REVIEW
Re-constructed Vision
Contemporary work with photography 25th July-23rd August, 1981
Review by Martyn Jolly
Written by Martyn Jolly when was a student intern at the Australian Centre for Photography
published by the Australian Centre for Photography as part of their newsletter.
In her introductory essay to Re-constructed Vision, its Curator, Gael Newton, says that a show of manipulated photography was originally proposed in 1979, but abandoned because insufficient local work could be found. Just two years later, however, there was work aplenty from which to draw a major exhibition of photography showing a "significant degree of intervention".1
One reason for this is undoubtedly the direct influence on Australian photography of an already established American aesthetic. Particularly through such photographers as Leonie Reisberg, who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Fiona Hall, Douglas Holleley and Christine Godden who have worked at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester. Both of these institutions have a strong tradition of hand-worked, interventionist photography.
However this resurgency of manipulated photography could also be seen as a major upheaval and realignment in the course of Australian photography generally. It could be seen as an immediate response to a sense of the formal and cultural exhaustion of the realist mode of photography, an exhaustion recently described and widely consumed in the form of criticisms such as Susan Sontag's 'On Photography'. |
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| Joan Lyons, #32 Prom. 1975 |
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This, combined with the establishment and recognition of v/hat can be called 'A Photographic History', and the increasing attention placed on photography from other areas of the visual arts, seems to have created a kind of Baroque or Mannerist period in photography.
A period where photographers are busy layering sets of signitiers on the surface of their photographs as though ironically the surface was the only thing left unexhausted by photography itself, (merely reconnaissanced by the pictorialists). These signifiers - panoramas or paint, sepias or colours, expressionism or structuralism - refer only to photography's own history, or art history, or science. They remain on the surface, in themselves, for their own sake.
So it can be briefly said that much of the work that was in Re-Constructed Vision is of very recent generation, as well, many of the photographers included are quite young themselves. These two facts alone are sufficient to explain the feeling of thinness one got off much of the work presented. A feeling that although much of the work, was in a highly finished state, denying it an experimental status, it lacked any depth, any sufficient reason for its "significant degree of intervention." Rather it seemed to be an immediate, superficial response to a perceived situation, a self- conscious filling of a perceived gap in the rhetoric of photography.
However the exhibition was so selected that this kind of work was thrown into sharp relief by the high quality of the rest of the photography exhibited. If we compare Kate Breakey's laboriously hand-coloured composites, where neither the photography or the painting seem sufficient excuse for one another, with Kathryn Paul's subtle and restrained panoramas, we are well aware of who come off best. Similarly, as Fimo's attempts at surrealist angst look across at Mike Parr and John Delacour's expert melodrama, we know who deserves more attention. Alan Cruikshank just transforms fairly ordinary photographs into fairly ordinary infra-red photographs, but Trevor Kenyon's long exposures create an intrinsic evocative effect.
But it would be doing the exhibition an injustice to arbitrarily pick out names and make judgments between the one or two of their works presented. The exhibition had a more important purpose than that.
With the continuing penetration of photography as a medium into 'contemporary art', and with the continuing resistance of contemporary art to the presence of a distinctive photographic tradition. Re-constructed Vision provided "an opportunity to view mostly young contemporary, photographer's work in a context with artists in other mediums whose work involves photography"2 The thesis of Re-Constructed Vision was that "ultimately work within any medium must cease to set internal standards and be seen within the context of contemporary art".3
This exhibition, then, is part of Australian Photography's coming out, a place where it can stand side by side with the rest of art. But whilst inviting a comparison with the rest of art, the exhibition could be accused of overstating its case somewhat by its inclusion of so much 'young' work, photography which hovers somewhere between experimentation and a conclusion, photography whose thinness is immediately evident amongst the rest of the work shown. Although you may have to be cruel to be kind, this overstatement tends to simplify the problem into a straight art/photography split, yet on closer examination of the exhibition the differences between artists' use of photography and photographers' use of photography don't seem to be as clear as that.
Firstly we must realize that all the work in the exhibition is photography, it all still relies, for its meaning, on the strong aura of the document that is innate in any use of the photographic process. This aura might be employed to transform a drawing by just peeping out of it, as in Marc Strizic's 'Face', or it might be used to give strong graphics an increased evidential nature, as in Bea Maddock's 'Caliper', or it might be codified into a quasi-scientific investigation, as in Robert Owen's 'Full Circle', it all remains however, photography. Even the documentation of a performance remains primarily a photographic experience. I could never work out from Suzanne Davies' colour photographs of Kevin Mortenson's 'Camp Atavism' what actually happened during the performance, but I can appreciate the photographs immensely.
Quite simply, I do not think it is true that the artists in this show do better photography than the photographers. I do not think that all photographers are equally implicated in photography's admitted ghettoization within contemporary art. The work of photographers like Lynn Silverman shines in the company of 'artists'. Her work shows a strong grasp of a broad range of concerns, traditional pictorial renderings of landscape, concepts of a private position in a 'universal' landscape, of detail and space, and a full exploitation of the logic of the camera's structural existence within the landscape.
Her concern for the landscape goes further than Douglas Holleley's spectacular photographic illusions and patterns, that are laid on the landscape rather than drawn from it. Her work also shows us more about the significance of the act of photographing than Robert Owen's ponderous combination of lines and angles and colour and monochrome.
More significantly, artists themselves are shown up by their photographic company. For example it is easier now to remove the aura of 'sculpture' from the single photograph of Adrian Hall's in the exhibition, his 'Sculptogram', a rather mundane symbolist still life whose significance seems to go little further than its grandiose nomenclature. Compare this with Les Walking's 'Fly Paper', where briIlian puns on surface texture and metaphor of content combine with just as briIlian printing to make a 'Photograph' that speaks for itself.
Rather than be alarmed, photographers have good cause to take heart from Re-constructed Vision, they are using photography just as significantly as anybody else, it only need be recognised.
#1,2, 3 are quotes from Gael Newton's introductory essay.
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