CAMERA
John Williams
The Australian, Monday Januray 1976 - Page 8
Hope for the learners
IT"S NICE to congratulate ourselves from time to time on just how much has been achieved on the local photographic scene in the past few years — but it's not so nice to drop earthwards afterward.
Sure . . . the Visual Arts Board has promoted exhibitions and directly assisted some photographers and we do have a gallery and promotions body in the form of the Australian Centre for Photography.
And compared with say three years ago the talent's around all right. Photography Is no longer merely trendy kids with Nikons, colour and fisheyes doing smart rip-offs of Nova ads on-one hand and camera clubs on the other.. It's also committed artists expressing themselves in a unique medium just as it has been for years in the odd civilised spot on the planet.
Not only is photography respected but to use the jargon of the 'sixties, it's also "in". The awareness of its potential and the desire to do it is rampant. People in their twenties and thirties particularly in an apparently even division of the sexes — are moving Into the medium.
Few, if any, of these newcomers are vary concerned with making a buck from their images. Self-expression is the name of the game. And when we plummet earthwards from time to time we must simply ask where can they learn?
The camera clubs, with their over-emphasis on technique and ridiculous concern for idiotic composition "rules" (at the expense of a genuine understanding of the medium's real traditions), are worse than useless. True, they serve a function in teaching a kind o f all-conforming photographic style based on salon pictorialism, but they substitute image sharpness for originality and reduce genuine talent to mediocrity.
We can't expect to find overnight the number of colleges, schools and workshops which now mark the American scene. But in a city the size of Sydney we can at least expect something. By comparison, Melbourne's not too badly served. Prahran College, uniquely In Australia, offers a three year diploma course about photography — not just technicalities.
The college already has some significant photographic artists to their credit — Carroll Jerrems and Robert Ashton are both ex Prahran, Jon Conte, Phillip Quirk and more recently Steven Lojewski.
A few private workshops have also opened recently In Melbourne. Both the Impact school and the Photographer's Gallery and Workshop have a number of outstanding talents emerging. Indicative of the times, it'll be a young woman from one of these workshops of the calibre of Carol Jerrems, Lin Bender and Jenny Atken who'll be pushing the established names in the near future.
In Sydney two developments offer more than just a glimmer of hope. The newly formed Sydney College of the Arts wilt soon be offering a three-year diploma in photography and the Australian Centre for Photography is moving into the workshop field.
If the Melbourne experience in private workshops is any guide, the centre's new project, long overdue, is bound for success and will serve a vital need.