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On The Edge: Australian photographers of the Seventies
Biographies
Compiled in 1994 by AnnO'Hehir
The biographies have not been updated - the text is published in 1994
Micky (Michele) Allan, born 1944, Melbourne, Victoria
After early schooling in Japan, Melbourne, and the United States, Micky Allan completed a bachelor’s degree in fine art at the University of Melbourne in 1967 and received a diploma in painting from the National Gallery School, Melbourne, the following year. At her first one-person exhibition she chose to “live in” the gallery, moving in items such as her bed and desk, so as to create an informal atmosphere in order to de-mystify the artistic process and to communicate more readily with visitors.
She had turned from her training as a painter to photography because of its possibilities of social interaction: she perceived painting to be an isolating, individual activity. From the beginning, however, she was not constrained by respect for the purity of the print surface. She handcolored her photographs using color pencils, watercolors and oils from a desire to further express her feelings about the people she was photographing. Allan worked in series and many of these explored cycles of growth — babies, the aged, families — while others reflected her environmental concerns. She taught at tertiary institutions in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide in the 1970s and 1980s. She had travelled through Asia to London at the end of the sixties and in the 1980s was awarded grants to work overseas. In 1983 she was in residence in the Australian studio at the Michael Karolye Foundation in Vence in southern France, and in 1985 worked at the Power Institute Studio, Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris. While working in Vence she began to paint again and ceased using photography. Her paintings have glowing, suffused, opaque and semitransparent colors and intricate figurative and abstract elements, and show an influence of Eastern philosophy. The technique of overlaying functions in a similar way to her early handcoloring of photographs, opening new paths between the inner and outer world.
Robert Ashton, born 1950, Melbourne, Victoria
Robert Ashton studied photography at Prahran College of Advanced Education, Melbourne, from 1968-70. He freelanced as a commercial photographer in the early 1970s and also studied film. In 1972 he travelled extensively in Europe, Asia and North Africa. On his return to Melbourne, he studied to be a teacher at Hawthorn Technical College but continued from 1974-81 to work for Rennie Ellis (q.v.) as a photographer and printer.
He was also employed by Ellis as assistant director of Brummels Gallery of Photography in Melbourne. In 1974 Ashton published a book of photographs of people of the suburb Fitzroy, Melbourne, entitled “Into the hollow mountains,”which included essays and poetry by a group of young writers. His work is characteristic of the highly personalized documentary photography of the period. Although his professed aim was primarily to document life as he found it, his photographs display a “magic realism” of unusual conjunctions and his own personal vision projected onto what he found. In 1981, unhappy with the commercial photography scene, Ashton turned to making his living as a furniture maker and restorer at Aireys Inlet on the west coast of Victoria. He continues to work on his personal photography; between 1987-90 he explored the technique of photogravure as a printing process.
Robert Besanko, born 1951, Melbourne, Victoria
A self-taught photographer, Robert Besanko began photographing in 1971 at the age of twenty. Living in Melbourne, he exhibited there from 1977, having his first solo show at the Photographers’ Gallery the following year. In the years 1979-81, he was awarded grants from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council and travelled through Europe, Japan and America, taking photographs and exhibiting his work. One-person shows were held in 1979 at the Canon Gallery in Amsterdam and in Santa Cruz,
California, and in 1981 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He also exhibited in group shows in New York, London and Paris. His work is in collections in France and Holland as well as major public institutions in Australia. By using Kodalith paper he produced prints with sepia-tones reminiscent of nineteenth-century photographers. The flattened and abstracted quality of his images also has a feel of the 1920s art deco movement. He lives in Melbourne and has not exhibited widely since the mid-1980s.
Warren Breninger, born 1948, Melbourne, Victoria
Warren Breninger attended Melbourne Teachers’ College from 1968-1971 and teaches in secondary schools in Victoria. He began exhibiting in 1971 and in 1975 received a diploma in art and design from Caulfield Institute of Technology. During the seventies Breninger was best known as a “photographer” even though he used only a few photographs as the bases for mixed media images. He has always employed a number of mediums; painting, drawing, sculpture, etching and poetry as well as photography. His work most often involves successive variations on an initial photographic image, as in his The Expulsion of Eve, in which the original print of a young girl’s head and upper torso was altered by pigments and drawing and cutting implements. (Begun in 1978, it had reached Series III by 1990; a series IV produced in 1993-4 is called simply Expulsion, as it includes male and female faces). The principle informing all of Breninger’s work is his deep Christian belief; his work, however, is not a simple illustration of theology. He represents a world in which there is a rift between appearance and what is real. The human body is seen as temporal — having to suffer the transgressions of the earthly world in order to achieve spiritual transcendence. His aesthetic dependence on the body is countered by his partly obliterating the image by manipulating it with additional media and
implements. The paradox of growth through effacement is a tenet of his religious belief: the process of photography, with its multiplication of the original object, is seen as symbolic of the constant renewal of life through death and reproduction. Breninger has received a number of major art prizes, including the Blake Prize (the major art award in Australia for religious art) in 1989. He continues to exhibit in mixed media and to work with the photographic image. A current series, Gates of Prayer, uses close-up images of mouths taken on SX-7 polaroids which are then copied on slide film, double and triple exposed, added to and subtracted from, then copied onto film again.
Christine Cornish, born 1946, Adelaide, South Australia
Christine Cornish taught art in secondary schools after graduating from Melbourne Teachers’ College in 1967, where she studied painting and art history. She further studied art history at La Trobe University in Melbourne during 1976-77 and photography at Preston Institute of Technology in 1977. In 1978-79 she worked at the Australian Centre for Photography and since 1978 has taught photography in tertiary institutions in Sydney. From 1983-88 she also studied for a master’s degree in visual art at the City Art Institute in Sydney. She has exhibited regularly since 1978: her first one- person shows were in 1983, at Visibility Gallery in Melbourne and at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney. Her early works, whether interior or exterior subjects, favored a close-focus and even light which introduced elements of abstraction and ambiguity to the final image. This approach explored the way in which camera vision redefines the relation of objects in space. For one series of works she also photographed scenery using a plastic lens “Diana” camera, which resulted in loss of detail and poor depth of focus, thereby transcribing the subject into a created atmosphere and space. Since 1986 Cornish has exclusively created her own
subjects in the studio which have the character of Renaissance grisaille drawings and still-life studies. Objects are set in shallow box-like spaces and lit with very low overall lighting. By painting the surfaces of both objects and the setting, she creates deliberate perceptual ambiguities. Her exploration of the nature of photography, drawing, and painting as tools for description and transcription reflects her early art historical studies of Renaissance and Baroque art and her interest in the theory of perception. The association with past art and literature is strengthened through titles of series such as Natura Marta shown at Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne in 1987 and das Verweilen included in Stranger than Fiction (contemporary still life) at the National Gallery of Australia in 1991. This direction has continued in the 1994 series titled INCLOSE.
Ian Dodd, born 1937, Sydney, New South Wales
Ian Dodd studied painting, design and illustration at the National Art School of New South Wales, graduating in 1957. During the years 1958-62, he worked as a commercial artist in magazine publishing and exhibited his paintings. During 1963- 64 he travelled extensively throughout England, Europe and the United States. Returning to Australia, he worked again as a graphic artist and in the mid-sixties began to use photography both commercially and to explore its possibilities as an art form. In 1967 he became art director of a large magazine publishing company, a position he held until 1979 . The first showing of his work as a photographer was in 1974 at the inaugural exhibition of the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney. He had a one-person exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography in 1977 and exhibited etchings (1978) and monoprints (1986) as well as publishing a cartoon novel in 1993. He has been self-employed as a graphic artist since 1980. Although Dodd’s subject matter draws on his personal relationships and vision, it does not fit the description of documentary photography as such. The soft, grainy quality of his prints — reflecting his background in graphic arts — recreates the original subjects as fragments of a new narrative which he describes as “exploring the magic and the real, the human, the erotic and the eccentric.”
Max Dupain, O.B.E., A.C., Hon. Fellow, Royal Institute of Australian Architects, 1911-1992, Sydney, New South Wales
By the time of his death in 1992 at the age of eighty- one, Dupain was established in Australia as a household name and had earlier that year been awarded the Companion of Australia, the country’s highest honor. In 1930 he was apprenticed in the studios of Cecil Bostock, a successful pictorialist art photographer before taking up the new fields of commercial and industrial photography. Dupain opened his own studio in 1934 and immediately attracted public attention and patronage as the most talented exponent of a modernist style, which emphasized clean lines, geometry, dramatic angles, and lighting. In the thirties Dupain worked across all fields, being especially noted for his fashion and glamor portraiture. Surrealism was a significant influence in his work from 1934-45. Dupain was a camouflage officer in the RAAF during the Second World War and became a photographer with the Department of Information. When he returned to Sydney and his photographic career in 1948, he rejected the artifice of his earlier work with its often surrealistic devices and turned his attention to the photographing of industry and modern architecture, in particular forming a long association with the young emigrant architect Harry Seidler.
The new interest in photography as an art in the 1970s and the inclusion of the medium in art museums led to his first retrospective in 1975, and many one-person shows followed. The renewed public enthusiasm and respect for photography seems also to have stimulated Dupain to revisit some of the themes of his earlier career and to reprint many lesser known images in his vast archive.
Sandy Edwards, born 1948, Bluff, New Zealand
Sandy Edwards moved to Australia in 1961 and graduated from the University of Sydney in 1969 with a bachelor of arts degree. After working for the Australian Broadcasting Commission during 1968- 70, she travelled to Asia and Europe before arriving in London and studying film part-time at the Slade School of Art. Coming back to Sydney in 1973, she worked as a video production assistant, and has continued to work in film and theatre projects through the 1980s and 1990s. From 1974-76 she worked as a photographic assistant in Sydney and then as an administrative assistant at the Australian Centre for Photography. In 1977 she began to freelance as a photographer and in 1979 opened a studio for commercial work in Surry Hills in Sydney. From 1980 to 1990, she tutored part-time at the Tin Sheds Fine Arts Workshop and since 1992 has been assistant director of Stills Gallery (a photography gallery) in Sydney. Her work has been informed by her feminism and more general social concerns. She was a contributor to the CSR Pyrmont Refinery Centenary 1978 Photographic Project and used the commission to comment on the conditions under which the women in the packing section worked. With three other photographers she founded a group called “Blatant Image,” the aim of which was to question the representation of women in the media and to produce new images. In 1986, Edwards was again involved with a commissioned photography project to document the construction of the new Australian Parliament House in Canberra and in 1988 participated in the After 200 Years Project, managed by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies — a project documenting Aboriginal Australia. In 1988, she further documented — at her own initiative — Aboriginal protest actions concerning the Australian bicentennial celebrations. In 1990 she was the photographer for Murrawina, a book on prominent Aboriginal women written by Dr. Roberta Sykes.
David Ellis, born 1956, Launceston, Tasmania
David Ellis graduated with a degree in visual arts from the Tasmanian School of Art in 1977. He received an arts and crafts fellowship from the Tasmanian Arts Advisory Board in 1978. His photographs were exhibited in group shows in Hobart, Sydney and Melbourne in the late seventies. Like Robert Ashton (q.v.), Greg Weight (q.v.) and others, his work often seeks to find the unfamiliar and bizarre in ordinary details through unusual juxtapositions. In particular he explored the border zone between town and country where nature and culture attempt a dialogue. In 1980 he joined the curatorial staff of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and in 1986 moved to Sydney and worked as project manager for the International Cultural Corporation of Australia. Since 1992 he has worked as exhibitions manager for the National Library of Australia in Canberra. He is no longer active as a photographer.
Rennie Ellis, born 1940, Melbourne, Victoria
After attending the University of Melbourne and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Rennie Ellis spent his twenties working in advertising and travelling overseas. In 1969 he began working freelance as a photographer/writer/filmmaker. In 1971 he exhibited for the first time, showing with Wesley Stacey (q.v.). The following year he became the founder and director of the Brummels Gallery of Photography (later Pentax Brummels) and established the Scoopix Photo Library in Melbourne. Since that time, his work has been shown regularly as well as being widely published in books and magazines in Australia and internationally. Much of his work of the seventies
was concerned with documenting subcultures, especially the demi-monde of strippers, massage parlors and tattoo freaks. Since the seventies he has also turned his camera on mainstream culture, exploring the notion of Australia as a hedonistic society. The female nude is a constant theme in his work. Ellis has published sixteen books, including two on Australian beach life and another which examined the mystique of the fashion show. He has received grants from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council and a United Nations Habitat Award for Photography. His photographs have appeared in such publications as Time, Vanity Fair, Taller, People and Playboy. In recent years Ellis has also developed a profile as a television presenter and public speaker.
Gerrit Fokkema, born 1954, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
Gerrit Fokkema grew up in Queanbeyan, just outside Canberra, and studied photography part- time at the Canberra Technical College during 1974- 77. In 1975 he became a staff photographer at the Canberra Times. He moved to Sydney in 1980 to work for the Sydney Morning Herald and attracted attention with his covers for the paper’s color supplement magazine, The Good Weekend. In 1986 he left the paper to freelance as a commercial photographer, working primarily for corporations. His first show was held at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, in 1975 and he had numerous group exhibitions there through the late seventies. In 1986 he published a book of photographs, Wilcannia, Portrait of an Australian Town, and from 1986-89 participated in five overseas Day in the Life of... projects. An interest in surrealism and the notion of automatism influences his photographs, which often play with sudden shifts in scale and unexpected juxtaposing of objects. While many of his photographs are somewhat sombre in mood, depicting a modern urban environment which is alienating, he often reveals a quirky sense of humor in his images. Since 1983 his personal work has centred on photographing his family.
Jillian Viva Gibb, born 1945, Bobinawarrah, Victoria
Jillian Gibb completed a diploma of art at Wangaratta Technical College, part of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, in 1965 and studied painting and printmaking for three years at the National Gallery Art School, Melbourne, graduating in 1968. She received a postgraduate diploma in printmaking at the same school (called by then the Victorian College of the Arts) in 1974 and began employing photography in her silk- screened prints. She gradually came to work in photography. In 1976 a one-person show of her photographs was held at the Ewing and George Paton Gallery at the University of Melbourne. In 1979 her exhibition, One Year’s Work, was shown at the National Gallery of Victoria. Her concerns are primarily social; she travelled to South Africa to photograph the injustices of Apartheid and in Melbourne she often documented the lives of migrants, children and the elderly. Her work also reveals her feminist and environmental concerns and in particular her protest against the cruelty of human beings to animals. Most recently her interest in photography has been in exploring the world of ritual and worship. Gibb continues to work as a painter and photographs when she can afford the materials.
Christine Godden, born 1947, Sydney, New South Wales
After study towards a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Melbourne, Godden travelled through Asia and Europe, arriving in the United States in 1971. She stayed for six years, working in New York and California and completing a B.F.A. (bachelor of fine arts degree) at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1974 and an M.F.A. (master of fine arts degree) at the Visual Studies Workshop, State
University of New York, Rochester in 1978. During this time, she showed in various group exhibitions in San Francisco and New York and also had one- person exhibitions in 1976 at the Ewing and George Paton Gallery at the University of Melbourne and at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney. She returned to Australia in 1978 to take up an appointment as director of the Australian Centre for Photography, a position she held until 1982. She gained an M.B.A. (master of business administration degree) in 1991 and works as a management consultant. A book of her photographs is to be published in 1995. Her photographs in the seventies were instilled with a sensuousness expressed through textures and gestures. Other works reflected her social concerns: she often looked at issues around family relationships. Her photographs of sunsets were exhibited at Watters Gallery in 1980. She displayed an irreverence for the techniques and concerns of high-art photography, choosing a subject usually eschewed and achieving grainy, indistinct prints by enlarging small-format negatives.
Tim Handfield, born 1952, Melbourne, Victoria
Tim Handfield was one of the few Australian art photographers to specialize in color printing during the 1970s. He began taking photographs in 1971 while studying physics at La Trobe University in Melbourne from 1970-73. On the completion of his degree he worked as a freelance photographer. From 1975 he worked exclusively in color, this work being exhibited at his first one-person show at Church Street Photographic Centre in Melbourne in 1978. He then travelled and photographed in Europe and America and on his return to Melbourne established a professional color process and print laboratory in order to print his accumulated work and to support his personal output. This work focused on urban topography and revealed an influence of American photography: of Lee Friedlander (who had visited Australia on a lecture
tour in 1977) as well as the color formalism of such photographers as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston. In 1992, following the sale of the laboratory, he established Colourfast Systems, a business providing equipment, training, support and services for photo CD and related digital imaging services for image-making professionals across a number of fields. Through the 1980s his work was included in a number of exhibitions at the Photographers’ Gallery, Melbourne, as well as at the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. He continues with his personal work.
Ponch Hawkes, born 1946, Melbourne, Victoria
After studying arts at Monash University, Melbourne, Ponch Hawkes went on to work as a journalist and later self-taught photographer for the counterculture magazines, The Digger and Rolling Stone. Since then she has freelanced as a photographer in the area of social justice and the arts. She has made many series concerned with projecting a positive, non-stereotyped image of women, such as the kit she produced on “Women and Work” which was used in Victorian government schools, and her documentation on women marathon runners, which appeared in the feminist publication, Lip. Her series exploring the relationship between women and their mothers, Our Mums and Us, was exhibited at Brummels Gallery of Photography in 1976. In 1978 she joined the Circus Oz collective as lighting designer and photographer and held a one-person exhibition, Circus Oz in Performance at Watters Gallery in Sydney in 1981. Hawkes’s work has appeared in several books: Best Mates (1989), a study of friendship between men; Generations (1988), a study of the way culture and values are passed down from one generation of women to another; and Unfolding (1994), the story of the Australian and New Zealand AIDS memorial quilt. Her current project is a commission from the City Council of the Sydney suburb of Marrackville and involves photographing and interviewing families.
Bill Henson, born 1955, Melbourne, Victoria
Henson is one of the few Australian photographers to have had his work consistently seen within the parameters of mainstream artistic practice; he has gained widespread acceptance by the art establishment both in Australia and elsewhere, particularly Europe. He studied photography at Prahran College of Advanced Education from 1972- 75. In the year of graduation, he was given a one- person exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria and has since had over thirty-five solo shows, at the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian Centre of Photography and many private galleries throughout Australia, as well as numerous exhibitions in Europe — in Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, Venice, Belgrade, Frankfurt, London, Edinburgh — in China and Japan, and in the United States, having solo shows in Denver and New York as well as appearing in a 1984 group show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. His work was also included in the Sydney Biennales of 1982, 1986 and 1990. Work was included in the XLIII Biennale di Venezia in 1988 and he will be Australia’s representative at the next Biennale in 1995. Henson skillfully employs complex technical and printing processes. His subjects, absorbed in their own world, are shot in soft-focus and the lighting throughout his oeuvre is low key, often used to obscure detail and to create a dark fin-de-siecle mood. His work in the seventies anticipated trends favoring constructed scenarios in the art of the 1980s and 1990s; his images have become increasingly staged and the influence of painting, film, literature, architecture, music and theatre are ever strong in his work. Since the mid-1980s Henson has also employed a collage process in which large sheets of torn prints are combined.
Carol Jerrems, 1949-1980, Melbourne, Victoria
Carol Jerrems is regarded as perhaps the greatest interpreter, among art photographers, of her generation in Australia. Undoubtedly the most well- known image of the seventies in the Philip Morris Collection is her Vale Street. Jerrems studied photography at the Prahran College of Advanced Education from 1967-70, her teachers including Athol Shmith and Paul Cox (now renowned as a filmmaker). The following year she attended the Hawthorn Technical Teachers’ College and from 1972-79 worked as a freelance photographer and part-time teacher in Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart. Her photographs were exhibited throughout the seventies — at Brummels Gallery of Photography, Melbourne, in 1972 (with Henry Talbot q.v.) and 1974 (with Robert Ashton q.v.); at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1973; at the Photographers’ Gallery, Melbourne, in 1975 (with Rennie Ellis q.v.); and at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, in 1976 and 1978. She also received a number of awards: the Walter Lindrum Scholarship in 1968, the Institute of Australian Photographers Award in 1970 and first place in the Kodak Students Photographic Competition in 1971. Jerrems was the recipient of a Visual Arts Board overseas travel grant in 1975 and in the same year also received a grant from the Australian Film Commission, completing a short 16mm film, Hanging About, in 1978. In 1977 she produced the production stills for Esben Storm’s film, In Search of Anna, as well as often photographing those in the film world. A growing influence of film is evident in her work as it evolved through the 1970s. The early work is strongly documentary while in later photographs she consciously intervenes in the event she is recording, staging the scene for the camera. Posed by friends and students, the photographs also reflect a humanist and moral concern that her subjects not be exploited; that the photographer not be a mere voyeuristic intruder into the lives of others. (The female model in Vale Street, however, has suffered considerable distress over the subsequent exposure and interpretation of this image). Jerrems died at the age of thirty-one from Budd-Chiari syndrome, a rare liver disease.
Mark Johnson, born 1946, Sydney, New South Wales
Johnson graduated in medicine from the University of Sydney in 1970 and became seriously involved with photography in 1972 while studying in London. He is self-taught, concentrating on photography from 1977. He first exhibited at the Australian Centre for Photography in 1978. Another solo show was held there in 1981 as well as at The Developed Image Gallery in Adelaide. In 1979 he tutored at an Australian Centre for Photography workshop and was on the executive committee of that institution in 1982-83. During the mid-1980s, he worked as editor of Photofik, the magazine published by the Australian Centre for Photography, and in 1985 he had another one-person show there. In the following year he left Australia to live in London and while he no longer works in photography he maintains an interest in the medium. Johnson’s interest in the Albertian perspective system employed in Italian Renaissance art is evident in the clarity and classical balancing of elements in his work and he happily acknowledges his debt to artists from medieval to modern times. The influence of the architectural work of the German photographers, Hilla and Bernd Becher, is also apparent in his work. In 1993 he donated a body of his photographs of Sydney to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which they exhibited in the show, City by the Sea.
Merryle Johnson, born 1949, Melbourne, Victoria
Merryle Johnson (nee Norris) trained as a painter at Bendigo College of Advanced Education, Victoria, from 1965-69. In 1970, she set up her own studio as a wedding photographer in order to support her painting activities, but after five years gave this work up to concentrate on photography as an art. Like others who came to photography from other disciplines, the dictums of the straight approach to photography meant little and she quite happily tampered with the purity of the print surface. She had practiced the techniques of tinting and handcoloring while working commercially and she used them again in her art photography; she also embellished the prints with oil paint and watercolors. After marriage she travelled to England and in 1979-80, lecturing there in art and photography schools, and in Victoria on her return to Australia.
In 1981 the family moved to Nayook, a small farming community in Gippsland, Victoria. The family returned to England and also visited Canada in 1986 where Merryle had a one-person show in Calgary. Her early work is figurative (and owes a debt to her early life-drawing tuition) and consciously explored the different way the camera — as opposed to painting — dealt with space, movement, and light. Nude studies continued her interest in the transformation of the figure when seen in other mediums such as air, light, and water. She frequently uses paired and sequenced images and adopted a panoramic format in England. In Gippsland, she used this format in a series of color photographs of her neighbors, friends, and family as well as community activities such as local shows. The latter works and her statements about her work express similar concerns to those voiced by others, like Carol Jerrems (q.v.) — that her stance be one of participator and her work a recording of her response to the people she depicts — suggesting her concerns were documentary. However, Johnson’s extensive series on ballet dancers and circus performers (her mother and grandfather had been circus performers) had symbolic intentions, the figures representing aspects of the human condition. She also made a series of semi-abstract color landscape studies which were included in the exhibition Contemporary Gippsland Artists, which toured Australia in 1990-92. She now helps run the family business, Country Farm Perennials, a historic garden and tourist center, and is not currently pursuing her career as a photographer.
Ian Lobb, born 1948, Melbourne, Victoria
Ian Lobb studied arts at Monash University in Melbourne from 1966-68 and taught English in secondary schools from 1969-77. He became interested in photography on a bushwalking trip in 1970 and thereafter devoted what personal time he could to the study of photography in general and landscape photography in particular. He was one of the first photographers to receive a Visual Arts Board travel grant from the Australia Council in 1974, which he used to attend workshops in the United States run by Ansel Adams and Paul Caponigro. On his return to Melbourne the following year, he became a co-director (with Bill Heimerman) of the Photographers’ Gallery in Melbourne. During his three years there, he was especially influential in arranging exhibitions of international photographers Eikoh Hosoe, August Sander, Ralph Gibson, Emmett Gowin, Paul Caponigro, Harry Callahan and Duane Michals. In 1979 Lobb received a second travel award. His first one-person show was held at the Photographers’ Gallery in 1980. Since 1978 he has taught photography in tertiary institutions in Melbourne. The landscapes of Lobb acknowledge the intense pre-visualization practices of American landscape photographer, Minor White, and the zone system as developed by Ansel Adams, but also the concept of the equivalence of an image and emotional/perceptual experience developed in early twentieth century arts, literature and photography, particularly through the work of Alfred Stieglitz. Lobb works in black and white and produces sonorously well-crafted prints, using large- format cameras and working from “expressive” negatives of the highest quality. Since 1986, Lobb has been photographing one area, Black Range in the Grampians, part of his continuing “devotional” approach to photography (he acknowledges the role of his Methodist upbringing) and pursues a belief through the almost ritualistsic practice of his art in the ability of intense visualization and perceptual change to alter personal reality.
Steven Lojewski, born 1952, London, England
Lojewski grew up in Canada and became interested in photography after emigrating to Australia in 1969. Moving to Melbourne from Perth in Western Australia, he received a diploma of art and design (photography) from Prahran College of Advanced Education in 1975, a master’s degree from the Sydney College of Art in 1978, and is currently a candidate in the doctoral program in the School of Creative Arts, the University of Wollongong. During 1975-77 he taught photography in various tertiary institutions in Melbourne and has lectured at the Sydney College of the Arts since 1978. He began to exhibit his photographs in 1973 and the first one-person show of his work was held at the Photographers’ Gallery in Melbourne in 1976.
His photographs have been exhibited widely in Australia since then and he also was the curator of a number of shows during the 1980s. Lojewski’s carefully structured early work showed an influence of the American Walker Evans and the French photographer Eugene Atget — he was drawn to producing finely printed depictions of nineteenth- century architecture in Melbourne. Upon his move to Sydney, Lojewski’s vision became low key, presenting the urban architectural and industrial environment with something of the dispassion of an archaeologist, but also highlighting unusual juxtapositions, shifts in scale and the conjunction of incongruous textures and surfaces. The work for his doctorate explores the decline of the industry-based cities of Newcastle and Wollongong, subtly suggesting links between urban and social decay.
Marion Marrison (formerly Marion Hardman) born 1951, Hobart, Tasmania
Marrison graduated from the Tasmanian School of Art in 1973 and received graduate diplomas in communication (1987) and education (1991) from the University of Technology in Sydney. She is currently an M.F.A. (master of fine arts degree) candidate at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney. Except for the years 1985-90, when she was education officer at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, she has taught photography, until 1983 at the Tasmanian School of Art and in Newcastle and Sydney in the 1990s. Her first one-person show was held in 1975 and she has exhibited frequendy since then. In 1975 she was commissioned to provide photographs for a book published by the Australian Conservation Foundation on the Green Bans. She often worked on large series of photographs produced over time: in the seventies she exhibited fifty-nine images taken over a three year span, which investigated the changes in Bonnet Hill, a small area of natural landscape in Tasmania. In 1981 she published a book of her color work, Practical Dreams. Her recent work continues her concerns for the environment and encompasses issues of cruelty to animals. Her current work, Dozing Duennas, is concerned with the politics of representation through a scrutiny of the stereotyped images of women. Although her preoccupations have remained constant — questioning that which is taken for granted and investigating the relationship between appearance and substance — Marrison now uses computer imaging and staged tableaux rather than the documentary naturalism of the seventies.
David Moore, born 1927, Sydney, New South Wales
David Moore joined the studio of Max Dupain (q.v.) in 1948 after deciding not to pursue a career as an architect (his father was the well-known architect, John D. Moore). His interest in working in a social documentary manner revealed itself in the photographs of the Sydney slums he took at this time. In 1951 he worked his passage overseas, and from a base in London freelanced as a photojournalist for seven years. His work was published in leading illustrated magazines. In 1958 he returned to Sydney, pursuing an international career through the Black Star Agency in New York. He travelled extensively, working on assignments in the United States, Canada, Antarctica, Asia and the Pacific.
He continued to evolve and adapt to the new developments in photography during the 1970s and was a prominent champion of the younger generation. With fellow photographer Wesley Stacey (q.v.) and others, Moore helped establish the Australian Centre for Photography in 1974. He has had many one-person shows since the early 1950s and in 1988 the Art Gallery of New South Wales held a major retrospective of his work. Moore was awarded a Creative Arts Fellowship in 1994, in part to be able to pursue his project of documenting construction of the Glebe Island Bridge in Sydney.
Grant Mudford, born 1944, Sydney, New South Wales
Mudford studied architecture at the University of New South Wales in 1963-64 where he was introduced to a wide range of art mediums. He had been active in photography from his childhood years through secondary education. After leaving the university, he started a practice as a professional photographer and by 1969 he was well-established in Sydney. In the early seventies he began to focus on his personal photography — his first one-person show was held at Bonython Gallery in Sydney in 1972 — as well as working as cinematographer on numerous short films. As one of the first photographers to receive a Visual Arts Board Travel Grant from the Australia Council, he travelled to the United States, moving permanently to Los Angeles in 1977. He exhibits in Australia and America. In 1979 Mudford was given a solo show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and in the following year was awarded an American National Endowment for the Arts photographer’s fellowship. His work was included in the 1981 Whitney Biennial in New York, and is to be found in many public and private collections in Australia and the United States. Mudford has stated that the strongest early influence on his work was the American photographer, Walker Evans, and he works within a formalist tradition. Moving to Los Angeles, he also discovered the work of his contemporaries — people like Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore and Joe Deal. Like their work, Mudford’s photographs explore the urban landscape. His minimalist, abstract style emphasizes geometric design and texture and he produces large, high quality prints. In the 1980s he also began to work in color. In 1990-91 Mudford travelled extensively through the United States on commission for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, for an exhibition and monograph on the architect Louis I. Kahn.
Ann Noon, born 1950, Lincolnshire, England
Ann Noon arrived in Australia from England in 1965. She started work in 1968 as an assistant in a wedding and portrait studio in suburban Sydney. In the next few years she worked as a printer and assistant for commercial photographic studios and studied photography part-time at Sydney Technical College. In 1975 she began a career as a freelance photographer specializing in fashion work and portraiture. The following year a travel grant from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council made it possible for her to carry out a project in Greece. During the latter part of the 1970s she lived and worked in Greece, South East Asia and England (where she worked for the auction house, Sotheby’s) and travelled through Europe and America. Returning to Sydney in 1981, she continued to work as a freelance photographer as well as teaching part- time at the Australian Centre for Photography. In 1988 she moved to Queensland and co-established Fotoforce, a commercial photographic studio.
In her portraits she often places the subject outdoors, against an often incongruous setting, which highlights their physicality, as seen in her series called Physical Portraits. Her work has a strong graphic quality. Photographs of the “Icebergs” (a group of men in Sydney who swim year-round in the sea) were exhibited at the Australian Centre for Photography in 1985. Over the past decade, a personal project has been documenting people who take their physical prowess to extremes, in dance, yoga and so on. A recent series of nude portraits called Acts of Containment places the subjects in a variety of “containers.”
Philip Quirk, born 1948, Melbourne, Victoria
After secondary schooling, Philip Quirk first worked as a bank clerk. He took up photography while convalescing from a car accident. His success in having his photographs published in the surfing column of the Melbourne Herald and encouragement from a professional photographer, Bruno Benini, led Quirk to undertake photographic and film studies at Prahran College of Advanced Education in 1973. While at college he worked with fashion photographers Bruno Benini and Shmith, Cato, and Barr. In 1974 he moved to Sydney to pursue work in reportage for the magazine industry. His personal work was included in the inaugural exhibitions and publications of the Australian Centre for Photography. In these years he also lectured on photography at tertiary institutions as well as the Australian Centre for Photography. Following a trip to Europe in 1980, during which he was able to visit the French office of the photo-agency, Magnum, Quirk was a founding member of Wildlight Photo Agency in Sydney. His first solo exhibitions were held in 1983, at the Orange Regional Art Gallery in New South Wales, at The Developed Image in Adelaide, and at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. A continuing, self-appointed project has been the documenting of such cultural rituals as horse-racing carnivals, eisteddfods (music competitions), school sports days, ballroom dancing, and the Sydney Harbor yacht race. He has also produced a large study of the drought-affected farming areas of Victoria and New South Wales (1982-84), which toured regional galleries in those states. Quirk works within a human interest “decisive moment” tradition of photography to which he often imparts the deliberate composure of still life. His landscape work uses color and panoramic formats. He is currently preparing a book on rural Australia.
Jon Rhodes, born 1947, Wagga Wagga, New South Wales
Jon Rhodes worked in a commercial photographic studio in Brisbane, Queensland, during 1966 and 1967 and in his early twenties worked for the University of New South Wales, Sydney, as an assistant cinematographer and still photographer. In 1970-71 he attended a photography course at the Ultimo Technical College in Sydney. In 1971 he joined Film Australia and for the next five years worked as cinematographer on many documentary films made on location in the often remote outback — in Western and Central Australia, North Queensland and the Northern Territory as well as in Papua New Guinea and India. During these years he photographed the people and places he visited. In 1977 he resigned from Film Australia in order to concentrate fully on photography, although his series fust Another Sunrise?: the Impact of Bauxite Mining on an Aboriginal Community, had already been given a one-person show at the Australian Centre of Photography in Sydney in 1976 and at the Ewing and George Paton Gallery, Melbourne in 1977. During 1981 he was artist-in-residence at Macquarie University in New South Wales. The influence of film is very apparent in his photographs. Just Another Sunrise?, for example, is structured like a documentary film, with photographs working in sequences to convey Rhodes’s intentions. In this series Rhodes explores the devastating impact of mining on the Aboriginal community and he includes panels of text in the installation to further elucidate the message. In 1986, 1987 and 1990 he undertook photographic projects in Aboriginal communities for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Social and ecological concerns are always of major importance in his work.
Roger Scott, born 1944, Sydney, New South Wales
At sixteen, Scott was employed as a photographic printer for the firm, Leicagraph, and later worked for a photographic mural printing company. He studied photography part-time at the Sydney Technical College from 1969-71 and travelled to Europe in 1973-4 and to Europe and America in 1976. In 1978 he set up his own business as a documentary photographer and specialist printer for black and white work. In addition he occasionally taught in various colleges in Sydney. Scott exhibited for the first time in a group show in 1973 and was included in the inaugural exhibitions and publications of the Australian Centre for Photography in 1974-5. His first solo exhibition was at Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane, in 1978. Scott works within the tradition of European street photography, trying to capture his subjects unobserved, documenting the social landscape of his home city. A series made during 1978-1985 looked at the eastern suburbs’ beach life and acknowledged the multicultural make-up of the population. Family circumstances curtailed his personal work from 1987-1992. He is currently working on an exhibition of his recent documentary work.
Wesley Stacey, born 1941, Sydney, New South Wales
After studying drawing and design at East Sydney Technical College from 1960-62, Stacey worked as a graphic designer and photographer in Sydney and London from 1963-66. In the late 1960s he worked as a magazine photographer based in Sydney; from 1969-75 he freelanced as a commercial photographer, and in the mid-seventies he travelled around Australia in a camper-van. With David Moore and others, Stacey helped establish the Australian Centre for Photography in 1973-4. His work was included in /Eureka! Artists from. Australia at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1982 and Australian Perspecta at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1983. A retrospective of his work was held at the National Gallery of Australia in 1991. In 1992 he was awarded one of the newly established Australia Council Creative Arts Fellowships. He continues to travel the country, working from a base on the south coast of New South Wales. Stacey often used a Kodak Instamatic camera during the seventies, making series of informal images of his friends and recording his environment. Since the early 1980s, he has employed a panoramic format to produce photographs which explore the symbolism of the natural environment and the sacred links of the Aborigines with the land. His exhibition Signing the Land (1990, published in book form in 1993), juxtaposes images of inscriptions and graffiti photographed in Italy with recordings of Aboriginal and European markings on the Australian landscape to suggest a cultural commonality among peoples.
Mark Strizic, born 1928, Berlin, Germany
Strizic spent much of his childhood in Zagreb in the former Yugoslavia and migrated to Australia in 1949 after studying geology for two years at the university there. From 1954-57 he studied applied physics at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He became interested in photography in 1957 and began to work as a freelance photographer specializing in architecture. From 1974-85 he taught photography in several Melbourne tertiary institutions including the Preston Institute of Technology and the Victorian College of the Arts. He received a bachelor in fine arts degree from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1985. In his photographic work he often experimented with technical innovations; in about 1967 he began working on the conversion of black and white images to color and multiple image combination. He employs these techniques in mural work, and from 1984 he began adding acrylics, oils, pastels and collage. In addition to his photographic activities he also works as a painter, printmaker and book designer. The relationship of people and the urban environment remains a constant factor within his work, whether documentary or heavily manipulated.
Henry Talbot, born 1920, Hindenberg, Germany
In the late 1930s Talbot studied graphic design at the Schule Reimann in Berlin, and during 1939- 40 at the Birmingham College of Art in England. He was interned at the outbreak of the war and sent to Australia in 1940, where he served in the Australian army. After the war he resumed his art training at the Melbourne Technical College and began to concentrate on photography. He spent 1947-50 in South America and on his return worked in various photographic studios in Sydney and Melbourne. In 1956 he set up a studio with Helmut Newton, specializing in fashion illustration. In 1958 he was named Fashion Photographer of the Year by Australian Fashion News and during the 1960s became one of Australia’s leading fashion photographers. In 1973 he became a lecturer in photography at Preston Institute of Technology in Melbourne and was appointed senior lecturer in 1977. Retiring from teaching in 1985, he moved to Sydney and has continued with assignments and the printing of his archives.
Les Walkling, born 1953, Melbourne, Victoria
From 1973-75, Walkling studied science and philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne. His interest in photography developed after leaving the university and in 1981-82 he travelled to America on Visual Arts Board travel grants to study with photographers Emmet Gowin and Frederick Sommer. He has lectured in photography part-time in Melbourne since 1983. During the 1970s he focused on landscape photography and poetic still- life studies, working with large format cameras and producing technically sophisticated prints. In more recent work, as in his exhibition So to Live as to Dream (1990) at the National Gallery of Victoria, Walkling uses text either in conjunction with the photographs or written on the prints. Like the earlier more documentary work, his manipulated images are of a rather somber, reflective mood, exploring, as he states, “those poetic moments in our lives; affairs of the heart, affairs of the mind.”
Greg Weight, born 1946, Sydney, New South Wales
Greg Weight received no formal training in photography although he worked as a studio and darkroom assistant in commercial photography studios before opening his own studio in 1968. He did portrait and general work for magazines, fashion and advertising studios and theatre companies. His photographs appeared in magazines in Australia, including Pol, Vogue and Camera Graphics. A growing interest in art photography developed from 1971 with his association with The Yellow House, a multimedia artists’ cooperative in Sydney. In 1974 he received a Visual Arts Board grant and the following year his one person exhibition, Time and Space, was held at the Australian Centre for Photography. In 1976 he tutored in photography at the Sydney College of the Arts. An interest in Zen Buddhism was reflected in his photographs, which often attempted to capture a sense of heightened awareness through unexpected combinations of elements. His exhibition, Faces and Places, was shown at the Hogarth Gallery in Sydney in 1981. Since the early 1980s he has continued with professional and personal photography as well as specializing in photography for artists, art exhibitions and art publications. Portrait and landscape commissions have been an important part of his recent work, including a commission to photograph Aboriginal art and communities in Central Australia.
Richard Woldendorp, born 1927, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Richard Woldendorp studied commercial art and painting in Holland from 1940-45. He joined the Dutch army in 1946 and spent three years in Indonesia, after which he returned to Holland and then migrated to Australia, settling in Perth in 1951. At first he worked as a house painting contractor, becoming interested in photography in 1955. In 1960 he won the first and third prizes in the Craven-A National Photographic Competition and the following year began his career as a professional photographer; in that year he also had his first one-person show at a gallery in Perth. In 1982 Woldendorp was named Professional Photographer of the Year by the Australian Institute of Professional Photography. In 1982 he was the Institute’s Industrial Category Winner and in 1984 their Landscape Category Winner. He was included in the Australian Centre for Photography’s publication New Photography Australia: A Selective Survey of 1974. He specializes in aerial photography and has published a number of books of his work.
William Yang (formerly Willy Young) born 1943, North Queensland
Yang graduated from the University of Queensland with a bachelor of architecture degree in 1968. In 1969 he moved to Sydney and dropped out of architecture, working sporadically as a playwright and briefly as a filmmaker in 1972. In 1974 he began to freeelance as a photographer and in 1977 had an exhibition, Sydneyphiles, at the Australian Centre for Photography. In the seventies, Yang photographed society and the trendy scene and since then has employed photography, along with text and performance, to focus on social concerns; to document aspects of gay politics — his highly successful performance monologue with slide illustrations, entitled Sadness, focused on the impact of the AIDS virus — and to explore his Chinese- Australian heritage. In 1993 he was awarded the International Photography Prize at the Higashikawa- cho International Photography Festival.
Links to pages for On The Edge:
Introduction page to the online publication
Australian Photographers and the Philip Morris Arts Grant, 1973- 1988.
The Soft Spread of Time: an essay about the photography and the photographers in the exhibition.
Australian Photographers of the Seventies
The Checklist for the exhibition
Top of this page: Biographies of the Artists: compiled by Anne O'Hehir
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