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Developing Photography:

A History of the Australian Centre for Photography 1973-2013– Toby Meagher, Research Paper–June 2013; Masters in Art Administration at COFA

APPENDICES - from the ACP Archive

VISUAL ART - De Berg Tapes

Graham Howe – 28th November, 1974

I am Graham Howe, Director of the Australian Centre for Photography.  The Centre for Photography opened on the 21st November, 1974 as the first Government-funded national organisation for the promotion of photography throughout Australia.

My early training in photography was basically as an amateur photographer .  From about the age of 16 I have been using a camera, and it was my formal education at the Swinburne College of Technology in Melbourne where I studied graphic design.  Further to that, I studied at the Prahran College of advanced Education, receiving a diploma in art and design, majoring in photography.

Following this diploma, I went to the United Kingdom, where I worked in London at the Photographers' Gallery.  There I was a designer of exhibitions and after a year's involvement with that gallery, spent in the following year much time in the archives of the Royal Photographic Society, researching and documenting the work of unknown early photographers.

After a two-year stay in England, I applied for this position I now hold, Director of the Australian Centre for Photography, and was appointed in January, 1974.

The Australian Centre for Photography is a seminal resource, where photography' is gathered in various systems, one main area is la the exhibitions.  The Centre puts together original exhibitions for touring throughout Australia and to overseas areas, original collections of Australian photography.

This work is also published in books printed to a high standard and after these exhibitions are toured, the prints are put into the Centre repository, which will be a public archive for contemporary photographs. The Centre will have other minor functions aad these will be to offer for public reading a library of photographic books, also it's hoped that the Centre will compile slide oopies of major photographic collections in other countries so that in Australia we too can enjoy the images that perhaps we can't own. This would be available in a self-projection system where* people could take a carousel projector and look freely at their own will through a collection of photographs.

The importance of the Centre in a world context is that it is unique in that for the first time a government body has funded a national programme for photography. This is setting an example for many other countries in the world who have been involved in photography but it has been funded largely through private enterprise. In fact, at this present time/ it's rather like adding Be a current trend Where the governments all around the world are contributing more and more than private industry to the public arts.

The Australian Centre for Photography is funded la part by tha Visual Arts Board of the Australian Council for the Arts. However, it is hoped that we will be able to secure a major finanolal contribution from the private sector, the industries, specifically photographic industries, in general.
This approach to a national programme of photography was conceived in the mind of David Moore, the photographer, and Wesley Stacey, both of whom have contributed greatly to reaching the point we are et now.

In September, 1973, after three years of planning, mainly by David Moore, a guiding committee was established. These were David Moore, the photographer, Wesley Stacey, photographer, Peter Keyes, architect. Danial Thomas, curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Laurence Le Gaye, photographer, and Craig McGregor, a writer.  

This guiding committee established the Centre as a non-profit cultural organisation with aims to research, exhibit, publish, collect and generally encourage photography in Australia. After securing premises early in 1974, renovations have been under way and were completed on the opening of the gallery. The gallery is in fact a meeting place for photographers, a place where photographers and their public can examine the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, research attitudes and concepts, and exchanga idaas on the subject.

In October, 1974 Bronwen Thomas was appointed our gallery director and the fulltime staff were established in the gallery from its opening date. The Centre is unique in another way and that is that after the idea of David Moore, we are hanging photographers off our walls by a process of magnetism, that is, that the walls have been covered in a vinyl covered steel donated by John Lysaghts Limited, and 2½ inch permanent magnets have been dipped in vinyl and adhered to the wall by magnetism and these hold our frames,  this obviates the needs and traditional problems of repainting and plugging walls.  Also it is a very sympathetic backing and environment for photographs which aren't quite so loudspeaking as paintings.

To keep a sympathy with the general Victorian feeling of this corner terraoe building that we are occupying, the colour scheme is thought to be a congenial and friendly place where photographers would be pleased to meet and discuss their ideas and exchange opinions. The colour throughout is largely brown with a brownflecked, serviceable haircord carpet, and the exterior of the building is painted a rich chocolate brown colour. The lighting of the gallery is an inbuilt fluorescent tube system with its colour corrected for the proper viewing of colour photographs as well as black-and-white. All this is generally unobtrusive, and the feeling of the gallery is one of clean, unobtrusive design, while the essential features such es staircase and exterior details are retained end presented in much the same feeling aa the building was originally Intended to be.

The general daylighting around the gallery is also quite extraordinary. The typical Paddington area low-angle long-shadow lighting. When the gallery opened about a week ago with Mrs Whltlam, the wife of our Prime Minister, Gough whitlam, who drove all the way from Canberra because of a plane strike.

She was able to meet the gallery at its best lit time, about 6 o'clock in the evening, when the shadows were extra­ordinarily long, the light strong, clear and bright as Australian light always is, and it was particularly congenial time because the Centre being the home of photographers was at that time infested with them, and from our balcony photographers of Mrs Whitlam'a policeman were being made by the dozens, and his particular shadow stretched twice his height, and in general the light textures were very rich and full. It was a most enjoyable opening end a very congenial, happy event for everyone.

For the last year I have been working on establishing the Centre. We were very fortunate in being allowed about eight or nine months to do something that has never really been done before in Australia, and that was to travel from town to town researching and looking up all the contemporary producers of photographs.

The photographara I met ware concerned mainly with private aspects of their art.  They didn't care whether it was to be sold or to be exhibited, or at least very few of then did. Yet at the name time, this private work they produced was certainly of a high calibre and enormous significance.

The research of this programme was finally compiled in a book which ie to be published later in 1974 called New Photography Australia, a selective survey which has some 49 photographers whom I found around the country, producing Interesting work. They have all personally differing styles yet they have all of them a sense of their creative integrity, if you like, or just I'll call them artists of high calibre.

One of our committee members, Peter Keyes, was -- is a director of McConnell, Smith and Johnson, town planners and architects, and it was his designs and ideas that were combined with ideas from the rest of the committee which made this gallery such a simple and yet functional building. It is in fact my belief that the committee behind the Centre is a unique group of men who have contributed in a specialised yet general way. The Centre is really the result of a great many hours put in by these people and an enormous amount of care, particularly on the part of David Moore, who has spent probably the last four years, almost 50 per cent of his time helping and coaxing and encouraging these ideals.

Ever since my early involvement in photography, I found it a tremendously rich Informational medium, where It was teaching me things that I couldn't see before. Having once seen something photographed, it would allow me to see it for evermore. This is one of the assets and values of photography. It has been said and oft quoted that photography is neglected in the arts, end this is very true, but I would think perhaps this is because it's never been fully understood.

It is a radical art form, one that conditions our visual Information almost unconsciously through newspapers, books and other mediums. It is the very ubiquity of photography as a folk art and as something which everyone does, it doesn't have the uniqueness or exclusiveness of the finer arts.

However, that doesn't reduce its importance as Information, as an aesthetic medium, as one that everyone can enjoy.

It has in fact been current in this year, when 'Cartier-Bresson's France" an exhibition from the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, that toured Australia as an exhibition Throughout major art galleries in each state.

It was in fact coupled with Paul Klee, and at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney just recently, it was astounding to find the upper gallery with Cartier-Bresson absolutley crowded throughout the extended season, and the Klee rather sparse, nevertheless a delighful exhibition.

If you caan consider how important these two artists are in their individual fields, it is perhaps more in perspective to say that Cartier-Bresson, a master and great photographer, is perhaps of greater magnitude in his tradion than Klee is in the tradion of painting. So it just points out that photography is immediately recognisable and largely understandable by everyone, and isn't this a true art medium?

It would fair to say that photography had a very stimulating and innovating effect on my whole life. It was as if the blinkers were taken off. This was hit only by accident,I suppose, during a achool camera club meeting. I wa s coaxed, bullied and otherwise made to made to go and take photographs for a competition, and in fact that I had to think about what I was doing, what this camera in my hands was pointing at, what In fact was a photograph, led me to create an image I was pleased with. I think it waa of a tree, a broken branch, but I'm sure that this is the same kind of stimulus, the feeling of fixing intuitions and feelings about a certain experience, that ever after can be recorded and recalled just on that image that many photographers experience, and it was in fact the hooking by the eyes that drew them into photography.

Although I was born in Sydney and received some of my early education here, it was because my father was in the Air Force and was posted every coupla of years that I waa fortunate, some might say unfortunate, to travel to many places throughout Australia and to overseas countries, those would include Melbourne, Canberra, Singapore, and finally England.

It was tha stimulus of some 13 schools, particularly one in Singapore, which was a satellite from the United Kingdom education system, where the freedom created in this school allowed one to experiment and become conversant with any particular art medium for the secondary level school it made available pottery and sculpture, painting, and photography, which was in fact set up as soon as I displayed an interest in photography, a unique situation for any school and that was a time I enjoyed immensely. After that it was to Swinburne College to study graphic design.

Generally the effect of travelling around was one that was stimulating, being aware of new places, new things, the ability to generalise and see now areas in a different way.

I think anyone who becomes involved in photography or any other of tho arts owes a certain amount at where whey are and what they understand to the people who imparted knowledge, and particularly one gentleman in Singapore, Clive Burton, although at a very early stage, made a marked impression upon my viewpoint on things.

Further on, in tertiary education, photographers like Paul Cox, Athol Shmith with his warmth and humanity and general fine personality, are people I can remember who have contributed greatly to what has been my position now.

Like all good young Australians I too had to leave the country and travel to the United Kingdom, in fact it was for personal reasons that I did go, having made many friends in Singapore who were from England and wanting to rejoin some of them, and at the same time involve myself in what I found was an ever-increasing desire for photography, a virtual addiction to photographs.

Although I've been a photographar for a very few years, about eight or nine, it has bean a long-drawn-out period which I can now see as relatively naive and innocent, which does have beauty of its own. Nevertheless at these times I was involvsd doing my own photographs and that enriched mg tremendously.

It would generally take me in phases. I would spend some time doing landscapes but always photographing people. Eventually, the camera came to mean a lot more to me, something that was a personal honesty, a truth, the fact that the camera was able to record and fix the feelings that I felt to me was enormously encouraging and enriching. As a photographer now in Sydney, although the Centre commits a great deal of my time, photographing objects and paying particular attention to Australian places and this superb, clear, bright, crisp Australian light that is unique, it is just astounding.

When I went to England after studying at Prahran, I was still intensely involved in photography, taking my own work at that: particular time, and it was the beginning of a period where I spent much time travelling throughout England, photographing the landscapes more than anything else.

It was a country which to me is full of mystery and light qualities, which are almost the reverse of Australia. Bright light seems to be almost non-existent, a soft diffused light which generally enshrouds everything is perhaps more the quality of England, whereas in Australia bright objects catch your ayes, and the photographer here seems to be drawn into a now kind of aestetic where the composition is structured more on the highlights than the shadows, which has been the tradition in painting and photography for centuries.

It's already apparent in the photographs made intuitively, almost naively, in the tradition that does exist, photographers like Grant Modford who have structured the light object as opposed to the dark areas, whereas in England the country seems to have more its own inner light, if we dare use a cliche, the light is just in general.

Well, this specifically interested me in the area of historical research when, having stumbled across the Royal Photographic Society's photographic archive, which at that time was just being catalogued, the collection was largely put together by a man named Dudley Johnson, who is now dead. This man religiously collected early photography and it is one of the most complete collections of photography from its beginnings to about 1920 or 1930.

While walking through the basement of the archive one day, I tripped over a heavy wooden crate filled with glass negatives. These I discovered later, after fossicking through and realising this was something very exciting, I realised later they were negatives taken by e photographer called Horace Walter Nicholls, probably one of the earliest photo-journalists in England, disregarding John Thompson's Street Scenes.

This was taken about 1898, his first photographs were of the Boer War, after which he returned to London to start his own photographic studio. The interesting thing about Nicholls is that he was one of the few that used a hand camera and photographed very much in the spirit of the times. When you look at his photographs of Derby Day, Henley Regatta, and other upper class English leisure, it's as if the feeling of the '10s end '20s, the radical feeling, the dynamism, the general energy in the air, is all on these photographs, which astounded me, because very few other photographs have shown It in this way.

Nicholls it also unique as a photographer, and I expect in the years to come he will rewrite our history books or be included in them, certainly, in that he was perhaps one of the few photographers to document women at war, in the First World War he photographed the women who stayed at home when all their family and husbands and loved ones went off to the War. Significantly for our current trend of feminism and women's liberation, it was the first time that women wore trousers. Nicholl's photographs show a number of ladies at work in overalls and dungarees, painting Hammersmith Station or tarring tha Paddington main street, and this is England in 1914-18.

He is in many ways a radical photographer. That was a very nice discovery to be made but it only pointed up to me that throughout all our photographic tradition, perhaps 10 per cent has been uncovered that has actually been made; our photographic history books just aren't any true record of what has actually been done. Because of the fact that photography could be practised by amateurs, anyone with enough money to buy camera and film, it was being done by everyone, and although a few of these, because of perhaps their self-promotion or accidental discovery, have made it to our tradition, a great many haven't.

In much the same way the Australian photographer, Dr Charles Gabriel, of Gundagai, his photographs taken around 1890 show a radical, naive feeling of a joyous family snap, the fact that this man documented almost every event of his town in a lighthearted way, typical of an upperclass family of the time, and yet this man is so radical to our tradition, he pre­dates Henry la Teague by 20 years, who was the main innovator of this naive photography. In Australia it is becoming more and more apparent that we are sitting on one of the richest photographic traditions, yet undiscovered, anywhere.

Another example is, for instance, the ethnological photographs taken by Henry King who was at one time business partner to Charles Kerry, and both of these photographer documented Sydney, Melbourne, and all the surrounding country, very primitive portraits by Henry King of Aborigines will in fact be the Centre's eecond exhibition. These have a dignity, a feeling that is more primitive, perhaps, than the photographs by American Edward S.Curtis of North American Red Indians. His photographs are more lyrical, more poetic.

Australia seems during all of its history and , let's face it, it has really only since the lnvention of photography about 1850 that Australian history really has taken place, that it's been thoroughly documented by the camera. Australia's growth and Australia's developments are there somewhere, yet to be found, hopefully not yet destroyed, on film.

It's my feeling that this tradition of photography in Australia is certainly an area of great potential, certainly an area that I personally feel now in a position that I can discover and explore and show to other people. It's really because I enjoy getting the charge that I do out of a photograph, the stimulus and the information that tells us more really, more then any other medium, what it was like, almost what it smells like, what it tastes like, what it was.  

Photographs can only do that, and it's a particular addiction of mine.

Just as important are photographs taken in what is now our history, now is our history, as this tape goes down it becomes a history, and as photographers today and tomorrow and next week make photographs of our time, they're documenting information that can never again be retrieved unless it is in some form. 

As photography has told many people, and will continue to tell many people, about our times and how we lived, so too do the images produced by everyone now today, family snapshot albums – Kodak must be the greatest source of information on contemporary life on earth, as is the telephone talkback radio,

We have all these contemporary mediums which give us an insight into our lives, our times, information which is there to enrich us.

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Intro & Chapter 1   /   Chapters 2 & 3    /   Chapters 4 & 5    /   Chapters 6 & 7   /   bibliography   /  Appendices