Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that the following article may contain images of deceased persons

Gladys, Wik Elder from the series Returning to Places that Name Us 2000
45.5 x 56 cm
black and white gelatin silver print
courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Portrait of a Distant Land is a touring retrospective of documentary photographer Ricky Maynard’s practice. A big show taking up the entire ground floor of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), it surveys six bodies of work: The Moonbird People 1985-8, documenting the muttonbirding season on the islands of the Bass Strait; No More Than What You See 1993, concentrating on Aboriginal inmates in South Australian prisons; Urban Diary 1997, featuring Aboriginal people in St Kilda, Melbourne; Returning to Places That Name Us 2000, a series of portraits of Wik elders in Northern Queensland; In the Footsteps of Others 2003, dealing with important Aboriginal cultural sites that belong to the Ben Lomond and Cape Portland People of Tasmania; and Portrait of a Distant Land 2005 – present, photographs of landscape important to Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

What I found most interesting about Maynard’s practice is a kind of double agenda that powers his work: the manner in which, as a Tasmanian Aboriginal of 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.

Hands of a birder, David Maluga from the series The Moonbird People 1985–88
black and white gelatin silver print
35 x 45 cm
courtesy the artist and Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra

There is no denying the urgent politics that drive Maynard’s photographs, and his decision to work within the tradition of documentary photography. Maynard, it is clear, is out to change the world, one photograph at a time. As Jim Everett writes in the exhibition catalogue, Maynard’s photographs contribute to ‘the struggle’ of Aboriginal decolonisation by representing the stories of Aboriginal people ‘from their respective and collective perspectives’.¹ They are, Everett continues, an important challenge to the way that they are misrepresented. ‘It is not hard to see why Ricky Maynard’s photographic documentaries are internationally acclaimed, especially by Aboriginal peoples who “read” the realities of colonialism in his representations.’² It is, for example, interesting to reflect on the effect that his series The Moonbird People must have had on Australian audiences once conditioned to believe that there were no more Aboriginal people left in the region; and there’s no trouble understanding the politics of Maynard’s photographs of Aboriginal prisoners, or his Urban Diary.

Untitled from the Urban Diary series 1997
26.5 x 40.5 cm
black and white gelatin silver print
courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Curator Keith Munro writes:

While this form of documentary photography is not something new, what becomes an interesting development is the formation of an Aboriginal photographic practice, documenting a cultural framework that sees Maynard acknowledge the importance of co-authorship between image maker and subject. This is significant from a wider Aboriginal viewpoint and certainly from the local perspective he represents in his latest body of work.³

Obviously this is important, and it strikes right to the heart of Maynard’s practice, his decision to work as a documentary photographer. (In his interview with Munro, Maynard describes the difference between photojournalism and documentary photography as ‘a deep, personal connection’ between photographer and subject.)⁴ It reveals that the shift in cultural politics and expectations, not to mention in Australian law, will be embedded in Aboriginal photographic practice; and Aboriginal photographic practice will in turn force changes in the wider culture, raise the bar further and continue to undermine the colonialism that remains deeply embedded in Australian society.

Arthur, Wik Elder from the series Returning to Places that Name Us 2000
45.5 x 56 cm
black and white gelatin silver print
courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

But as I reflect on this exhibition and catalogue and continue to think about Maynard’s work, this is not the most interesting or powerful aspect of his photography. The most notable thing is how Maynard’s photographic practice grants new and strange life to the metaphysics of representation – for example, in the quality of aura. This is exactly what many of Maynard’s photographs traffic in, especially his portraits of Wik elders, the landscapes of In the Footsteps of Others, and Portrait of a Distant Land. We are given permission to believe in aura again, but only if we recognise it as a pointer to an alternative cultural framework and spirituality. As Maynard himself writes of Returning to Places that Name Us:

It is my wish that viewers identify in these pictures the existence of struggle below the surface, to see things that are not immediately visible and to see that what things mean has more to do with you, the observer. To know the meaning of a culture you must recognise the limits and meaning of your own. You can see its facts but you cannot see its meaning. We share meaning by living it.⁵

I find myself thinking about the exhibition Revealing Moments in Time that accompanied Maynard’s show at the MCA, in which the artist selected works by a group of international photographers who have been touchstones for his practice. First up, this was a brave thing to do, since there is a strong possibility that you will be judged and found wanting in such company. (And, in fact, this happened in my opinion when Maynard’s prison photographs were seen alongside Mary Ellen Mark’s photographs of patients in an Oregon psychiatric ward.) Secondly, it was incredibly useful, revealing something important about what Maynard is seeking to achieve, demonstrating the framework and history within which he creates his photographs. But, most importantly, it provided a first hand glimpse of the language that Maynard inherits and transforms with his Aboriginal photographic practice. I’m thinking, in particular, here of the mesmerising power of Ansel Adams’ photographs of the American west, with their associated rhetoric of spirituality and grandeur in nature, their connection to the growing voice of conservation and Adams’ belief in the Zone system as a photographic method for creating harmony, balancing light and dark in an act of creation that mirrors God’s actions in fashioning a wondrous natural world.

Rookery, Trefoil Island from the series The Moonbird People 1985–8
black and white gelatin silver print
35 x 45 cm
courtesy the artist and Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra

It is important that, in his introductory catalogue text, Henry Reynolds chooses to intertwine Maynard’s political agenda with a history of landscape photography in Tasmania. Reynolds writes:

Ricky brings to his work the complex and tragic history of his people. His landscape work is haunted by that history and the sense of ancient injustice. And yet he is also part of the great tradition of Tasmanian landscape painting and even more, the island’s long history of what is locally called “wilderness photography” which reaches back to the earliest years of the genre in the mid-nineteenth century. There is however one great distinction. Settler Tasmanians have celebrated nature: have enthused about places empty of people; have turned their cameras to what they perceived to be pristine nature. No such fancy is possible for a descendant of the old people, whose historical relics and sites Ricky documents as if to remind modern Tasmanians of their own history, and that it was their actions which made the landscape empty.⁶

In the nineteenth century, large format photographs were often made and used for the purpose of aiding colonisation, expanding settlement and conquering nature – with just a hint of awe at the empty land that God created for the benefit and use of settlers. This same technique became the preferred mode of American modernist photographers in the twentieth century, and of Ansel Adams in particular – where it was used in service of an almost oppositional sentiment. Maynard proves to be another moment in this story of photography’s troubled relationship with colonialism. Not only does he undo the myths of the settler’s empty land, but he finds a new use for the myths of modernist photography as a tool for gesturing to a system of meaning in Aboriginal culture, to show us that more exists than what we can see.

In this regard, I find the image quality – its character – in the catalogue to be somewhat disappointing. It isn’t glossy enough, it doesn’t have enough depth, it is too grainy and not enough like Maynard’s exhibited photographic prints to reproduce the effect of his landscapes and portraits – that illusion that the photograph is somehow equivalent to the world, to the scene it captures, or to the faces that fill the frame and look right at you. Ironically, this proof of photography’s indexicality (which is somewhat oppositional to the auratic idea that it can convey something other to, or beyond, the actual image) is critical in establishing the conditions under which Maynard is able to represent the meanings that lie beyond the surface appearance of his subjects.

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

As Reynolds makes clear, it isn’t just photography’s rhetoric that Maynard draws on in his work, but a larger history of landscape representation. Marcia Langton captures this nicely in her reading of Vansittart Island, Bass Strait 2005, one of the photographs from Portrait of a Distant Land:

The composition seems to hold an eternal thought, or is it a trick of the imagination? It seems to raise the possibility of the voices of Old People, long passed but ever present, whispering and singing, their voices mingled in a soundscape of melancholy and memories. The clouds, caught in a momentary arrangement, are rolling across the heavens. Are they the source of these voices from the past, telling us something in whispers and snippets of conversations; but what? If the clouds, rocks and waves could hint at more than this sense of foreboding, of the remembered past, they might tell us about the Aboriginal people who met the sealers and whalers, and those who were imprisoned near this place, promised refuge but delivered into hell on Flinders Island, after the colonial wars in the Colony of Van Diemen’s Land: among them Truganini, whose name was changed to Lullah Rookh; Woorraddy, who became Count Alpha; Manalargenna; and Tanganuturra, mother of Fanny Cochrane.⁷

The clouds, rocks and waves do talk about such things in Maynard’s photographs and we know to look for such voices because of the prior visual history that precedes them. We are conditioned to read the central tree in Traitor 2005 as a sign, a metaphor of what happened (George Augustus Robinson, aided by Truganini, negotiated with the chief Manalargenna for his people to move ‘temporarily’ to an island in the Bass Strait), because of the innumerable images that come before it, in which nature is a bearer of meaning. We are very familiar with Maynard’s delivery system, even if his specific meaning is one that proves to be new. It is very satisfying to watch Maynard turn this tradition to such subversive purposes in the present. As Langton concludes, ‘Against all the odds, his photographs speak a truth that he senses in people and in landscapes. They might be whispering, among other things, “We are here”.⁸

Keith Munro et al., Ricky Maynard: Portrait of a Distant Land.
Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008.

Ricky Maynard: Portrait of a Distant Land
5 June – 23 August 2009
Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney

19 November 2009 – 24 January 2010
Port Macquarie Hastings Regional Gallery, Port Macquarie

15 February – 1 June 2010
State Library of Victoria, Melbourne

¹ Jim Everett, ‘Ricky Maynard/The Man’, in Keith Munro et al., Ricky Maynard: Portrait of a Distant Land. Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008, 30.
² Everett, 32.
³ Keith Munro, ‘Portrait of a Distant Land’, in Munro, 18.
⁴ Keith Munro and Ricky Maynard, ‘Revealing Moments in Time’, in Munro, 91.
⁵ Ricky Maynard, ‘Returning to Places That Name Us’, in Munro, 59.
⁶ Henry Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, in Munro, 9.
⁷ Marcia Langton, ‘We Are Here: Memory, Presence and Landscape in Tasmania’, in Munro, 39.
⁸ Langton, p.50.