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 × 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 × 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 × 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 × 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.

:::

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 × 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 × 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 × 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 × 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 × 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 × 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.

Sue Ford
Self-Portrait 1969
gelatin silver photograph
courtesy the Estate of Sue Ford and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

The art world lost a significant and much admired member of its community with the recent death of Sue Ford. Ford had a long and outstanding career as a photographer and filmmaker and was an active and engaged member of the arts community. She was a pioneer of Australian photography and was one of this country’s few women art photographers when she began her practice in the 1960s.

Ford’s art was dominated by her interest in time: in how it changes us; in how it propels life; in how the past is in the present and even in our futures. It seems appropriate, therefore, that she had a life-long love affair with photography because it is a medium intimately connected with time. But the camera also suited her perfectly in other ways too. For Ford, it was a natural, spontaneous, unprecious device that was an adjunct to her art and her life. It suited her open and pragmatic nature and, in her practiced hands, could be incisive, accessible, and real. Ford wasn’t a photographer alone: she also did significant work in film and video (she was a founding member of the Reel Women film collective in 1980 for instance); she also painted, drew and made books. She chose whatever medium was necessary to express her ideas but photography remained a constant.

Sue Ford
Robin & Jenny 1969–1982
from the Time series 1962–1974
gelatin silver photographs
courtesy the Estate of Sue Ford and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

Sue Ford
Ross 1964; Ross 1974
from the Time series 1962–1974
gelatin silver photographs
courtesy the Estate of Sue Ford and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

One of Ford’s great early contributions to the medium was her remarkable Time series 1974. In many ways it is a deceptively straightforward but exceptional body of work. Ford took portraits of various people in 1964. They are direct images with the men and women looking straight to camera. Ten years later she photographed the same people again. When shown together, the paired portraits chart the changes brought about by age and life experiences. She returned to this theme several times in differing photographic series and also produced two films. The first, in 1975, was Faces and she revisited the subject (assisted by her son, Ben) in Faces 1976-1996.

Ford’s work was often based on collaboration. She thrived as part of communities and she was energised and supported by creative interchange. Part of this way of working and living was no doubt influenced by her involvement in the early women’s art movement in the 1970s and her photographs were often included in feminist publications including Lip. Helen Ennis, who, in 1995, mounted a survey of Ford’s work at Monash University Gallery, has written of how important feminism was to her art and its strategies of giving primacy and validity to the everyday facts of women’s lives strongly impacted on her.

This interest is clearly apparent in a book she published called A Sixtieth of a Second: Portraits of Women 1961-1981. Ford had gone back through her archive of negatives and ‘with incredulous eyes’ she found that they told an important story of women’s lives. The photographs are as much about Ford’s own journey as the hopes and dreams of a generation of Australian women. Some of these moving, poignant and often funny images were exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1982 (as The Photobook of Women), and the National Gallery of Victoria held an exhibition of them in 1988.

Sue Ford
Discussions Between Bob Hawke and Galarrwuy Yunupingu
(Galwarrway is painted with his father’s body design from the Gumatj clan) 1988
from the Treaty Meeting at Barunga, NT series 1988
gelatin silver photograph
courtesy the Estate of Sue Ford and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

The 1980s were a productive time for Ford. She became fascinated by history, in particular white cultural history and identity. Although intellectually based, Ford’s approach was certainly not dry and academic – her work was based on actual experiences. In 1988 she went to Bathurst Island to work with Tiwi women, to teach them photography and, ultimately, help them mount an exhibition. It was an important trip for her and she later wrote that she experienced ‘the Australian landscape in a totally new way. During the hunting and bush education trips that the women took me on, the landscape became alive with their history and meaning’. She also went to the Barunga Festival which was an annual gathering of indigenous people. She photographed meetings between the then Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Galarrwuy Yunupingu regarding a Treaty. It was an important event and the photographs she took are now part of Australian visual and political history.

Ford had a fluid approach to her art practice – she never persisted in one style of working if it no longer served her ideas. Around this time, she began to move out of the documentary way of working and instead used the new technologies of digital processes such as laser jet printing. She continued to reflect on the colonial experience and many of her highly innovative images were shown in the exhibition Time Surfaces at the NGV in 1994.

Sue Ford
Somewhere in France: 1917 1999 (detail)
digital print
courtesy the Estate of Sue Ford and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

Five years later Ford created a major series for the prestigious Clemenger Award that was the most personal of her inquiries into Australian identity. Titled Somewhere in France: 1917 it was inspired by the war journals of her grandfather Jim Keating who served in the First World War. Ford’s images featured large prints of classical busts – great stony monoliths – on which she overlayed some of her grandfather’s powerful diary entries. It is a complex and often moving meditation on war and nationhood.

Ford always had a fascination with time but hers was not the rather depressing Western linear view of life as having a beginning, middle and end. Instead she saw the past informing the present in an active way and life as a continuum that was constantly evolving. It is very apt, then, that some of the last photographs she made (on commission for the Rupert Bunny Foundation at the City of Port Philip) returned to her childhood. They drew on her memories of living on Acland Street as a young girl for a few years from 1945. As with much of Ford’s work they were both personal but also universal in their grasp on what it is to be a child. When I saw them – only a few months ago – I was struck by how very alive they were.

It is hard to think that relatively soon after I saw these photographs, Sue Ford was gone. She undoubtedly went too soon. I know from talking to her family that she had many art projects and ideas that she wanted to realise. She had recently been awarded a new work grant from the Australia Council and was keen to start on a semi-documentary video and photography project revolving around her relative Edward Munday who came on the First Fleet. She was also actively discussing an exhibition with the Monash Gallery of Art (which will now take place in 2011).

Sue Ford
Self-Portrait 2004
courtesy the Estate of Sue Ford and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

It is painful to think that Ford will not be here to realise her plans but it is some consolation to know that her work will remain a powerful on-going testament to her ideas and her distinctive presence. We are pleased to have many of her photographs in our permanent collection at the NGV, as indeed do other major public galleries and these works will continue to take a place on our walls and in our publications in perpetuity. It is a legacy of which she should be proud and which her much loved children, Ben and Emma, her family and her many friends and colleagues certainly are.

I am impressed with the growth of the Biennale from its origins as the Daylesford Foto Biennales of 2005 and 2007 and its new relationship with Ballarat, as I am all to familiar with the difficulties that are inherent in mounting visual arts events in regional areas, where venues for art are difficult to locate, or difficult to stage such events in. This Biennale found some really interesting places to stage the works, including a train station parcel loft, the mining exchange and knitting mills. Some locations were more successful than others, but all were the result of a huge effort. Staging a festival based entirely of visual arts is also a difficult thing to fund. With no door costs or ticket sales to cover overheads, funding support, sponsorships, volunteers and in kind assistance are all needed on a large scale. Credit is therefore due to the organisers and partners who have pulled this event together.

The Biennale featured a diverse mix of photographic work across a core and fringe exhibition program, ranging from the fashion photography of Bruno Benini to pin hole photography installations. In general, the works that captivated me were those that showed sensitivity to their subject and an experimental approach to the photographic medium. In this regard, I found Konrad Winkler’s work most striking in its sensitive representation of a subject we are all likely to encounter, the loss of a beloved partner or family member.

Winkler’s suite of works titled Leila: Losing Frank allows the viewer to empathise with Leila as she undergoes life transformations following the loss of her husband. Winkler handles the fragility of his subject matter and its emotional content well, focusing not on moments of crisis, but quiet moments of loss experienced over time. The work uses odd angles, abstract foregrounding and varied focal techniques to record Leila’s five-year journey with a beautiful and articulate sensitivity.

Julie Millowick
Water Flows Down the Fryers Creek for the First Time in Ten Years 2007
digitally stitched panorama on archival silver rag paper
100 × 600 cm
courtesy the artist

Julie Millowick has a long history as a photojournalist who has recorded local people and places. The premise of her show Close to Home at the Gold Museum, Ballarat is that one doesn’t have to look far to find a subject. This has allowed her, over several years, to create an archive of the community of Fryerstown, where people have built their lives on the landscape relics left after the Victorian gold rush. (I declare a close relationship to this subject as a resident of Fryerstown). I was pleased to see this work alongside Millowick’s recent work depicting the scrubby landscape of the area in moments of transformation. Both beautiful and desolate, when the mist comes or the water fills the empty creek, this landscape takes on ethereal qualities. It’s these moments that Millowick has captured, digitally knitting together a number of frames to create photographic panoramas.

A fantastic surprise in the strangest of places was the work of third year photography student Amina Perona. I especially made my way into the downstairs lobby of the Forest Resort in Creswick to see Fact or Fiction?, a group exhibition of work by Bendigo La Trobe University photography students, as the work of emerging artists can often be as stimulating as that of the professionals. At the time of my visit, the tension of the Grand Final last quarter was palpable upstairs in the bar, but down in the lobby the mood was entirely different. It was here I encountered Perona’s humorous suite of works titled The Lost Vermeers, which make a direct correlation between his paintings and contemporary culture. Perona’s appropriation is direct but astute.

Bindi Cole
Wild Foxy 2008
pigment print on rag paper
120 × 90 cm
courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan

Unexpected Who We Are was a group exhibition at Kirribit Gallery in Ballarat, which featured a range of works exploring representations of indigenous female identity. Unfortunately I could not view the entire exhibition, as the venue had closed at the time of my visit, but I look forward to seeing more work from Dianne Jones, Bindi Cole and Gayle Maddigan. In contrast, the work of Wayne Quilliam at The Mining Exchange in Ballarat was unfortunately a very clichéd representation of female identity and representations of nature that was very commercial in appearance. His large inclusion in the core program and Biennale catalogue and the programming of the Kirribit’s exhibition as a fringe event was, in my opinion, a shame.

If St Kilda are still trying to nail the Grand Final the next time the Biennale is on I will make sure I go the following week. If you are not a footy fan, be sure to take your time and plot a lovely course. Stop at the Trentham Bakery, Anderson Mill, the Smeaton pub and other interesting venues. And be sure to look at the whole Biennale catalogue as the exhibitions of note are not always those of the international artists or in the core program, they are often the works of artists who simply have a sharp notion of the possibilities of the medium and an affinity with their subject.

Ballarat International Foto Biennale
4 September – 4 October 2009
Various venues in Ballarat and Central Victoria

Simryn Gill
A small town at the turn of the century #5 1999–2000
type C photograph
91.5 × 91.5 cm
courtesy the artist and BREENSPACE, Sydney

Simryn Gill: Inland is the first survey of Gill’s photography and presents the second in CCP’s biennial series of mid-career surveys. While photography forms a significant and wondrous part of her practice, Gill does not consider herself a photographer. In this email interview, she speaks with exhibition curator Naomi Cass, who begins by asking Gill about her new series Inland 2009, commissioned by CCP for this exhibition.

At the centre of CCP is a small gallery housing your series Inland 2009. Gallery 4 is largely empty except for a rather ordinary office table and stools. The walls are bare. On the table are 162 prints, 13 × 13 cm each in several piles, and a few pairs of white gloves, inviting visitors to sit down, put the gloves on and explore the prints. Within each pile are three types of images: cibachrome photographs of interiors; black and white landscape photographs and a third group of studio cibachromes. Can you describe what the three different groups of photographs are and why they are taken in these different modes?

The photos were taken during a journey through New South Wales and South Australia. When I asked people if I could photograph their homes, I described what I was doing as ‘trying to photograph the interior through interiors’. So perhaps the pictures of the insides of homes and the pictures of the out-there, the landscape, if you like, are both versions of interiors. The stones were also collected during the trip. And then they became part of the picture of the interior that we had made. Yet another version. But these three versions, to become a set, needed to exist in the same form, on the same plane. Inevitably the stones had to meet the other two and be photographed to be included as equals: homes, wilderness, farmland, clouds, road, stones, rocks, fossils, glass shards, shells. Of course it’s an absurd proposition – it could be the other way around – for the homes, the landscape places, the clouds, to match, to meet the form of the stones and shards, as a real, physical, set of collected ‘objects’.

Regarding the choice of colour and black and white film: no reason, really, that I can offer. I think I wanted to see how the bush would translate into black and white. It’s so colourful.

Simryn Gill
from Inland 2009
cibachrome and black and white photographs
13 × 13 cm each
courtesy the artist and BREENSPACE, Sydney
installation photograph by Jenni Carter

There is something humble about this installation. It is really quite surprising given the preciousness attributed to photographs within an exhibition context. Indeed, visitors to the survey walk through, or past, six major bodies of work variously and precisely installed in grids, or restrained in some way by their framing or installation, before reaching Inland. All bets are off in Gallery 4, our bodily relationship to the photograph is changed. This simple gesture is more akin to viewing vernacular or family photographs. Can you comment on the active relationship the viewer has with this work?

When I was looking at initial test prints of the photos, picking them up, putting them down, shuffling, arranging, I realised that that was how I wanted them to be seen, with that same physical proximity, the same access, and also that tenderness. I had no idea if people would be responsive to such an offering, if they would want to take the time to look in this way. But it felt like the right way to show them.

Inland does have filial relationship with earlier series including Dalam 2001 in Gallery 3 and A small town at the turn of the century 1999–2000, one of which is exhibited in Gallery 1. While different in many ways, in both series the camera is gathering, collecting for a purpose and yet you are not a documentary photographer. Can you comment?

Yes, the camera in these works is gathering, but I am not sure that the viewfinder is collecting for a purpose so much as simply looking. Like people-watching when one is sitting in a crowded place with a lot of time on one’s hands, such as an airport lounge, or a tourist place. The looking takes on a kind of absent-minded, day-dreamy search for order, but not with a purpose to explain or describe.

Simryn Gill
from Dalam 2001
type C photograph
23.5 × 23.5 cm
courtesy the artist and BREENSPACE, Sydney

You came to photography amidst a wide practice of collecting, tearing, arranging, casting, wrapping, rubbing and engraving, a practice that is at once hand made and yet highly intellectual. On the surface, photography is very different from these activities in being once removed, technical and often a practice remote from engagement with subject or materials, particularly considering digital technologies. Can you say something about what interests you in making photographs? And, by the way, do you use a digital camera?

My first photo was a commission for artist pages in Art & Text. I made a banana skin wig for a friend in Singapore, a blonde wig, which, even if the photo did not tell you this, one knew would rot and turn black in a few days. Like Cinderella’s dress, waiting to turn into a pumpkin at midnight. I loved being able to work with this wet, icky material, in the way that I was used to, but also to be able fix it in a photo, in a way that implies the rot ahead. This and other early works were photographed for me. But when I started doing it for myself, I became entranced by how film has its own materiality too, like the banana skins. Films have their peculiarities: I loved the formal struggles of making a film do things against its grain, as it were. I loved that old idea of how film literally captures time and light inside itself. So perhaps I approach film as a material. And film taught me to approach time as a material.

I haven’t used a digital camera. I really like the constraints of film. The slowness of setting up. The focus, concentration, looking, as one may only have a few frames to do the job at hand. I love the freedom of not being able to check the results immediately, in the middle of working, so that one can, and must, lose oneself in the present actions and choices and trust one’s judgements. I am attracted to the discipline that the limitations of film demands.

Simryn Gill
from Vegetation 1999
silver gelatin photograph
26.5 × 26.5 cm
courtesy the artist and BREENSPACE, Sydney

A survey of your photographic work in a media specific photography gallery was probably not something you were seeking. Has bringing work together from your earliest photographic series, Forest 1996–8 to the present, and including your only moving image work, Vessel 2004 placed an unnecessary emphasis on photomedia in your work?

Well, I was somewhat uncomfortable about the idea. And I 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.

I think medium is beside the point. I’m quite sure I do the same thing in different materials. I’m not interested in iconic images, but in how we are informed through detail.

Simryn Gill
from Forest 1996–1998
silver gelatin photograph
120 × 95 cm
courtesy the artist and BREENSPACE, Sydney

In writing about a series not included in Inland, the series May 2006, you made a visceral analogy between the vigilant attention you give to detail in making a photograph and the vigilant attention an immigrant must pay to their new environment.¹ In many respects, much of the work exhibited in Inland is paying attention to traces of an individual or a community within a particular environment or place. I am thinking of Forest, Rampant and Vegetation 1999, Dalam, Power Station 2004 and Inland 2009. Do you think photography has a heightened ability to focus our attention on an issue, or is the medium overburdened by its indexical relationship to the real world?

Wow, this is such a big question! I am not sure that these two disqualify each other. And I can talk about how I think I use photography, in that very ‘attentive to detail’ way, but not attentive to issue. Is looking at detail an example of indexical relationship? I don’t know. A picture is just that. Its like a glimpse which is frozen and then can be extrapolated and theorised and used to prove all kinds of real things – like the existence of WMDs in Colin Powel’s hands or, in John Howard’s hands, some photos of children in the sea in life jackets as proof that some ‘barbaric’ people wanting to come to Australia threw their children into the ocean to get sympathy. Or that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, as shown in photographs by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, those two young English girls who convinced ‘the best minds’ of the time that their elaborate hoax was real. All indexical relationships. To something.

Simryn Gill: Inland (9 October – 13 December, 2009) is supported by the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council and with financial assistance from Melbourne International Arts Festival. Catalogue available. Selections from Simryn Gill: Inland will tour to five regional Victorian venues in 2010 and 2011 with NETS Victoria and support from Melbourne International Arts Festival. For touring locations and dates see www.ccp.org.au.

¹ Simryn Gill, ‘May 2006’, Off the Edge, Merdeka 50 years issue no. 33, September 2007, p87.

John Joseph Dwyer
Untitled (Horseshoe Battery 100 stamp Oct-903, GMM 31) 1903
courtesy the Western Australian Museum, GM01031

Sometime during October 1903 a tall, red headed photographer with an Anglo Celtic complexion not at all suited to the desert sun, set up his camera in the crushing mill of the Golden Horseshoe Gold Mine in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. In the stilled quiet of this hot industrial shed John Joseph Dwyer photographed the mine’s battery.

Using the building and the battery head, Dwyer has composed a dense graphic image of architectural and mechanical elements. These are alternatively thin and robust, circular and rectangular, timber and steel, rough hewed and finely machined, all precisely arranged in the photographic frame. Two elaborate brass light fixtures hang in the space, incongruous in detail and intricacy. Light reflects off the dark water in box channels that run down the side of the shed. The repetition of these elements, their efficient industrial organisation and lack of scale are exploited by Dwyer’s camera and its capacity to reproduce a convincing representation of perspective. The exposure is quick. Light reflects crisply off the water, the surface of which is fixed in an instant, but the openings in the shed are overexposed. Blurred light eats into the image, revealing the strength of the light outside in contrast to the dark interior.

The graphic density of the photograph is further complicated by its surface texture and imperfections. These are, in part, due to the technical challenges and fragility of the dry plate process. They are also traces of an archival palimpsest that the image has accumulated. Textual evidence of this process is found on the image, scratched precisely into the dark, or overexposed in the blurred light at the edge of the timber walkway. These traces mark the photograph as a commercial product that then shifts from studio to public archive. The photographer’s notes are joined by a museum accession number and notations made by several hands on the emulsion side of the glass plate that are now seen in reverse. Cracks in the glass plate arc across the image, the corner is shattered, and the sharp line of these breaks captures light, casting crisp shadows.

The vanishing point in this photograph is not contained by the shed’s thin tin wall but projects out into a terrain that Dwyer also repeatedly re-imagined. This landscape was exploited for its picturesque rather than its formal potential. Despite the cliché of ‘the Golden Mile’, the richest mile of gold in the world was actually a landscape of waste, pictorialised by Dwyer into a terrain that, in its disordered state, marks the triumph of the industrial over the natural, where a low line of desert hills becomes a new topography of poppet heads, chimneys and slime dams. In this industrial picturesque, changes to the environment are documented by the camera; before and after photographs show the progress of mines and men pose before great tailing dumps or large artificial underground caverns.

The image that you are looking at on this web page arrives here through a convoluted pathway. What you are viewing is the web quality version of a high resolution scan of a photographic print. This print was scanned to produce large, exhibition quality images. Its negative has been lost or stolen. This negative was a contact negative made to preserve the images as the sulphuric air of Kalgoorlie dissolved the emulsion on Dwyer’s original glass plates. These recent transformations of the format of the image – from negative to negative to positive, glass plate to contact print to digital scan, from light held by silver salts to light captured by a sensor and converted into a binary code of zeros and ones – seem entirely appropriate when looking at the Dwyer ‘collection’. He regularly rephotographed the work of others, cropping out their signatures and imposing his own studio stamp or watermarks. His images have also been appropriated, reproduced repeatedly without credit. They often become the standard representation of aspects of life in Kalgoorlie, reappearing decades later in publications such as tourist brochures. He sold his studio, equipment and plates in 1917, which subsequently changed hands several times again before being institutionalised in the State Library of Western Australia and the Western Australian Museum. In Kalgoorlie, Dwyer’s photographs have become the anonymous historic background to contemporary life in a place that locates itself simultaneously in its ‘golden past’ as well as its slightly less heroic present. They hang alongside the grand staircases of nineteenth century hotels and on the walls of fast food joints.

These are reasons why one might risk returning to the potentially hazardous terrain of this archive. In this instance, it is to an image that teeters on the edge of abstraction, one that challenges its status as merely industrial documentation. The image is fixed in its precise perspectival order, fragile as physical object and fluid in its contexts. These processes and traces are marked on its surface, written in darkness.

Len Lye
Colour Flight 1938 (film still)
courtesy the Len Lye Foundation, Govett Brewster Art Gallery
and New Zealand Film Archive

Back in 2002, I saw a wonderful Len Lye show at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). It was not a vast exhibition, but rather a well-selected showcase of a few different facets in the extraordinarily prolific œuvre of this protean, New Zealand-born artist (1901-1980). There were samples of his photographic works, his kinetic sculpture, and a small room set aside for continuous screening of a selection of his film works.

16mm Projection of Rainbow Dance at ACMI Len Lye exhibition 2009
installation view Mark Ashkanasy
courtesy the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI)

One of these films has never left me. N. or N.W. 1937 is one of several short pieces Lye was commissioned to make for the UK postal service. Lye, who never lost any opportunity for formal, technological or lyrical experimentation, merrily played with many techniques in these works: animation, graphic design (printed words and overlaid shapes) in motion, the rhythmic fusion of image and music (often an eclectic mix of popular musical styles), and the vibrant exploration of colour. All this we know from Lye’s more famous films, such as A Colour Box 1935 and Swinging the Lambeth Walk 1939. But N. or N.W. tackles something different and rare in Lye’s career: narrative. And its ‘narration’ (in the fullest sense) is wonderfully scattershot: all the codes of character exchange, cross-cutting, scene-setting and so forth are exposed as Lye tries to briskly whip them into shape and into service. In fact, the piece is, today, strikingly modern: a forerunner, for instance, to Jean-Luc Godard’s dazzling fantasia on modern communications systems for France Telecom in the short video Puissance de la parole 1988 – for Godard, as for Lye, the media of ‘connection’ inspire a barrage of cinematic disconnection.

Len Lye
Rainbow Dance 1936 (film still)
courtesy the Len Lye Foundation, Govett Brewster Art Gallery
and New Zealand Film Archive

Perhaps Lye himself, at the time and ever after, regarded N. or N.W. as something of a failed experiment. Posterity has (hélas!) tended to treat it that way, too. Nonetheless, the film seems today like a tantalising ‘path not taken’ in his career.

Seven years after the Monash experience comes the ACMI spectacular, an exhaustive and exhausting survey show drawn (as all Lye events great and small are) from the archives held by the Len Lye Foundation in New Zealand. And, for me, a curious detail: N. or N.W. is overlooked. It’s a small but emblematic omission: what this film prophesised of a certain avant-garde style of narrative tinkering is glossed over for the sake of, on the one hand, a certain ‘fine art’ vision of Lye – as the marriage of abstraction and technics, magic and science, expressionism and information-pedagogy – and, on the other hand, a very clean, distinct, chronological-biographical lay-out of Lye’s achievement. In other words, a very conventional narrative account. It’s a terrific show for what it imparts and represents, but not such a great enactment or performance of the mind and matter of Lye, of the kind we might have dreamt.

Grass 1961 at ACMI Len Lye exhibition 2009
installation view Mark Ashkanasy
courtesy the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI)

Lye’s work was a remarkable example of unity in diversity. All his various researches and experiments led back to his bedrock interests in the ‘engineering’ of states of bliss, happiness, ecstasy and, in this, he was surprisingly close to Sergei Eisenstein. Every blast of light, colour and sound in Lye, in whatever medium (from batik to film, via painting and doodling), led back to this conceptual matrix of sense-experience heading ultimately (he hoped) for a better, more joyous world. The vision is infectious, and few could leave this exhibition without a suitably engineered smile tingling throughout their entire body – especially after experiencing the kinetic sculptures which were the most vital and successful part of the exhibition (assembled crowds, including many children, were even spontaneously applauding them as they performed their spectacular and noisy ‘turns’!).

Len Lye on the set of Fountain Hope 1959
courtesy of Len Lye Foundation, Govett Brewster Art Gallery

At the Time Performance Transcendence conference held in October, Monash Art and Design lecturer Vince Dziekan gave an illuminating presentation about the ACMI Lye exhibition in the context of current curatorial practice – and specifically about the ‘refiguring’ of Lye as, in a certain sense, a key prophet of digital media culture. But to carry through with the full weight of this conviction would have required a more full-blooded style of curatorial gesture: less ‘museological’ and more dramatic, mixing the works up and connecting them in relation to their motifs and intensities, rather than neat divisions of medium, genre or mode. The ghost of Lye, like an eternal grinning Cheshire cat, is still tempting and daring us to do him justice.

Len Lye: An Artist in Perpetual Motion
Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne
16 July – 11 October 2009

Jane Burton
The Royal Derwent Hospital Suite 4 1997
type C photograph
75 × 75 cm
courtesy the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

Survey exhibitions have the effect of revealing the persistent currents in an artist’s body of work as much as they demonstrate the radical changes and nuanced shifts that give personality to an established practice. The Glen Eira City Council Gallery’s Eye of the Beholder, an exhibition of Jane Burton’s photographs taken over the last two decades and gathered together by curator Diane Soumilas, is no exception. This exhibition has been vaunted as a celebration of Burton’s ongoing exploration of sensuality and female sexuality, her contribution to the imagining of rural Australian landscapes as sublime and her debt to cinematic – in particular noir – and Australian Gothic literary and visual traditions.¹ But Eye of the Beholder is, above all, a manifestation of Burton’s pervasive recourse to repeat images and ideas. 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. Despite the important changes that can be observed in Burton’s twenty-year practice, through all the apparent shifts in focus and the experimentations with new technology, collected together her photographs seem to inhabit their own psychic topography and reveal a compulsion to return to specific emotional terrain.

Jane Burton
Cul-de-Sac 8 2000
type C photograph
120 × 120 cm
courtesy the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

This compulsion has been, and continues to be, an abundantly productive one. And Soumilas’ exhibition provides ample opportunities to observe the fertile energies of repetition, drawing together a comprehensive range of Burton’s photographs from her art-school days in 1989, through her principally analogue-based practice to her early experiments with Photoshop begun with the Cul-de-Sac series from 2000, right through to her most recent series, Ivy 2009.

Two principal forms of repetition recur in Eye of the Beholder. Each allows for multiple (repeated) variations within a series and for conversations to emerge between otherwise temporally distant and, at least superficially, distinct photographs. Firstly, there are photographs that gain potency in combination with others. For instance, Available Light 5 and Available Light 9 2003, The Fall 1 and The Fall 14 2004, along with Parking Stations No. 1 and No. 2 1998, repeat the female form. Seen together, they offer a powerful comment upon some of the fixed sexual roles available to women. In this, Burton’s work aligns itself with that of other women photographers such as Cindy Sherman, whose iconic Film Stills similarly, and repetitively, re-present the female figure in the various, but always constrained, personalities she has been allowed to assume in cinema.

Jane Burton
Badlands 4 2001
type C photograph
110 × 110 cm
courtesy the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

But there are also, from my point of view more interesting photographs that stage their own, inherent repetitions: Burton’s mirrored women in The Sweetest Path 10 1999 and The Other Side 2 2002-3; her congenitally twinned objects – Telstra phone booths in The Other Side 11 2002-3 and the furnishings of clinical interiors in The Royal Derwent Hospital series 1997; and the buildings, often located in rural landscapes, that appear to withhold a precious echo of their own, indeed, of themselves. This is seen in the eerily deserted, near-symmetrical dwellings of Cul-de-Sac 8 2000, Badlands 1 2001, Motherland 3 2008 and also in Ivy 1 2009, in which each half of an uncannily symmetrical house exactly mirrors the other, with only a stray cloud to the right of its pitched roof giving a moment’s relief to this unnatural equilibrium. Again, natural landscapes tender their own echo in the sundered cliffs of Cul-de-Sac 6 2000, the tree-top that finds its reflection in the exposed knot of its own roots in Badlands 4 2001 and in a small girl, white against the dark withered earth – Miranda, re-imagined, harkening to the siren song of Hanging Rock – who answers the form of another tree in Motherland 8 2008. I could go on.

Jane Burton
Motherland 8 2008
type C photograph
75 × 75 cm
courtesy the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

It is these interior echoes, the ones that resound within the frame of the photographic image, that most successfully capture the uncanny quality present in the whole of Burton’s body of work. They present the familiar and return the (also familiar) repressed. They picture the domestic and disclose its desolation. Burton’s repeated staging of these imaginative compositions can be viewed as a repetitive acting-out that, if we believe Freud, is in turn a form of remembering.² During a visit to Eye of the Beholder, it became for me a form of remembering that in its turn grew into a kind of itinerary as I retraced my steps, returning to earlier photographs as I found, again and again, their echo elsewhere.

Jane Burton
Eye of the Beholder – Survey Exhibition
24 September – 18 October 2009
Glen Eira City Gallery, Melbourne

¹ See Diane Soumilas, ‘Private Encounters’ and Helen McDonald, ‘Inhabiting Illusions’ in Jane Burton: Eye of the Beholder, Glen Eira City Council, Caulfield South, 2009.
² See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Uncanny, Penguin Books, London, 2003; ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’ and ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, both in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, Penguin Books, London, 2003.

Tacita Dean
Kodak 2006 (still)
16mm colour and b/w film, optical sound
44 mins
courtesy the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris

Found Obsolescence 2006 is a small, framed work by Berlin based artist Tacita Dean, currently on display in her survey exhibition at ACCA in Melbourne. The work is an objet trouvé, a short length of 16mm film negative. Without the aid of projector or light, the film seems solid, opaque. In a way, this thin, non-descript, pinky-brown strip with a row of small sprocket holes puncturing its lower edge is quite mute.

For Tacita Dean, this found object is significant. As its title suggests, it is a specimen of a medium that she has much passion for, and which is becoming increasingly difficult to come by. Nearby, in a darkened room, her 44 minute film Kodak 2006 documents the process of film production at the Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, France. The work is a film about film, and is also a memorial. Like many around the world, the factory has stopped producing film, leaving Dean to record x-ray film going through its production cycle.

The found and the obsolete are central to Dean’s practice, her love for the analogue boundless. Of digital, she has said in interview, ‘It just doesn’t interest me. No, it’s more profound that that. There’ll be a point probably very soon where that’ll be the only thing to shoot on, and I will be faced with a dilemma as to whether to abandon the filmmaking part of my work, or to film on digital.’¹ I’ve heard some photographers say this, too, with palpable sadness. It’s also a sentiment that has been expressed more broadly as the shrinking stocks of Polaroid and Kodachrome are mourned by a public who grew up using these photographic technologies to record their lives.² In this sense, Dean’s deep passion for and advocacy of analogue locates an abiding sense of loss and time passing, perhaps too quickly.

All of this is an intriguing counterpoint to the still and moving images featured in this second online issue of FLASH. Here, we encounter a myriad of practices and positions, including Rozalind Drummond’s quiet counter to Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’; a blurry snapshot most likely shot on a digital camera and gleaned from the internet by Christos Tsiolkas; Arlo Mountford’s adventures in Adobe Flash animation, currently on display at CCP; Rosemary Laing’s latest body of work in her ongoing dialogue with science and the technologies of photography and Lyndell Brown and Charles Green’s digital record of the surprisingly banal theatre of war, chosen by our guest On Show reviewer as the pick of recent exhibitions in Melbourne. Central to this tangled web of technologies and takes is the Anne Landa Award’s focus on video and new media arts, including digital prints, single channel video works and robotics which, as reviewer Bec Dean notes, is ‘reflective of a contemporary moment’.

It is especially interesting to think about Tactia Dean’s exhibition against Ross Coulter and Meredith Turnbull’s recent collaborative exhibition at Conical Inc, The Body Electric, which they discuss with Ulanda Blair in our Interviews section. Both of these exhibitions make much of the apparatus, the machinery of the medium. Upon entering the dark rooms of Dean’s ACCA exhibition, visitors find themselves accompanied by a constant whirring, the sound of 16mm film moving through multiple projectors. The projectors themselves are often in view, the film racing through them. It’s quite a mesmerising sight. In The Body Electric, an exhibition which addressed our relationship to a technology-saturated society, televisions were strung up, photographic images scrolled across digital photo frames and DVD players sat atop wooden platforms. Degraded analogue video was projected digitally onto a structure of abstract wooden shapes.

Most of this latter technology does not yet carry the nostalgic pull of the 16mm film projector (although, with the rise of the flat screen, CRT televisions are fast becoming objects of nostalgic desire). But perhaps something just as forceful, even emotional, is happening here. As Ross Coulter puts it, “I am very susceptible to the influence of technology. From the need for personalised hardware, to the presentation of technology as a status symbol, to the consumer desires it stimulates, to the way technology infects our behaviour and language: its sounds, shapes, colours, movements.  I am fascinated by the endless variety of possibilities in which technology offers itself up to be consumed by us – selflessly – always ever-present. Electro Magnetic Radiation is my body electric.”

We seem to like to build dichotomies around photography and moving image technologies. Endless battle lines are drawn between still photography and moving image, the analogue and the digital, so-called straight photography and the fine art print, light versus pixels … ‘new’ media versus ‘old.’ As many photographers mourn the demise of film others are just as avidly turning to their iphones as their chosen apparatus. As Tacita Dean argues, analogue may still be ‘the medium that keeps verisimilitude intact greater than any digital.’³ But slowly, the pixels are getting under our skin. To me, all of this means we live in exciting times.

¹ ‘Art Worker of the Week #60: Tacita Dean’, Kulterflash 171, 06 | 07 | 06. www.kultureflash.net/archive/171/priview.html

² A recent opinion piece in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper is the latest voice in this growing chorus. Geoff Strong, ‘Kodachrome helped make memories worth waiting for’, The Age, 25 June, 2009. www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/kodachrome-helped-make-memories-worth-waiting-for/2009/06/24/1245522879702.html

³ www.kultureflash.net/archive/171/priview.html