Keynote speakers
Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of the History of Photography and Contemporary Art, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
PERPLEXITY AND EMBARRASSMENT: Photography as Work
Geoffrey Batchen is a Professor of Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he specializes in the history of photography. He is currently working on an exhibition about the careers of Richard Beard and Antoine Claudet, due to open at the Yale Center for British Art in October 2011. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (The MIT Press, 1997); Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (The MIT Press, 2001); Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Van Gogh Museum & Princeton Architectural Press, 2004); and William Henry Fox Talbot (Phaidon, 2008).
There has been much debate in the photographic world about the effects of the advent of digital technologies. These debates have tended to focus on aesthetic, ethical and ontological issues—that is, on questions of appearance, truth and identity. But not much has been said to date about the economic implications of this new phase of photography's development. Indeed, not much has been said about the economics of photography at any stage of its history. There are a few honorable exceptions, of course, but in general the literature on the history of photography has tended to avoid discussion of the tawdry commercial side of the photographic industry, to repress even the notion that photography is an industry. This repression, another sign of the dominance of art history as a way of talking about photography, is faithful to nineteenth-century prejudices, when there was a concerted effort to associate photography with those "in society" rather than with those "in trade." It is time to overturn this prejudice and consider the degree to which a history of photography should be based on a business, rather than a fine art, model. In short, we need to think of photography as a form of work and the photographer as a worker if we are to ever grasp the full complexity of the photographic experience. After some brief remarks about the present and recent past of photographic labour, this paper will go back again to the beginnings of photography, a moment long framed by the preoccupations of Romanticism, in order to reconsider this new phenomenon within the economic, social and political contexts of industrialization and consumer capitalism. Particular attention will be paid to Henry Talbot's effort to establish a photography business in Reading in the 1840s, and to the competition he faced from the daguerreotype studios operated by Richard Beard and Antoine Claudet, both established in London in 1841. From this consideration, an alternative model of photographic history will be proposed, a model with implications for our understanding of photography's past, but also its present and possible futures.
Shelley Rice, Associate Arts Professor, Department of Photography and Imaging, Department of Art History, New York University
CROSS CURRENTS: MODELS, MIGRATIONS AND MODERNISMS
I am currently finishing a catalogue essay for the Role Models exhibition, which will open next year at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. I have served as consultant for this photography exhibition through its planning stages, and have worked closely with Director and Senior Curator Susan Fisher Sterling to shape an intergenerational vision of the medium’s impact on American women artists’ evolving concepts of gender and identity. Including artists like Nan Goldin, Mary Ellen Mark, Cindy Sherman, Eleanor Antin, Collier Schorr, Nikki Lee, Justine Kurland, Cathie Opie and Anna Gaskell, the show will move from the straightforward documentary imagery of the 1970s to the more postmodern ideas of “identity construction” embodied in recent conceptual and directorial photography.
Given the mandate of its originating venue, Role Models will only include American artists. My essay, however, will expand the relevance of the show beyond the shores of the U.S.A., by focusing on the ways in which contemporary concepts of identity construction depend on the rapidly changing role of the individual in an increasingly global society. Using artists like Fiona Foley, Nikki Lee, Mariko Mori, Orlan, Morimura, Annu P. Matthew and S. Kahara as well as Rineke Dijkstra, Orlan, Tracey Rose, Samuel Fosso, Marjane Satrapi, J.D. Samson, Rachel Papo and Janaina Tschape, the premise of the text is that the shift from a subjective, internalized sense of identity to one which rests on visual signals (media images, clothing, body language) performed in the public domain is one of the most significant offshoots of our loosening ties to ancestral space, time and traditions. Visual information about identity, once seen as deeply tied to local customs, class and family structures as well as concepts of individuality, now circulates in a much wider arena, thanks to migrations, outsourcing, postcolonialism, tourism and increasingly mobile populations linked by technology. As a result, this information now serves as a primary method of social communication--a political and symbolic “coinage” as easily exchanged on Facebook or MySpace as in the public arena of a town square. I would like to expand on these ideas in my conference talk, which will focus primarily on photography’s role in this theatricalization of identity, and its implications for the “new histories, new practices” of contemporary visual cultures.
Public Lecture: National Library of Australia, Saturday 12 July 4pm
Gail Jones, Writer, and Professor in Writing, University of Western Sydney
'MYSTIC, AWFUL WAS THE PROCESS": the suspicious encounters of literature and photography
Gail Jones is Professor of Writing at the Writing and Society Research School, University of Western Sydney and the author of six books of fiction. These include the novels Black Mirror, Sixty Lights, Dreams of Speaking and Sorry, all of which consider, at some point, the centrality of photography to modernity and the contest between images and words. Jones is an accomplished author whose recent book Sorry is longlisted for this year's international Orange Prize and has been nominated for the 2008 Miles Franklin award, a prize for which she has been nominated twice previously. Her previous book Dreams of Speaking is currently shortlisted for the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Balzac was terrified, Conan Doyle saw ghosts, Nabokov believed photography to be the very height of mendacity. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on the other hand, noted only the revelatory joy of the image and contended that the new technology of the daguerreotype “exceeded the noblest Artist’s work ever produced”. This lecture considers writers’ attitudes to portrait photography, both in being photographed and in viewing the images of others. It ranges widely to meditate on the odd, compelling mysticism of photographs, the ways in which photos both verify and de-verify the world, stimulate anxiety or jubilation, and attach to ideas about the passing or fixing of time.
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Confirmed Abstracts and Speakers (24 June)
Dr Ann Elias, Sydney College of the Arts
MAX DUPAIN: A PACIFIST IN THE PACIFIC THEATRE OF WAR, 1943
Ann Elias graduated with a PhD in Art History from the University of Auckland in 1991. She is a Senior Lecturer in Theoretical Enquiry at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. She teaches the history of contemporary art to undergraduates, and supervises PhD candidates. She is Chair of the SCA Board. Her research is primarily in the discipline of art history, with specialisations in still life painting, and aesthetics and war. Recent journal publications focus on camouflage as a conceptual entity and a physical phenomenon, the language of flowers in the First World War, and the significance of floral imagery to Hans Heysen, George Lambert, Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton. She has published on the contemporary photography of Peter Peryer, and the historical photography of Max Dupain. Journal articles are forthcoming in Leonardo; Journal of Australian Studies; War, Literature and the Arts; History Australia.
Max Dupain was not a war photographer although in 1944 he tried to become one. But he was an important photographer in the Second World War, deployed by the military to make and interpret technical photo-tests of camouflage experiments. Dupain was a self-declared pacifist but in becoming a camoufleur he became part of the ‘scopic regime’ of makers and interpreters of photographic images whose mission, according to the Australian Director of Camouflage, was to ‘wreak moral and physical ruin upon the enemy’. Aside from his military work, the war years offered Dupain a range of photographic subjects that satisfied his agenda as a modernist and documentary photographer. In 1941 when the war was still a relatively abstract concept for Dupain, he made abstract photographs of camouflage nets. But in 1943, in the theatre of war, when stationed on Goodenough Island, Dupain turned his lens on the landscapes and indigenous people of the D’Entrecasteaux Islands. Unlike the Bankstown work, Dupain’s photographs on Goodenough Island are invested in the real, the certain, the here and now, and the figurative. Using Dupain’s oral memories of the war, I will argue that these humanist photographs, that communicate the importance of embodiment, provided an antidote to the depersonalisation of military work. Dupain’s New Guinea Portfolio proves an exception to a 1990 claim by anthropologists Lamont Lindstrom and Geoffrey White that the photographic record of the war in the Pacific Theatre omits the experiences of villagers, particularly women and children. I will also argue that Dupain’s photographs on Goodenough Island provide insight into cultural encounters during the war and I will show that the images benefit from being read in conjunction with anthropologists’ accounts of the impact of the war on the region.
Anne Marsh, Associate Dean Research, Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University
THE PERFORMANCE ART DOCUMENT
Dr Anne Marsh is Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University. She is author of Pat Brassington: This is Not a Photograph (2006), The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire (2003), Body and Self: Performance Art in Australian, 1969-1992 (1993). She is contributing editor for Eyeline Contemporary Visual Arts. Her current research includes Contemporary Australian Photography forthcoming with Macmillan 2008 and with Matthew Perkins and Elena Galiberti, The Australian Video Art Archivehttp://www.videoartchive.org.au/about.html
In this paper I will explore the issue of the indexical photographic record in both photography and ‘real time’ video of performance art from the 1970s to the present. The documents that inscribe these ephemeral events in history are almost an anathema since many of the artists, at the time, rejected the concept of the photographic or camera record.
There has been an interesting scholarly dialogue over the last decade which is split over the issue of ‘authenticity’ and presence. In many respects, for historians of photography, these issues have been played out. But there is an interesting naivety in debates about the performance art record. Some scholars insist that one had to be there to experience the event in real time if one is to write about the work. This forecloses on history – how can one write about a work one never saw. There’s a residual essentialism apparent in these arguments. In my paper I plan to think through these issues and use archival and contemporary material to support my argument that the historic record comes in multifarious forms and can be read as evidence and as an indicator of presence.
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Anne Tucker, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
TWO PHOTOGRAPHERS / TWO WARS: DAVID DOUGLAS DUNCAN AND LARRY BURROWS
David Douglas Duncan photographed the Korean War from July, 1950 to January, 1951, publishing the photographs and his own text in his first book This is War (1951). In September and October 1967 and February, 1969, he returned to war coverage, photographing first in Con Thien and then in Khe Sanh, Viet Nam, producing two books I Protest (1968) and War Without Heros (1970). Larry Burrows photographed in Viet Nam for nine years, until February 10, 1971, when he and four other photographers were killed by antiaircraft fire into their helicopter. Between 1958 and 1968, Burrows created 15 cover stories for Life magazine, including the iconic photographic essay, “Yankee Papa 13.” Born in 1916, Duncan was an American citizen who first came to prominence for his combat photographs as a Marine in World War II. Burrows was British and ten years Duncan’s junior. The differences in their ages and in their nationalities were important aspects of the differences between their coverage of the war. Duncan was an ex-Marine who photographed Marines both in Korea and in Viet Nam. As an American, he was photographing “our boys.” Although Burrows worked for an American publication, his being British gave him some distance from the U.S. troops.
In its sequence and structure, Korea was closer to World War II than to subsequent 20th century conflicts in that there were battle lines recognized by both conflicting armies. Duncan’s searing black-and-white photographs of the men and of the United States and South Korea’s early victories and later their retreat in bitter winter conditions are recognized as the most powerful of the Korean War. Duncan’s pride in having been a Marine threads throughout his coverage of Marine units in both Korea and Nam. Viet Nam was an entirely different conflict with its shifting lines, complex tunnel systems and the role of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Although the helicopter was first used in Korea, it played a major role in armed conflict in Viet Nam and began a key motif in photographs. Burrows gruelling color photographs of battles and death did not valorize the men or the conflict. His photo essays were as much of the war’s inexplicable tragedies as of the admirable endurance that Duncan perceived.
Elizabeth Hartrick, Honorary Fellow, The Australian Centre, School of Historical Studies
SHOWING OFF: AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHY AND PROJECTION IN MELBOURNE c1900
Elizabeth Hartrick’s current interest in photographic history arose out of her research into culture and practices surrounding nineteenth century visual projection technologies for her doctoral thesis ‘Consuming Illusions: the Magic Lantern in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1850-1910’. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Centre in the School of Historical Studies at The University of Melbourne. Other current research interests include use of visual aids in the popularisation of science during the nineteenth century.
The development of the hand camera and improved photographic processing at the end of the nineteenth century saw a huge rise in amateur photography in Australasian and internationally. The late nineteenth century was also the heyday of the lantern slide projector in a broad range of public and private contexts where projected images, both photographic and non-photographic, were used extensively to entertain and educate.
The resultant combination of these two powerful visual media – photography and image projection – in the hands of amateur practitioners unleashed that popular and enduring phenomenon of photographic performance in the domestic realm, the “slide evening”. In order to establish an historical context and to demonstrate how closely interrelated the histories of the two media became, this paper will firstly survey the impact of photography on lantern slide projection in the nineteenth century, as the two media developed technically and in breadth of practice across the Australasian colonies.
The paper then considers the ways in which amateur practitioners in the early twentieth century responded to and enjoyed the performative opportunities created by the pairing of these two modern visual technologies. The work of amateur photographers and lanternists Arthur Fox (b. 1866-?), General Store proprietor of North Melbourne and his son Elton Villiers Frederick Fox, whose collection of photographic lantern slides is held in the State Library of Victoria, is used to show how ordinary Melbournians performed and projected aspects of their daily lives.
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Geraldine Bloustien, Deputy Director, Hawke Research Centre, University of South Australia and Denise Wood, Program Director, Media Arts, University of South Australia
REFRACTIONS THROUGH VIRTUAL SPACE: PHOTOGRAPHY AS TOOL AND SYMBOL IN 3D IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENTS
To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to re-experience the unreality and remoteness of the real (Susan Sontag 1977:164)
Susan Sontag alerted her readers to the ‘unreality’ and the ability of photography to ‘create distance’ in the capturing and accessing of ‘the real’ in everyday life through the camera lens. But what happens when the referent of the real becomes one step removed as in immersive virtual environments such as Second Life? Drawing on their larger ethnography undertaken in Second Life, the authors explore the phenomenon of photography in this new space. Here we particularly focus upon the meaning and symbolism of photography, both as an art form and a tool, in the hands of the graphic artists and their avatar ‘creations’ especially in the context of their virtual photographic studios where art theory and practice meet. In such an innovative context, in the blurring of real and virtual worlds, new meanings and ethical dilemmas emerge to challenge any previous understandings of photographic reality.
Harry Nankin, artist and teacher
SYZYGY (SHADOWS OF HEAVEN)
The ‘anthropocentric gaze’ is one way of describing the dominant character of modernity’s encounter with non-human first nature. To speculate upon an alternative ‘biocentric gaze’ invites the possibility of unfamiliar modes of understanding and representation. A contemporary art that attempts to work with the emergent latter pole of perception inevitably references and is defined in terms of its incumbent and gravitationally more powerful opposite. Yet any serious articulation of a biocentric vision can offer new insights into both the apprehension of nature and the nature of modernity. This is particularly so when the medium is photography and the ostensible subject is that aspect of nature conceptualised in the western schema as ‘landscape’.
‘Landscape’ has the double honour of being both a harbinger of the photographic idea and a principal target for recording since the medium’s inception. Inspired by the Romantic picturesque and initially enabled by the nexus of camera obscura, silver halides and glass optics, the essential practice of landscape as photograph has rarely strayed far from its origins. To apprehend land by ways and means other than to ‘picture’ it via habitual ocular tropes is one critical goal of a biocentric aesthetic. A key to uncovering such an apprehension lies in photography’s distinctive claim to authority, its indexical character. This response to an external reality is normally optically mediated so that photography is almost always understood as a mechanical eyewitness. The relational (as distinct from representational) dimension of the medium’s indexical character is generally incidental in photographic practice yet invites being privileged in a biocentrically oriented reconstruction.
In Syzygy photography as index is used to interrogate the anthropocentric gaze and explore a biocentrically-informed encounter with myth, time and place. In Syzygy the 'misalignment' between culture and nature characteristic of modernity is evoked through an envisioning of Lake Tyrrell in the Victorian Mallee as a 'tragic' mnemic surface. The project involves literally collecting the nocturnal 'light of the universe' falling on Lake Tyrrell in order to expose a sequence of jewel-like photographic images on film metaphorically ‘reflecting’ the site as it is, as it once was and as it might be imagined.
Photo-media artist Harry Nankin is undertaking Syzygy in collaboration with University of Melbourne scholar/artist Professor Paul Carter and University of Melbourne astrophysicist Dr Maurizio Toscano. The project is supported by grants from Arts Victoria Arts Innovation and Australia Council for the Arts Inter Arts programs. Work began in 2007 and should be completed in 2009.
This paper will briefly consider the global environmental. literary and photo media context, underlying critical rationale, unprecedented methodology, intended public outcome and possible aesthetic and cultural meanings of Syzygy. The verbal presentation will be accompanied by documentary imagery.
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Jennifer Deger, ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, COFA, University of NSW
UNCANNY CONNECTIONS: MIMETIC FORCES BEYOND LIKENESS IN YOLNGU FAMILY SNAP
Jennifer Deger is an ARC post doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, COFA, UNSW. Her on-going work as an ethnographer and collaborative videomaker with Yolngu in North East Arhem Land fosters an abiding interest in the dynamic and constitutive relationships between vision, culture and digital media technologies. These themes are explored in her recent book Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community (University of Minnesota Press).
This paper will explore the intensity, creativity and purpose that Yolngu bring to both the taking and the viewing of photographs - particularly their potency as a revelatory medium. As I will describe, for Yolngu photographs the aesthetic qualities that matter most in photographs of themselves, their families and forebears are not attributed to the photographer's skills, but the potential visible presence of ancestral agency. Deeply appreciative of the ways that photos open up ontological resonances that exceed the bounds of everyday time and space, Yolngu identify and harness moments of uncanny photographic encounter as a powerful possibility for connecting with past generations and simultaneously as a means to uncover new layers of ancestral knowledge. Expanding that idea I speculate that Yolngu when posing for photos these days, many are
looking down the camera lens into a future beyond their own death, when their photographic presence will allow them to actively remain 'in touch' with family members.
Jessica Whyte, Phd Candidate, Centre for Comparative Literature, Monash University
PERVERTS ON THE BEACHES; TERRORISTS AT THE SHOPPING MALLS: PHOTOGRAPHY RESTRICTIONS IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL REPRODUCTION
In July 2006, security guards at Melbourne’s Southbank tourist complex stopped amateur photographer Val Ross from taking photos “because of the terrorism overseas.” The photo ban was prompted, a Southbank spokesperson explained, by “tourists taking photos of obscure things” that “would be of no interest to put in a photo album.” Later that year, Rex Dupain had his camera confiscated and was questioned by police on Bondi Beach. Anyone with a camera today is regarded as a “potential pervert”, Dupain warned.
These incidents, selected from a raft of similar ones, point to contemporary anxieties generated by the proliferation of photographic technologies in the age of digital reproduction (and distribution.) Amongst the consequences of these anxieties are bans on photography in swimming pools and train stations, new laws against “up-skirting” and “down-blousing”, and a conceptual push for a right to “privacy in public.”
Are these new restrictions simply temporary measures, generated by the ‘war on terror’? Relying on Walter Benjamin’s 1940 observation that “the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule,” Giorgio Agamben argues that our time is characterized by the normalization of the state of exception, which permanently collapses the borders between law and fact, politics and life, public and private. Rather than exhibiting nostalgia for earlier forms of separation, however, Agamben argues that it is “by starting from this uncertain terrain, from this opaque zone of indistinction” that we must construct a new politics—a politics whose premise is what Benjamin once referred to as “the stretching of frontiers that mirrors the most radiant freedom of thought”. In this paper, I will examine the contribution of new photographic technologies to “stretching the frontiers” between public and private spaces, and ask if—rather than attempting to bolster these frontiers with new laws and new confinements—it is possible to see emancipatory possibilities in the breakdown of the separation between public and private that is the presupposition of the liberal state.
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John L. Tran, Assistant Professor, School of Art and Design, Tsukuba University
LIGHT AND DISHARMONY: JAPANESE TAISHO PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY AS SOCIAL DISCOURSE
John L Tran was born in 1965 in the UK. He studied Intellectual History and French at Sussex University and spent several years in Japan after graduating. Returning to Britain in 1994 he studied an MA in Photography at the London College of Communication, followed in 2001-2005 by a practice-based PhD at Chelsea College of Art and Design, investigating nostalgia in the history of Japanese landscape photography. Dr Tran is an internationally exhibiting photographic artist, and currently works an assistant professor specialising in the theory and practice of photography in the Institute of Art and Design, Tsukuba University. Current research interests are visual culture and national identity, and contemporary landscape photography.
As the dominant form of landscape photography among early twentieth century amateurs and fine art photographers, pictorialism was a self-professed reaction to the growth of cities and industrialisation. At the same time the emphasis on craft and symbolism in pictorialism attempted to delineate/preserve the notion of artistic creation as an act of individual expression.
As an international movement, the pictorial style had an ambiguous relationship with specific locales and regional identity. This paper explores the production of early 20th century pictorial photography in Japan in which reactions against modernity and nostalgia for nature became inexorably connected with the problematic search for the location and character of a national identity. In this respect so-called ‘Taisho Pictorialism’, in particular the work of the Nagoya Ai-Yu shashin club, is discussed as being a visual equivalent to the work of ethnologist Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962). Yanagita’s seminal folkloric study Tono Monogatari (Tales of Tono) was published in 1910, two years before the formation of the Ai-Yu shashin club.
Taisho Pictorialism is further contrasted with the earlier dominant form of Japanese landscape photography, the Yokohama shashin or tourist photo. Initially a photographic style produced by non-natives, but soon adopted by Japanese photographers, Yokohama shashin were a nostalgic construction of a pre-modern periphery to western industrial societies. Taisho Pictorialism is discussed as a development of the binary opposition of centre and periphery, in which the centre has symbolically shifted to being within Japan.
Keith Beattie, Faculty of Arts, Deakin University, Visiting Research Fellow in Film and Visual culture, ANU
A PENETRATING EYE: THE MICROPHOTOGRAPHY OF JEAN PAINLEVE
Dr Keith Beattie (Deakin University, Melbourne) is Visiting Research Fellow in Film and Visual Culture at the ANU during 2008. He has published The Scar that Binds, New York University Press, 1998; Documentary Screens: Non-fiction Film and Video, Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 2003 (second, revised edition forthcoming); The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand, co-edited, Wallflower Press, London and New York, 2007; and Documentary Display: Re-viewing Nonfiction Film and Video, Wallflower Press, 2008. Forthcoming: Humphrey Jennings, Manchester University Press, and Albert and David Maysles: Interviews, University of Mississippi Press. He is currently writing Performing the Real: The Direct Cinema of D.A. Pennebaker for Continuum Press (New York and London). His research focuses on documentary studies (film, video, and photography).
According to Gaston Bachelard, ‘[t]he destiny of every image is magnification.’ Béla Belász reinforced the importance of magnification when he argued that via the camera and image enlargement ‘hitherto unknown objects and events [are revealed]: the adventures of beetles in a wilderness of blades of grass…the erotic battles of flowers and the poetry of miniature landscapes.’ If, then, as Bachelard claims, magnification is the fate of the image, ‘only [magnified] images of nature’, as Belász insists, ‘bear the convincing stamp of unquestionable authentic reality.’ The connections between image magnification and such a documentary reality are integral to the microphotography of Jean Painlevé (1902-1989). Painlevé’s combination of the familiar and the exotic within magnified images of various species, particularly marine organisms, contributes to an expansion of the realm of the visible through representations of the normally unseen. This paper situates the ‘penetrating eye’ of Painlevé’s microphotography in relation to the long history of ‘theatrical’ and entertaining uses of microscopy and microphotography, and the rigorous and measured applications of microscopy in science. More specifically, Painlevé’s microphotography is situated within and against the contexts of documentary photography and early twentieth century French Surrealism; particularly the version promulgated by Georges Bataille in his short-lived journal Documents. The resultant ‘Surrealist documentary’ effect of Painlevé’s images is summarised in Raymond Durgnant’s assessment that ‘attitudes usually kept stiffly apart – Surrealism + science, modernism + ultra-modernism’ are aligned and reconciled by Painlevé. This paper explores these intersections and examines the ways in which Painlevé’s microphotography can be used to rethink Surrealist and documentary photography, and the representation of nature.
According to Gaston Bachelard, ‘[t]he destiny of every image is magnification.’ Béla Belász reinforced the importance of magnification when he argued that via the camera and image enlargement ‘hitherto unknown objects and events [are revealed]: the adventures of beetles in a wilderness of blades of grass…the erotic battles of flowers and the poetry of miniature landscapes.’ If, then, as Bachelard claims, magnification is the fate of the image, ‘only [magnified] images of nature’, as Belász insists, ‘bear the convincing stamp of unquestionable authentic reality.’ The connections between image magnification and such a documentary reality are integral to the microphotography of Jean Painlevé (1902-1989). Painlevé’s combination of the familiar and the exotic within magnified images of various species, particularly marine organisms, contributes to an expansion of the realm of the visible through representations of the normally unseen. This paper situates the ‘penetrating eye’ of Painlevé’s microphotography in relation to the long history of ‘theatrical’ and entertaining uses of microscopy and microphotography, and the rigorous and measured applications of microscopy in science. More specifically, Painlevé’s microphotography is situated within and against the contexts of documentary photography and early twentieth century French Surrealism; particularly the version promulgated by Georges Bataille in his short-lived journal Documents. The resultant ‘Surrealist documentary’ effect of Painlevé’s images is summarised in Raymond Durgnant’s assessment that ‘attitudes usually kept stiffly apart – Surrealism + science, modernism + ultra-modernism’ are aligned and reconciled by Painlevé. This paper explores these intersections and examines the ways in which Painlevé’s microphotography can be used to rethink Surrealist and documentary photography, and the representation of nature.
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Ken Hall, Assistant Curator, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu
WILLIAM JENKINS WITH ARAPATA TE WARETUTURU AND HIS WIFE AND FOUR UNIDENTIFIED MOTUEKA MAORI
Ken Hall is an Assistant Curator at Christchurch Art Gallery, where he has curated a broad range of historical and contemporary exhibitions. His first, in 2004, was George D. Valentine, A 19th Century Photographer in New Zealand, a long-term personal project which also culminated with publication of a book. In 2005 Ken curated Ansel Adams: Photographic Frontiers, formulating interpretation for one of Adams’s ‘Museum Sets’ that has since been successfully used in the United States. Ken is a BFA (Hons) graduate in Painting from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts (2001), and in Visual Communication Design from the Wellington Polytechnic School of Design (1980). In Wellington his early interest in historical photography was encouraged by his tutor, well-known photographic historian William Main. Ken has worked internationally as an art director, designer/illustrator and teacher, which has included involvement in development education in Africa and Asia. Recently he has commenced work upon a survey of pioneering New Zealand photographers.
My proposed topic involves discussion centred around a single photograph, an early studio group portrait depicting a British colonist settler and a group of South Island Maori. This highly-posed and unusual image is quite unlike any other known New Zealand photograph from this period, and is recognised as a significant early image. It has never previously been researched or published, and offers many opportunities for investigation and analysis.
While at this stage the photographer responsible for the image is not known, further investigations are likely to narrow this down to one of two photographers operating studios in Nelson at this time, Thomas Oxley or George Hoby. Two copies of the photograph (with minor technical differences) are known to exist, one in the Alexander Turnbull Library (with little accurate information about the photograph other than where it was purchased), and the other in a private collection. On the reverse of this second copy are traces of barely legible descriptive pencil text which have provided sufficient clues to enable this photograph to be researched and understood.
The pencil text remaining on the photograph’s paper mount that is not completely faded or obscured by foxing reads:
“Arapata (Albert) […]
imprisonment […]
The […]
jealousy caused the attack by Albert […]
the other Maori that he killed”
From these few scraps of text it has been possible to learn that the photograph relates to a court case held in Nelson in early 1861. The defendant Arapata te Waretuturu is seated centrally; the figure at left is ‘native interpreter’ William Jenkins; Arapata’s wife faces the camera directly; of the four remaining unidentified Maori, three are likely to be named witnesses. Arapata and his wife are in European dress, rather than traditional woven Maori garments. Arapata and his wife (and probably the other Maori present) were from a Maori reserve in Motueka.
In the photograph, the event being enacted or celebrated is the explanation by Jenkins to Arapata of the outcome of the court case. In February 1861 a charge of violent assault was laid against Arapata for severely injuring another M?ori man, Manahi te Poka, who testified against him in court in Motueka, then subsequently died. It seems that both had been intoxicated by alcohol, and that Manahi had already been ill, and had also to some extent provoked the attack through assaulting Arapata’s wife. Although Arapata was imprisoned and charged with manslaughter, due to the particular circumstances (and with mercy recommended by the presiding judge) he was subsequently set free. Details about the case were reported in the Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, and the case was held as an example that might encourage Maori to believe in the fairness of the British justice system.
The photograph’s tone is sombre, and is indeed many shades of seriousness deeper than that regularly seen in studio portraiture of the time. Its creation seems touched also with a coercive strain, with Jenkins as interpreter the only one presenting any sense of assurance. Such a mood is completely absent among the Maori participants, who appear as reluctant models, with Arapata in his absolutely central position seeming most especially averse to this moment.
Although tension-filled, the image from a European point of view may have been seen as a positive image. Clearly it has been created for a European audience, with William Jenkins performing for the camera his explanation in M?ori to Arapata of the finer points of the trial, where British justice is seen to have been dispensed. While the image might be an example of the use of photography as political tool, the territory it most clearly occupies (that we may claim some familiarity with) is as illustration to news drama. The figures’ tableau arrangement and composition also seems to recall the type of image from this period that might have reached the printed page as line engraving in publications such as the London Illustrated News. It is tempting to imagine the photographer, or perhaps Jenkins himself, having such an eventual destination in mind. Despite a knowledge of the incidents that may be now applied to this photograph, the image remains enigmatic, difficult and troubling. It captures a group of Maori caught in time by the camera, between worlds, carrying uncertainty, in the process of being overwhelmed.
Leonard Bell, Department of Art History, The University of Auckland
PASSAGES: NEW SOCIAL SPACES AND THE WORK OF MIGRANT CENTRAL EUROPEAN PHOTOGRAPHERS IN NEW ZEALAND IN THE MID TWENTIETH CENTURY
Leonard Bell is an Associate-Professor in Art History at The University of Auckland. His writings on cross-cultural interactions and representations In New Zealand, Australia and the South Pacific have been published in New Zealand, Australia, USA., Britain, Germany and the Czech Republic. He is the author of The Maori in European Art (1980) and Colonial Constructs: European Images of Maori, 1840 - 1914 (1992), and In Transit: Questions of Home and Belonging in New Zealand Art (2007). His essays have appeared in J. Codell & D. MacLeod (eds), Orientalism Transformed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Art (1998), A. Calder, J. Lamb & B. Orr (eds), Voyages and Beaches (1999), N. Thomas & D. Losche (eds), Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific (1999), F. Driver & L. Martins (eds), Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire 2005), A. Coombes (ed), Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand and South Africa (2006) and T. Barringer, G. Quilley & D. Fordhham (eds), Art and the British Empire (2007). At present he is completing a book on the work and career of the British-born, New Zealand photographer, Marti Friedlander.
This paper has several intertwined concerns: photography and cross-cultural interactions; the ways photographic practices can travel, and the value in the writing photographic histories of detailed investigations and close ‘readings’ of photographs in their particular socio-cultural contexts of production and use. Peter Osborne claimed that ‘all of exile’s manifestations involve a crisis in the experience and representation of space and its meanings’ (Traveling Light, 2000). That proposition will be explored in the work of two photographers, who came to New Zealand as refugees from Nazism: Frank Hofmann from Czechoslovakia and Irene Koppel from Germany. One photograph by each will be focused on in terms of the complexities and problematics of spatialities – that is, not just of physical and geographical spatial relationships, but also in relation to negotiations of social, cultural and emotional spaces.
Hofmann’s photograph (1949) presents a standing woman, his wife, the writer, Helen Shaw, facing the photographer (and viewer) and mirrored in the hallway of their Auckland home, designed by leading architect, Vernon Brown, an exponent of the need for a new distinctively New Zealand style of building. Koppel’s photograph (1941) shows a new modernist interior, designed by the émigré Austrian architect, Ernst Plischke . There is a view through the picture windows to suburban Wellington. Both photographs can be seen to image a threshold condition, in which the clear demarcation or boundary between the inside and the outside, in several senses, would be difficult to fix or define, and in which unambiguous or singular identities or identifications of figures, objects and places remain elusive.
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Max Quanchi, Humanities Program, Queensland University of Technology
VISUAL HISTORIES: THE COLONIAL ERA IN FRENCH NEW CALEDONIA, AUSTRALIAN PAPUA AND BRITISH FIJI
The huge output of photographically illustrated material generated by Euro-American colonial administrations, capitalist enterprise, settlement, evangelism and cross-cultural relationships has been only recently applied to histories of colonialism. This paper addresses these themes comparatively by analysing early 20th century photography from the British Crown Colony of Fiji, the French territory of New Caledonia and the Australian colony of Papua. Historians now acknowledge that deconstructing a monolithic colonialism in Oceania may be disoriented, reversed and undermined, or confirmed, when the metropolitan or national histories of France, Britain and Australia are treated separately or juxtaposed. Their history of a region - Australia, New Zealand and the southwest Pacific - sought to elucidate puzzles which elude scholars working within national parameters. The indexical or forensic visual evidence in picture postcards from Fiji, New Caledonia, and Papua might support or challenge the interpretation in conventional histories already on bookshelves and call for a revision of histories written without critical reflection of the visual evidence. The visual evidence might also reveal that each colony was unique – a reflection of its indigenous history and the nature of its subsequent French, British, German or Australia colonial regime, or reveal similarities between colonies and therefore support claims of a monolithic Pacific Island history of colonialism.
Melissa Miles, Research Fellow, Theory of Art and Design, Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University
THE ART OF CONTEXTUAL MOBILITY: RETHINKING PHOTOGRAPHY, PRIVACY AND PUBLIC SPACE
Dr Melissa Miles is a Research Fellow in the Department of Theory of Art & Design, Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University. She has published several papers on photographic history and theory in academic journals including the Journal of Visual Culture and Word and Image, and is a regular contributor to Eyeline: Contemporary Visual Arts. The Burning Mirror: Photography in an Ambivalent Light is Melissa’s book length study on light in photographic history, theory and practice, and will be published in 2008. Melissa’s current research areas include photography in public space, conceptual documentary photography and the photobook.
In recent years, the notion of photography in public space has become increasingly problematic. The appearance of photographs of schoolboy rowers on a supposedly ‘gay website’ in 2002, and the 2005 publication on the Internet of large numbers of photographs of children playing at Brisbane’s South Bank Parklands are amongst the controversial events that have helped to shape the new climate. The moral panic that enveloped these events led to the banning of photography in some shared spaces, and widespread hostility towards photographers who point their cameras towards people in public.
In an effort to make sense of this moral panic, this paper will draw on Helen Nissenbaum’s model of privacy as ‘contextual integrity.’ It is interesting that much of the debate in Australia is linked not so much to the photographs themselves but to their circulation and consumption, and ongoing problems associated with the concept of privacy in public space. Unlike much of this debate, Nissenbaum’s approach to privacy as ‘contextual integrity’ does not oppose public and private realms. Breaches in privacy are instead understood in terms of the movement of information about ourselves from an appropriate or acceptable context to another inappropriate one.
The power of photography to isolate a subject within the camera’s frame, seize it from its original context and make it available for consumption at other times and places makes it particularly suitable medium for slipping between and across contextual frames. Concerns about this distinctly photographic power have pervaded the medium’s history since the nineteenth century. However, photography’s contextual mobility has been heightened recently with the popularisation of digital cameras and camera phones that allow photographs to be disseminated rapidly in new virtual social spaces. After arguing that the current moral panic over photography in public space is underpinned by anxiety over breaches of contextual integrity, this paper will address whether this approach to privacy can facilitate a more tolerant and supportive environment for photographers, their subjects and audiences.
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Penny Cousineau-Levine, Professor at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Arts
Title to be confirmed
Ross Moore, School of Arts and Sciences, Australian Catholic University
EMBALMING THE DEAD: CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY AS UNCANNY ETHNOGRAPHIC SYMPTOM
Dr Ross Moore, an artist and writer, lectures in Art and Design at the Australian Catholic University. His installation “Dear Primitive: Black Bodies as Décor” (now in the Queensland Art Gallery) was first exhibited in “Colonial-Post Colonial”, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne in 1997. His journal article, A Most Sensitive Man Who Lives Ideas: Gleeson, The Closet and Art Criticism, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Volume 6, Number 1, was awarded Best Journal Of Art essay in 2005. “Nursing in the Outback: Infective Piracy as Colonial Technology” published in Antithesis, Vol 18 (2008) continues his work with his rare late colonial book collection.
This paper focuses on the fraught intersection of ethnography, contemporary art practice and self-representation in the work of two important Australian artists, Brook Andrew and Christian Thompson. Starting out from a discussion of Andrew’s recent controversial Coming into the Light series (Tolarno 2007) in which enthnographic images of “Victorian” Aborigines are lifted from the museum archives and monumentalised and re-enbalmed in Photoshop I propose that the politics of “repeating” the printed image (familiar from Warholian commodification contexts and discussions of simulacral fetish operations) are at least doubly complex in the case of disseminating or casting out images of Indigenous Australians. By extending the discussion to the work of Christian Thompson who employs hyper-theatrical or hyper-performative strategies of self-impersonation to avoid essentializing tropes that inhabit the body of photography itself (in one case he assumes the appearance of a camera-wielding and very stylish Tracy Moffat and more recently the formerly suited “body” of his grandfather) I elaborate the theoretical stakes circulating in contemporary reception and critique of several of Australia’s most significant artists. Complex and very current issues involved in popular media photography and the “intervention” into Northern Territory Aboriginal communities are broached at the end of the paper by way of bracketing what must be considered a significant discussion, whether considered nationally or internationally. The uncanny or “occult” power of photography to “capture” and colonize appearances seems weirdly active, even spookily resilient, as we launch into the digital period where photographic truth would presumably be found well and truly dead.
Tim Smith, PhD candidate, University of Melbourne
NEW LIES OLD TRUTHS: SHADES OF GREY IN THE BLACK AND WHITE
Reflecting on his travels throughout Australia in 1895, the American writer, Mark Twain wrote:
'Australian history is always picturesque. Indeed, it is so curious and strange that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer, and so it pushes the other novelties into second or third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies, and all of a fresh new sort, not the mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprise, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities, and they are all true.'
Twain’s image of a picturesque history of settlement, while valuable in understanding the intent of many 19th century Australian photographers is in stark contrast to the ugly image of colonisation that Xavier Herbert painted in his 1930s epic, Capricornia. Debate in the ensuing years has centred on quantifying the levels of conflict in the seizing of Aboriginal lands, and for photography characterizing it as an agent of these colonising processes. While claims to the extent of conflict and violence enacted on Northern Territory Aborigines are endorsed in my own research, the day-to-day interaction between Aborigines and settlers cannot be as neatly polarised into one of resistance or acceptance by Aborigines.
Similar problems exist in making assumptions about Aboriginal participation in early photography. Many Aboriginal clans in the Northern Territory took advantage of the settlers’ presence and obsessions with collecting and recording. This paper takes up Twain’s idea of the incongruous and contradictory nature of Australia’s history to explore the complexities, and occasionally conflicting readings of several early portraits and landscape photographs that have been interpreted, misinterpreted and reinterpreted to different ends.
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Victoria Garnons-Williams, PhD candidate, Visual Arts, Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology
"WELL-KNOWN CHARACTERS"*: ABORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHS BY J.W.LINDT
Circa 1870, an album of original photographs taken in the studio of J.W. Lindt in Grafton, NSW, was gifted, as Lindt was to do regularly, to an illustrious personage, in this case the mayor of Grafton. The album, consisting of 19 tableau and portrait photographs of aborigines mounted on its pages, has one such page torn loose and many empty. The torn out image is electrifyingly modern. The man, an islander rather than a local tribesman, has entered an isolated space in the portrait defined by a very shallow depth of field. The lens, the best of German optics at the time, allowed such detail that the camera itself can now be seen in the pupil of his eye with the aid of high magnification.
Another portrait is of Pondoon, a youth of 17, who was found as a boy by Ed Ogilvie hiding under a log after police massacred some of his tribe. He became devoted to Ogilvie, and was easily persuaded by the man to sit for Lindt, who was well-known in Grafton and a bit of a celebrity. Lindt was looking for characters and types to realize his lucrative album project. He laboured assiduously to obtain the highest class of photographs and was remarkably canny in his entrepreneurial strategies. His superiority of technique was matched by a deep understanding of the social and cultural context of Australia at the time and fuelled by consistent energy and opportunism. This presentation is based on three specific images that provide the catalyst for analytical narratives, which consider technical, social historical and monetary aspects of Lindt’s work.
*The Grafton Argus and Clarence River General Advertiser. Monday, November 16, 1874.
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