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Anne Ferran
Scenes on the Death of Nature 1986
gelatin silver print
114 x 173 cm
edition of 5
courtesy Stills Gallery, Sydney and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
Anne Ferran has been one of Australia’s most significant artists since the mid-1980s. A survey exhibition of some of her work — titled The ground, the air — opened in December 2008 at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and toured to Wollongong City Gallery in March 2009. The exhibition includes landscape photographs taken by Ferran at the sites of former prisons for women convicts located in Ross and Hobart, Tasmania. These have been digitally applied to thirty sheets of aluminium, giving them a metallic sheen. The exhibition also includes work made with the collections of the Hyde Park Barracks Museum in Sydney and with (in the TMAG exhibition only) an archive of images of inmates taken in 1948 in Gladesville Hospital, Sydney.
Anne Ferran was interviewed by Geoffrey Batchen in January 2009, via the internet.
Anne, your own photographic work has gradually turned from the recording of staged tableaux vivant to deadpan documentary images of landscape. What has motivated this shift in your approach to the making of photographs?
The series of tableaux vivant I made in the 1980s were loose re-stagings of historical painting and sculpture. I was trying to use the shift to the medium of photography to open up a space for critical reflection on those past forms.
In 1995 I happened to be offered an artist residency at Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, a building that dates back to the early days of settlement. That was the start of my work becoming a lot more focused on the culture and place where I was born. I became increasingly interested in the materials that the stories about the past were being concocted out of — the nature of the evidence, the vagaries of the record, its gaps, things like that.
Once something gets left out of the historical record, that absence itself becomes a fact and not something you are free to recreate/reinstate later. Not that I’d want to — it’s the gaps that interest me. So you can see why the tableau vivant disappeared. As for the deadpan aesthetic, what I value most about it is the appearance (in both senses of the word) of detachment from the subject. For me the deadpan quality in imagery is the visual correlate of everything that separates us — physically and emotionally — from the past, a distance that cannot be photographed. And this is useful because my ‘real’ subjects are all ones that can’t be photographed directly, in the usual way.
If we had to define documentary, we might say that it joins the photograph’s capacity to function as a document (and therefore as an objective record) with a social program of advocacy or reform. But what do your documentary photographs advocate?
There’s been a very big gap of time between the events my work refers to and the photos I make about them. So the photos would need super-magical powers to work in the way you’re describing. Added to that, the physical subjects — the buildings, the people — have disappeared … so it’s not the situation most documentary photographs are faced with.
I suppose I am hoping for a kind of effectiveness in spite of all that. But, given the gap of time, advocacy is too strong/confident a word to describe it. (All this makes me wonder about the term ‘documentary’ as well. Do the photos fall short because they were taken so long after the event? Or do they suggest that ‘documentary’ needs defining differently?)
The effect can only be some new quality or thought the photographs offer the person who sees them. Perhaps they are able to understand or glimpse something they hadn’t considered before. Or they apprehend the knowledge they already had in a new way. The recent work is a good example … the shiny metal surface has a surprisingly strong effect. The images seem more real somehow and a lot colder. (Inadequate explanation I know, but the work is still new.)
Anne Ferran
INSULA: books 2-4, 2003
installation view, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery 2008-9
inkjet prints on paper, felt
courtesy Stills Gallery, Sydney and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
photo Simon Cuthbert
Anne Ferran
Book 1: 1-38 2003
Ilfochrome print
93 x 121 cm
edition of 7
courtesy Stills Gallery, Sydney and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
Do you regard the distinction between fact and fiction as important to your work? What advantages does the medium of photography offer you in this regard?
Almost always there is a bedrock or ground of fact to the work … some thing happened, some place existed. This is what gives the work substance and significance, for me. I’m not interested in the metaphorical/allegorical implications of the ground for instance. Actually, that’s not true. I’m mildly interested but not enough to bother making work about it. I would leave that to someone else.
I guess what is important to me is not the distinction between them (which sounds like something hard and fast) but the place between them, where they mix. If you press hard enough on most facts, chances are they will become shaky or doubtful in some way. Only the very simplest single-cell facts are self-evident, it seems to me.
On another note, I like photos because, by being so ‘factual’, they appear to underwrite/validate your interpretation of them, no matter what it is. I don’t make direct use of this capacity in the way some artists do but I do use it indirectly, or try to. I try to play off the facticity (the claim to factuality) of the photographs I make against the subject matter of my work, always something that has disappeared from view or from record. It’s like peering into the place where the photos would be if anyone at the time had thought the subject(s) worth recording.
At the female convict sites I used to wonder where the history has gone. The answer I ended up with was twofold — it’s either disappeared into the ground or vanished into the air. The air was my shorthand for the intangibilities of memory, story, rumour, gossip — all the things you can’t corroborate and therefore you might have made up. However by itself the ground is too dry, as is the evidence it yields; you need both.
Anne Ferran
The Ground at Ross 10 2001
2 gelatin silver prints
each 120 x 120 cm
edition of 3
courtesy Stills Gallery, Sydney and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
Anne Ferran
Lost to Worlds 2008
installation view, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery 2008-9
digital prints on aluminium
each 120 x 120 cm
edition of 3
courtesy Stills Gallery, Sydney and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
photo Simon Cuthbert
Anne Ferran
Lost to Worlds (detail) 2008
digital print on aluminium
120 x 120 cm
edition of 3
courtesy Stills Gallery, Sydney and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
Your most recent exhibition combines photographs with objects (woven blankets, for example) and projected video. These additions imply that photography by itself is insufficient to your purposes. Can you say something about this insufficiency?
It’s true that tactility and movement are inherent limitations to photography, though I wasn’t consciously thinking about that when I set out to make the blankets, or the videos. (I used to dream a lot about still photos that were very slowly moving. They were always great dreams.)
Actually photography’s insufficiencies are one of the things I value about it and I like to exploit them if I can. For instance the photograms of clothing … they were photographic in a very pure way but they seemed both tactile and three-dimensional. I like it very much when the powerful sensory illusion — whether it’s of texture or depth or movement — is carried by a medium that also says, ‘I don’t do touch, or movement’.
The other aspect to all this is the continued photographing of a subject that can’t be grasped visually (The Ground at Ross 2001 and Lost to Worlds series 2008). At those convict sites the historical evidence, if it still exists at all, is buried in the ground, meaning that photography will never find it since all it can show you is the surface. My idea was that the fact of there being so little to see would somehow be underlined or augmented (made more telling) by the knowledge that photography is a machine for showing you things — by its failure in other words.
That was the idea, but what’s also happened is that over time the medium worked in ways I wasn’t necessarily anticipating. The gradual accumulation of slightly varied images, the odd occasion where the camera or film didn’t work properly amounted to something. That work is still visually austere and limited by the capacities of the medium, but by now it’s expressive/atmospheric as well.
Anne Ferran
The ground, the air
12 December 2008 - 22 February 2009
The Tasmanian Museum Art Gallery, Hobart
21 March - 17 May 2009
Wollongong City Gallery, Wollongong
