Ricky Maynard
Vansittart Island, Bass Strait, Tasmania 2005
from the series Portrait of a Distant Land 2005
40.5 × 50.5 cm
black and white gelatin silver print
courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

This issue of FLASH features one instead of our usual two interviews. We have diverted from this format to include a comment piece by Glenn Pilkington, Associate Curator of Indigenous Objects and Photography at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, responding to the National Indigenous Photographers’ Forum hosted in Melbourne in October by CCP. Prompted, in particular, by papers presented by Brenda L Croft and Fiona Foley, Pilkington’s BRANDED: The Indigenous Aesthetic a passionate, provocative challenge to what he identifies as fixed views of Indigenous art practice that still exist in Australia. Pilkington is also an artist and writer, and his very personal essay also describes the effect of the Indigenous brand on his thinking around his own art practice:

The representation of my Indigenous self within my work is not contained within the aesthetic but more within the inspiration behind the work, within the sensibility of its creation. For my next body of work I was thinking of working with blue and white Dutch-inspired Delfts Blauw. Interesting? Maybe. Personally rewarding? Possibly. But probably not the right brand.

Pilkington’s observations got me thinking about the idea of practice and how it is defined more broadly. How does the artist make their way in the world, what decisions drive them and how does the critical and curatorial reception of their work inform, or even shape their output? Does a photographic practice have particular rules of engagement? These questions lie quietly beneath much of the writing in FLASH, but Pilkington’s discussion around Indigenous aesthetics brought them to the fore.

The essay also reminded me of an assertion I once heard made that criticism should be ‘anti humanist’ in its intent. I imagine such an approach to be singular in its attention to the work of art to the exclusion of matters such as artist’s intent or subjectivity. Pilkington seems to argue something close to the opposite of this, instead calling for an engagement that is attentive to the active, evolving role of the role of the artist and, in the context of his discussion, Indigenous culture as a whole. Perhaps there is scope then, in the plurality of voices writing in response to creative practice, for a humanist critical turn that has the artist at its core? How might cultural specificity remain an active discussion in such an approach?

It’s interesting to consider the practice of documentary photographer Ricky Maynard in relation to this idea. His touring survey exhibition Portrait of a Distant Land is reviewed in this issue by Damian Skinner, who asserts that Maynard, engaging with urgent politics through his documentary photography practice, is ‘out to change the world, one photograph at a time.’ Skinner is intrigued by ‘kind of double agenda that powers [Maynard's] work: the manner in which, as a Tasmanian Aboriginal of the Ben Lomond and Cape Portland people, he addresses the politics of colonisation, whilst also engaging with the aesthetic legacy of photography and the genre of landscape within European fine art.’ As Skinner describes it, the complex relationship Maynard has built around his chosen medium, its history and the history of representation more broadly is intrinsically related to the politics of his practice. It’s a stance that calls for a certain measure of belief in photography and its ability to communicate certain truths about the world. And Skinner’s observations sit in active engagement with Pilkington’s discussion of the Indigenous brand.

The role of the survey exhibition is also under discussion elsewhere in this issue. What shape should it take? And how might this shape reflect, or reinvigorate, an artist’s practice? In his review of the Len Lye survey held earlier this year at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Adrian Martin argues for a more ‘full-blooded’ curatorial gesture in response to Lye’s diverse practice. One that would, he argues, make connections ‘in relation to their motifs and intensities, rather than neat divisions of medium, genre or mode.’ A certain discomfort with medium-specific boundaries is also discussed by artist Simryn Gill’s in relation to her photographic work being brought together for a survey exhibition at CCP. In her interview with curator Naomi Cass, Gill reveals that she ‘also felt that the repetitiveness and the scale of some of my series could make me seem a bit obsessive. But the density actually works very well I think, not least because of the way the gallery leads a viewer in an intense and unusual (for a gallery) spiral into a heart. A centre.’

The role of obsession and repetition is revealed as fertile ground in Anna MacDonald’s reading of Eye of the Beholder, a recent survey of photographer Jane Burton’s work over two decades held at Glen Eira Gallery. In her review of the exhibition, MacDonald detects a near compulsive engagement with repetition and doubling across Burton’s oeuvre. For MacDonald, this awakening is enabled by the density of the exhibition:

What, over time and across disjointed viewings of individual photographs or separate bodies of work, might be experienced as instances of the artist’s persistent interest in mirroring, doubling and echoic forms of composition becomes, via this survey exhibition, an awakening to her obsession with these forms.

MacDonald seems to emphasise something here that might be defined as the works’ unconscious, a subterranean but persistent attribute that defies categorisation via art history, medium or genre.

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Just as we were about to go online with this issue, we heard the sad news that Sue Ford had passed away. We are honoured to publish an obituary for Ford contributed by Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator, Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Of Ford’s relationship to the camera, Crombie writes that ‘it was a natural, spontaneous, unprecious device that was an adjunct to her art and life. It suited her open and pragmatic nature and, in her practiced hands, could be incisive, accessible and real.’ An important Australian photo artist, Ford will be greatly missed by her family, friends and community, to whom we extend our deep sympathy and thoughts.