Hamish Tocher
Overhead Project (Galla Placidia) 2009 (video still)
single channel digital video
edition of one
courtesy the artist and McNamara Gallery, Wanganui, New Zealand

Welcome to the first issue of FLASH online, a quarterly journal of reviews, interviews and comment on photography and video, published by the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne. FLASH brings together discussions around photography and video from both established and emerging writers and practitioners, including voices from outside the discipline.

In this inaugural issue, our contributors and their subjects have independently delved into the pleasures, discomforts and complications of looking, with an eye to the past.

In our reviews section, Peter Shand takes an extended look at the two major photographic exhibitions presented at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria over the 2008-9 summer: Andreas Gursky and No Standing Only Dancing: Photographs by Rennie Ellis. Ellis’ prolific, diaristic body of work is a stark contrast to Gursky’s digital, cerebral approach. Of the presentation of these two diverse figures, Shand observes that ‘Ellis and Gursky are akin to two different types of popularist art fantasies: the former as charming, nostalgic; the latter as challenging, spectacular.’ His discussion of how subjectivity has been asserted — or made unstable — in these exhibitions describes a complex web of relations between their respective works and gallery visitors that belies the apparent simplicity of such fantasies.

Odette Kelada’s review of Nici Cumpston’s recent Attesting series of hand coloured photographs of Nookamka Lake in South Australia, exhibited at Melbourne’s Gallerysmith in February 2009, deals with images that Kelada found difficult to walk away from. She writes that Cumpston’s scarred trees on a parched riverbed have a melancholic beauty borne from their tying together of past and present. ‘There is a sense,’ she writes, ‘of bearing witness, of testimony to a passage of time and change wrought through the landscape Cumpston has chosen.’

In the first of our two interviews in this issue, Geoffrey Batchen converses with Sydney-based artist Anne Ferran following her exhibition The ground, the air at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart. Whilst Ferran’s work also deals with history and its relationship to the present, for her ‘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.’ Where the receding waterline of the lake has revealed the scarred trees in Cumpston’s work to us, as if bringing history forth into our contemporary line of sight, the history at the female convict sites Ferran has photographed had ‘either disappeared into the ground or vanished into the air’.

Like that of Andreas Gursky, whose relationship to history painting is discussed by Peter Shand, the work of emerging artist Hamish Tocher connects with an art historical past. Tocher’s relationship to the imagery of artists such as Giotto and Caravaggio has a lightness of touch. In his interview with CCP Director Naomi Cass, Tocher says that, for him, ‘the making process proceeds from a kind of awkwardness towards the past, the kind of fatal attraction the dorky boy feels to the glamorous girl’. Whilst this describes something of the somewhat informal appreciation he has for his influences, Tocher’s chosen analogy underplays his sophisticated relationship to the world of images and the way they are reimagined across time.

Every quarter, FLASH will ask a different writer to comment on their choice of photographic and video exhibitions around Victoria. Our first contributor is Alison Inglis from the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Inglis observes a photographic response to our painted colonial past in exhibitions by Siri Hayes and Christian Thompson, both of which, she asserts, ’simultaneously remind us that the original sources could be just as allusive and multifaceted as the current works.’

Finally, in our regular One Image series, a wide range of contributors will select and write about single photograph. In this issue, artist Patrick Pound sifts through his vast collection of photographs and asks the impossible question: ‘How to choose a single photograph, a photograph to stand in for all the others?’ His choice of image says much about the nature of seeing and the role photography can play in making sense of our world.

I hope you enjoy this issue of FLASH and invite you to join the discussion through the comments section following each text. We look forward to hearing from you.

Kyla McFarlane