A Decade of Australian Photography 1972 – 1982

During the 1970s a new wave in Australian photography gathered momentum, propelling photographers into the Australian art arena. This exhibition is a recognition of some of them as represented in the Philip Morris Arts Grant collection, given to the Australian National Gallery at the time of its official opening in October 1982. While it is still too early to chart precisely the course of the 1970s its features are now open to tentative definition.

Nearly all of the work on view was made by photographers in their twenties or early thirties. While the majority had received art school training this was not always in photography, and a significant number had none at all, a sign of the medium's recent arrival on the art scene. All were animated by a burgeoning awareness of photography as art, as an adventure in perception.

The artistic interests of these photographers have ranged from youth culture and feminism to the more traditional art concerns of redefining the Australian bush and private obsessions with sex, death and the metaphysical. The style of the work varies considerably, ranging from street photography through formalism to individualistic forms of symbolic expressionism.

The dominant influence on Australian photography during the 1950s and 1960s, aside from commercial, fashion and architectural photography, was that of the 'human interest' genre, the humanist, quasi-documentary style dominant in Europe since the 1920s, which found its summation in the Family of Man exhibition from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, seen in Sydney and Melbourne in 1959. This style continued to be influential in Australia into the 1970s and is particularly apparent in the work of Roger Scott, Philip Quirk, and Carol Jerrems.

Scott reinforced a Cartier-Bressonesque mode in Australian visual consciousness with affectionate good humour and sense of celebration. He exploits the familiar street photographers' devices of ironic juxtaposition, satire and apparent serendipity (sometimes in fact the result of a long wait), although sometimes a degree of alienation is suggested along with companionship and physical exuberance (e.g. in Bronte Beach, 1979). His work compares interestingly with the more incisive, precise and detached nature of the slices of life taken by Philip Quirk.

Carol Jerrems photographed with ease and familiarity within the sub-cultural milieu in which she lived, and her subjects assume a relationship with the photographer/viewer. Her portraiture is extraordinarily sympathetic, to the point of becoming a vehicle for her subject’s aggression (for example Mark Lean, Rape Game, 1975). When her subjects do not overtly project their personality they are rendered in a manner suggesting gentle compassion and intimacy. Jerrems’s best compositions have a casual perfection: Vale Street has justifiably become an icon of 1970s Australian photography, yet seems free both of forced formalism and mere chance. The image has reverberations of Renaissance painting in its evocation of a Botticellian goddess with attendant satyrs emerging from Titianesque shadows, their tattoos, however, reinforcing the contemporaneity of the image.

The work of Hawkes, Ford and Allan similarly tends to reflect an inner city Melbourne milieu as well as the strong feminist consciousness which developed in the mid 1970s. Sue Ford's Time series echoes early 1970s conceptualism in its structure, but the apparent personality of the individuals depicted comes through strongly as Ford directly and effectively exploits photography’s terrible capacity to freeze time and thereby to convey the inescapability of its passing.

Ponch Hawkes's series Our Mums and Us has a more conventional basis, comprising warm, relaxed assertions of a new found identification between generations of women.

Micky Allan, like Jerrems, was one of the strongest Australian artists in any media to emerge during the 1970s. Her Babies series, 1976, remains one of the most striking examples of the new hand-colouring approach which emerged during the decade, exhibiting a delicacy which indicates a romantic yet unsentimental respect for babies as creations and individuals. Similarly, in Yooralla at twenty past three, 1978, she tints an inner city narrative sequence about the end of the day at a school for handicapped children so subtly that it takes on a lyrical beauty, and becomes a metaphor, perhaps, for human dignity.

Gerrit Fokkema, Grant Mudford, Mark Johnson and Steven Lojewski have all in varying degrees refined a sense of order within the conventions of the straight social landscape. Fokkema renders the life of the world; Mudford enhances it with technique and exploits its formal properties; Lojewski extols it.

Lojewski's early work is reminiscent of fin-de-siècle symbolism: in Untitled, 1975, a dog emerges from an inky pool as if from the Styx. Lojewski's more recent photographs render his subjects with the care of a fine print approach, his lighter tones of grey suggesting a rapture with the play of light on forms, a sense of delight accentuated by the delicate precision of his composition.

A sense of surrealism is clearly apparent in the ironic counterpointing of Fokkema's Canberra photographs, in which he seemed to intend something more meaningful than mere quirkiness or to point out the follies of human ambition. His later Sydney images remain clear, energetic and luminous, his intuitive responses allowing the visual business of Sydney to infuse his work with a greater subtlety and complexity than hitherto.

The size and brightness of Mark Johnson's work allies it to Fokkema's, while its formality and frontality relates it to that of Grant Mudford.

Mudford's work is more pared down, disciplined, and extreme in its formal emphasis than the other social landscape work in this exhibition. (He has used a perspective correction lens to control verticals and a point-source enlarger to cover his prints with an energetic pattern of razor sharp grain.) Mudford developed these characteristics after moving to Los Angeles, an environment he found appropriate to his photography.

Jon Rhodes, Wesley Stacey, Max Pam, and Robert Ashton, in their distinctive ways, have worked out of the road epic, Jack Kerouac/ Robert Frank tradition, the edgy, adventurous and sometimes cynical side of the street photography genre.

Max Pam and Robert Ashton took the hippy trail to the East. Ashton's photographs from India are among the earliest in the exhibition and reveal the documentary mode then still widespread; his later works (taken originally for theatrical productions) expressionistically exorcise a darker view of life in Australia. Pam combines the spirit of the 19th century travel photographer with that of hippy consumerism. His Himalayan photographs include evocations of an insouciant innocence (Early morning hot spring, N.W. Himalayas, 1977) while his rendering of the movement of people and trees through blurred motion (Windy Day in North Himalayas, 1977) emphasises the comparative durability of the mountains in an ecstatic recognition of the natural order.

Jon Rhodes has mainly photographed in India and outback Australia, environments with geographical affinities. His mature work comprises pairs or longer sequences of images. He thereby takes the ironic juxtapositions beloved of street photographers and revitalises the convention by putting the elements into different frames (the effect is not so much ironic as startling). He also suggests the unfolding of time, like the précis of a movie, but as a defined sequence, often, within a much larger, more slowly moving temporal context. The black borders of his photographs suggest that a slice of unvarnished life lies within; in sequence they further suggest a machine-like authority used also with considerable effect in Sandy Edwards's work at CSR's Pyrmont refinery in 1978.

The incidents Rhodes depicts include an Australian flag waving, its motion emphasising the isolation and stillness of the building and by extension the town it is in (Girl Guide Hall, Merriwa, 1974); the awkwardness and fragility of life passing through harsh terrain (Camel, Jodhpur, India, 1976); and a Northern Territory sunrise (Diarrakpi, Blue Mud Bay, Northern Territory, 1974). Such works operate in part as metaphors for human transience against 'eternal' time and space, and are reminders of Rhodes's major work Just another sunrise, 1976, an extended piece on the effect of bauxite mining on the Yirrkala Aboriginal people at Gove Peninsula, Northern Territory.

From the late 1970s Stacey's most significant work has comprised panoramas in black and white and colour, mostly of the bush. The black and white work is the more abstract and symbolic, evoking a reverential sense of place, while the panoramic scan adds a sense that the places are real, and important in every part. The colour work, on the other hand, allows a more relaxed descriptiveness, while enhancing a perception of what is or—as in Woodchips logging aftermath near Myrtle Mountain, 1980—what should not be.

Stacey’s acceptance of both close-up and broad sweeps of landscape and the 'all-over' nature of his compositions are reminiscent of abstract expressionism, while a broad analogy also may be found with Aboriginal art in its subtlety and the use of pattern to suggest natural forms and events. Marion Hardman also applies the conventions of frontality and randomness derived from painting to the Australian bush in her Bonnet Hill series, but approaches the landscape with a cool consistency and art consciousness characteristic of recent Tasmanian photography.

A number of Australian photographers studied overseas, particularly in the United States, for extended periods, including Christine Godden, Fiona Hall, and Douglas Holleley. Each returned to Australia with sophisticated strategies for art-making. Their work from their period of study reveals their freedom from the quasi-documentary or street photography styles prevailing in the early 1970s. Godden demonstrates a sensuous love of texture and form; Hall stylishly photographs special places; and Holleley forms a vision of landscapes around complex patterns and shapes.

The work of John F. Williams is also symptomatic of this shift of sensibility. His semi-random daylight flash photographs in the street, in 1977, were a transitional step away from his 'human interest' photography of the 1960s and early 1970s to a more abstracted conception of image-making, leading to multi-image panoramic portraits.

The periodical Light Vision (1977-78) demonstrated a refinement and an elegance unseen in Australian photography publications since the pictorial era, and the photographs by its editor, Jean-Marc Le Pechoux, reflect these characteristics. It is no surprise that one of the photographers represented in the first issue, Robert Besanko, also exemplifies the aestheticising tendencies of the magazine. This strand in Melbourne photography coexisted there with the strongest assertion in Australia of the American West Coast fine print, straight photography tradition, seen in the work of Ian Lobb and Les Walkling, and championed (inter alia) by the Photographers' Gallery. Walkling later built on this approach to create subtly toned images, including Cat, 1979, and Grapes, 1980, both grim, richly worked mementos mori.

Other photographers of note to emerge in Melbourne during the late 1970s include Jillian Gibb, Warren Breninger and Bill Henson, all of whom have worked in series or sequences.

Gibb uses the titles of her works as an integral part of their meaning, often, as in We'll be happy now, 1979, to convey an ironic sense of melancholy. She has shown a consistent concern for victims of society and its myths.

Breninger's outstanding achievement is his Expulsion of Eve series, a continuing project. Each head is from the same negative but is obsessively reworked, associating beauty and mortality with lust, guilt and decay. In Expulsion of Eve number three, 1977, the word 'ache' adds an unequivocal clue to these emblems of suffering and desire. The extraordinary concatenation of techniques, painting, gouging, and collaging, project as well as depict a quasi-medieval and agonized conception of the human condition.

Henson's Untitled sequence of 1977 is seemingly on the simplest level an erotic fantasy. As in Breninger's work eroticism and religion are associated: early images in the sequence (for example No.5) suggest sexual activity, the later ones (for example No.9) the deposition of Christ, with bare ribs and boards signifying starvation, imprisonment, or martyrdom.

Signs of increasing activity in Australian photography in the 1970s were the founding of the Australian Foundation for Photography in Sydney in 1973, quickly to become the Australian Centre for Photography; the appearance of several commercial galleries, notably in Melbourne, devoted exclusively to photography; the publication, however brief, of serious photographic magazines, aimed higher than at the hobbyist market; the establishment of photography courses at art schools in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Hobart.

Australian art museums too, started or renewed their collecting of photography as art: the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968, the Australian National Gallery in 1973, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in 1975, the Art Gallery of South Australia, in 1977, after some years of purchasing conceptual photography in the painting department. In 1977, too, there was sufficient interest and energy for a large photographic conference to be held in Sydney; Light Vision began; both the Photographers' Gallery and the Church Street Photographic Centre in Melbourne emerged as serious influences; and what was billed as Australia's first photography auction was held in the same city.

The Philip Morris Arts Grant's acquisition of photographs from 1974 was an important act of private sector patronage. James Mollison, the Director of the Australian National Gallery, brought many young photographers into prominence with his adventurous purchasing. Increasingly these photographers are being seen as heirs to an Australian photographic tradition of greater richness and importance than was imaginable before the boom years of the 1970s.