HAIR: Carol Jerrems 1970
Gael Newton, 2012
This essay was originally published in Art and Antiques Australia
In January 1970 Carol Jerrems then about to start her final year of photographic art studies at Prahran Technical School in Melbourne, travelled to Sydney with her boyfriend Geoff Rock, a psychology student who was doing a thesis on the relation of life and art in Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical.
Later that year Jerrems presented a spirax-bound booklet of images from the Sydney Hair performance as part of a school assignment. It was labelled with her distinctive san-serif stamp ‘carol jerrems / photographic artist’ and no doubt helped win her an award that year from the Institute of Australian Photographers.
For even as a student Jerrems had a powerful sense of her identity as a photomedia artist. Her work attracted other awards and attention; she was clearly marked as a talent and went on by 1975 to have her work, exhibited, published and collected and celebrated by a new wave of popular and official acceptance in the early 1970s of photography as an art in step with contemporary art and life. |
|
Carol Jerrems, Hair preformers on Stage,
National Gallery of Australia collection |
After Jerrems premature death in 1980 her Hair booklet – so much a part of the energy of the times encapsulated in the musical, was gifted to the National Gallery of Australia by her mother Joy Jerrems. The Hair booklet and a group of other works from her student years not seen since graduation, will be on view in the retrospective, Carol Jerrems: Photographic Artists 1968-78 which opens at the National Gallery of Australia on 25 August 2012.
Hair had been conceived in 1966 by two American actors by James Rado (James Radomski) and Gerome Ragni, as a new style musical reflecting the Hippie counter culture energy on the streets of the East Village in New York and Haight Ashbury district in San Francisco. The plot follows the adventures of a Vietnam War draftee from Kansas who meets befriended by a tribe of hippies on his way to the army induction center in New York.
The musical promoted the Hippies anti-war and peace movement activism, drug experimentation, sexual and personal liberation. With a score inspired by Rock music by Galt MacDermont Hair became the first production at the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre. It went on in a new production produced by Michael Butler at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway in April 1969 which had rave reviews from the outset and ran until July 1972. The scenario was controversial for its politics, drug endorsement, swearing and a scene when the entire cast are briefly naked on stage as innocent as multi-coloured Adam and Eves, for the production was also ant racism and included African-American performers.
The first Australian production of Hair opened at the Metro Theatre in Kings Cross in June 1969. The local show was produced by Harry M Miller with the young Jim Sharman as Director and included an experimental film by Albie Thomas for the Anti -War sequence, and lighting by the UBU collective of which he was a member.
A few months later in May 1970, the death of a number of Kent State University students protesting the escalation of the Vietnam War into Cambodia who were shot by their own local Ohio National Guardsmen, ensured the Broadway and international productions of Hair remained linked to these tragic events.
The Australian production was mostly drawn from locals not all seasoned performers although professional actor-singers John Waters and Reg Livermore became household names but also had imported African-Americans including the teenage Marcia Hines from Boston. Reg Livermore on his website calls Hair ‘The show that set me free’ recalling how after initial scepticism ( his sister was a cast member) ‘Once I saw it I knew that was where I wanted to belong, that there had to a place for me on that stage; I had to get into it, some way somehow. I'd wanted to change the usual parameters of the actor's life in Australia anyway, certainly as they affected my own career, to venture beyond possibilities as they'd presently existed. It really was a case of time and tide in alignment.’
Jerrems left no particular comment in her journals about the impact of Hair (she had or soon after adopted an Afro hair do instead of a shorn Mia Farrow cut) but the power of the show is alive in the little booklet today as much as when it startled and impressed her teachers at Prahran. As an early viewer this author can also attest that you didn’t need to be stoned
Livermore attests that it was as much a lifestyle for the cast as a musical, you came away believing it was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius!
By 1970 when Jerrems was forging what would become her distinctive style she was drawing on the highly charged graphic arts of the sixties, Rock album and jazz photography, new wave European films, and the wide-angle 35mm reflex cameras that enabled startling close-ups and blurred backdrops or vice versa and went for energy and grain rather than the decisive frozen moments of older style magazine photojournalist.
She was not by any means the first to reflect the sixties ethos. Older experienced photojournalist David Moore (b. 1927) while not embracing the Hippie lifestyle in Sydney brought a new emotionalism, sensuality and sexuality and dynamic to his image-making in the 1970s and while younger photojournalists Robert McFarlane (b.1942) was consciously recording the sweet optimism of counter-culture youth.
Some of the new generation of personal-documentary photographers who sought a new freedom from commissioned photoessays in 1970s, such as Jerrems slightly older contemporary friend Roger Scott (b.1944), took a more acerbic look at the Australians old and young while Wesley Stacey (b.1941) and Rennie Ellis (b.1940) embraced the wilder lifestyles of the era with their 1971 book on Kings Cross which recorded six months at the end of 1970 and early 1971 in the R&R ( Rest & Recreation) watering hole of choice for American soldiers serving in Vietnam.
Carol Jerrems was one of the first women photographers to have her works collected by Australian art museums and public collections and her work both in her own time and to the present has commanded respect and attention among a rich history of Australian photographers who saw the medium as both personal and political and uniquely geared to the liberation and zeitgeist of their own post-WII generation.
The 2012 Jerrems exhibition presents the full spectrum of the prints which Jerrems signed and presented as her best work from 1967-78 as held in the Jerrems archive at the National Gallery of Australia.
more of Gael Newton's Essays and Articles
More on Carol Jerrems
|