Donna Bailey, Zoe, 2004

This issue of Flash turns to the world of photography and publishing: in print and online; in conjunction with exhibitions; as monograph, artist’s book and history.

We were inspired to take this route following some lively discussions on the topic in Australian photographic and visual art circles in 2010. At the close of that year, Anne Marsh’s substantial recent history Look: Contemporary Australian Photography Since 1980 was released, the air of anticipation for which was an indicator of just how much we need such histories and documents to exist.

Lionel Bovier, a curator, writer, editor and head of the Zurich-based art-publishing house JRP|Ringier, visited Brisbane and Sydney that year for two publishing workshops. Bovier came to Australia at the invitation of the IMA and Artspace, supported by the Australia Council’s International Visitors Program. At the workshop I attended in Brisbane, there was much discussion about distribution—and its problems for small publishers. The Hamlet-like question of whether to publish online or not publish online was not the core focus of this conversation, but it has certainly been the question on many lips in Australia and globally in the months since then.

At the 2010 Fotofreo Festival, the biennial photography festival held in Fremantle, as Flash editor I took part in a panel as part of their Incite series of talks and discussions. Discussion in other panels across the festival emphasised the persistence of print, including print on demand and independent publishing, from the Hijacked series published by Big City Press to the Blurb books phenomenon. As Jennifer Phipps and Natalie King’s conversation around King’s Up Close exhibition and book on Carol Jerrems, along with William Yang, Larry Clark and Nan Goldin reveals, the artist’s book has been a significant medium for these artists.

Our panel, ‘The Virtues and Vagaries of Online Publishing’, including Andy Adams from web-based Flak Photo, John Levy from the British-based photojournalism and documentary company Foto 8 and photographic artist Amy Stein, waded into the territory head-on. In my post-forum interview with Adams and Stein, the latter contends that not being online is to somehow not exist—an interesting provocation to ponder for any photographer or artist working today.  Since our conversation, both have continued to inhabit the web and discuss its future and broader implications for photographers and their practice more broadly—most recently in this ‘Photo 2.0 Online Photographic Thinking’ panel, which can be viewed at: http://vimeo.com/32268134

Back in the world of print, M33’s Helen Frajman, who has herself contributed to a mini-boom in Australian art photography publishing with the recent release of a series of artists’ monographs, casts a critical eye over the Oculi documentary collective’s self-titled book, which brings together work by its members, who focus on Australia’s social landscape and the story-telling potential of photography.

Maggie Finch also writes about the extraordinary publication that coincided with Thomas Demand’s exhibition Nationalgalerie—a project that won the artist the Deutche Borse prize, and which has an intriguing image-text relationship.

And in our On Show section, usually reserved for exhibition round-ups, we publish a selection of photography books chosen as particular favourites by a range of contributors including artists, writers and booksellers. This in itself gives us a curious ‘potted history’ of some of the ways photography has developed and expanded through publishing.

Dean Sewell, Kangaroo, from the series Canberra Bushfires, 2003
on the cover of Oculi, Hardy Grant Books, Melbourne, 2010

This substantial publication marks the first ten years of Oculi, the Australian documentary photography collective.

Established in 2000 by a group of Sydney based photographers including Trent Park, Narelle Autio, Tamara Voninski and Dean Sewell, the group now consists of ten members – Donna Bailey, James Brickwood, Tamara Dean, Jesse Marlow, Nick Moir, Jeremy Piper, Andrew Quilty, Dean Sewell, Steven Siewert and Tamara Voninski.

This book is both a survey of the work of its current members and a celebration of the collective’s longevity and burgeoning success.

Ten years ago a book like this (and a collective of this sort) would both have been considered a starry eyed fantasy.

The climate for documentary photography was not good and many of its practitioners despaired of ever seeing their work in quality publications.  Finding high profile galleries in which to show was equally difficult as the art world exhibited an open hostility towards documentary practice.

Photographic publishing – indeed fine art publishing as a whole, is very limited in Australia, even today. Our very small market coupled with a lack of a strong tradition of art publishing means that producing a book here is commercially unattractive to publishers.

In 2000 it would have been difficult to imagine that a commercial publisher would take a punt on a substantial collection of documentary photographs. In 2010 such a publication is still a brave act, but at least the environment for documentary photography has somewhat altered.

This shift in attitude has of-course a multiplicity of causes, but among them must be considered the emergence of the CCP’s Documentary Photography Award (whose first winner in 1997 was Oculi member Steven Siewert).

Also significant in the softening of attitudes towards documentary photography is the role played by Aladsair Foster, Director of Sydney’s Australian Centre for Photography since 1998, in supporting the work of documentary practitioners – many of them in fact members of Oculi.

In 2000, the early Oculi photographers decided that for them the best way to combat the prevailing sense of despair was to band together and use the then very new medium of the internet to promote themselves and their images.

They did not form a photo agency as such. Their aim was not commercial. As they continued to expand and grow, to lose some of their founding members and gain new ones, their work was picked up by European and American photo agencies, which now distribute their work internationally.

Donna Bailey, Zoe, 2004

Since 2000, the Oculi photographers have enjoyed remarkable personal success. Each one of them boasts a cornucopia of significant prizes, residencies, grants and awards – both locally and internationally. Individually and collectively they have exhibited broadly throughout Australia and overseas. Indeed, their personal and collective successes must also be counted amongst the reasons for a shift in the perception of documentary photography in Australia today.

For all those interested in documentary photography this book ought therefore be a cause to celebrate too. Unfortunately, this particular publication does not do justice to the individual photographers’ work. Anthologies are intrinsically difficult. Looking at a bunch of different people’s work in a publication means moving from one ‘voice’ to another and often the voices can cancel each other’s impact out.

This is particularly the case when dealing with photographers whose practice is as diverse of those of the Oculi collective. When you have, for instance, the menace-charged images from the 2005 Cronulla riots by Andrew Quilty alongside the intensely personal, moody portraits of her family by Donna Bailey, or Nick Moir’s lyrical shots of dramatic environmental events side by side with Tamara Dean’s constructed images from her Ritualism series replete with art historical references, you have a very heady brew.

This kind of juxtaposition of many artists, many voices, many subjects requires careful editing in order to bring to the viewer an understanding and appreciation of the disparate artists and their work.

Oculi is laid out in a particularly idiosyncratic fashion.

The book mixes extended layouts from each of the photographers with longer melanges of two to four images from a number of them.

Hence a run by Jeremy Piper veers forwards and backwards for ten pages from his images of ship breaking in India to his work from East Timor, segues into Dean Sewell’s photographs from Aceh for two pages and then to Sewell’s images from Chechnya for another two and then to a shot by James Brickwood of an ambiguously gendered person asleep in a debris strewn warehouse.

As there are no titles or section names and captions to the images are at the end of the book, we don’t quite know what (or whose work) we are looking at and the images drift into each other yielding undesired outcomes. In the case of the above-mentioned sequence what are in fact works from several very different series, here becomes a sea of displaced and marginalised people.

This is an unsatisfying way to experience these photographers’ images. Many of the works come from larger series and are much more profound and comprehensible when viewed as discrete bodies of work.

Those images which are allowed that kind of presentation, for example, Jesse Marlow’s lovely little explosions of colour from Don’t Just Tell Them, Show Them, presented here as a continuous group for ten pages, remain in the mind long after the book is closed.

Jesse Marlow, Yellow Square, 2007, from the series Don’t Just Tell Them, Show Them

It’s a very large book (over 250 pages) and by book’s end one is rather wearied by so much variety presented in so confusing a way.

The book’s design alas is also not kind. The paper stock and layout, particularly in the captions section, suggests a more ‘commercial’ venture than a photographic book – something akin to an annual report.
The rather heavy handed use of black backgrounds for many of the images tends also to leach them of life and many images have not been prepared as well as they could have for printing. The black and white images in particular feel somewhat flat and muddy.

Still, for those unfamiliar with the work of the Oculi photographers, this is nevertheless a good introduction to their work; full of several breathtaking photographs including Dean Sewell’s sensational – in every sense of the word perhaps – cover image of a dead kangaroo seared to a burnished glow by bushfire.

Dean Sewell also provides an engaging and frank essay surveying the group’s history and ideological tussles and most intriguingly tells us that below the surface of the collective is ‘a matriarchal undercurrent driven by Voninski, Dean and Autio’.¹ Given the notoriously butch reputation of documentary photography, you’ve got to check out the book on that basis alone!

¹ Dean Sewell, Oculi, Hardy Grant Books, Melbourne, 2010 p vii

Laura Pannack
Mike, Devils Dyke, Sussex 2009

Amy Stein is a photographer and teacher based in New York. Her work explores our evolving isolation from community, culture and the environment. In 2007, she was named one of the top fifteen emerging photographers in the world by American Photo magazine. Amy’s first book, Domesticated, won the best book award at the 2008 New York Photo Festival. Online, she hosts her own website and blog at www.amysteinphoto.com.

Andy Adams is the editor and publisher of FlakPhoto.com, a contemporary photography website that celebrates the culture of image-making by promoting the discovery of artists from around the world. An online art space and photography publication, the site provides opportunities for a global community of artists and photo organizations to share new series work, book projects and gallery exhibitions with a web-based photography audience.

The photographs illustrating this interview are a selection of works that have featured on Flak Photo, chosen by Andy Adams.

Jen Davis
Untitled No. 32, Brooklyn, New York 2010
from the series Self-Portraits

What is your presence on the internet and how did it evolve?

Amy Stein: Currently I have a portfolio website and a blog, plus I maintain a regular presence on Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm and LinkedIn. In grad school I developed my portfolio site and that has evolved a bit over the years including the addition of a CRM (customer relationship management) tool that I use to do blast emails to my list. In 2006, I graduated from the School of Visual Arts MFA program and started writing a blog. In the past two years I have been a lot more active on social media and have curtailed the email communications.

Andy Adams: I publish FlakPhoto.com, an online art space that promotes contemporary photography from an international community of contributors. The site’s main feature is a daily photo blog featuring a different photographer six times a week. Since launching the website four years ago, I’ve expanded the photo-a-day format to include a monthly Weekend series and photography book section. I also collaborate with book publishers, art galleries and photo organisations to produce a continuous program of community “happenings” in tandem with the work I show on the site.

The scope of the project is continuously evolving and has roots in online publishing and arts exhibition and it’s becoming more “social” every day. Flak Photo’s success hinges on new developments in online communication and social media and it’s becoming a kind of “real-time” photo community hub. In addition to the website, I publish a Facebook page and Twitter feed and I interact with those audiences on a daily basis. I’m passionate about creative collaboration and am constantly energised by what’s happening in the online photo community, so publishing FlakPhoto.com gives me an outlet to satisfy that craving.

Daniel Shea
Untitled (Cheshire, Ohio) 2009

Who is your audience online?

AS: The primary audience is fans of my work. I have also used various online tactics to specifically target collectors, curators and gallerists.

AA: Certainly plenty of photographers see the site and there’s a solid cross-section from within the photo industry that watch it too — I regularly get emails from curators, editors, publishers and gallery dealers who enjoy the work they find there and I make professional connections between colleagues when I can. A big part of my mission is to help artists get their work seen and my contributors are always updating me with news about exhibitions and publication opportunities that have come out of their work being discovered on FlakPhoto.com.

Does the internet function well as an exhibition space for photomedia work?

AS: It serves a vital role in terms of exposing one’s work to a broader audience, providing access to a wide variety new work and sourcing previously unknown artists, writers and thinkers. The internet has changed the way we view and interact with images as a society and as artists, but the screen is still an inferior exhibition experience compared to prints and books.

AA: Absolutely! I don’t think of online vs. offline exhibition as very different at all, actually - especially since the selection process is the same for me: I almost always review work using my laptop, so that part is entirely screen-based and digital. Nearly every photographer has a website, so an online exhibition, if properly executed, can provide unique opportunities for a spectator to discover more of an artist’s work.

I would never argue that looking at pictures on a monitor is the same as experiencing physical prints in a traditional exhibition. But I’m actually more interested in exploring the web browser as an exhibition space, if only because an online show is likely to be seen by more people. The social nature of the web continues to inspire me, so I plan to keep working with that in-between space, presenting experiences for a global, online audience while providing a platform for them to interact with and learn from each other.

Clayton Cotterell
Waterpark, Fort Jackson, South Carolina 2007
from the series All in the Family

At our Fotofreo discussion, we touched on web-based interactivity, such as comments on blogs, and the increased role of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook. What are some of the experiences you have had with this interactive landscape? And how do you see it evolving in the future?

AS: The future will continue to be about personalisation and social sharing. And content, content, content.

AA: The internet is a natural broadcast and publishing medium, but it’s also a relationship medium that’s fostering the growth of a global online photo community at an increasingly rapid pace. Web 2.0 technology has played a huge role in expanding Flak Photo’s reach and the site’s readers are web-savvy people who use social media on a daily basis, so that’s really inspired me to explore how those tools can encourage online audiences to communicate with each other about contemporary photography. In addition to using social media to promote the artists I work with, I’ve coordinated interactive photobook giveaways, real-time photographer interviews and a series of comment conversations for Flak Photo’s Facebook and Twitter audiences. It’s hard to predict where the technology is heading, but it’s clear that more of us are connecting with each other in blogs and social networks and those connections are bound to provide new opportunities for collaboration and discovery.

Andy, you recently took part in a discussion about the future of the photo book. Can you tell us about this? And what were some of your conclusions following this discussion?

AA: Last winter I teamed up with Miki Johnson to host a cross-blog conversation considering the question, “What will photobooks become over the next decade?” Our aim was to pool the collective wisdom of thinkers from all corners of the photo world, so we invited bloggers from across the globe to post responses and nominate the most exciting photobooks currently being published. We summarised those ideas and invited the online community to participate in three blogger-moderated discussions that explored the most innovative means of creating, consuming, and funding photography books.

Miki does a great job of summarising the project in a Tumblr she produced earlier this year (2010). The findings were many, but the resounding feedback was that people love printed photography books and don’t want to trade them for digital substitutes. The modes of production have obviously changed, but photobooks are as popular as ever (more so maybe) and with more indie publishers producing small press runs, printed books are valuable collectibles in their own right.

I don’t think that analog publications will disappear anytime soon, but I do think we’ll see more artists using digital media to promote and sell their books independently. I also suspect we’ll see more analog/digital hybrid publications and how we define “the book format” is bound to change in the iPad era. There are certainly larger questions about what constitutes a photography publication: photo blogs, multimedia websites, and online magazines are self-publications that have exploded in recent years and we’ve really only begun to see how those forms will influence the shape of photobook publishing in the future.

Justine Reyes
Al with Eye Patch 2009

Amy, as an artist, what impact has your web presence had on your practice? Would you recommend it to other artists and photomedia practitioners?

AS: I think we are at least five years beyond on the point where having a website should be a question. Frankly, if you don’t have a website you don’t really exist.

There has been some debate recently about the role of the ‘amateur’ on the internet and their influence on the broader culture. The apparent democratisation of the internet allows anyone to publish their work, their views, unedited, on a global platform. What is your opinion on this situation?

AS: The promise of the internet has always been the democratisation of information. The proliferation of web 2.0 tools in the past five years has made this promise more of a reality. The boundaries of media have pretty much blurred at this point. We consume content without regard for medium and can customise the experience to match our values, tastes and opinions. Just like all major technological leaps there are positive and negative aspects to the transformation.

AA: I hear a lot of concerns about how amateur web publishers compromise the quality of work we look at online. This doesn’t concern me – in my experience, the quality work tends to rise to the top. Web 2.0 is shrinking the gap in the arts community and provides all kinds of exciting opportunities to develop relationships with creative people from all over the world. We can certainly expect to see more artists and photo organisations using these tools and I’m eager to see how the new media will impact the future of photo exhibition and publication.

Cover of Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang, edited by Natalie King

Up Close is mostly made up of an exhibition of the photographs of Carol Jerrems (1949–1980), an artist who died aged thirty. She left a large archive of photographs that was gifted to the National Gallery of Australia by her mother, Joy Jerrems in 1981. Curator Natalie King has spent four years researching the exhibition, and placed Jerrems in the context of candid photography as self-identity.

Jerrems was amongst the first to photograph the sub-cultures of Australian urban youth. Her genius was to become a part of them, showing the beauty, vulnerability and vitality of socially and sexually marginalised Australians. She early grasped the changes in prosperous Australia. From the late 1960s, Australian governments had removed the most stifling aspects of censorship and were gradually modernising laws of social behaviour and status (such as no fault divorce, equality for women and for Aboriginal people, and abortion. With the exception of South Australia, however, homosexual behaviour remained outlawed). Jerrems photographed a new kind of society: including actors, artists, homosexuals, hippies, single mothers and women leaders. Photographs in this exhibition date primarily from before the mid–1980s.

Jerrems’ only publication, A Book About Australian Women was published by Outback Press in 1974, an alternative publishing house run by Morry Schwartz with three other young men. Up Close is a multi-authored book edited by Natalie King and published, once more, by Morry Schwartz of Schwartz City, to coincide with the Heide exhibition.

Jennifer Phipps (JP) interviews Natalie King (NK), curator of Up Close. Thursday, 27 May, 2010 and by email.

JP: Did you intend the exhibition title Up Close to suggest intimacy or an opposite kind of closeness, like fronting up, toughness?

NK: The title Up Close is a word play on the photographic term close-up whilst suggesting the intimate, candid and consensual approach that each artist in the exhibition adopts. Jerrems photographed her friends, peers, acquaintances and students, drawing on the informality of social and convivial situations. For our book, Virginia Fraser has revisited her contribution to A Book About Australian Women and managed to find many of the sitters including Kate Fitzpatrick, Linda Jackson and Robyn Ravlich. Virginia comments on how Carol’s photographs often seem ‘unstaged, uncontrived, natural—an effect produced with patience, chance and many small interventions.’

JP: How do the photographs by Nan Goldin, Larry Clark and William Yang work in with those of Carol Jerrems? Did Jerrems know their work? Were Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol and even August Sander models for these photographers?

NK: It’s not entirely clear from my research into Carol’s personal papers, darkroom notes and letters that she knew the work of Goldin, Clark or Yang however; there is a strong synergy in terms of their remarkable capacity to capture people, places and events with empathy. Goldin, in particular, has been influenced by Clark’s diaristic approach to photography. She was introduced to Clark’s work in 1974 and says ‘It has entirely changed my work. I knew that there had been somebody else who had done their own life.’

I interviewed many of Carol’s peers—Esben Storm, Mirta Mizza, Robert Ashton, Ian Macrae—who repeatedly mention Arbus as an influence. Perhaps it’s Arbus’ troubling photographs of people on the edge of society that appealed to Jerrems. For our book, I produced an extensive chronology on Jerrems and found a flyer in one of Carol’s files about Andy Warhol’s film, Women in Revolt about transgendered superstars who form a women’s liberation group. This suggests that Jerrems was certainly aware of Warhol.

JP: How do you make a book and an exhibition out of a slide show and a group of books of photographs, notably the 1974 Fraser and Jerrems’ A Book About Australian Women?

NK: Publishing was central to the practice of Jerrems, Clark, Goldin and Yang as a way of disseminating their images. The kernel of the exhibition is Carol’s images from A Book About Australian Women, published in 1974, the year prior to International Women’s Year. Carol was meticulous about the sequencing, layout and grouping of works. For example, a small child—Caroline Slade—appears as the first arresting image wearing a patterned dress, which is heightened by decorative wallpaper. Carol photographed this little girl at her fourth birthday party and it reveals her compositional astuteness and the optimism of the 1970s. We are presenting these works in their original format in the exhibition, mounted on chipboard and deploying Carol’s exact ordering. Carol’s interest in sequencing, cinematic flow and the accumulation of images can be linked to her tutelage under filmmaker Paul Cox. Carol was one of the first graduates from Prahran Tech in 1970 alongside Ian Macrae, Linda Jackson, Robert Ashton and Ross Hannaford from the band Daddy Cool.

JP: You have brought two William Yang books to look at—Sydney Diary and Friends of Dorothy—Carol Jerrems’ A Book about Australian Women and I’ve never seen Larry Clark’s Tulsa.

NK: It’s interesting that a group of artists resorted to some form of publishing to present their work. I think it partly has to do with the rise and buoyancy of photography, the influence of cinematic and the way each artist often worked in series. All amassed a large group of images so it made sense to use this format.

JP: Tell me about how you deal with the prints in the exhibition—whether you are using vintage prints or have you used digital prints?

NK: We are using only original vintage prints and in the case of William Yang he has retrieved many original gelatin silver photographs from the 1970s and early 80s. We are complementing these works with a loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Larry Clark’s works are from the Tulsa suite, from the National Gallery of Australia and we have included the sexy photograph from the cover of Clark’s follow up publication, Teenage Lust, sourced from a private collection.

The Jerrems’ works primarily come from the National Gallery of Australia and from other collections both private and public including Macquarie series from Macquarie University and Alphabet folio from the National Gallery of Victoria. They are all original vintage prints, and prints that Jerrems made herself. The exception is Carol’s final series produced while a patient in the Royal Hobart Hospital in 1979 while suffering from a rare liver disease. With unflinching detail, Carol photographed her physical demise. She sent rolls of film to her friend, Roger Scott in Sydney, entrusting him to produce the prints in his darkroom. They are hauntingly detached and Helen Ennis has written most eloquently about this final body of work.

JP: This is really a quality show and worth visiting just for that reason. And what about Nan Goldin?

NK: With Goldin, her iconic work that she commenced in 1979, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, was first presented as a slide show for Frank Zappa’s birthday party at the Mudd Club in New York. Over subsequent years, she modified the work and altered the sound component. This work also exists as photographic stills but I was much more interested in showing the slide version, which amounts to close to 700 slides projected to sound, as it is mesmerising and dynamic. It was a coup for Heide to secure this loan from the Cartier Foundation in Paris. Ballad is also in the collection of MOMA and was on display at London’s Tate Modern in the exhibition Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera.

—

Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
31 July 2010–31 October 2010
A publication of the same name is edited by Natalie King and published by Heide Museum of Modern Art/Schwartz City Publishing.

Sam Hood
Depression “bread wars”, corner store on Bourke & Fitzroy Streets, Surry Hills, Sydney, 21 August 1934
From the collections of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
www.sl.nsw.gov.au

As a young wastrel in the mid 1990s I was a regular at the Hopetoun Hotel on the corner of Bourke and Fitzroy Streets in Surry Hills. They had some of the best live music in Sydney (and some of the worst) and more importantly, they didn’t check ID.

At that time yuppies were moving in to the inner city in droves, but they soon realised that the drawcards of bohemian culture inconvenienced them. Nightlife is loud. Pubs were shutting down in the frenzy of noise complaints. As publicans’ rent rose, the soothing reverberation of guitar feedback was replaced by the insane parasitic pinging of the poker machine (an honest Sydney icon). But the tiny Hoey stayed true, dedicating its space to new bands and providing the authentic live music experience, complete with overcrowding, spilled beer, acoustic atrocities and occasional genius.

Eventually you would need something – cigarette papers, sugar, or a gulp of oxygen. Diagonally across from the Hoey was a corner shop. It had a sky-blue wall with vines painted all over it, and it was open late in the years before convenience. The corner shop offered more than convenience – it sold the unpredictable and absurd.

Jellybeans? Fishing line? Porno mags from 1982? You got it. You even got jellybeans threaded onto fishing line. No name hung over the door, but the shop itself was full of hand-written signs in oddly phrased English which had a mystical meaning at 2am. It was dusty. The lightbulbs were so dusty they glowed like candles. The whole place was as shadowy and crowded as the subtropical rainforest that still leans on the edges of Sydney like a tired publican patiently waiting for everyone to leave. In the background, a cassette tape was usually playing. It was a loop of the old bloke who ran the place singing “Thank you very much” to his own invented tune, incorporating the traditional music of Cyprus with a weird drone. And yes, for two dollars you could buy a copy of the tape.

The proprieter, Andreas Hadjisavvas, was a man advanced in years and pretty much deaf. After migrating to Australia from a conflict-ravaged Cyprus in the 1970s he had taught himself English, set up shop, and promptly ignored the reserved social customs of his adopted nation. The shop had accumulated ten or twenty years’ worth of his whimsy. It was an outbreak of poetic nonsense amid the ordered universe of Surry Hills. I loved it.

Andreas had the mad grin of the true artist and was not a very good capitalist. He would often charge ten cents for a can of soft drink, give away a chocolate bar with the cigarette papers, or wave you out of the shop without accepting your money just because he liked your smile. And you had to smile. Every interaction came with a deadpan joke of the “that is two-hundred-dollars, I mean two-hundred-cents” variety. Casual customers often emerged flummoxed from the shop with the wrong purchase in hand. I have no idea how he paid his rent.

Andreas had to come out from behind the counter to see you because every available surface was covered in his humourous notes and instructions. His English retained all the eccentricities of the self-taught immigrant. But he wasn’t just a corner shop owner. He was a performance artist who made surreal videotapes and sang his occasionally alarming songs at festivals organised by avante-garde violinist-composer Jon Rose. I was delighted to discover that the Thankyou Very Much song is archived here: http://www.abc.net.au/arts/adlib/stories/s985920.htm

Browsing Flickr one day, I come across this picture of the same corner shop, sixty years earlier. A woman with strong ankles and an expression of exhausted defiance stands in the doorway. The photo was taken by Sydney’s pioneer photojournalist Sam Hood in 1934 for the Labour Daily (an issue of the newspaper is hanging on the front of the shop) and uploaded to Flickr Commons by the State Library of NSW. In the newspaper, it was identified as a different shop on Riley Street – perhaps to protect the woman in the doorway from having her windows broken by her starving neighbours. Bread prices rose astronomically during the 1930s, in part because of high transport and fuel costs, in part because shopkeepers were desperate or ruthless or both.

Long before the bohemians, Surry Hills was a slum of infamous wretchedness. Typhoid, high child mortality, overcrowding and violence were rife. There’s a myth in Australia that the Depression wasn’t too bad here, that by about 1933 it was effectively over. If you look at the economic statistics, you might get that impression. But if you look at images from the period and read oral histories (like Lowenstein’s seminal Weevils in the Flour), it’s clear that a severely impoverished underclass remained in Australia until World War Two came along and men dropped their swags and picked up rifles.

I was a young punk at the start of the (shudder) Howard Years. A long period of economic growth coincided with a neoliberalist narrative of unending economic advancement. Everything was growing. If I felt left out of this happy story, I wasn’t alone. Many were suffering from inflated rents, cuts to social services, the rising cost of living. We were dumpstering and squatting our way through, working two or three shitty jobs to pay for uni, getting cut off the dole every other month and trying to find space to write and make art in between. Life was a righteous battle, but eventually Sydney won. I spent too much time surviving. I had to move away if I wanted to focus on writing.

Researching Depression-era stories for The Diamond Anchor, I was moved by the narratives of tenacity, survival and rebellion that emerged from the 1930s. Where are those narratives now? If we look at Australia’s economic statistics, we’re doing all right in 2009. If we listen to anecdotes, look at the images, we get a different story. Unemployment might be stable, but there are full-time workers living on the streets. The artificial inflation of housing prices which eventually pushed me out of Sydney continues relentlessly. During the 2000 Olympics, while our squats were getting evicted and streets cleared of unsightly homeless people, Andreas plastered his shop with hilarious and often incomprehensible satire. I wonder what he would make of today’s city.

There are few shops like this left in inner Sydney. They stand like remnant old growth among the new plantations of bland townhouses, hairdressers and designer chairs. Glimpsing one of these shops from a bus window, I get the same startled feeling I get from old photographs. Roland Barthes said that looking at old photographs was like being ‘chafed by reality’. Like photographs of the dead, these places are abrasive to the myth of progress. They are not supposed to be there, but they resist.

The corner shop is still there, with the same worn front step, but Andreas has moved on. I don’t know if he’s still alive. His shop is a brightly-lit, well-ordered convenience store now, an identical clone of which adorns every inner city street. I pass it sometimes, but I don’t go inside much. The predictability is too heartbreaking.

Somewhere under that new white signage there’s an old blue wall with whimsical vines painted all over it. And under that, if an archaeologist looked, they’d find handpainted ads for Orange Delite, Mother’s Choice flour and carbolic soap. Maybe the erasure of past edifices is an inevitable result of Sydney’s development. But all too often it feels like cultural cleansing, like someone’s erasing the history of a particular social class. Poetic outposts are a funny thing, though. Every time one of them gets shut down, three more spring up somewhere in the world.

In September 2009 the contemporary German artist Thomas Demand staged the first major solo display of his photographs at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. The exhibition was also called Nationalgalerie and coincided with two major anniversaries in recent German history (sixty years since the forming of the Federal Republic and twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall). The photographs on display were chosen by Demand from works created over the last fifteen years as images which all related to Germany, in that they were based on German source materials.  This is not something that would have been apparent to the average gallery visitor.  Rather than providing explanatory texts in the usual museological tradition, Demand employed German writer and poet Botho Strauß to compose parallel captions, which accompanied the images in adjacent showcases. The photographs and captions were also then published together in book form in a catalogue that is lavish, yet minimalist in design.

Thomas Demand’s practice and method of construction is well known and highly renowned. He builds detailed paper sculptures of scenes, usually interiors, which are based upon media images or personal memories. While being highly realistic, the sculptures are intentionally simplified by the removal of identifiable features and people. The sculptures are photographed at a scale of 1:1 and then destroyed, the images displayed. The photographs, therefore, are representations in two dimensions of a three-dimensional interpretation of a two-dimensional image taken from the real world or from memory.  Confused? Well that is largely the point.

With Nationalgalerie Demand appears intent on directing the reception of his images in a new light and context. The title, the subject matter and the timing of the exhibition and book immediately suggest that Demand is implicating himself and his art in a discussion about the national art institution and, by extension, about German nationalism and identity surrounding art and politics. The forward and prefaces to the book corroborate these aims. The traditional understanding of the national gallery is as a civic space with a collection owned by the public: by the people, for the people. For a country whose concept of nationalism has such a loaded and complex history in the recent era, it seemed a provocative act. The experience of viewing the catalogue obviously differs greatly from seeing the exhibition and the ways in which the images and texts related to each other when on display. It is interesting, therefore, to consider how the book operated independently as a means of conveying ideas about the “Deutschlandbild” or the so-called “German image”.

At first glance, the catalogue appears not to contain any images at all. Image titles and captions conceal the photographs, which are only revealed by the slow and careful unfolding of the pages. It is a clever design in which the Strauß texts precede the images and compels ‘slow’ looking, making Demand’s unpopulated photographs all the more ambiguous. An example of this relationship is Fotoecke 2009 – an image of a reconstruction of a mundane-looking photographic portrait studio, which is preceded by the following caption:

That images are, after all, like seals placed upon the invisible. But in some images there are empty spaces where the invisible has made notable inroads. It is present.

National Galerie by Thomas Demand published by SteidlMack / www.steidlville.com

This pattern of image and text continue throughout the book, with captions preceding Demand’s anonymous scenes. The photographs have no obvious relationship – images of an empty bathtub, a diving platform, the doorbell of an apartment block, papers strewn around a room. Botho Strauß, renowned in Germany as a highly creative and prolific writer, has written short fragments which are evocative yet inconclusive. Taken together it forces a suspension of belief – the images are without excess information and the lack of logical narratives is utterly compelling. The effect is one of longing: to make sense of the images, to understand what it is that you’re looking at, and what the relationships are between the images and the texts. Despite the order and discipline evident in the construction of the photographs and the design of the book there is an interesting disorder which occurs through the use of the captions. It is as though the artist has laid a trap with Strauß as his accomplice – cause and effect that can never lead to a definitive answer or resolution.

But what then of the German content and the German subject of the photographs? For those unfamiliar with Demand’s works they may be relieved to read the eloquent essay by Mark Godfrey, at the conclusion of the book. Godfrey explains the methods of construction as well as the source materials for the photographs which all reference, in varying ways, elements of German history and events. Raum 1994, for example, is based on an image of the remains of Hitler’s headquarters after a bombing attempt; Zeichensaat 1996 shows the studio of Richard Vorhoelzer, responsible for post-war reconstruction of the architecture of Munich; while Kinderzimmer 2009 is the memory of the artist’s childhood bedroom. (And in Fotoecke 2009 the contextual reference is the story of a prison in Gera, Germany. Years after the closure of the prison, high numbers of leukemia were found in prisoners who had been regularly photographed – it was later revealed that behind the curtain in the photo-corner was an exposed X-ray machine, emitting radiation.) Godfrey alludes to the idea of blurred memories when he argues that the ‘main reason why Demand’s photographs continue to perplex is that we sense immediately that the depicted spaces, for all their seeming banality, are associated with real sites half recognised, vaguely remembered or perhaps unknown, but none the less probably associated with troubled and even horrific narratives.’

National Galerie by Thomas Demand published by SteidlMack / www.steidlville.com

Thomas Demand uses both personal and national histories to build his suite of ‘German’ images. Images of the artist’s childhood are given equivalence to images relating to national sites of trauma, such as the headquarters of Hitler. Similarly, pop culture references mix with images of political controversies. The selection does not, therefore, seem to articulate one specific or unified view of national art or culture.  Rather, Demand’s choice of photographs appears subjective, almost autobiographical, relating to scenes and events that have affected or influenced him on a personal level. On the other hand, the leveling of imagery already stripped of obvious referents can be seen as proposing something different: it opens up ideas about collective memories and collective consciousness. Demand seems to be reminding us that certain events are remembered more than others due to their prominence or repetition in the media, so by inserting personal memories into the mix he is questioning what it means (or whether it is even possible) to construct a ‘national autobiography’ in the first place.  In some ways, the very lack of information and the addition of cryptic captions seems more concerned with forgetting the past than with remembering. When looked at sequentially in book form, Demand’s obsessively neat photographs create a sense of simulacrum; of vague semblances that trigger feelings and narratives but which remain indistinct.

Having known many of Thomas Demand’s photographs and their stories from previous publications, I enjoyed the feeling of uncertainty upon picking up this book and looking at the images as if anew in the context of the Strauß captions. A brave act might have been to remove any external information altogether (such as the foreword, prefaces and essay) and use the format of the art book to revel in the confusion, allusion and illusion which is otherwise provoked, so beautifully, by the abstracted images and texts.

—

Thomas Demand: Nationalgalerie
Captions by Botho Strauß
Essay by Mark Godfrey
Design by Thomas Demand, Michael Mack and Joby Ellis
38 six page gatefolds, with 39 color plates
29.5 cm x 27.7 cm
Clothbound hardcover
steidlMACK
ISBN: 978-3-86521-941-1

Shirana Shahbazi: Accept the Expected
Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneve and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2005

A combination of brains and beauty, thanks to its Swiss designers, Shirana Shahbazi’s Accept the Expected is both an excellent exhibition catalogue and impeccable piece of merchandise. Published in 2005 for her exhibition at Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneve, the hardcover publication includes a number of parallel texts categorised under the simple subjects of still life, portrait and landscape. I was drawn to the indexical quality of Shahbazi’s photography, represented in the book as ‘figures’ illustrating the essays and seemingly non-art. The work and the layout of the book reminded me of John Berger’s 1972 Ways of Seeing, as the images can also be read as diagrams or stock photography.

—

SUSAN FEREDAY
Artist
www.susanfereday.net

Bede Morris, Images: Illusion and Reality
Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, 1986

Published to accompany the art-science photographic exhibition, Images; Illusion and Reality, this book contains a refreshingly francocentric array of rare historical photographs, mainly from the collection of the Société Française de Photographie.

The photographs affirm the extraordinary contributions made by the medium’s pioneers not only to its technologies but also its aesthetics. Fusing discovery with artistic inspiration, these early researchers pursued open-ended questions of a kind unlikely to pass science’s current peer-review processes.

Hand of a Banker 1860 by Nadar and Bunch of Grapes 1844 by Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (who conceived the marvellous pendulum in the Panthéon, Paris) are personal favourites.

—

YANNI FLORENCE
Book designer
www.yanniflorence.net

YF: My favourite book this year. Protest Photographs by Chauncey Hare. Have you got it? Rough looking photos. Brilliant compositions. So sad.

PG: Got it a few weeks ago and love the opening statement! When we catch up for dinner at yr place? H and L. R, me and G! Moomba!

YF: Another favourite. Jacob Holdt. United States. 1970–1975. His web site is crazy. http://www.american-pictures.com/english/jacob/index.html

YF: Holdts book is good. What is happening with yr book Yanni? And can you name your top ten photographic books?

PG: what thee be doing Paris, Yanni T’morrow?

PG: Jacob Holdt’s web site is very strange indeed! What are you up to?

YF: Thinking. Have been asked by the editor of FLASH to write about my favourite photo book. ??? What is your fav?

PG: Solitude of Ravens, Fukase; Learning to Dance, JH Engstrom; Tulsa, Larry Clark; Bye Bye Photography, Daido Moriyama; In Flagrante, Chris Killip; Dogs Chasing My Car In The Desert, John Divola; The Ballard Of Sexual Dependency, Nan Goldin and of course The Americans, Robert Frank…

PG: Oh and add – Outlands, Roger Ballens; In the American West, Richard Avendon; Ray’s A Laugh, Richard Billingham…

PG: Add Immediate Family, Sally Mann and Portraits, Diane Arbus

YF: Nice choices. I might respond with the books I wish existed. The complete photographs of Lewis Carroll (including the missing albums). The Bunker. Photographs by Eva Braun of the last days of the Third Reich. She was after all a photographer’s assistant.

PG: Perhaps LC’s photographic illustration of Alice with Alice Liddle? I’m dreading Tim Burtons version. Have u seen Sarah Moons Little Red Ridinghood photo book? The Eva Braun idea is a brilliant fantasy book unless they look like Leni R’s. What would they look like?

YF: Frauline Braun was by all accounts a narcissistic dullard so I expect the photos would be in line with that. Lighting would be crude. Flash maybe with heavy shadows. I expect she would hide from or be oblivious to the horror of the situation. Photos of her birthday party, dancing etc would be chilling. The Nazi elite party goers posing in front of the camera in that context is an horrific thought. Anyway on a lighter note, I could go with the family album but maybe that’s too easy and not that interesting to others? I’m thinking of that Wallace Berman book. Apart from the fact he died about when I started to take photos, that book was a huge boost for me when putting “self-conscious” together. Big thanks to RS for putting me onto that one.

PG: Here’s a book I own and you fantasise about at one of my favourite book dealers:
http://www.dashwoodbooks.com/info.cfm?object_id=5538&inventory_id=5815&cookie1=4929706.00281&email=

YF: I have it now too – maybe my Fav now?

—

REBECCA ANN HOBBS
Artist

Edward Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip
Los Angeles, 1966

This book is significant for me as I project personal nostalgia onto it, having had the opportunity to live in Los Angeles for a couple of years. Apart from this I find it a playful work that carries telltale signs of conceptual art.

Ruscha drove his pick-up truck down a small section of the 24 mile long boulevard with a motorized camera on the tray. Eventually assembling the images, with the use of inexpensive offset printing and standard paper, to create an artist book that was intended for commercial distribution.

—

DANIEL PALMER
Academic & Writer
www.danielpalmer.com

James Agee/Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Houghton Mifflin, 1941

One among many photography books that I endlessly admire is the Walker Evans/James Agee collaboration Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 1941. Ostensibly an exposé of poverty in the rural South of Depression-era USA, but actually a crazy experiment in the genre of realism and the relationship between image and text, this book (which started life as a rejected magazine article), divided critics then as much as now, nearly seventy years after its original publication. Specifically, Agee’s writing is variously described as ‘a deeply felt examination of what it means to suffer” and ‘overheated, confessional and patronizing’. But every time I look at Evans’ unassuming photographs, positioned uncaptioned up the front, some overlooked detail or logic emerges. And while the text may be ‘overlong and indulgent’, it’s precisely this flaw that makes it so fascinating. In the end, Agee’s relentlessly self-conscious and descriptive prose offers a fascinating contrast to Evans’ cool and mute photographs – and the whole thing becomes an object-lesson in the myth of ‘photographic objectivity’.

Image: Cover of my 1960 edition

—

JOHN SAINSBURY
Sainsbury’s Books
www.sainsburysbooks.com.au

Nacio Jan Brown, Rag Theatre: The 2004 Block of Telegraph Avenue 1969-1973
Grey Star Press, Berkeley, CA, 1975

One of my favourite photography books is Nacio Jan Brown’s Rag Theatre: The 2004 Block of Telegraph Avenue 1969-1973. It was published by Grey Star Press Berkeley in 1975. Nacio photographed major anti war and protest movement activities in the San Francisco Bay area from the mid 1960s. Although his photographs have been published in books, magazines and the underground press this is his only book. This book covers the same subject as Richard Misrach acclaimed Telegraph 3A.M.; the street people of Telegraph St at a time when the protest movement was dying and the junkies, runaways and Jesus freaks were taking over. I like the way his photographs capture the people and chaos of the street in a natural and causal way.

—

EVE SAINSBURY
Sainsbury’s Books

Edward Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966

I came across this book by chance, many years ago when I worked for my Dad at Sainsbury’s Books. I was unpacking a pallet of books from America, a huge ‘pot luck’ box with hundreds of art and photography books inside. About half way through I saw the silver slipcase of this modest little book and thought it can’t be. But it was – all 27 feet of it – the book I had heard so much about but never seen, Every Building on the Sunset Strip.

Every so often I think about the word Indigenous and the notions and implications the word carries along with it. I often think about my family and how their lives are different from mine. They live in regional Western Australia, close to the land, but not in the romanticised fashion often associated with the Indigenous brand. I live in the city, in an apartment building overlooking the river and the freeway, with which I have a great affinity. My family are Indigenous Australians, Yamitji people from the Gascoyne Murchison region and Nyoongar people from the south west of Western Australia. Most of my family live in Yawuru and Gija Country in the Kimberley, where I have spent a third of my life. They often fish, sometimes at a fairly remote fishing spot called Minari and sometimes with a trolley at a less remote place called Woolworths. Like most of us, my family listen to popular music, travel on aeroplanes, use the internet, communicate by email and, most importantly, they don’t feel they are any less ‘Indigenous’ for doing so.

I think about this probably a little too often, but this internal dialogue resonates right to my core. If I am one thing, I am hybrid, a result of many generations of diaspora. I am an Indigenous man, but I am also Dutch, French, English, Scottish and Pakistani and I, too, am Australian. I am these many things, but branded as one. Like a glowing iron brand taken from the red hot coals of a day old fire, I have been marked, marketed, packaged and sold as an Indigenous man. I wear this mark with pride, but this is just one component of my identity.

I recently made a pilgrimage to Melbourne by aeroplane to the National Indigenous Photographers’ Forum. Indigenous photographers and artists had travelled there from all corners of Indigenous Australia, from Palm Island, Sydney, Perth, Darwin and remote Tjuntjuntjara, to name a few. The first of its kind, the National Indigenous Photographers’ Forum was coordinated by Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography to provide Indigenous commercial photographers and visual artists with a platform to discover more about technical and visual principles of photography. Personally, what I found most invigorating during the three days was the discussion surrounding the representation, or re-presentation, of Indigenous people within historical colonial narratives, contemporary society and the art world. Re-presentation in this context differs from representation and refers to Indigenous artists who challenge historical representation of Indigenous peoples though their creative practice.

Christian Thompson
Humpy Away from Home 2008
100 x 100 cm
c-type print
image courtesy the artist and Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi

I had the pleasure of hearing addresses by two strong, passionate blak women, Fiona Foley and Brenda L Croft.² What was interesting was that, for both women, the re-presentation of Indigenous people was a recurrent theme. As artists and curators, this has been evident in their work for some time. A pertinent example of this is The National Indigenous Art Triennial 07: Culture Warriors, curated by Croft at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA). Currently on display at the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center in Washington DC, Culture Warriors provides a comprehensive and current survey of Indigenous art practice, here and now, and was received extremely well when on display at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Artists ranged from urban dwelling Indigenous painters, photographers and video artists Richard Bell and Christian Thompson, to artists working in traditional custodial practice such as John Mawurndjul and Jean Baptiste Apuatimi. This bringing together of diverse practices successfully challenges fixed views of Indigenous art practice.

The role of the artist is in constant recreation of itself, like a snake shedding its skin. The role is ephemeral, it is fluid, changing, growing, thriving, struggling and, of all things, it is transient. Both the nature and social role of contemporary art practice is ever-evolving. Its purpose for some is expression, for others it is documentation, or radical thought. For others, it is a crucial tool used to re-present personal cultural identity and a sense of self.

The question I asked myself as I left the forum for my hotel was this: How do we re-brand ourselves in a world where our Indigenous brand has become so sinuous with the context and content of our work? Is it possible as a curator or artist to escape the ever-strengthening grip of ethnographic prescription, when it is this very prescription that the Indigenous visual arts sector relies upon to sell the Indigenous brand? If it were at all possible, why would one want to re-brand, or be freed from the brand? To bite that hand that feeds? Why would McDonalds be rid of its famous glowing golden arches?

What became apparent over the three-day forum in Melbourne was that the Indigenous brand has become generalised, like saying ’sportswear’ rather than identifying something as ‘Adidas’. Indigeneity is diverse, and its breadth of personal experience and sensibility is almost immeasurable. However, within the fine art field the alignment of the brand with a visual aesthetic has become so inseparable that those working beyond that aesthetic are in a constant fight for survival, re-presentation and for the market to diversify its understanding of the Indigenous aesthetic. You may ask what art fits this accepted aesthetic? And, if you work within the art world or are a passionate collector, then my commentary may seem ambiguous, dated and redundant. However, for a general public, this accepted aesthetic is one of dot paintings from the central desert, imbued with symbols representing movement, cultural pilgrimage and translations of ceremonial body painting.

Tony Albert
No Place 3 2009
chromogenic print
100 x 100 cm
courtesy the artist and Gallerysmith, Melbourne

This struggle is long lived, continuing over some three decades, yet there is no surrender. Artists such as Fiona Foley, Dianne Jones, Tony Albert, Vernon Ah Kee, Christian Thompson, Brenda L Croft, Gordon Hookey, Richard Bell, Jenny Fraser, Nici Cumpston and Bindi Cole continue to challenge the status quo by re-presenting their passions, their cultures, their people and most importantly themselves, as considered contemporary artists engaged in practice that redefines the notions of Indigeneity. Indigenous curators are now integral to collecting a breadth of Indigenous work and delivering exhibitions that re-present Indigenous people in a self-empowered manner. These curators, along with a growing group of artists working in diverse practices, are at the forefront of this discussion, redefining publicly accepted understandings to reflect the diversity of Australian Indigenous life and, in a larger conversation, human life - after all, we are all just human.

Looking closely at the structures within both commercial and public art institutions it seems that the Indigenous brand is both the angel and the devil. Institutions have, in the past three to four decades, focused on developing Indigenous collections and endless exhibitions advocating for Indigenous artists and communities. But is it this advocacy in the most public of arenas that has predetermined the public conception of the Indigenous brand and established the accepted and valued Indigenous aesthetic? There is no question that traditional contemporary Indigenous art practice, informed by ancestral lore, language, ceremony and story, has produced some of the most divine and visually succulent works of art to come out of Australia, both in the past and in the here and now. The commercial and institutional commitment to this aspect of Indigenous art has indeed changed the way the world perceives Indigenous society, but at what cost?

With such investment and emphasis on custodial practice, the associated notions of traditional life rich with language, cultural knowledge and custom have somehow become transferable to all Indigenous artists, working in all mediums and thematic contexts. Artists working in photo media, video, and performance cannot escape the romantic notions of traditional custodial practice, and works produced by an Indigenous artist are somehow isolated within the Indigenous brand, compared to the associated aesthetic, and then often refuted in the minds of many. For some artists this is not a problem and actually provides inspiration for content working with a modality of institutional critique, as seen in the Aboriginal Dot Painting series 2001 by Indigenous photographer Dianne Jones. In these works Jones uses the text ‘dot, dot, dot…’ in simple and highly graphic works which investigate the preconceived ideas around Indigenous art and its accepted aesthetic.

For artists engaging in the critical discourse of the global environment, whose work is informed, researched and seeking dynamic academic engagement with issues surrounding global race politics, oppression and accepted European history, such romantic notions of Indigeneity are immobilising, generic and pre-determined stereotypes of the colonial world.

Fiona Foley
Wild times #2 2001
type C photograph
76 x 112 cm
courtesy the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne

In Fiona Foley’s presentation at the National Indigenous Photographers’ Forum, she made the following commentary, which has been a catalyst for this article.

I’d like to reflect on the series, Wild Times Call, created in the United States during 2001, and the response to the work in Australia. Melbourne art critic Robert Nelson made the observation about the Seminole men in the photographs, attired in their regalia, standing on their reservation in Tampa, Florida.

In The Age, Nelson wrote:

Her photographs are monumental and melancholy, depicting the artist among her people, the largely massacred and displaced Badtjala, formerly of Fraser Island. She often appears on her own, wrapped up in textiles of heavy weave or coarse loom-state pattern, looking over an Australian landscape with heroic sadness.

The same article also contained the word primitive no less than thirteen times. In an international context, I thought about white Australia’s attitudes towards Indigenous peoples the world over. Did Robert Nelson think we – Indigenous folk – all look the same? What was I to make of the language used in this review? Is there a fixed type of thinking about race in Australia? Perhaps a lazy methodology in his reporting, or was I really a 21st century primitive at work?³

How is it possible for an artist to re-define the terms in which their work is read, critiqued, interpreted and dissected? If we have come to a juncture where the interpretation of Indigenous artwork has become, let’s say, more about generalised ethnographic and narrative-driven assumptions than informed research, or even real human communication, I think we have to honestly accept that change is needed at all levels, don’t you?

There is nothing particularly new about my commentary within this conversation, and many before me have championed the cause with conviction, determination and passion. For that, I am eternally grateful. Engagement in ongoing debate and critical discourse surrounding the re-presentation of Indigenous art, an evolving and diverse field, is imperative to the creation of challenging, meaningful, confrontational and informed contemporary Indigenous art practice. Multiple sub-cultures lie within all cultures and, within commodity culture, it is inevitable that creative works will fall within brands. But brands must diversify and change in form as shifts in the branded product appear. The most successful brands are those that are responsive to contemporary culture and all of its sub-cultures.

Dianne Jones
Aboriginal dot painting series #4 2001
inkjet on photo paper
60 x 60 cm
Image courtesy the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne

As an emerging artist working predominantly with digital media, the Indigenous brand has been instrumental in the early successes of my art practice, yet now it lingers on, premeditating the way in which society will forever read my work. For many, this is a battle that they are willing to fight. Some before me have chosen to work as artists outside the Indigenous brand and their work is now highly valued within the global visual arts environment. From my perspective, I am still analysing the enthusiastic response to my work, and comparing the response to my current sales history, through no fault of my representative gallery. 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.⁴ Interesting? Maybe. Personally rewarding? Possibly. But probably not the right brand.

Indigenous Australia as a term conjures romanticised images of traditional custodial life and the passing of sacred knowledge, of life on the land, of a rich cultural understanding. But does it conjure an image of a fair-skinned working professional, living in urban Country, who relies on commodity to such a degree that left in the hot arid landscape of Australia for a day or so would burn, blister and probably perish?5 I am Indigenous, I have no traditional language, other than Aboriginal English, nor does my father or my grandmother. Come to think of it, I speak more Dutch and Spanish than any traditional Indigenous language. My Indigenous custom has been passed, for at least three generations, in English.

To me, what it is to be Indigenous is a deeply personal connection I have to myself, my living family, my ancestors and this land we call Australia. It is a feeling that is always present in my body. It is a sense of ‘knowing’ and understanding. And at the forefront of my Aboriginality is a completely overwhelming sense of responsibility. This is what it means for me to be Indigenous. Indigenous is not a brand, not a marketing tool, not a sales pitch, but a way of life and an indescribable privilege. It is also a privilege that Indigenous people are now sharing their understandings of the world and their unique sensibility and connection with their Country through art. For countrymen and women, living in urban regional and remote Australia, from all walks of like, culture is omnipresent.

Earlier I commented on the nature of the artist, and now I would like to reflect. Like the artist, Indigenous identity and culture is transient and evolving, it is dynamic, not static and it is of the highest importance that our understandings and perceptions of Indigenous art and culture are aligned with contemporary culture, instead of keeping it shackled to the past.

¹ Buzzin’ Fly at Plastic People, London, July 24 2009. Posted to YouTube August 12, 2009.
Episode 02 [Video file]. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XigDPbD1oXg&feature=channel

² Blak: a term first attributed to Destiny Deacon and used in her work Blak Lik Mi 1991. The term Blak is a reclaimed re-presentation of the term black or blacks, which was commonly used in a pejorative context. See Deacon in H Perkins, Half Light: Portraits from Black Australia, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2008, 66.

³ Fiona Foley, ‘Erasure’, paper presented at National Indigenous Photographers’ Forum, Melbourne, 12 October 2009.

⁴ Delfts Blauw (Blue Delft) describes collectable and recognisable blue and white pottery made in Delfts, Netherlands from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

5 Country is a term which describes a place in which an individual or group of people feel a custodial connection. This place of important cultural significance can be where people or their family have been born or raised, but also a place which has held significance within family lineage. Country in this context also refers to a place to which an individual feels a strong and deeply personal affinity. An understanding of one’s Country describes an intimate relationship between person and place.

Ricky Maynard
Vansittart Island, Bass Strait, Tasmania 2005
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

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.

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.