italy Dedicated to Frederick Sommer, 1975 Gelatin silver print 19.5 x 24.5cm (7 11/16 x 9 5/8 in.) Gift of Mrs Saul Reinfeld
William Crawford. “Photographic Syntax,” in William Crawford. The Keepers of Light: A History and Working Guide to Early Photographic Processes. Morgan and Morgan, 1979, p. 6.
Claudia Terstappen (Australian born Germany, b. 1959) Jungle I (Brazil) 1991 From the series Ghosts at the Jucurucu Silver gelatin print 46 x 68cm
David Tatnall (Australian, b. 1955) Clifton Springs Jetty 2012 From the series Coastal Pinholes Silver gelatin contact print 20 x 25cm
Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945) Bellambi, NSW 1989 Hand coloured gelatin silver print 19.6 x 49cm Vintage print, unique state
Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945) Self-portrait #2 2004 From the series Light touches Sun print on black and white photographic paper Vintage print, unique state
“The process of analogue photography is created through darkness and light. To celebrate the launch of the Strange Neighbour Darkroom this exhibition brings together a group of artists who pursue and extend the practice of analogue and darkroom photography. These artists work across many of the countless possibilities of the medium: 35mm, medium format and large format photography, and their diverse processes include pinhole photography, photograms, sun prints, fibre printing and hand colouring. Contemporary photographers are driving the current resurgence in analogue photography and Strange Neighbour is excited to be able to facilitate this irreplaceable art form. Darkroom practice is unique and magickal, alive and well.”
Press release from the Strange Neighbour website
Khem; a possible derivative of the word alchemy, the native name of Egypt, is thought to mean black. Some scholars maintain that Khem is derived from a root meaning wise.1
Alchemy is described as chemistry endowed with magic, and alchemists as those who work with metals and keep these operations secret.2 Apart from the obvious associations of working with metals (silver) and chemistry, there are more subtle and intimate parallels between the art and science of alchemy and darkroom practice.
It is common among darkroom practitioners to consider the process as ‘magic’. When most people encounter printing their first photograph in the darkroom, the simple sight of an image appearing on the paper in the developer tray seems ‘magical’. Even experienced darkroom practitioners never lose this special feeling. Exhibiting artist, Siri Hayes notes, “Watching images come up in developing tray is as mysterious and exciting as any magic show. Perhaps more so as there are no tricks except that the photographic product is the grandest of illusions.”
Distinct from many other forms of photography, darkroom based practice is now specialised, with few people having access to the knowledge, equipment and skills associated with the medium. Like a secret esoteric order, few share this wisdom, and even those willing to teach it may keep special recipes, techniques and discoveries to themselves or within a select dedicated group. Some of this information, although scientific, is not completely understood in rational terms of facts or calculations, but is more related to intuition and perception. It is technical and it is intuitive.
The complex rituals associated with the process allow practitioners to get into a headspace that is conducive to contemplation, bringing forth intuition, allowing space for chance and universal cause and effect. In this art and science there are so many variables with endless possibilities. Ruth Maddison‘s Sun prints are made without camera, film, enlarger or developer. She states, “the tonal range depends on variables like paper stock, length of time in sun or shade, whether the objects are wet or dry … and an unpredictable magic that happens when light sensitive paper is touched by light.”
In this unpredictable environment often mistakes lead to new ideas and create new methodologies. One of the charms of analogue processes is the discovery of beauty through error. Ponch Hawkes recalls this as disasters and wonderful happenstance. Claudia Terstappen remarks it is the number of variables in the darkroom that leaves the creative process wide open and it is often these inaccuracies caused by chemical reactions that lead to a new meaning. This is what makes analogue processes so valuable and irreplaceable. There are many effects in the analogue process that one can recreate with digital technologies, but not invent.
Imperfections caused by these variables or ‘mistakes’ may imbue the image with a ‘spirit’ and otherworldliness, as if the energy of a place or person has been captured. Black and white photography too has the ability to transcend time, memory and death. Jane Brown says, “I examine this a lot in my work – landscapes seem to have vestiges or traces of past life and memorials become otherworldly.” Claudia Terstappen‘s work, “is motivated by the stories, beliefs and histories of the people who live there. Here people spoke about the forest spirits that one should be aware of. B+W images suggest a kind of silence.” At a symbolic level, silence is part of most sacred traditions3, and it is part of darkroom practice.
Using analogue processes and working in the darkroom can be aligned to the slow movement, of valuing quality over quantity and returning to a feeling of connectedness. For the images in this exhibition David Tatnall has used an 8 x 10 inch pinhole camera and made contact prints. He expresses of this technology, “my reasons for using this slow, cumbersome and fickle means to make photographs is because I feel it conveys the interaction of the sky and water, the presence of wind and the pulse of nature. I am particularly interested in how the long exposures and lack of sharpness make these features merge into something else… (The) simplicity: no lens, shutter or batteries, no need to upgrade, no click or buzz, no flashing lights or mega pixels no viewfinder and no distortion.” For Ruth Maddision, “she says of working with hand colouring, the pleasure of it – I love working on the real object again, and away from the screen.”
Clearly there is belief and an element of trust in the medium. Lloyd Stubber‘s images in this exhibition are taken from a one-month round the world trip. On return he processed the 15 rolls of film in his laundry. Perhaps the potential fear of loss is overwhelmed by the sense of anticipation, surprise and the flood of memories that return on seeing the work at a later date, as compared to digital, which is immediate and holds none of the mystery.
Another important distinction of darkroom and analogue practice from other forms of photography is the presence of artist’s hand throughout the entire progression of creation to final outcome. In each step of the process, significant choices are made from the many possibilities, from exposing light sensitive film in the camera, developing the film, to printing and finishing the art object. The artist’s mark is therefore not only discernible but also inherently valuable. To Ponch Hawkes, being the maker is of significance. For Terstappen, The physicality of arriving at the ‘perfect’ Gelatin Silver print – with its deep tonal ranges – is something that I highly value.
Contemporary artists are driving the current resurgence in analogue photography. This is a treasured, magickal4 and irreplaceable art form. It is with great pleasure that I declare the Strange Neighbour Darkroom open, and may it provide the space and opportunity for the love of darkroom practice to be enjoyed, shared and fostered.”
Linsey Gosper, curator, darkroom lover, 2014
1/ Francis Melville. The Book of Alchemy. Quarto Publishing plc, 2002, p. 6
2/ Kurt Seligman. Magic, Supernaturalism and Religion. Pantheon Books, 1948, p. 84
3/ Ami Ronnberg (ed.,). The Book of Symbols. Taschen, 2010, p. 676
4/ Magick, in the context of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, is a term used to differentiate the occult from stage magic and is defined as the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will, including both mundane acts of will as well as ritual magic
Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967) Decommissioned Art History Library, University of Melbourne 2012-2013 Fibre-based gelatin silver print 44 x 49.5cm Edition 2 of 7
Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967) Lathamstowe 2011- 2013 Fibre-based, gelatin silver print 46 x 44cm Edition 2 of 7
Ponch Hawkes (Australian, b. 1946) Silken Seam 2005 Silver gelatin print 34 x 34cm Courtesy of the artist and Chrysalis Gallery, Melbourne
Ponch Hawkes (Australian, b. 1946) Rouleau 2005 Silver gelatin print 34 x 34cm Courtesy of the artist and Chrysalis, Melbourne
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Aquatic listening device 2009 Silver gelatin print 39 x 45cm Courtesy of the artist and M.33, Melbourne
Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967) Untitled #16 2010 Silver gelatin print and ink 20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s
This is a wonderful exhibition by Stephen Dupont at Edmund Pearce Gallery. Using a 4″ x 5″ Polaroid type 55 and striping away the emulsion, Dupont is left with a fine grain large format black and white negative (which he can use in an enlarger) with the “Polaroid frame look”, which he incorporates into the silver gelatin prints.1
Most of the photographs are glorious, notably the ones where Dupont pulls back from his subject to reveal the context of the sitter (much like taking the mat off a Daguerreotype to reveal more of the studio hidden underneath). I particularly like where you can see two hands poking over the top of the white sheet hiding the person behind (see Untitled #08 2010, below). The spontaneity and improvisation of this act is very appealing.
As Dupont observes this allows him “to reveal the audience gathering and the environment around the sheet. This is meant to give the viewer a real sense of place and time, and a window onto the streets of Haridwar.” This technique gives the images real presence, they fairly “sing” to me from the gallery wall. And then! to surround the silver with hand printed Indian textile stamps in red ink… these images are really something.
Dupont’s incisiveness at the coal face of the pictorial plane is also exemplary. Notice the construction of Untitled #14 (2010, below), and observe the arms of the protagonists. An arm is raised aloft mirroring the arm of the swami in the photograph behind and also the supporting pole of the tent at top right. His other arm points to the earth but this is crossed by the arm of an out of focus man at left, which forms a strong diagonal intervention into the image as he reaches out. The money and mobile phone, at bottom left, add to the incongruity of the scene.
I am less enamoured with Dupont’s riff on Richard Avedon’s contextless background portraits. They don’t really possess the power or presence of the photographs mentioned above or of Avedon’s portraits from the series In The American West. I would have also liked to have seen the field journal (the small images at the bottom of the posting) in the exhibition. It would have been fascinating to read the text and view the other textile stamp designs. Finally, a couple of prints at a much larger size would have been good to see, to break the regularity of the series.
Having said that, you really have to see these images in the flesh for they look so much better than when reproduced online. The red is luminous and it is a joy to see good silver gelatin prints instead of so-so digital failures (Polly Borland I hope your ears are burning). This exhibition is a perfect example of what Bill Henson was talking about in his recently curated exhibition Wildcards: Bill Henson shuffles the deck at Monash Gallery of Art (MGA) where he states that his interest “is in the photograph as an object, in the physical presence of the print or whatever kind of technology is being used to make it…”2 where the images appeal not just to the eye but to the whole body, “because photographs are first and foremost objects, their size, shape grouping and texture are as important as the images they’re recording.”3
These photographs have, as Henson notes of some photographs, “the ability to suggest some other thing and that’s what draws you in.”4 You stand in front of the best of these images and contemplate them with a sense of wonder, for they suggest to the viewer – through the hand and eye of the artist in the analogue process, through the hand of the artist when applying the wood block printing which was made with much spontaneity and feeling – other worlds of which we know very little brought close to our imagination.
Through their inherent textures and tonalities, their physical presence, there is a sense of the people who populate that place, but more than that, there is a sense of our own fragility and mortality. A feeling of anOther existence for our life if we had been born into such worlds.
That is what makes these images so compelling.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ According to Wikipedia, “Type 55 negatives are the famous source of the “Polaroid frame look” … the Polaroid reagent / gel is squeezed between the negative and positive. Some of the reagent is trapped underneath the onion-skin-like frame that crops the print into a perfect 4 x 5 image. This reagent however creates an impression of that frame on the negative, which is not protected. The result is a perfect negative, but with imperfect frame-like image surrounded 3 of the four sides, while the 4th side shows the impression of the connective mesh that controls aspects of the Polaroid packet’s sleeve functionality.”
2/ Interview with Bill Henson by Toby Fehily posted 01 Feb 2014 on the Art Guide Australia website [Online] Cited 18/02/2014. No longer available online
Many thankx to Edmund Pearce Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967) Untitled #08 2010 Silver gelatin print and ink 20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s
Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967) Untitled #14 2010 Silver gelatin print and ink 20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s
Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967) Untitled #04 2010 Silver gelatin print and ink 20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s
Edmund Pearce is excited to present a solo exhibition by legendary Australian photographer Stephen Dupont, entitled The White Sheet Series Number 1. This new series was shot during India’s most important Hindu Festival, Kumbh Mela, and features portraits of pilgrims and visitors combined with hand printed Indian textile stamps.
Stephen Dupont has produced a remarkable body of visual work throughout his career; hauntingly beautiful photographs of fragile cultures and marginalised peoples. He captures the human dignity of his subjects with great intimacy and his images have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into the people, culture and communities that have existed for hundreds of years, yet are fast disappearing from our world.
Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe states, “Inevitably, Dupont is an outsider; yet he’s an engaged outsider, full of calm, clear-eyed curiosity. There’s not just a sense of place in his work but also something that matters even more: a sense of the people who populate that place.”
Stephen’s work has earned him a number of photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America. His work has featured in influential publications such as The New Yorker, Aperture and The New York Times Magazine; and he has had major exhibitions in London, Paris, New York, Sydney, Canberra, Tokyo, and Shanghai. His photographic artist books and portfolios are held in numerous private collections and by prestigious institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the British Library and the Library of Congress in Washington DC to name but a few.
Press release from the Edmund Pearce Gallery website
Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967) Untitled #07 2010 Silver gelatin print and ink 20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s
Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967) Untitled #13 2010 Silver gelatin print and ink 20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s
Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967) Untitled #12 2010 Silver gelatin print and ink 20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s
Stephen Dupont (Australian, b. 1967) Untitled #18 2010 Silver gelatin print and ink 20 x 16″ (51 x 40.5cm) / edition of 5 + 2 AP’s
Richard Avedon at work
Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004) Bill Curry, drifter, Interstate 40, Yukon, Oklahoma, 6/16/80 1980 From In the American West, 1979-1984
This body of work is a selection of portraits I made in 2010 at India’s most important Hindu festival called the Kumbh Mela. In one of four locations every four years Hindu pilgrims and visitors descend into the holy waters of the Ganges River to purify the soul in a spiritual ritual considered the largest peaceful gathering in the world. The photographs were taken in Haridwar of pilgrims and sadhus I chose randomly during that festival.
Inspired by an earlier series I made of anonymous portraits of Afghans in Kabul titled Axe Me Biggie, or Mr Take My Picture, but instead of an existing Afghan outdoor studio backdrop I chose the white sheet this time for its purity and simplicity. My subjects were asked to simply stand and pose before my camera. I use a white bed sheet to create an outdoor studio that not only captures my subject but also allows me to reveal the audience gathering and the environment around the sheet. This is meant to give the viewer a real sense of place and time, and a window onto the streets of Haridwar. Had I used the backdrop in a conventional way, to solely isolate a person, you’d have the impression that they were taken anywhere – New York, Sydney, or in a studio. This process is a creative choice and allows me with some control over my sitter but brings with it the spontaneity and surprise of what may take place around the zone I am working in: the gaze of someone holding the sheet that has no idea they are in the frame, or a hand holding the sheet or something else that crops up in front or behind. In the end my portraits are environmental or even landscapes.
Over many years of travel throughout India I have been collecting textile stamps and I decided to use them on my photographs. The research and experiments started in my field journal and then to the final hand printed images in this show. I wanted to create a relationship with Indian design and cloth, the Polaroid borders and the people in my pictures. Much like my photographic practice here the wood block printing was made with much spontaneity and feeling. The photographs have been handcrafted by Chris Reid at Blanco Negro using warmtone paper and processed in a specialised developer for unique tonality.
Exhibition opening and book launch: Thursday 1st May, 6 – 8.30 pm
To be opened by Robert McFarlane Stories by Charlotte Laemmle
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) In the Folds of Hills book cover 2014
One of my favourite contemporary Australian photographers has a new book and exhibition!
Hopefully a review to follow but having seen a digital copy of the book, the sensitivity of the work feels admirable… unrecalled stories and photographs of people’s lives and the environments in which they live.
The book retails for $60 AUD and will be available in selected book stores nationally. It is being published by Pearce Press and includes a foreword by former prime minister Malcolm Fraser and an essay by Robert McFarlane.
Marcus
Many thankx to Kristian Laemmle-Ruff for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Barn in the Mist 2014
Foreword
In the Folds of Hills depicts a life in the secluded valleys around Lima, a little over 100 kms from Melbourne, Victoria. Kristian Laemmle-Ruff not only has great technical control of his craft, but translates this skill into truly artistic photographs.
His images of ordinary objects from everyday life invite the viewer to slow down and contemplate. These photos create a narrative that offers us insight into the way these people live.
The portfolio focuses on individuals who have lived most, if not all their lives in this area. They would all be hard-working and modest in their possessions. Their individual characters shine through the photographs with a rugged determination and strength.
In the Folds of Hills will come to have historic significance because it captures aspects of Australian rural life, which in many parts of this country are fast disappearing.
Rt Hon Malcolm Fraser AC CH
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Lima East Valley 2014
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Ralph Pearce 2014
Photographer’s Note
This project began with a curiosity to discover something that is quietly going unnoticed. As our cities grow and society increasingly relies on technological advances, there remain those older generations whose lives are still rooted in a past era: the early to mid 20th century. This was an era where small-scale labor-intensive livelihoods could thrive. In the face of changing needs and corporate competition these kinds of livelihoods, such as the family-owned farm, are disappearing.
Susan Sontag wrote in her book On Photography that “a beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists … Photography is a twilight art.” This photo-series also lingers in some kind of twilight zone and has a sense of urgency; indeed one person has passed away since being photographed.
It wasn’t uncommon for someone to still live in the house they were born in. An empty chair, a leaning barn, a clock ticking on the wall: these once mundane objects became potent symbols of their owner’s past, their hopes and their reality. Some objects suggested loss and melancholia, others embodied feelings of pride and even humour.
In the Folds of Hills is an exploration of the wisdom and rich humanity found in the characters living and working on this land. In celebrating and acknowledging them and their stories, the photo-narratives also offer a somewhat poetic insight into their inner worlds.
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) On Mother’s Bed 2014
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Old Flowers 2014
Ralph Pearce
Ralph’s knowledge and understanding of this part of the world is humbling. Rainfall patterns, geography and vegetation are things that matter to Ralph. He invites us to climb into his ute and drives to a stand of fabled Lima stringybarks. Few now exist in the valley. Our gentle giant is very much at home amongst the tall timbers that have been his livelihood for so many years.
“I still love mucking about in the bush,” chuckles Ralph with a twinkle in his eye. He shows us his tools, most importantly his axes, and carefully describes their variations and uses. The sheds back at the homestead hold a treasury of farming history and Ralph proudly shows us the old dairy, his shearing shed and a faithful companion, a Honda 110 motorbike. The land continues to give Ralph what he needs. His vegetable patch is impressive and the old gnarled fruit trees bear their gifts seasonally. Once a fortnight Ralph drives to Benalla for groceries and a chat. Every second Tuesday evening he travels to the nearby Moorngag Hall for a round of cards with friends from the district. Charlie Jensen, his childhood mate, collects him.
When next we visit Ralph he shows us around the rest of his house. His mother was clearly a significant influence. She died in 1985 aged ninety-eight and was blind for the last nine years of her life. Ralph cared for her. Her suitcase, packed for hospital, still sits in her room. Little has changed in the house since she died.
ABC Radio keeps Ralph informed. And informed he is. Television has never made an appearance in this house. Ralph speaks to us with the wisdom of someone who has seen many fashions and many politicians come and go. One cannot help but be touched by the simplicity and integrity of this man’s life. Ralph is a quiet gentleman, unassuming, self-reliant and comfortable within his skin.
Extract from stories by Charlotte Laemmle from the book In the Folds of Hills
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Ralph’s oven 2014
The Field Institute at The Compound Interest (Centre for the Applied Arts) 15-25 Keele Street, Collingwood, Victoria
Exhibition dates:Â 1st February – 30th March, 2014
Curator: Bill Henson
Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers should be aware that the following posting may contain images of deceased persons.
Installation photographs of Wildcards: Bill Henson shuffles the deck at the Monash Gallery of Art Photos: Marcus Bunyan
1/ stygian gloom 2/large grouping of 14 works by Wesley Stacey
Unknown photographer Untitled c. 1900 Cyanotype print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Acquired 2012
vapid [vap-id] adjective lacking or having lost life, sharpness, or flavour
Origin: 1650-60;  Latin vapidus;  akin to va·por [vey-per] noun a visible exhalation, as fog, mist, steam, smoke diffused through or suspended in the air; particles of drugs that can be inhaled as a therapeutic agent
This is an unexceptional exhibition, one that lacks jouissance in the sense of a transgressive kind of enjoyment, an investigation of the subject that gives pleasure in taking you to unexpected places. At times I felt like a somnambulist walking around this exhibition of photographs from the Monash Gallery of Art collection curated by Bill Henson, pitched into stygian darkness and listening to somewhat monotonous music. It was a not too invidious an exercise but it left me with a VAPID feeling, as though I had inhaled some soporific drug: the motion of the journey apparently not confined by a story, but in reality that story is Henson’s mainly black and white self-portrait. The photographs on the wall, while solid enough, seemed to lack sparkle. There were a couple of knockout prints (such as David Moore’s Himalaya at dusk, Sydney, 1950 below; the Untitled cyanotype c. 1900, above; and Mark Hinderaker’s delicate portrait of Fiona Hall, 1984 below) and some real bombs (the large Norman Lindsay photographs, modern reproductions printed many times their original size were particularly nauseous). And one has to ask: were the images chosen for how they were balanced on the wall or were they chosen for content?
Henson states that there was no concept or agenda when picking the 88 photographs for this exhibition, simply his INTENSITY of feeling and intuition, his intuitive response to the images when he first saw them – to allow “their aesthetics to determine their presence… our whole bodies to experience these photographs – objects as pictures as photographs.”1 Henson responded as much as possible to the thing which then becomes an iconography (which appeals to his eye) as he asks himself, why is one brush stroke compelling, and not another? The viewer can then go on a journey in which MEANING comes from FEELING, and SENSATIONS are the primary stuff of life.
One of Henson’s preoccupations, “is an interest in the photograph as an object, in the physical presence of the print or whatever kind of technology is being used to make it.”2 He would like us to acknowledge the presence and aura (Walter Benjamin) of the photograph as we stand in front of it, responding with our whole bodies to the experience, not just our eyes. He wants us to have an intensity of feeling towards these works, responding to their presence and how he has hung the works in the exhibition. “There are no themes but rather images that appeal to the eye and, indeed, the whole body. Because photographs are first and foremost objects, their size, shape grouping and texture are as important as the images they’re recording.”3
Henson insists that there was no preconceived conceptual framework for picking these particular photographs but this is being disingenuous. Henson was invited to select images from the MGA collection with the specific idea of holding an exhibition, so this is the conceptual jumping off point; he then selected the images intuitively only to then group and arrange then intuitively/conceptually – by thinking long and hard about how these images would be grouped and hung on the wall of the gallery. I would like to believe that Henson was thinking about MUSIC when he hung this exhibition, not photography. Listen to Henson talk about the pairing of Leonie Reisberg’s Portrait of Peggy Silinski, Tasmania (c. 1976, below) and Beverley Veasey’s Study of a Calf, Bos taurus (2006, below) in this video, and you will get the idea about how he perceives these photographs relate to each other, how they transcend time and space.
This is one of the key elements of the exhibition: how Henson pushes and pulls at time and space itself through the placing of images of different eras together. The other two key elements are how the music rises and falls through the shape of the photographs themselves; and how the figures within the images are pulled towards or pushed away from you. With regard to the rise and fall, Henson manipulates the viewer through the embodiedness of both horizontal and vertical photographs, reminding me of a Japanese artist using a calligraphy brush (see the second installation image above, where the photographs move from the vertical to the square and then onto panoramic landscape). In relation to the content of the images, there seems to be a preoccupation (a story, a theme?) running through the exhibition with the body being consumed by the landscape or the body being isolated from the landscape but with the threat of being consumed by it. Evidence of this can be seen in Wesley Stacey’s Willie near Mallacoota (1979, below) where the body almost melts into the landscape and David Moore’s Newcastle steelworks (1963, below) where the kids on the bicycles are trying to escape the encroaching doom that hovers behind them.
One of the key images in the exhibition for me also reinforces this theme – a tiny Untitled cyanotype (c. 1900, above) in which two Victorian children are perched on a bank near a stream with the bush beyond – but there are too many of this ilk to mention here: either the figures are pulled towards the front of the frame or pushed back into the encroaching danger, as though Henson is interrogating, evidencing un / occupied space. Overall, there is an element of control and lyrical balance in how he has grouped and hung these works together, the dark hue of the gallery walls allowing the photographs to exist as objects for themselves. Henson puts things next to each other in sequences and series to, allegedly, promote UNEXPECTED conversations and connections through a series of GESTURES.
As Henson notes,
“Maybe it’s the fact that the photographs have the ability to suggest some other thing and that’s what draws you in – that’s that feeling, the thing that slips away from thought. These are really the same things that apply to our meetings with any work of art, whether it’s a piece of music or a sculpture or anything else. There’s something compelling, there’s something there that sort of animates your speculative capacity, causes you to wonder. Other times, or most of the time, that’s not the case. Certainly most of the time that’s not the case with photography.”4
. For me, there was little WONDER in this exhibition, something that you would go ‘oh, wow’ at, some way of looking at the world that is interesting and insightful and fractures the plaisir of cultural enjoyment and identity. While the photographs may have been chosen intuitively and then hung intuitively/conceptually, I simply got very little FEELING, no ICE/FIRE (as Minor White would say) – no frisson between his pairings, groupings and arrangements. It was all so predictable, so ho-hum. Everything I expected Henson to do… he did!
There were few unexpected gestures, no startling insight into the human and photographic condition. If as he says, “Everything comes to you through your whole body, not just through your eyes and ears,”5 and that photographs are first and foremost objects, their size, shape, grouping and texture as important as the images they’re recording THEN I wanted to be moved, I wanted to feel, to be immersed in a sensate world not a visible exhalation (of thought?), a vapor that this exhibition is. Henson might have painted an open-ended self-portrait but this does not make for a very engaging experience for the viewer. In this case, the sharing of a story has not meant the sharing of an emotion.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Interview with Bill Henson by Toby Fehily posted 01 Feb 2014 on the Art Guide Australia website [Online] Cited 18/02/2014. No longer available online
2/ Ibid.,
3/ Fiona Gruber. “Review of Wildcards, Bill Henson Shuffles the Deck” on the Guardian website, Wednesday 12 February 2014 [Online] Cited 16/03/2014
4/ Fehily op. cit.,
5/ Fehily op. cit.,
Many thankx to the Monash Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
MGA Collection: Bill Henson on Leonie Reisberg and Beverley Veasey
Bill Henson talks about the photographs of Leonie Reisberg and Beverley Veasey from the MGA Collection in WILDCARDS: BILL HENSON SHUFFLES THE DECK, Monash Gallery of Art, 1 February to 30 March 2014.
John Eaton (born United Kingdom 1881; arrived Australia 1889; died 1967) Sheep in clearing c. 1920s Gelatin silver print 15.6 x 23.8cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Donated by Janice Hinderaker through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2003
Fred Kruger (born Germany 1831; arrived Australia 1860; died 1888) Queen Mary and King Billy outside their mia mia c. 1880 Albumen print 13.4 x 20.8cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2012
David Moore (Australia 1927-2003) Himalaya at dusk, Sydney 1950 Gelatin silver print, printed 2005 24.5 x 34.25cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection donated by the Estate of David Moore 2006 Courtesy of the Estate of David Moore (Sydney)
Wesley Stacey (Australia, b. 1941) Willie near Mallacoota 1979 From the series Koorie set Gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Christine Godden 2011
Published under fair use for the purpose of art criticism
David Moore (Australia, 1927-2003) Newcastle steelworks 1963 Gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Acquired 1981
Published under fair use for the purpose of art criticism
One of those preoccupations is an interest in the photograph as an object, in the physical presence of the print or whatever kind of technology is being used to make it. Part of the reason for that is that photography, more than any other medium, suffers from a mistake or misunderstanding people have when they’ve seen a reproduction in a magazine or online: they think they’re seeing the original. A certain amount of photography is made with its ultimate intention being to be seen in a magazine or online, but most photography, historically, ended up in its final form as a print – a cyanotype, or a tin type or a daguerreotype or whatever it might be.”
Interview with Bill Henson by Toby Fehily posted 01 Feb 2014 on the Art Guide Australia website [Online] Cited 18/02/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use for the purposes of education and research.
Leonie Reisberg (Australia, b. 1955) Portrait of Peggy Silinski, Tasmania c. 1976 Gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Donated by Janice Hinderaker through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2003
Beverley Veasey (Australia, b. 1968) Study of a Calf, Bos taurus 2006 Chromogenic print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Acquired 2006
I think when you look through any collection, you’re often struck by the kind of pointlessness and banality of photography. It doesn’t matter which museum in the world you look at. It’s like, “is there any need for this thing to exist at all?”. It probably comes back to the capacity of the object, the image to suggest things, the suggestive potential rather than the prescriptive, which is a given in photography of course, the evidential authority of the medium preceding any individual reading we have of particular pictures. Maybe it’s the fact that the photographs have the ability to suggest some other thing and that’s what draws you in – that’s that feeling, the thing that slips away from thought. These are really the same things that apply to our meetings with any work of art, whether it’s a piece of music or a sculpture or anything else. There’s something compelling, there’s something there that sort of animates your speculative capacity, causes you to wonder. Other times, or most of the time, that’s not the case. Certainly most of the time that’s not the case with photography.
Interview with Bill Henson by Toby Fehily posted 01 Feb 2014 on the Art Guide Australia website [Online] Cited 18/02/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use for the purpose of education and research.
Axel Poigant (born United Kingdom 1906; arrived Australia 1926; died 1986) Jack and his family on the Canning Stock Route 1942 Gelatin silver print, printed 1986 Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Acquired 1991
Tim Johson (Australia, b. 1947) Light performances 1971-1972 Gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Acquired 2011
Cherine Fahd (Australia, b. 1974) Alicia 2003 From the series A woman runs Gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2011
Wesley Stacey (Australia, b. 1941) Untitled 1973 From the series Friends Gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Donated by Bill Bowness 2013
That was one of the things that interested me and continues to interest me about photography: how these things inhabit the world as objects. And indeed we read them not just with our eyes but with how our whole bodies read and encounter and negotiate these objects, which happen to be photographs. And that’s very much a thing that interests me in the way that I work. I feel sometimes that I only happen to make photographs myself and that it’s a means to an end… So there’s a sense in which I’m interested in these objects that happen to be photographs and the way that they inhabit the same space that our bodies inhabit. Everything comes to you through your whole body, not just through your eyes and ears – it’s a vast amount of information. Watching something get bigger as you draw closer to it, not just matters of proximity, but texture or the way objects sit in a space when they’re lit a certain way – all of this is very interesting to me, always has been.”
Interview with Bill Henson by Toby Fehily posted 01 Feb 2014 on the Art Guide Australia website [Online] Cited 18/02/2014. Used under fair use for the purpose of art criticism. No longer available online.
Mark Hinderaker (born United States of America 1946; arrived Australia 1970; died 2004) Fiona Hall 1984 Gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Donated by Janice Hinderaker through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2003
Lionel Lindsay (Australia 1874-1961) Norman Lindsay and Rose Soady, Bond Street studio c. 1909 Gelatin silver print, printed 2000 Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Donated by Katherine Littlewood 2000
Mark Strizic (born Germany 1928; arrived Australia 1950; died 2012) BHP steel mill, Port Kembla, 1959 1959 Gelatin silver print, printed 1999 Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Donated by the Bowness Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008
Monash Gallery of Art 860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150 Australia Phone:Â + 61 3 8544 0500
Opening: Tuesday 22nd July 6-8pm Nite Art: Wednesday 23rd July until 11pm Artists represented:Â Philip Potter, John Storey, John Englart, Barbara Creed, Ponch Hawkes, Rennie Ellis
Curated by Dr Marcus Bunyan and Nicholas Henderson
Five days, that’s all you’ve got! Just five days to see this fabulous exhibition, so make a note of it now in your diaries…
The exhibition Out of the closets, into the streets: gay liberation photography 1971-73 pictures the very beginning of the gay liberation movement in Australia through the work of Philip Potter, John Storey, John Englart, Barbara Creed, Ponch Hawkes and Rennie Ellis. The exhibition examines for the first time images from the period as works of art as much as social documents. The title of the exhibition is a slogan from the period.
As gay people found their voice in the early 1970s artists, often at the very beginning of their careers, were there to capture meetings in lounge rooms, consciousness raising groups and street protests. The liberation movement meant ‘being there’, putting your body on the line. “It was a key feature of the new left that this embodied politics couldn’t stop in the streets: that is, the public arena as conventionally understood. ‘Being there’ politically also applied to households, classrooms, sexual relations, workplaces and the natural environment.”1
Curated by Dr Marcus Bunyan and Nicholas Henderson and with catalogue essays by Professor Dennis Altman and Dr Marcus Bunyan, the show is a stimulating experience for those who want to be inspired by the history and art of the early gay liberation movement in Australia.
The exhibition coincides with AIDS 2014: 20th International AIDS Conference (20-25 July 2014) and Nite Art which occurs on the Wednesday night (23rd July 2014). The exhibition will travel to Sydney to coincide with the 14th Australia’s Homosexual Histories Conference in November at a venue yet to be confirmed.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Connell, Raewyn. “Ours is in colour: the new left of the 1960s,” in Carolyn D’Cruz and Mark Pendleton (eds.,). After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation. Perth: UWA Publishing, 2013, p. 43.
Many thankx to all the artists for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
From a series of photographs of the very first gay rights demonstration which attracts 70 people outside NSW Liberal Party headquarters in support of the pre-selection of Tom Hughes against a right wing challenge following his support for homosexual law reform.
From a series of photographs of the very first gay rights demonstration which attracts 70 people outside NSW Liberal Party headquarters in support of the pre-selection of Tom Hughes against a right wing challenge following his support for homosexual law reform.
From a series of photographs of the very first gay rights demonstration which attracts 70 people outside NSW Liberal Party headquarters in support of the pre-selection of Tom Hughes against a right wing challenge following his support for homosexual law reform.
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Rennie Ellis is an award winning photographer and writer (03) 9525 3862 www.rennieellis.com.au
AIDS 2014: 20th International AIDS Conference 20 July – 25 July 2014 Melbourne, Australia
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