Big Pictures

Wesley Stacey's The road, 1973–75, was exhibited at The Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, in 1975. It comprises seventeen long panels of colour snapshots taken when Stacey travelled across Australia in a Kombi van.

Stacey's trip invites comparison with Swiss photographer Robert Frank's epic journey across the United States in the mid 1950s. Frank's photographs, published in the book The Americans, 1959, have become a monument in photographic history. Whereas Frank's vision of 1950s America was grim and pessimistic, Stacey's view of 1970s Australia is fresh and full of hope. He went on the road in what was undoubtedly an optimistic period in Australian politics and culture.

Stacey's approach to photography was not precious; his snapshots were produced by an instamatic camera and the colour film was commercially processed. The use of the colour snapshot format, with its spontaneity and informality, serves to express the artist's exuberant feelings about life — to convey his particular delight in travelling, in what he sees, and in the photographic medium itself. The combination of colour and the snapshot gives Stacey's images a relaxed air which is unusual in a period dominated by serious black and white photodocumentary work.

The grouping of the 280 photographs into panels sets out and orders the various stages of Stacey's travels. The resulting installation commands a large physical space which the viewer cannot take in at a glance, but must move across the various parts. Single photographs are not given primacy but are shown to be part of the continuum of Stacey's travel experiences.

While Wesley Stacey looks out at the external world, Melbourne photographer Bill Henson looks inwards. Untitled, 1979–80 focuses on Henson's own feelings about life, death and sexuality.

Untitled, 1979–80 comprises two large vertical panels of photographs of a male nude. The work has a disturbing effect, as the young man, a Saint Sebastian unable to escape the arrows, is in an ambiguous state of pain or pleasure. Henson does not present a full and complete human figure in a single photograph, but rather one whose body is dismembered and fragmented into a number of images. The evocation of pain comes from the violence enacted photographically on the human form and is reinforced by the vertical format, suggestive of a crucifix.

However, the soft-focus photographs also sensuously describe the young man's face and limbs, with the light playing gently over his smooth skin. His body is offered up to us for our enjoyment. Sensuousness, so conspicuous in Henson's work, is shown to be inseparable from pain and death.

Virginia Coventry's Whyalla - not a document, 1977–81, is concerned with 'how corporate decisions shape our environment', the case in point being the BHP mining town Whyalla in South Australia.

Whyalla owes its existence to BHP, to the industries of iron and steel processing and shipbuilding. Across the seven parts which make up the work, a selection of which are on display, the flat horizontal expanse stretched out in the 35mm frame is punctured only by man-made structures. The vertical elements of the steelworks, the chimneys, the jetty, the street signs and so on, are the only accents in the deliberately non-dramatic compositions.

In examining land-use patterns in Whyalla, Coventry also draws attention to the nature of photographic representation. She uses a number of strategies to remind the viewer that the photograph is, to quote her title, not a document, but rather, a constructed reality. When she brings her single photographs together into a sequence, she does not present an uninterrupted, seamless panoramic view. The horizon lines are not continuous and photographs of the same scene do not automatically and smoothly flow one into another.

Coventry invites us to be active rather than passive viewers. In physically moving through the installation, we are encouraged to work with what is being presented, to think not only about what we see in photographs and texts but also in the external world. Therein is built the possibility for social and political change.

The family room, 1982, is Micky Allan's most recent major photographic project. Since 1983 she has concentrated on drawing and painting.

From the mid 1970s onwards Allan drew and painted onto the surface of series of black and white photographs, a number of which are in the Australian National Gallery collection. In The family room we remain aware of the underlying photograph as structure, particularly in the faces of the subjects, but in many passages the painting functions independently as gesture and colour. The panels were painted in oils, ranging from thin glazes (as many as seven layers) to thick paint.

The twelve panels (there were fourteen when The family room was first shown at the Adelaide Festival in 1982) explore Allan's characteristic concern with life cycles and with the larger social world beyond the individual. The work follows the progression from infancy to late adulthood, opening with a young baby and closing with a middle-aged woman. Above each person is an object which, as Allan describes it, loosely represents his or her desire: above the baby is a bottle; above Allan is a camera mounted on a tripod.

The subjects are members of the artist's own family, but, although autobiographical, the work is also about the family generally. The viewer enters the installation and is surrounded by life-size figures whose scale makes personal identification with them more compelling.

While the works in this exhibition have in common their large scale, size in each case is used to different ends. Stacey's installation of colour snapshots establishes the continuum of his on-the-road experiences. Henson's large vertical panels are grand and are loaded with references to other symbolically charged art forms, particularly altar-pieces and crucifixes. Coventry's installation, comprised of many interlocking parts, encourages us to work with what we see; and Allan uses life-size scale to bring us into the family, hers and our own.

Exhibition and brochure compiled by Helen Ennis, with assistance from Kate Davidson, Department of Photography.