Traditional photography, as we seem destined to refer to daguerreotype or digital or anything in between, records something captured in what immediately becomes the past. That doesn’t mean a photograph represents a historical truth — there are many ways, including deliberate fakery, by which the camera can lie. But however much an image may trick or mislead us, we can still be confident that it has its roots in history, that something happened, even if that something was designed to fool us.

That is what is changing. AI images fundamentally challenge the relationship of the image with the past. It is true that AI image-making (or AI-assisted, as some would more carefully express it) does in one sense depend on the past, in the form of the vast number of extant photographic images that AI draws upon to do its work. But the resulting “photography-like” image is indeed new — the person, the object, the event that it depicts did not exist. Nothing, so to speak, happened.

Given the way the ground is shifting, it isn’t surprising that we are witnessing an upsurge of interest in telling photography’s story so far. The huge stocks of photographs held by galleries and libraries and museums, sometimes deliberately collected but often accumulated almost by chance, are increasingly being brought to the forefront, as curators and historians of photography grapple with the most effective ways of displaying and contextualising examples from the vast stocks of images at their disposal.

Three current exhibitions — one at the National Gallery of Victoria, the others at the State Library of New South Wales and the National Archives of Australia — reflect this upsurge of interest. In the words of David Campany, a contributor to the splendid catalogue of the NGV exhibition, Photography: Real and Imagined, photography “finds itself centre stage again.”

The NGV first began collecting photographs more than fifty years ago with a brief “to acquire both Australian and international photography.” The collection began with an emphasis on documentary photography but moved rapidly into what, to use the shorthand, is generally termed art photography. This distinction may once have seemed clearer than it does now, when we are much more likely, as Susan Bright writes in her catalogue essay, to see photographs as belonging “on the spectrum,” somewhere between the polarities of reality and imagination.

Whether a photograph is seen as real or imagined, as documentary or art, amateur or professional, these categories are in fact “intertwined,” to use Bright’s term; whatever its status, whether as snapshot or artistic triumph, the photograph is evidence of something that happened in the past.

Among the exhibits at the NGV is German photographer Thomas Struth’s well-known image Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001). It shows a group of gallery visitors posed in the act of viewing the Telephos frieze in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. For all kinds of reasons, including scale and complexity of composition, Struth’s image announces itself as art.

Thomas Struth’s Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001). National Gallery of Victoria

We are hardly surprised by this — it is part of an exhibition, and it is in an art gallery. The past of 2001 — a group of people arranged around a room in a gallery — is shown in contemplation of the past of more than 2000 years before, suggesting how any photograph, whatever its primary intent, also acts as a record of the time it was made. That photographic record may be as open to interpretation as the surviving fragments of an ancient frieze, but both photo and frieze qualify as history as well as art.

In looking at photographs on display on the walls of a museum or a library, as opposed to a public or private art gallery, we are very much primed to read the images the other way, as history first and art, if at all, second. The exhibitions currently at the State Library of New South Wales and the National Archives of Australia take different approaches to the question of photography’s role in illuminating the past, and of how we should read photographs on display as history — but also, sometimes, as art, depending both on the innate qualities of the image and the institutional setting.

Shot: 400 Photographs, 200 Photographers, 3 Centuries inaugurates the State Library’s new photography gallery, a subterranean space created out of an old storage area once filled with “empty filing cabinets and the like.” It is difficult to think of a more striking metaphor of how photography has assumed a much more prominent role in our public collections, pushing its way forward by way of adaptive reuse.

The role of photography as historical record is emphasised by the organising principle of the exhibition — at least one photograph from nearly every year from 1845 to 2022. The library holds something in the order of two million photograph images; 400 are on display in Shot. This disparity in these numbers gives some idea of the curatorial task involved in choosing what to include.

The library’s inauguration of a dedicated space for displaying photographs is to be applauded, but it is hard not to notice, when descending into the former storage area, how limited that space is. The walls feel crowded, with some images mounted so high that details are almost out of visual reach. They can be examined more closely, however, on one of the wall-mounted monitors that have been distributed around the display area.

This combination of physical and electronic display seems deliberately to be raising the question of how we most effectively comprehend the vastness of Australia’s archive of photographic history. The viewer is being encouraged to see the images on the walls as a starting point, an encouragement to engage in further exploration online. “These 400 works,” we are advised in the useful if all too brief booklet that accompanies the exhibition, “convey some of the rich rewards to be gained by examining the archive as a whole,” suggesting how the role of curator is moving speedily through a process of democratisation — just as photography itself has undergone a similar process over many decades.

On the evidence of one moderately busy morning, that strategy is working: the monitors in the room were all taken up by people zooming in on details of the image — or seeking out further background information, or comparing one image with another — while others patiently waited their turn.

Shot explicitly challenges any distinction between “art” and “documentary” photography, consigning that distinction, not altogether convincingly, to history, to the twentieth century when “the ‘art-hang’ was a popular method for exhibiting the work of artist-photographers.” The library doesn’t abide by that distinction, instead choosing a middle way between a gallery-style “art-hang” and what might be called a documentary-hang. “If they’ve got visible sprocket holes, for example, that’s how we reproduce them.”

The many photographs in the library’s collection have been “sourced from official documents,” from shoeboxes and mantelpieces and from the archives of newspapers and portrait studios, but there are also images that we would conventionally think of as being more at home on the walls of art galleries. Max Dupain’s The Sunbather is there (in two versions) along, for example, with a beautiful autochrome Still Life (1912–20) by an unknown photographer, and Anne Zahalka’s 1988 Cibachrome print The Sisters, which also, as it happens, includes a still life, in the bottom right hand corner of the frame. Zahalka’s is a brilliant image, its forthright compositional techniques — its multiple references to framing, for example — and its combination of visual formality and domesticity inviting reflection on what a difference a frame makes.

Anne Zahalka’s The Sisters (1988). State Library of New South Wales

The inclusion of works by Dupain and Zahalka emphasise the fact that, in addition to their status as photographic art, these images are also part of Australian history and of the time in which they were made. The exhibition makes the further point that all manner of photographic output — studio portraiture, holiday snaps, photojournalism, police mug shots, “art photography” — documents the past, and indeed that examples of all those genres have a place in the library’s collection.

“Most of the Library’s photographs,” remarks curator Geoffrey Barker in the exhibition booklet, “have been acquired for their documentary value rather than for their artistic or aesthetic value, but… when visitors look at these photographs they will realise that often there’s not much between them and art photography.”

Some images, rather more than others, bear out this contention. Photo Kiosk (1949), for example, by the little-known Brian Bird, captures a moment in history, but it would also look perfectly at home displayed among the work of the world’s great mid-century street photographers. As an indication of the richness and variety of the library’s holdings — and by extension of the country’s photographic heritage — the exhibition is best seen as it suggests we see it, as an incentive to look further, to explore and curate these collections for ourselves.

Brian Bird’s Photo Kiosk (1949). State Library of New South Wales

The selection criterion for Focus: Australian Government Photographers at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra, is quite different. This is a selection of the images produced by the professional photographers employed, in various capacities and under various departmental headings, by the federal government. This system of direct employment lasted from its inception in 1939 until 1996, when it gave way to outsourcing.

The job of these photographers was, as Martyn Jolly puts it in his introduction, to “show off” Australia, its landscape, its industry and way of life. The photographs were destined to be printed in brochures and departmental reports, often without attribution. “They weren’t,” says Jolly, “taken for the gallery wall.” And yet here they are, framed and attributed and looking very much like art.

Many photographers worked for the government in this way. Eighteen are represented in the exhibition, complete with names and brief biographical details, the recovery of which in many cases required diligent research. Only one, the pioneering Aboriginal photographer Mervyn Bishop, could be described as widely known outside professional circles.

The names of the other seventeen will almost certainly be less familiar, including that of the sole woman among them, Jocelyn Burt, for whom entry into the world of professional photographers was no easy task. “I ran headlong into male chauvinism before I even started to work professionally,” she says in her laconically knockabout memoir Shutterbug in the Bush (1981).

Seeing these works displayed alongside one another gives an idea of the tightly encompassing brief to which the photographers were working. The human subjects look happy or purposeful or occasionally pensive, with few images of suffering or deprivation and only occasional ones of delicately implied sadness. People are typically arranged in groups, working on some common task or engaging in sport or leisure activities in a spirit of cheerful competitiveness. (Buildings, meanwhile, are shown as modern and clean-lined, embodying Australia’s commitment to the future.)

We cannot help but be conscious of how people have been directed to stand here or there or hold their heads just so. In John Tanner’s Workers at the BHP Steelworks (1956), for instance, a trio of men in hard hats gazes towards the future. One of the men is shown with his arm draped over the shoulder of his colleague, looking very much as if this is the first time he has ever done such a thing. And yet the image works. It conveys both the social constraints and the essential optimism of the time, suggesting by the bright-eyed way in which the men look into the distance that, those social constraints notwithstanding, the future is open.

John Tanner’s Workers at the BHP Steelworks (1956). National Archives of Australia

While the emphasis is on the vitality of youth, the relatively fewer images of older people treat them with an amused affection. In Jim Fitzpatrick’s Fruit Connoisseurs Assess the Produce (1968) three elderly women in complementary hats look balefully at a display of apples, determined not to be fooled by anything less than the best, while in Keith Byron’s Veteran Punter Outsmarts the Flies (1969) the veteran of the title, with netting draped over his hat, conveys a similarly robust resourcefulness.

It is Byron’s work, along with Mervyn Bishop’s, that most stands out among these resonant images; Bishop’s for his ability to capture both social disadvantage and genuine spontaneity in his pioneering photographs of First Nations people, and Byron for his instinct for unshowily combining documentary and art. Byron’s Tensions Run High Among Brokers at the Melbourne Stock Exchange (1968), with its multiple visual cross-references, is one to keep coming back to.

Given that the national stock of photographs is almost unimaginably vast, it is not realistic to think that more than a very small proportion can ever be displayed on the walls of cultural institutions. Just as we are all photographers now, so we are being encouraged to become curators too, exploring and researching the national collections for ourselves.

We don’t yet know where artificial intelligence is taking the practice of photography itself but, as Martyn Jolly points out, AI can already assist immeasurably in productive searching, finding links and illuminating correspondences that might otherwise emerge only by chance. Whatever its implications for the future of photography, when it comes to getting the most out of the photographs we already have, AI could well be a good thing. •

Photography: Real and Imagined
The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, until 4 February 2024

Shot: 400 Photographs, 200 Photographers, 3 Centuries
State Library of New South Wales until 3 November 2024

Focus: Australian Government Photographers 
National Archives of Australia until 10 June 2024

The post What a difference a frame makes appeared first on Inside Story.

As the film opens, a young priest walks urgently across the frame. He is heading towards a meeting with his superior, where he is to receive final advice before embarking on a journey. It is the end of the nineteenth century and Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) is being despatched from Denmark on a mission. He is to travel by sea and then by arduous overland trek to a remote settlement on the southeast coast of Iceland, where his task is to oversee the building of a church and lead the congregation in worship. He will be travelling to another country and, crucially, to another language.

Lucas’s gait, bent forward in his haste, suggests his determination to leave no room for doubt or hesitation. He is indeed on a mission. His pace suggests too the importance of getting started, for as his superior, Vincent, makes pragmatically clear in this farewell briefing — delivered in tones both avuncular and forbidding — the church must be completed by the winter. There must be no delay.

The briefing over, Lucas is shown fussily setting up a cumbersome wet-plate camera in preparation for taking a photograph of Vincent, an image intended to serve as a memento and a marker of the occasion. Vincent might be the subject of the photograph, but it is the photographer who is more clearly revealed, as both a traditionalist and a modern man. Lucas is a servant of God and a keen amateur photographer, in thrall to the new technology. We can already see that the two don’t sit easily together.

Vincent is played, in a small but resonant part, by the distinguished Danish actor Waage Sandø, who incidentally gives a masterclass in talking while shelling and eating a boiled egg (a scene that rivals Robert De Niro’s famous boiled egg scene in Alan Parker’s 1987 film Angel Heart, to which it surely alludes). He poses authoritatively in front of a patterned backcloth, his formal neck ruff appearing to separate his head from his body, in the manner of a portrait. In a series of subtle gestures, he adjusts his clothing and his expression as he waits to adopt those necessary seconds of stillness when his image will be captured. There is an atmosphere of theatrical significance. It is indeed an occasion, a moment of enforced calm before the urgent departure.

As we gradually learn throughout the course of the film — including in one brilliantly underplayed and comic scene at its midpoint — Lucas’s commitment to the urgency of his mission is compromised by his propensity for delay and deferral. His bulky camera and equipment also serve as an impediment, a literal burden (a publicity still shows Lucas, about to collapse under the weight of the camera on his back, arriving on the Icelandic shore) that weighs on him and slows him down.

Lucas displays a combination of confidence and uncertainty, of urgency and willed delay, that grows ever more starkly contradictory. It is a theme that permeates the entire film, embodied in the complex series of steps involved in wet-plate photography, which requires the right combination of perfect stillness, as the image is taken, and controlled urgency, as it is developed.

Starting out on his journey across the formidable Icelandic landscape, Lucas struggles to control his horse. The guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurðsson), impatiently demonstrates how he must handle the reins more confidently, judging when to apply force and when to let up, to show the horse who is in charge and to control its pace. “Pull a little, then release,” Lucas is advised later on, but he never quite learns a comfortable balance, whether in making a photograph or riding a horse. In everything he does, the strain shows.

We are told during the opening credits that a mere seven of Lucas’s photographs have survived, from which, it is implied, the story of his journey and eventual fate have been constructed and imagined. It is one of many instances in which Pálmason subtly explores the role of photography in helping us to understand ourselves and our place in the world. Just as Godland brings those supposedly historical images to life, so the extraordinary cinematography of Maria von Hausswolff, Pálmason’s frequent collaborator, repeatedly alludes to still photography.

Von Hausswolff’s camera shows characters frozen (sometimes almost literally) in moments of inaction or contemplation. A shot of the Icelandic landscape will appear as if all is unmoving, until a horse or a bird or a small human figure wanders into the frame to remind us that what we are looking at is indeed a moving image rather than a photograph. This intermingling of the two genres, photography and cinema, is characteristic of Pálmason’s and von Hausswolff’s work. A White, White Day (2019), for example, begins with an extended series of near-still shots of a stark and isolated building as it appears in different weathers.

These allusions to photography are reinforced by Pálmason’s habit of centring the subject — a building or a person or a natural object — in the manner of traditional portraiture. We are constantly being invited to pay attention, to look closely at what is before us. This effect is further reinforced, as many commentators have pointed out, by Godland’s 4:3 aspect ratio, with rounded corners, which seems to echo the proportions and appearance of Lucas’s wet-plate photographs.

The decision to deploy that historical cinematic ratio to capture the look of nineteenth-century photographs is immediately convincing, but when it comes to similarly capturing the imposing dimensions of the Icelandic landscape, and forcefully conveying the relative smallness of the people within it, it seems counterintuitive, a rather odd directorial decision.

Yet both the director and cinematographer felt, as von Hausswolff has commented, that “framing Godland in 4:3 aspect ratio on 35mm film created a real connection to the landscape,” as well as to “the portraiture of the people.” That “real connection” is very effectively established by implication as well as directly through the camera. The audience is encouraged to imagine what lies beyond the frame as well as what is within it.

Because the screen’s borders don’t suddenly expand to modern dimensions to take in the landscape, as they might have done, we both see and imagine its vastness through the confines of the more traditional 4:3 framing. The frame seems to say that the vastness and disorienting visual experience of the Icelandic landscape — an experience W.H. Auden likened in Letters from Iceland (1936) to “walking the wrong way on a moving staircase” — cannot be fully captured by the camera.

As if to emphasise this point, Pálmason further plays with frames and framing throughout the film, experimenting with different ways of capturing what cannot be fully contained. We see the landscape through the lens of Lucas’s camera, through the triangle of open tent flaps, through windows and doorways, in near darkness and in the obscurity of fog. We are constantly reminded of how difficult it is to see it all at once.

The vulnerability of humans within this landscape is shown in painterly long shots. Lucas and his party cross the frame on horseback, their slow, deliberate pace ironically echoing the opening scene in which the eager, nervous priest bursts across the screen. Later, nature’s dominance is demonstrated in one slow, impressive 360-degree pan across the landscape, as the focus ever tightens until it lands upon the supine figure of Lucas, lying still, with his eyes closed. Were it not for the sound of his breathing, he could be dead. He could almost be posing.

Stay perfectly still, the ship’s crew are instructed as they assemble for a group photograph earlier in the film, their faces overlaid with white to ensure more effective contrast in the final image. Keep still, they are told again, “as if you’re dead.” We learn almost nothing about this ship’s crew. Similarly, the men and one woman who accompany Lucas on his overland journey, apart from the leading guide, Ragnar, remain virtually unknown, as do the members of the small coastal community when the party arrives at its destination.

We know these subsidiary characters almost exclusively by their faces, and by the attention the camera pays to them, not only in Lucas’s photographs but also in the lingering, portrait-like focus of the cinematography. Almost entirely by visual means, we get a strong impression of their individuality — they are not just figures in a landscape.

The individual and group portraits that Lucas makes — of his priestly mentor, of the crew of the ship taking him to Iceland, of his unnamed translator, of the young woman he seems destined to marry, and of her father — all seem to offer their subjects proof of their existence within an unforgiving world. Meanwhile Lucas, who might nowadays be described as short on social skills, approaches his most meaningful, if fleeting, connections mediated by the camera.

In the film’s most striking instance of this kind of mediated intimacy, Lucas and his unnamed translator (Hilmar Guðjónsson) are seen striding into the landscape, camera and equipment on their backs, to “take a picture.” Lucas photographs the translator posed against the landscape, and this seems to lead directly to a greater understanding and connection between the two men. We next see them standing, bare-chested and apart from each other, facing the spray of a waterfall. They jointly raise their arms, if not in worship of nature, then in something close to it.

In another instance of the power of nature, the party of travellers comes to a swollen river that must be crossed if they are to continue their journey. Rivers are “difficult to read,” Vincent has warned Lucas earlier, and Ragnar, the Icelander who knows the country as no other, advises strategic withdrawal. They will try again in a few days, when the waters will have subsided. But Lucas insists on proceeding, putting himself and his companions in danger. At the crucial moment, rather than pausing — easing up on the reins — he plunges forward.

Lucas comes close to death during the gruelling journey. “I want to go home,” he cries in despair. But he then undergoes a kind of resurrection, brought back to life first by the dour Ragnar and then by a Danish widower, Carl (Jacob Lohmann) and his two daughters — Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne), born in Denmark, and Ida (Ída Mekkin Hlynsdóttir), born in Iceland — who house and care for him. Lucas, in return, makes a portrait of each of them.

In preparing to photograph Anna, Lucas gently gently smears white powder on her face to make her ready for the camera, later calling her over excitedly to the makeshift developing tent to witness the emerging image. I look old, says Anna as her face starts to appear in the developing tray (a reaction that subjects often had to their wet-plate portraits when the complex pattern of contrast had not quite worked to their advantage). Young and beautiful, responds Lucas, uncertain whether to look at Anna or at the image he has just made.

Photography, which tantalises with its apparent promise of facilitating his connection with others, ultimately fails Lucas. In a cruelly dramatic scene towards the end of the film, Ragnar, the man who has guided him across Iceland to his destination and has saved his life along the way, asks Lucas to take his photograph. He wants to own an image of himself. Lucas refuses, rejecting any possible connection. For him, Ragnar is an animal, a “swine.” Much more than language separates them.

Ragnar has earlier had the opportunity to be in a group photograph. But he has moved at the crucial moment, spoiling the image — your dog moved less than you, Lucas mutters angrily — and Lucas destroys the plate in frustration. The failure of the photograph embodies the failure of the relationship — with Ragnar, with Iceland. In a film replete with foreshadowings and visual parallels, it foreshadows the tragedy at the end.

Of all Lucas’s human subjects, Ida, the younger, more carefree daughter, is the only one to adopt the characteristic photographic postures of our time — rather than formal and submissive, obedient to the camera and to the photographer, she is ironic, self-aware, cheeky. She is not at all intimidated. Others sit perfectly still, as instructed, looking “straight into the eye.” Posing with her horse, she stands on its back, then seats herself the wrong way round, then turns her face away from the camera. Lucas allows himself the beginnings of a smile at this performance, while Ida’s horse ambles away with her, out of the frame.

Surrounded by failure and thwarted ambition (“we are all very small and fleeting,” says her father to Lucas), Ida is nevertheless optimistic. She is the only character to be entirely comfortable in both Icelandic and Danish. The rest speak only one language, or speak the other one imperfectly, or are reluctant to speak it at all. Even the unnamed translator sometimes struggles to understand what Lucas is getting at. But Ida slips easily between the two languages, confidently demonstrating, by passing her hand across her face in the manner of a slow camera sweep, how she can move smoothly from one to the other. In a film rather short on optimism, it is a small sign of hope and of faith in the future. •

The post In the frame appeared first on Inside Story.

When the winning entry in a small Australian photo competition was revealed as “fake” earlier this year, there was much debate over whether technology was taking over from people. What purported to be a drone photo of a beach had been generated using AI. Not long after, followers of another photographer’s Instagram account were dismayed when he revealed he had used AI to create images.

Some react angrily to revelations like these, expressing outrage at a fake photo masquerading as real; others claim that its fakeness was always obvious. The waves are going in the wrong direction, as more than one person said of the beach photo. “If you know what to look for, you can spot these fakes at a single glance,” say the founders of the website Which Face Is Real? (“For the time being,” they add.)

Given that photographic experimentation and manipulation dates back to the very beginnings of the medium, it is hard to understand why this kind of stunt generates such dismay. The cry from doubters over the direction AI is taking us in overlooks the fact that judging the realness of an image has never been straightforward.

Ambiguity over authorship has been part of the world of photography since the beginning, with anonymity and attribution coexisting for the most part comfortably. That world contains works by professional photographers, some of them with stratospheric reputations, alongside “found images” made by amateurs and unknowns, quite possibly created by accident and involving the very minimum of human agency.

The success of a photographic image, its ability to strike a chord in the viewer, has never depended on its place on the spectrum of authorship. We might seek out further images by a photographer we admire because experience tells us that it will be likely to work its magic on us. But we can equally value images whose provenance we will never know.

Such has been the proliferation of photographic images in the digital, “pre-AI era” — that is, up until yesterday — that we are already well attuned to the difficulty of keeping up with the images themselves, not to say with who made what. Anonymous images blend with attributed ones, and if individual images stand out from the crowd we don’t always understand why.

A significant number of practitioners in these early days of AI photography are dealing with this complicated relationship by using handles rather than names. “What led you to choose anonymity,” a Vogue Italia interviewer asks Str4ngThing, an “AI artist of fashion,” to which the answer is “to leave room for interpretation.” This is a neat device for having it both ways — allowing the image to speak for itself while being credited at one remove with whatever success and approbation it may enjoy.

Approbation as a photographer was already running up against the fact that it has become increasingly difficult for an image to stand out not only because there are so many of them, but also because so many closely resemble one another. It has long been the case that certain themes have their moment, with photographers coalescing around those themes — portraiture with the face obscured in some way, photographic re-enactments of the old masters, moody shots of abandoned buildings.

The popular Instagram account, Insta Repeat, has great fun pointing out the unoriginal nature of so much photography, not only by displaying clusters of sunsets and waterfalls, but also by showing how specific subjects — the photographer’s feet dangling over a precipitous cliff, for example — are suddenly everywhere.

Yet all those sunsets also point, in an exaggerated way perhaps, to one of the more attractive aspects of photography as a creative art — its ability to foster collaboration and cross fertilisation, and to encourage emulation. Just as copying the old masters is a way of building painterly skills and confidence, so is making yet another image of a sunset or a girl with a pearl earring a means of mastering the capacities of the photographic medium.

AI is the beneficiary of this profusion. By mining the online datasets, image generation tools such as Midjourney and DALL-E and Stable Diffusion draw on untold numbers of extant, humanly created images, out of which new, AI-generated images are built.

According to Jaron Lanier, among the most illuminating chroniclers of the technological age, these tools “mash up work done by human minds… illuminating concordances between human creations.” Crucially, they are facilitators rather than independent creators. They are not in themselves new minds, Lanier says with confidence.

The philosopher and neuroscientist Raphaël Millière similarly emphasises the primacy of human artistic creativity in the face of this current whirlwind of technological advancement. The nature of artistic creation will change, he says, as it has often changed in the past, but the artist will remain in control.

The key to this artistic control lies in the text, the “prompts” used to instruct the program to produce an image. “This means that visual artists can now craft their art with words, much like poets,” says Millière, forming “a new bridge between linguistic and visual forms of artistic expression.”

The French filmmaker and artist Alain Astruc posts similarly stimulating reflections on the nature of AI image-making on his Substack. He is pleased to discover through his explorations of the new tools what he calls “a certain poetry of the prompt.” Astruc sees prompting as being both an art in itself and a new and exciting means of image creation. It is no surprise, given the power of the prompt, that instructional guides to effective prompting now abound on the internet, following on from the legions of tips on how to get the best out of your photo-editing software.

It is not only emerging young practitioners who are embracing AI. Hailing from an earlier, post-war generation, American photographer Laurie Simmons is well known for her innovative practice, and in particular for her staged scenes of domesticity involving carefully placed dolls and dummies. These images, borderline cute in a deeply unsettling way, have a distinctly proto-AI look to them.

Simmons has recently moved, by her own account quite seamlessly, into exploring the capabilities of AI. The tools can produce unexpected and even unwelcome results, but this only encourages greater deliberation and thought in her choice of prompts. “I feel like an AI whisperer,” she has said.

But perhaps a certain amount of wishful thinking is going on here. Judging by the prompt sequences AI explorers share online, few if any are raising the bar of poetic expression. Nevertheless, the sentiment expressed by Millière, Astruc and Simmons rings true: there is something essentially poetic about the art of prompting, of playing with words to produce the most satisfying result.

It is far too early to tell whether these various expressions of optimism are well founded. The question remains, do the various tools for AI image generation genuinely foster creativity, or do they stifle it? So much is being produced, so much experimentation and playing around is going on, that nobody quite knows.

A further, even more difficult question is whether these images are any good. Do they strike a chord? The critical vocabulary for assessing photography, never very robust, is at a loss when it comes to AI images. The standard online response to an individual AI image is along the lines of “impressive,” “wow” or “ground-breaking,” and from there the eye moves on in an instant.

The only meaningful form of validation so far comes from the collector, occasionally a museum but more often an individual, someone who is “comfortable in the space” and confident enough to pick an NFT image or two from the latest collection, transfer however many Ethereum in payment, and wait patiently to see if their investment pays off — in financial gain, growth of the artist’s reputation, or both.

In that sense, old-fashioned connoisseurship is back with a vengeance. The collector’s eye has become at least as important as the photographer’s in ensuring the continuing life of the image.

This leaves photography seemingly poised between the past and the future, but this is nothing new. Photography has always embodied the transitional state. Even the most “realistic” photograph captures an unrealistic stillness, an artificially stopped moment between the past and the future.

The New York activist photographer and filmmaker of the 1980s, David Wojnarowicz, in his memoir Close to the Knives (1991), suggests that this affinity with transitional states is what drives him as a photographer. “I hate arriving at a destination. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.”

In our current cultural climate, where we are especially fascinated by states of transition — with the spaces between fixed identities, between points of departure and points of arrival — it is not surprising that AI photography should be so heavily preoccupied with the “disconnected and unfamiliar.” Images produced with the aid of AI typically dodge questions of origins and destinations, mixing up the past and the future in a single frame, so that we have little sense of beginnings and endings.

When a human-like figure appears in the frame, they will often have a lost or bewildered expression, as if they don’t quite know what they are doing there or where they have come from. The Canberra-based artist Lilyillo, who describes herself as “collaborating” with AI, places her mock-human subjects in ways that parody conventional studio portraiture, covering them in bright harlequinesque patterns and giving them dreamy, spaced-out expressions, as though they have dressed themselves up and have nowhere to go.

Her images — and those of many other AI artists — suggest that whoever came up with the name of Midjourney for the popular image-generation tool was on to something. Either that, or it constitutes an outstanding instance of nominative determinism. For the great majority of AI images do indeed occupy a middle space, blending past and imagined future by means of a kind of retro-futurism, in which recognizable if distorted figures are placed within fantastical, quirky or off-kilter settings.

The result is unsettling, or “uncanny,” to use the most frequently deployed descriptor for this effect. Freudian notions of uncanniness have long been associated with photography and many past practitioners have deliberately sought to explore and highlight this effect. But the overwhelming emphasis of AI image making on this quality of strangeness is something new.

According to the online platform Fellowship, which displays curated examples of AI photography, “much of the ethos of AI work we have seen so far,” its visual language, can be summed up in the words “uncanny, surreal, fantasy and otherworldliness.” In other words, they’re not real.

Instead, AI helps the artist to create “complex, uncanny, neo-surreal images that can shift artistic styles seamlessly,” says Jess Mac, whose work (including this image) appears in Fellowship’s first group show of emerging AI artists, posted online in April. “This allows for a queering of the imagery,” they say, “undoing normative representations of gender, kinship, and embodiment with ease.” Alain Astruc’s forthcoming exhibition (which might well include these images), to be held in June in Cahors in southern France, has as its title “In the Valley of the Strange,” which is perfectly on point.

Taken as a whole, across the range of AI image production, this preoccupation with uncanniness can feel suffocating. It seems paradoxical that a technology that promises so much creativity and variety can produce so much sameness of approach, but that could fairly be said of the camera too — think of all those sunsets. The capacity for repetition and sameness has never precluded the emergence and the recognition of images that stand out and that strike a spark in the viewer, and something similar will increasingly happen with AI photography.

In contrast to the dispiriting idea that the exciting times, photographically speaking, are over, that all the good photographs have been taken — that the golden age of mid-century photography isn’t coming back — the advocates for AI as an image-making tool have launched a counter-narrative, in which the creation of “photographic” images is being reinvented and re-energised.

Like it or not, the term AI photography is doubtless here to say, even as some persuasively maintain that it’s not photography at all — that it would be more accurately if less sharply described as photography-like. Some favour the term “synthography” on impeccably logical grounds, but it has a bit of a robot-generated ring to it and is unlikely to catch on. AI photography could also be described as AI illustration, in that it is the rendering of text as image, but that hardly sounds cutting-edge.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of AI imaging, at least in the department of cultural change, is its dependence on words. We are even told that tools will soon become widely available that link directly to our thoughts. We will be able to think an image, which others will then view and perhaps admire.

But for the moment it is words, or prompts, that deliver the picture, by means of a technical miracle that most of us can barely comprehend. Just as we have long been familiar with the idea that every picture tells a story, so we will soon unquestioningly absorb this new iteration of the relationship between word and image, in which every story tells a picture. •

The post Every story tells a picture appeared first on Inside Story.

It didn’t come as a surprise. The previous fifty or more years had seen many attempts to produce colour images. Some had achieved encouraging if fleeting results, but the images either could not be fixed, or survived only for a brief time.

By the early twentieth century, progress was such that a good many rivals were competing to come up with a process that was accessible, relatively affordable, and able to represent the world as it is — in colour. The Lumière brothers won that race. Autochrome was, in the words of the influential photographer and critic Alfred Stieglitz, “a dream come true,” a marvel of modern technology.

Thanks partly to the unrestrained enthusiasm of early-day influencers like Stieglitz, autochrome was an immediate success. Photographers with sufficient means were keen to try the new system. It was felt that, in some profound sense, the capacity to produce images in colour would unequivocally establish photography as no longer an ambitious interloper but an art form in its own right, one that would stand on equal terms with its elders.

For J.M. Bowles, who wrote extensively on art and photography, “the modern photographic print needs colour in order to make it a complete work of art.” The need had long been identified; now at last it was being met. For many of the self-styled Pictorialists, for example — those photographers who took an avowedly painterly approach to their work with the camera — colour offered the means to justify their claims for photography’s status.

In the October 1907 edition of his journal Camera Work, Stieglitz was unreserved in his vision of the future. Not only would the practice of colour photography become widespread, it would also provide new creative opportunities for those with the necessary talent to take full advantage of its potential. “The photographer who is an artist and who has a conception of colour will know how to make use of it.”

Not every photography enthusiast felt this way. The critic and editor Dixon Scott, for example, lamented that the “lilliputian Frankensteins” — a reference to the tiny, coloured dots, made from potato starch, that coated the plate and formed the bedrock of the colour image — would render it “impossible for the human hand to interfere.” The dots would make the photograph on their own, limiting the ability of the photographer to manipulate the image to create effects of the kind that could be achieved with monochrome. For this reason, Scott declared, photography’s “true sphere must always be the world of monochrome.”

From excited to despondent, these differing reactions were united in the certainty that the invention of the autochrome image heralded a revolution. It just wasn’t clear where the revolution was headed. Whether the new world of photographic colour would turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing remained to be revealed.

As Catlin Langford shows in her fascinating account of the rise and fall of autochrome, Colour Mania, the enthusiasts initially triumphed over the doubters. Drawing on the V&A’s considerable collection of some 2500 autochromes, and aided by excellent reproductions, Langford shows how the best of these early colour images, with their characteristic combination of realism and other-worldliness, “are as alluring today as when the process was first made available.”

In 1907, the future of colour photography seemed assured. Processes would inevitably improve, and before long colour rather than black-and-white would become the dominant medium. And yet it did not quite happen that way. Within only a few years some of the most prominent of the initial enthusiasts, including Stieglitz, had largely abandoned the new method for the more familiar and more flexible “world of monochrome.”

The portraitist and fashion photographer Adolph de Meyer, who declared in 1908 that he “no longer had an interest in monochrome photography,” returned to black-and-white a mere two years later. Although he was initially excited by colour’s possibilities, that excitement waned after a brief period of experiment. For de Meyer, monochrome continued to be where the real technical and artistic possibilities lay.

Adolph de Meyer’s Four Trout (1909). Victoria and Albert Museum

And yet de Meyer’s experiments with colour in those two years captured much of the promise and potential of autochrome. Langford includes half a dozen of de Meyer’s works in Colour Mania, all from the period 1908–09, all of them still lifes in which he explores the impact of various colour combinations. In one particularly effective example, Four Trout (1909), the fish of the title are arranged in a vertical row, one above the other, on a similarly arranged bed of waterweed.

Because of its highly patterned nature, this exercise in geometrical composition could also be extremely effective in monochrome. Indeed, the stippled trout look at first glance almost to be in black-and-white. It is the pale green of the background leaves that provides the dominant colour, causing the eye to focus as much on the backdrop as on the fish of the title. Four Trout is a fascinating exploration of colour’s ability to make a difference to how we see, yet it was an exploration that de Meyer felt he could take only so far.

In retrospect, it is not surprising that the initial enthusiasm for autochrome faded away. Autochromes took photography backwards as well as forwards. While improvements in monochrome cameras and associated processes had made it easier to travel light and respond more readily, autochrome revived more complex methods of preparation and display, and set back progress towards the highly desirable goal of capturing the moment.

Monochrome photography in the early twentieth century was rapidly being democratised. By contrast, the new colour process recalled a time when the practice of photography required considerable money and time and was an occupation for the few. The relatively cumbersome business of making a colour image seemed to belong to the past almost as much as to the future. Not only was making an autochrome demanding, but the result was uncertain and fragile.

In a detailed account of the process itself, Langford points out that while no specialist equipment was required — “any plate camera could be used” — the business of preparing and developing the plate involved many steps and left considerable room for error along the way.

Long exposure times, sometimes of a few seconds and often much longer, were required, obliging the photographer to minimise movement of the subject. Flowers, for example, were often brought inside to avoid any hint of wind that might ruffle the petals. After all this effort, an autochrome was difficult to reproduce effectively on paper. It needed to be backlit for display, and then for only short periods lest the plate be damaged and the image ruined.

Autochromes had their own mortality built into them. Langford quotes an estimate that fifty million autochromes were created during the twenty-five years in which the plates were commercially produced. Few have survived. Yet to view an autochrome in those early days, briefly backlit in a darkened room, must have been a thrillingly theatrical experience.

As more and more professional photographers returned to favouring monochrome, an opening was left for the supposedly less talented, “these people with their silly little enthusiasm and their inability to appreciate the niceties of colour,” as the photographic portraitist Alvin Langdon Coburn unkindly put it. The French Pictorialist Robert Demachy meanwhile resigned himself “to the inevitable atrocities that the over-confident amateur is going to thrust upon us.”

Yet for those who stayed the course of colour, gifted and persistent amateurs with the necessary means, it was also an opportunity for a further blurring of the distinction between professional and amateur, a blurring that had always existed and has never really gone away.

It is one of the most fascinating aspects of the history of photography in the twentieth century that colour, from its first commercial appearance in 1907, did not sweep the board, at least as far as art or what might be called serious photography was concerned. With major exceptions, particularly in areas such as fashion and travel photography, black-and-white retained its artistic dominance for many decades.

This was not only because of the difficulties, complexities and cost of making autochromes, nor of the challenges in producing an easily viewable image. It was also because the effect of colour, while immediate and striking, was felt by many to be ultimately unsatisfying, the equivalent of popular fiction. Monochrome was more literary.

The introduction of Kodachrome in 1936, which would help make colour photography both simpler and more affordable, reinforced this effect. Colour went on to become the medium for recording family occasions and holiday outings rather than the preferred medium for artistic expression. It was not until the 1970s, with the rise of photographers such as William Eggleston and Joel Meyerowitz, that colour photography finally began to be recognised and appreciated for its full artistic capabilities.

Colour now dominates our view of photography. To many eyes, images in greyscale, which speak of the past, need colour to become truly alive. Hence the boom in colourising, by which the dead past is reanimated for contemporary eyes. The digital artist Marina Amaral, for example, has built a huge following by colouring black-and-white photographs, thereby “breathing life into the past.”

Amaral’s most recent book of colourised images, A Woman’s World 1850–1960, co-authored with historian Dan Jones, follows two highly successful earlier volumes in which Amaral and Jones focused on colourised images of key historical events and of war. A Woman’s World is described as offering “a strikingly fresh perspective on the female experience during an era of extraordinary events,” by which “these women and their lives are brought wholly to life.”

Autochrome, seen in this context, was a false start. It offered the means of bringing the world “wholly to life,” but it was not until half a century later that colour was kickstarted onto its path to dominance. Colour Mania takes us back to the beginning, providing an opportunity to assess the achievements of these early experimenters with colour, and to understand why they did not lead at once to the revolutionary change that many expected.

Making and then viewing an autochrome entailed a good deal of effort. Autochromes were advertised as rendering photography “true to life,” but arriving at that truth required considerable creative deception. Autochrome recorded the artificially static, not life as it was lived. Spontaneity was out of the question. Langford records the advice of one contributor to the British Journal of Photography: “rose trees that are rather bare may have a few blooms wired on for the occasion.”

Photographers were obliged to take particular care in selecting their subjects, avoiding overly sharp contrasts and incompatible colours (which could cause a “fried egg effect,” rendering the centre of the photo darker) and instead favouring certain colours, for example red, which reproduced particularly well and contributed to a striking yet harmonious whole. The ability of red to anchor the image can be seen in Mervyn O’Gorman’s dramatic and justly famous portraits, from 1913, of Christina, dressed in red and photographed against a coastal background.

Of the photographers represented in Colour Mania, the one to best show the full potential of autochrome was the one who stayed loyal the longest. F.A. (Friedrich Adolf) Paneth was a quite remarkable man. His day job, so to speak, was as a chemist, a field in which he achieved great distinction. On leaving Germany with his family in reaction to the rise of Hitler, he worked principally in Britain and America before capping a brilliant career as director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz.

Paneth brought the same intelligence, inventiveness and precise eye for detail to his hobby of photography as he did to his profession of chemistry. Rather than being frustrated by the constraints of the autochrome process, he seemed to relish the challenge of working with them to maximum effect. Langford describes how Paneth even stockpiled a supply of autochrome plates to use against the inevitable day when production would cease. When that day came, in 1932, he continued to produce autochromes until, reluctantly, he switched to newer technologies. It seems that even then he would sometimes process his images in ways that would cause them to resemble autochromes.

A.F. Paneth’s Lutz, Otto, and Myself at Semmering, Austria (1908). Victoria and Albert Museum

As Langford rightly notes, Paneth’s scientific mind and methodical approach, though they resulted in highly composed images, “nevertheless convey a sense of immediacy” and of “intimacy.” This is particularly noticeable in his group photographs — of friends, family, colleagues and students.

It is difficult for any photographer to capture in such an image a genuine sense of equality and companionship. Certain faces or figures will tend to dominate and demand particular attention. Paneth, however, had a talent for distributing our attention equally across the figures in the frame.

In one striking image, Lutz, Otto and Myself at Semmering, Austria (1908), Paneth is shown photographing his brother and their friend Otto. The men are formally dressed in the manner of the time, and rather stiffly posed. Yet the image relays an impression of mutual affection and of collaboration in this new way of making images, an impression reinforced by the vitality of colour. Paneth, whose work was never exhibited in his lifetime, was both a conservative — he stuck to his last — and an innovator, pointing the way ahead, never losing his faith in the bright future of colour. •

Colour Mania: Photographing the World in Autochrome
By Catlin Langford | Thames and Hudson | $90 | 238 pages

The post Autochrome’s intimate legacy appeared first on Inside Story.

Still Pictures, Malcolm’s just-published final work, is a collection of twenty-six short chapters, or meditations, on this relationship. It amounts to a fragmented yet highly evocative autobiography, a genre of which she also remained wary to the end.

Most, though not all, of the chapters begin with a photograph. A few contain no reproductions at all, a few contain several, but mostly there is just one photograph, acting as a starter culture for the reflections that follow. The illustrations as they appear on the page are small and of low resolution; they don’t seem to have much of a life or significance of their own. Some come, we are told, from a cardboard box marked “Old Not Good Photos,” clearly signalling their lack of aesthetic value. They certainly don’t leap from the page, demanding our attention. It is Malcolm’s words that make them.

The title, Still Pictures, refers to the essential quality of photographic images, their status as frozen moments in time. The subtitle, “On Photography and Memory,” provides a bit more of a hint of what to expect. Are photographs, these frozen moments, the embodiment of memory, or at the very least stimulants to memory (whether those memories are collective or private), or do we accord photographs a status and power they don’t really merit?

Which takes us back to the main title, and its subtle ambiguity. Photos and snapshots, made with the greatest care or taken casually and unthinkingly, may well provide keys to the past. Or they may, in the end, still just be pictures.

Malcolm repeatedly approaches this question, before feinting and dancing away from it. We are not to be treated to conventional or indeed unconventional analysis of why this or that image works or doesn’t work, of why it might qualify as art. This is no surprise, given that she became, over many decades of engagement with photographs and their impact on our view of the world, increasingly uninterested in the theoretical exploration or artistic appreciation of photography.

In an email exchange with fellow writer on photography Geoff Dyer in 2014, published in the journal Aperture, she asserts her complete lack of interest in that trio of giants of photographic theory, John Berger, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag. Their “writings on photography have meant almost nothing to me,” she tells Dyer in characteristically take-it-or-leave-it style.

Malcolm does however directly follow the Barthes of Camera Lucida in her insistence on the essentially private nature of our response to photographs. In Still Pictures, her readings of the photographs she has selected are partial, tentative and very personal. Our interaction with a photograph is “always, at bottom, a private reading,” Barthes wrote, a reading in which the subject of the photo intertwines with our own past and our own memories. It is not the photo that we see, but what it says to us, the memories it evokes.

Malcolm differs from many a speculative and freewheeling reader of photographs in that even what is for her a very personal image, one with an earlier version of herself in the frame, may not offer very much in the way of material. Photos, like memories, possess a natural resistance. “I am in the front row, third from the left,” she says of a class photo, but beyond that “the picture brings back no memory.” Another image, of Malcolm, her sister and “three people I don’t recognise,” is dismissed as “barely readable… It has no artistic merit and summons no memories.”

This is one of many comments Malcolm makes on the failure of photographs — photographs in this case related directly to her own life — to deliver in the memory department. I remember nothing, she will say of a photograph, yet paradoxically Still Pictures is packed with memories. Even as she tells us that, memory-wise, this or that photograph is a disappointment, the memories take off — usually in unpredictable directions, but memories all the same.

“Barely readable.” Janet Malcolm

In that image of a young Janet, her sister and the three women she does not (at first) recognise, the figures are variously arranged, in a row, against a car. The woman on the left of the frame is half standing, half leaning behind and against the driver’s open door, her face full on to the viewer, framed by the car window. A frame within a frame.

But Malcolm — and this is a sign of her dismissive brilliance — gives only the most cursory nod towards this rather obvious piece of compositional analysis. Instead, she mimics the process of looking more closely at a photograph and of a memory suddenly coming back to her. She does, after all, remember this woman in the window, but then the memory begins to fade. “There may have been some tragic story, or there may not.”

“I have a memory,” she remarks in a further reflection, and the memory sounds from her telling of it to have many of the qualities of a photograph. It is from her teenage years. Leonard and Sue are “standing together at the back of an assembly hall.” It is a highly romantic, evocative image. Both of them “exceptionally good-looking.” They form a composition on their own, apart from their “unformed” fellows. Their apartness, Malcolm says, has “stayed with me through the years.” But it isn’t a photograph, she reminds us — it’s a memory.

In this retained, unphotographed memory, Malcolm resists what can often seem to be the inevitable takeover of memory by physical and digital images. Images from our personal archives pop up unbidden on our screens and we have rapidly learned to call them what they call themselves, “memories.” Advertisements for cameras and smartphones exhort us to “make memories.” We frequently ask ourselves whether it is the event, the person, the landscape that we remember, or the photos we have of them, and we can be forgiven for suspecting it’s the photos.

In defiance of photography’s takeover bid, Malcolm makes the case for memory as memory, rather than slave to photography. In pursuit of this objective, her repeated failures to remember the events captured in a photograph can sometimes seem almost too insistent — a way of putting photographs in their place.

Yet time may be on her side. We now have the capacity, by means of AI and image-generation models, to turn memory into image using text commands, upending the balance between the two. Malcolm’s memory of Leonard and Sue, standing at the back of the assembly hall, can now be turned into a photographic image, stealing a march on the camera.

For Malcolm, Leonard and Sue notwithstanding, “most of what happens to us goes unremembered,” either by us or by photographs. When photographs of past events do exist, they don’t necessarily help in the process of recall. Rather than acting as memories on our behalf, photographs from school and holidays and family occasions can unsettle us, exactly because we may not remember anything about the event, or the people recorded in the photographic moment. A photograph, even one in which we recognise ourselves, can leave us questioning our own capacity to remember much at all.

We will sometimes look at a photograph of our past selves and be unsettled by how long ago it seems. Even or perhaps especially if the image comes with a date-stamp, we can feel disoriented. The date just doesn’t seem right. The photograph could easily belong to an earlier period of history, before ours. Instead of bringing back our youth, a photograph can push it further away. “I am struck,” Malcolm says of that school photo, “by how different the girls look from some of the girls of today, as though they were living in the nineteenth century and being photographed by Mrs Cameron.”

At the same time as she identifies the gaps that separate photography and memory, Malcolm also emphasises their similarities. She likens the events of our lives to photographic negatives — “the few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories.” The photographs we retain in our heads are the ones we have developed, curated and stored. The others have been discarded with the contact sheets.

Strikingly, Malcolm compares the creation and retention of memories to a photographic process that is now outdated, one of analogue cameras and darkrooms and developing fluid; it is an old method for old memories. But this metaphor has a notable absence: there is no mention of the photographer, no human hand placing the negative in the tray. In the same way, the images that Malcolm reflects upon in Still Pictures are by photographers unknown or unsung.

Occasionally, a professional, named photographer does intrude. Decades after they were taken, a small bundle of photographs turns up unexpectedly in the mail. They are part of a set by Marjory Collins, one of the remarkably gifted photographers deployed by the Office of War Information to document American life during the second world war. Malcolm’s family, as Czech immigrants, was selected to be photographed as part of a “propagandist” project designed to show America’s rich and welcoming social variety.

Young Janet Malcolm with “Slečna.” Marjory Collins/Library of Congress

The photograph that begins the chapter shows Janet’s teacher of Czech in pedagogical pose, pointing at the blackboard, while Janet herself, not yet tall enough to do so with ease, reaches up aspirationally with her chalk, her back to the camera. What follows on from the image is a moving reflection on the teacher, known to her pupils only as “Slečna,” or “Miss,” about whose life Malcolm knew and knows little. She can speculate, but can’t in any meaningful sense remember, either the events depicted in the photograph or the specific moment in which it was taken.

The unexpected package contains only a dozen or so photos — the one of “Miss” at the blackboard and other moments involving her childhood self — but there must, we infer, have been a good many more. Indeed “must have” becomes a brief refrain. Marjory Collins “must have” spent several days on these photo sessions. She “must have” sat in that empty chair after taking her photos of the family at table.

By this stage, a third of the way through the book, we are already unsurprised as Malcolm distances herself from these photos of her and her family: “I have no memory of the sessions with Marjory Collins.” In Malcolm’s memory, Collins as photographer is near to invisible.

“Outstandingly terrible.” Janet Malcolm

In her final chapter, “A Work of Art,” Malcolm returns to this question of authorship in photography. She recalls the publication in 1980 of a collection of her photography pieces, Diana and Nikon, pieces that had previously appeared, without illustrations, in the New Yorker. To support her text, Malcolm selected examples, by prominent practitioners, “of a new kind of avant-garde photography that took its inspiration from — and to all intents and purposes was indistinguishable from — the home snapshot.” The provocativeness of that word “indistinguishable” foreshadows what comes next.

Among her examples of “artless” photography, Malcolm includes a bit of mischief — an “outstandingly terrible snapshot” of unknown provenance that her husband had long ago chanced upon and kept for its very awfulness. She connives to attribute the image to her husband, thereby identifying him as creator rather than mere collector. With gotcha delight, Malcolm describes in Still Pictures how this interloper of an image, with its newly assigned authorship, assumes an afterlife of reiterated artistic merit, solely because she has deemed it such.

In her study of the impact of social media on memory, The End of Forgetting (2019), Kate Eichhorn argues that the ubiquity and digital longevity of photos mean that “the ability to break away from the past is severely compromised.” How can we move successfully into the future, she asks, “carrying an archive of past images?”

Photographs are everywhere, their numbers increasing daily to reach yet further unimaginable heights. Everyone takes them, looks at them, exchanges and archives them. They are in danger, we fear, of overwhelming our lives, substituting recorded memories for the real thing, for what we have come to defiantly call our “lived experience.”

For Janet Malcolm, this is to exaggerate the power of photography. Her personal, randomly retained collection of largely undistinguished images is not so much a burden as a mystery. These photos stimulate memories, again often at seeming random, but they don’t substitute for them. Sometimes we connect with the past our photos represent, sometimes we don’t. The memories contained within the photos are anything but simulacrums of her own — the most she can expect is that if she looks at an image long enough, a connection will form, and something in the frame will “begin to speak.” •

Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory
By Janet Malcolm | Text Publishing | $29.99 | 155 pages

The post Taking it or leaving it appeared first on Inside Story.

But when fire was followed by pestilence, the question of how to convey the pandemic’s full impact was more complicated. For one thing, in a very literal sense, there was nothing to see — no orange flames to make the visual point, but rather an invisible virus accessible only to the most specialised branches of photography.

The question persists — a question, essentially, of where to point the camera — as photographers continue to explore ways of capturing the essence of what it has meant to live through the pandemic and witness, either from close-up or further away, its effects on our lives. When it comes to recording the physical effects of the virus, and the possibilities of hospitalisation and death, even the most intrepid of photographers has faced daunting restrictions, both ethical and practical.

Access to intensive care units, for example, is no straightforward matter, particularly in a time of heightened hygiene protocols. When granted, the effect can be powerful, as in Kate Geraghty’s series of photographs of the ICU ward at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, taken earlier this year for the Sydney Morning Herald. Here, seriously ill patients are shown being monitored by watchful staff and multitudes of screens.

Other, more day-to-day, obstacles are perhaps insignificant in themselves but cumulative in their effect. In many cases they are largely psychological, a consequence of the new climate of boundaries and protocols and rules, and of a new wariness of intruding on other people’s privacy and space.

But sometimes the restrictions can be more substantive. The Greek-Australian photographer Angelos Giotopoulos recalls his time in quarantine during a recent visit to Australia for urgent family reasons. “I opened my door to photograph the corridor and immediately received a stern phone call reminding me that I was only able to open the door to pick up food, sheets or laundry.” In this case the photographer is being photographed to ensure that he doesn’t step outside the new boundaries.

In the early days — way back in the first half of 2020 — many images invited us to look anew at scenes of everyday life, and particularly at spaces both empty and occupied. Photographs of rows of empty seats — in buses and planes and theatres and restaurants — began to appear in force, signifying how ordinary life, where people routinely travelled to work and ate out and went to the cinema, had dramatically slowed down and even in some cases come to a halt. Outdoor crowd scenes, by contrast, captured at concerts or in parks, carried a new hint of threat lurking in all that human proximity, though their impact lessened over time as we became more aware of the relatively low risk of transmission in the open air.

If they are to count as commentary on the pandemic, images of spaces, empty or crowded, rely for their impact on context. In normal, non-Covid times, theatres and cinemas are empty for long stretches, even during hit runs, and buses continue to operate outside the busy peak hours, often with only one or two passengers. By the same token, crowded beaches were and will continue to be part of everyday life. It is the context of the pandemic — the explanatory caption — that makes the difference to how the image is perceived.

The impact of these photographs, or rather their impact as pandemic photography, may lessen over time as the scenes they depict become “re-normalised” and the images themselves come to be seen as insufficiently distinctive as a record of the uniqueness of living through the pandemic.

Given that a pandemic is difficult to photograph directly and straightforwardly, many Australians recognised early the importance of encouraging a varied visual record derived from a wide variety of photographers with differing perspectives and emphases. Local and regional competitions sprang up all over the country, inviting photographers — a category that nowadays is coincident with pretty much the entire population — to submit their own takes on the impact of the pandemic on themselves and their communities. Libraries established distinct projects, and galleries commissioned works and staged exhibitions, contributing to what is now already a vast archive for future generations to explore and ponder.

If one common theme emerges across all these photographs, it is the theme of isolation: hands placed up against glass, people sitting alone on park benches or wrapped Christo-like in masks and protective clothing, children learning from screens, and people queueing just too far apart to comfortably strike up a conversation.

Mass Isolation Australia, a project launched in early 2020 under the auspices of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, was quick to pick up on this emerging theme and to “invite Australians to share photographs of their experiences in isolation.” Of the almost 13,000 images submitted to the project, 500 have been selected by curators Amelia Saward and Shaohui Kwok and may be viewed via @massisolationaus on Instagram. Several hundred of these images will appear in a new book, Mass Isolation Australia, to be released in January, and a selection are on view in Ballarat until 9 January.

The project’s title alludes somewhat self-consciously to the culturally influential Mass Observation project initiated in Britain in the 1930s, which sought the written observations of volunteers on a wide variety of topics coming under the rubric of ordinary life. In tune with our visually oriented times, Mass Isolation invites photographic rather than written contributions, and its subject is more specific than the original project to which it refers. But the emphasis on ordinary, daily life is the same. This is not a visual record of high-end laboratory research or the back and forth of meetings and briefings that go towards formulating pandemic policy. It is a record of daily impacts as experienced, either directly or at a remove, by everyone.

Lisa Sorgini’s Matilda, Indigo and Beck at Their Front Door.

The curators divide the photographs into categories including Empty Streets, which is self-explanatory, and the New Normal, which embraces images of queues, masks, grounded planes, admonitory signs and yes, rows of empty chairs. People are frequently captured in moments of reflection, as they sit at tables alone, or at their windows, “gazing through the glass longingly,” their expressions betraying feelings of uncertainty and of disconnection from the ordinary flow of life.

It is no surprise that the view through glass features so prominently in the photographic record of the pandemic. The architectural critic Tarō Igarashi, director of the splendidly named Windowology Project at the Window Research Institute in Tokyo, has spoken of how windows, both metaphorical and literal, have played such a crucial part in our experiences of being governed by the new rules and restrictions, fuelling a surge of photographic images based on the metaphor of looking through windows.

“‘Windows’ of the new era, such as our personal computing devices” provide an alternative form of connection in times of social isolation, says Igarashi, while “actual windows have also played a unique role in the crisis,” allowing us to communicate safely and to look out on a world that we are constrained from entering freely. These same windows also allow the photographer to look in.

Included in the Mass Isolation book are several examples of this focus. In Lisa Sorgini’s Matilda, Indigo and Beck at Their Front Door, three women convey by their poses and expressions a complex mixture of proximity and separateness as they gaze out through the glass door of their home in distinctly different directions. Sandy Scheltema’s Hugs on Hold, Alice Sarah-Lay Greets Her Grandmother Margaret Wheeler at the Trentham Aged Care Facility presents a more deliberately affecting, highly composed image that speaks to the many people who found themselves suddenly and unexpectedly cut off from direct contact with their families. And Viki Petherbridge plays with the long line of storefront photography from Eugène Atget to Vivian Maier with her Self Portrait with Vandalism During Lockdown, an image of disorientation and uncertainty that conveys something of the personal and social stresses imposed by lockdown-induced isolation.

Viki Petherbridge’s Self Portrait with Vandalism During Lockdown.

In their different ways all three images reflect on the limitations of individuality and self-reliance, and work best not as isolated artefacts but in relation to one another. It is not surprising that more than one commentator has noted that a genuinely iconic image of the pandemic has yet to emerge, and may indeed never emerge, in contrast to the single, dominant images that have come to stand for the Spanish civil war or the Vietnam war, for example, or for a variety of other disasters and events of international significance. It is not simply a question of there now being too many photographs and too many photographers for one single image ever to stand out above all the others. This absence of the truly iconic photo lies in the nature of the subject itself.

The organisers of the Mass Isolation project acknowledge this reality when they effectively pass the whole question of iconic status down the line, inviting prospective contributors to “please share an iconic photo.” The word “iconic” here does not mean the singular image that will stand the test of time; it means good or striking or the best of the burst. It suggests the kind of image that will complement and interact with other images of similar intent, together creating a more complete picture.

This is another way of saying that no single photograph is likely to stand for the experience of the pandemic, even within a single country or community. A thoughtfully assembled exhibition like Mass Isolation Australia instead shows how images sourced from a variety of image-makers can together tell a coherent and evocative tale of what it was like to be there. •

The post Through a glass, longingly appeared first on Inside Story.

Whenever we went to visit, I’d grab a magazine to shield myself from the pain and awkwardness in the room, flicking through the ads and fashion till I got to the stories. I might read about a civil war in Latin America or morality and manners in the Outer Hebrides or… honestly, I don’t remember most of the subjects, but I’ve never forgotten the voice. Polished, witty, literate, knowledgeable, superior. I read a lot and the Vogue voice — which other glamorous titles used too — etched itself on my brain.

A decade later, when I wrote my first stories for Vogue Australia as a freelancer in Paris, I was hoping to replicate that worldliness. My personal fashion sense was never going to pass muster — couturiers Azzedine Alaïa and Franco Moschino must have been highly amused at the appearance of the young woman sent to interview them — but I could try to sound the part.

By the time I left the magazine in 1992, having worked on several of its titles, I was disabused of the notion that writing added any value to the product. Fashion editors talked about doing a little black dress story, or a weekend away story, or maybe a leisurewear story (activewear was yet to come), and these were the stories that counted. Everything else was just text. “How will we illustrate it?” was the usual response to any idea from the features department. Over its 125-year history, though, some very fine writers have taken the Vogue coin. A roll call would include Virginia Woolf, another Wolfe (Tom), Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, Nancy Mitford and Jeanette Winterson.

You won’t find feature writing mentioned in Glossy, Nina-Sophia Miralles’s new history of the magazine, but nor does Miralles mention models or fashion trends as such. What interests her is how the magazine evolved from a Manhattan society gazette into one of the world’s most recognised brands, and the people who drove and profited from its growth, who managed it through war and economic downturns, and who pushed through to the top of a company that demands crazy degrees of loyalty from its staff.

Thus far, Vogue — once a magazine, now a self-styled global brand — has prospered in good times and in bad. In what counts as a very bad time, quite possibly the end times for glossy magazines, Vogue is one of the few structures still standing in the ruined landscape of old media. It struts its stuff, shapeshifting with the times and technology, still recognisably Vogue, haughty, never naughty and, most importantly, with never a hint of self-doubt.

Vogue was born during the Gilded Age. Its founder, Arthur Turnure (no, not Condé Nast — he was Vogue’s second owner), came from old New York money but had an eye on the new money pouring into Manhattan. His publishing formula, which still holds good, was one part entitled to one part aspirational. Miralles describes how, from the first issue of 17 December 1892, Turnure nailed his market. “With one paper he seduced two social groups: middle class readers would buy it so they could finally see what the rich and distinguished were up to and upper class readers would buy it to feed their egos.”

Miralles’s profile describes her as a London-based fashion and arts writer who launched LONDNR, an online culture magazine, in 2015. Her style is breezy and palatable, her narrative rich in detail and anecdote, and she doesn’t ask too many hard questions. But this is not Vogue propaganda; it is a well-researched biography of the queen of fashion titles, relying heavily on the memoirs and biographies of former editors, proprietors and fashion luminaries.

The focus is on the big three — American, British and French Vogue. New York is where the power lies, and American Vogue has always had the biggest budgets, the most formidable editors, the final say. But the London and Paris offices, established in 1916 and 1922 respectively, sound like a lot more fun.

The Newhouse family, which bought Condé Nast’s company in 1959, launched Vogue Australia that same year. They asked a gregarious shoe-and-textiles salesman, Bernie Leser, to help them. Together with his editor, Sheila Scotter, this most unlikely of publishers made a huge success of the venture. Leser’s star rose in the corporation until in 1987 he was appointed president of Condé Nast in the United States. Forget Nicole and Elle. Bernie — everyone called him Bernie — was the most influential Australian in the magazine’s history.

I remember him visiting the Vogue office in Sydney with Si Newhouse Jr, maybe for the thirtieth anniversary bash in 1989. He wanted to trade memories of growing up in Auckland with me. Did I remember the Tudor cinema in Remuera? I did. Had I rolled Jaffas down the aisles? I had. He didn’t tell me that he’d arrived in New Zealand in 1939 as a fourteen-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany — and though I sensed he was an outsider, I didn’t ask. We didn’t have much else in common. I was a Vogue writer, and Vogue’s top brass, including fashion editorial, have a polite but profound indifference to the written word.

Miralles covers Vogue Australia in two scant pages dealing with Bernie, and Norman Parkinson’s first golden cover photo. Other editions of Vogue get even shorter shrift. The Condé Nast licensing strategy is described in an extended paragraph, and it’s not complicated. Emerging economy grows a middle class. Vogue — created by the smart set for the smart set — sweeps in to tempt the newly created wealth. Same formula applied in Brazil, Korea, China, Turkey and so on. It works. And until very recently it seemed immune to cultural pushback.

Of the many anecdotes Miralles recounts in Glossy, there’s one that really sticks in my mind. It features Edna Woolman Chase, editor-in-chief of American Vogue from 1914 to 1952 (you read that correctly) and the treatment she meted out to Alison Settle.

Settle was appointed editor of British Vogue in 1926, replacing Dorothy Todd, who had edited the magazine from 1922 to 1926 with her girlfriend, a wealthy Australian tearaway called Madge Garland (née McHarg). The magazines produced in those four years are now celebrated as avant-garde masterpieces, but Todd and her entourage (Bloomsbury — say no more) were too much trouble for the Americans. Chase fired her and hired Settle to steady the ship. Settle’s personal life was conventional, and she brought solid experience in journalism to the job.

Not that Vogue had much use for the latter. Little in the British edition was homegrown. Covers came from New York, pictures from Paris. Settle’s job was to see and be seen at a relentless round of dinners, parties, dress shows, performances, sporting events… It was exhausting, but then editing Vogue has never been for homebodies. It’s no surprise to read that Chase considered it Settle’s “duty” to become good friends with Helena Rubinstein (who took out double-page spreads for her beauty products). But the degree to which she micromanaged her editor’s private life is pretty horrifying.

When Chase learned that Settle, a widow with two children, lived in Hampstead and caught the tube to work, she read her the riot act. “In one of her more draconian moments,” writes Miralles, she declared that “Hampstead was essentially vulgar and Settle was forbidden from living there.” (The kiss of death for a story proposal at Vogue Living, I recall, was to be judged suburban.) Settle was ordered to find a flat with a uniformed porter and a lift. She complied, moving to Mayfair and leaving her children behind in Hampstead. On her next visit to London, Chase reportedly found the Mayfair flat unsatisfactory and told her to move again.

Settle was caught in “the Vogue vice grip,” as Miralles calls it. Some handle it better than others. Settle left Vogue under a cloud in the mid 1930s, and went back to Fleet Street. In a letter to her daughter, cited by Miralles, she said working for the Observer gave her a cleaner conscience. I cheered for Settle, but she was quickly replaced.

Condé Nast proprietors play favourites, and for those who make the cut, the lifestyle is princely. Art director Alexander Liberman was rewarded handsomely for his friendship with Si Newhouse, earning US$1 million a year in 1980. He stayed with the company for more than fifty years. Anna Wintour has been the editor-in-chief of American Vogue since 1988 and has outflanked all her rivals. Her annual salary is reportedly US$4 million, and at seventy-one she shows no sign of abdicating. Miralles is good on Nuclear Wintour, as she was known during her tenure at British Vogue.

The final few chapters of Glossy will interest those who want to know the nitty-gritty of the reign of Wintour and her generation, and to learn how the magazine is coping with the media climate since 2000. But the problem isn’t just the internet: fashion as an industry is facing serious consumer resistance right now, and Vogue’s trajectory is twinned with the industry’s.

I found more to enjoy in Miralles’s back catalogue: the twentieth-century chronicles of Vogue when it was just a magazine. I learned of editors who will never be household names again, some from surprisingly modest backgrounds, whose resourcefulness made small fortunes for Condé Nast (the man rather than the company). I didn’t know, for example, that Chase “invented” the catwalk show (it’s a great story) when the outbreak of war in 1914 choked supply from Paris ateliers.

There are some great characters in Vogue’s management too. Miralles tells of the extraordinary efforts of Harry Yoxall, the managing director of British Vogue, to get copies of the magazine out around the country during the second world war. In Paris, meanwhile, Michel de Brunhoff showed the ingenuity of a Resistance fighter in keeping Vogue Paris out of the hands of the Nazis. “Exactly what motivated everyone in this herculean effort is another question entirely,” Miralles comments in one of her few, albeit gentle, digs at the idea of a fashion magazine as a cause worth supporting.

In one of her strongest chapters, Miralles takes a close look at Colombe Pringle, who in her time at the helm of Vogue Paris (1987–94) finally managed to put a black woman on the cover (a previous editor had been fired by the Newhouses in 1966 for trying to do so). Pringle then followed up with holiday issues featuring the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. Miralles asks whether fashion should be political, but backs away from answering the question. Vogue Paris seems to have been much less a vassal of New York than London was. But then, in 2017, it was the British edition that broke the mould most spectacularly by appointing Edward Enninful — not only a man but a gay black man — as editor-in-chief.

Vogue is a business, and you can bet that Enninful’s appointment reflected business priorities that have been clear from the outset. Condé Nast was firstly an ad man — his soulmates, says Miralles, were in the advertising department. The Nast business model, which came to be used everywhere, never saw magazine sales as the end game. They were just a number to throw at advertisers to lure them into spending money. Condé Nast’s guidelines are that 40 per cent of the “book” should be advertising. Well, that worked brilliantly for a long time, but we know now that it isn’t foolproof.

Still, Vogue has a lucrative niche on the top shelf. Some of its current advertisers (Tiffany & Co., Veuve Clicquot and Perrier Jouët) have been buying space since the first issue. Miralles finds some comfort in noting that the habits of the ultra-rich haven’t changed all that much. I can’t say that I do. •

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The review will explore questions of “context,” Arthur stresses. The weight of the task ahead falls very much on that word, and on the extent to which historical and situational context can be reconciled with what she calls “evolving standards.” This challenge is hardly unique to Magnum, so it is not surprising that the organisation has been aware for some time now of the need to engage with its vast collection of historical material, and with the complexity of interpreting past ways of seeing.

Recent articles on the Magnum website with titles such as “Old and New: Working with and Responding to the Photographic Archive” and “Breaking Out of the Archive Trap” have tackled the status of the individual image by emphasising the importance of the context in which it was made and the context in which it is seen. Magnum has also encouraged photographic projects that revisit and interrogate its own work, applying a contemporary perspective to Magnum’s trove of images of China, for example, or Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous “Man and Machine” series from 1968.

The agency has devoted particular attention to highlighting the process by which its photographs were and are created. The substantial volume Magnum Contact Sheets, published in 2011 and edited by Kristen Lubben, shows in absorbing detail, complete with mark-ups and annotations and recollections from photographers, how published images were selected from the reams of “contacts” that characterised photographic practice in the pre-digital age. “Unique to each photographer’s approach,” writes Lubben, “the contact is a record of how an image was constructed.”

A rather different “process” can also be seen at work in a series of Magnum-sponsored Live Labs held in collaboration with a variety of cultural institutions around the world over the past two years. Here, says the agency, the “process of making, editing, printing and curating the work is performed in full view of the public.” The audience “is invited to ‘join’ the journey,” and in doing so to “highlight the collaborative nature of production at the heart of the Magnum Photos cooperative.” It’s an ambition that, at this stage of the journey, doesn’t sit entirely comfortably with the culturally persistent trope of the star photographer that is at the heart of Magnum.

What these varying approaches to photographic history and practice have in common is a recognition of the overriding importance of context — using the word in the broadest sense — in allowing the viewer of today to form a judgement. An image that may once have been accepted at face value may now raise questions in the mind of the viewer: questions about the ethical issues involved in breaching privacy, for example, or photographing controversial subjects, or undertaking the kind of photographic manipulation that masquerades as spontaneity. And beyond that is the question of when the questions stop. When does the revelation of process, of what goes to make a photograph, stop being explanatory and start being overwhelming?

Magnum Photos was founded as a cooperative in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, “Chim” Seymour and George Rodger, all of whom had built significant reputations, and reached vast audiences with their images of Spain in the 1930s and of the second world war and its aftermath. With the gradual involvement of newer recruits such as Eve Arnold, Inge Morath and Werner Bischof, Magnum cleverly combined its brand of humanistic, engaged photography with the business savvy needed to seek out new clients and deliver a product according to a brief.

A lot of photo agencies have come and gone since those years, but Magnum — despite changes in technology, distribution and consumption — remains a major cultural force. Its unusual model of cooperative entrepreneurship appears to have survived pretty much unscathed, with Magnum members exercising complete authority over admission to the ranks. And ranks there are, with an ascending hierarchy of nominees, associates and, finally, the elusive and desirable category of member, from which, like monarchs, only a very few have abdicated and none, as Magnum attests with some pride, has been dethroned.

In this impressively researched study of the early decades of Magnum, Nadya Bair uncovers the complex interactions of artistic ambition and business acumen that somehow produced a kind of order out of chaos, and shows how an organisation that inspired intense loyalty and commitment was able to balance the image of the lone, intrepid and in most cases male photographer, so important to its profile, with the realities of entrepreneurial endeavour.

Bair highlights the role played by marketers and picture editors and other behind-the-scenes staff, many of them women, who managed the processes of picture-making, from identifying photographic opportunities to setting schedules and not infrequently selecting, on behalf of the photographer and from a vast array of contact prints, what would work best on the page. While never detracting from the artistic and professional achievement of the photographers themselves, Bair shows how the organisation conspired, in effect, to downplay the role of its backroom staff in order to keep the photographer in the foreground.

As individual Magnum photographers became increasingly well known and in demand, so it became more important to emphasise their unique visions and minimise the role of the apparatus that kept the show on the road. Cartier-Bresson, ever a dab hand at self-mythologising, increasingly let it be known that his success in the postwar years was more in spite of than owing to Magnum, but if anything this kind of public lament only enhanced the overall brand. The idea of the lone artist resisting the constraints of capitalism, all within a framework that brought recognition and financial reward for the individual, for the agency and for the commissioning organisation, suited everybody.

Magnum was equally successful in managing and exploiting a further contradiction, between the idea of the photographer as a silent witness whose personality and presence are minimised in the interests of giving full weight to the subject, and the photographer as artist, adventurer and active mediator between the world and the viewer. This romanticised notion of the fearless photojournalist, simultaneously distanced and engaged, continues to exert cultural force today, in fiction and in film. It didn’t hurt that those early Magnum photographers were often highly photogenic themselves — George Rodger, the “handsome young photographer,” or Robert Capa, with whom every woman in the Paris office was said to be in love.

The contradiction between being apart from the action and embedding yourself remains inherent in the profession. Magnum continues to embody this tension, even as viewers have grown more alert to its implications. The agency remains culturally significant, not because membership is essential to professional success but because of how it has set the cultural parameters for what it means to be a photojournalist — concerned, humane, fearless, truthful. And successful.

Magnum photographers made an astonishing number of images during the postwar period, the vast majority of which were never published. These unseen images were referred to as “dead” material, in the manner of the 7000 or so pictures, taken by George Rodger for the Economic Cooperation Administration, that “were mostly filed away in the ECA archives.” The oversupply of visual images — and the difficulty of telling them apart — is regularly cited today as a function of the digital era. But as Bair shows, the portable camera and overproduction have long gone together for the professional photographer, as well as for many an amateur. Indeed, as she has it, “if the medium in which the agency worked had any single defining quality, it was overproduction.” The editorial eye — that indefinable instinct for what would be the right, and most striking, image — was vital to the success of the enterprise.

With the advent of digital photography, the process of selection has devolved more and more to the photographer. But in the early days of Magnum, when photographers were often working on assignment in remote areas without access to photographic laboratories, they might not be able to see their own work. Rolls of unopened film would be sent off in the post, to be dealt with back at base. Many people might then be involved in the process of editing and selecting what to publish or to offer for publication. This was no simple matter: in late 1948, as Bair notes, “the entire Magnum staff in Paris spent November and December editing Cartier-Bresson’s 300 rolls of film” brought back from an assignment in the Soviet Union.

It was Cartier-Bresson who famously coined the term “the decisive moment” to describe his photographic method, a phrase that by extension seemed to capture something essential about Magnum. It suggests a rare ability to spot the potentially iconic scene or subject in a moment, and to capture it with a click. It plays down the processes of pre- and post-production in favour of the inspired instant. Contemporary art photography has rather turned away from and in some cases actively rejected this idea of photographic genius, favouring instead an emphasis on overt staging rather than spontaneity, on exploiting the ever-expanding options for post-production effects, and on celebrating technical artifice.

But for all that, the idea of the decisive moment retains enormous power. While the term has always been misleading in the sense that it airbrushed out the role of the picture editors and all the others involved in the chain of production, it was accurate in the way that it caught the importance of the photographic eye, the quality that made a photograph instantly recognisable as a Cartier-Bresson or a Werner Bischof or an Eve Arnold. It was part of the Magnum style.

Bair catches something of this essential contradictoriness within the Magnum enterprise in her clever title, The Decisive Network. The moment of capturing the image was decisive, but so were the processes and the interconnections surrounding that moment. She shows, for example, the surprising extent to which a photographic assignment was framed and specified beforehand. Rita Vandivert, working from Magnum’s New York office in the late forties, instructed photographers working on the major magazine project “People Are People the World Over” to “cable before shooting” should they ever feel an overwhelming need to deviate from their detailed brief.

In a fascinating chapter on Magnum’s collaboration with the influential travel magazine Holiday, Bair notes how such instructions sometimes became superfluous because Magnum photographers “learned to gravitate towards florist shops filled with bright bouquets, ‘pretty girls’ dressed in red, and particularly bright blue skies and pools of water.” As for the other end of the production line, that was when the real business of making a photograph began, at least according to John Morris, Magnum’s most senior administrator throughout the 1950s, who was known to remark that “shooting is only the beginning.”

A strong streak of idealism accompanied the commercial savvy of those foundation years. There was an emphasis on “the cultural unity of the world,” on the role that photography could play in bringing people together and leading them to recognise commonalities across cultures. Magnum images featured prominently in the famous Family of Man exhibition that opened in New York in 1955 and subsequently toured to more than sixty countries. The exhibition, which drew massive visitor numbers, has been criticised, not least by Roland Barthes, for its naivety and sentimentalism, with its emphasis on the family as humanity’s unifying commonality. Morris, who was instrumental in ensuring the agency’s involvement, represented the time’s prevailing view that the exhibition showed that “there are really no foreigners any more.”

Morris’s remark was accurate as far as it went. Foreignness could be captured and also made less foreign by photographs, particularly if images appeared under such harmonising rubrics as “youth” and “family.” But Magnum photography could promote the ideal of inevitable progression towards a harmonised world while simultaneously highlighting difference — even in The Family of Man, or in “People Are People the World Over,” published in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1948 — by showing stark discrepancies in social relationships, living conditions and implied political backgrounds.

In “People Are People,” eleven families from different countries were selected to have a visual record made of their daily lives. The shooting schedules were highly choreographed to ensure direct comparability from family to family. “The pictures of women, standing or sitting at their stoves, were astonishingly similar,” notes Bair. But, as she also points out, this does not entirely override the discernible differences in material wellbeing and notions of domesticity and privacy.

By highlighting the paradoxes inherent in the making of a documentary image, Nadya Bair makes an important contribution to the growing reassessment of photographic history. In doing so, she shows Magnum to have been an organisation creatively built on paradox. The idea of the decisive moment coexisted with the often drawn-out processes of pre- and post-production; the lone and intrepid photographer coexisted with the realities of teamwork and cooperative endeavour; and the humanistic worldview coexisted with a sure grasp of commercial reality.

In her introduction Bair highlights the particular difficulties photography poses for drawing clear boundaries between recording a subject and manipulating or even, by implication, exploiting it. She notes how the phrase “small baby crying over rations” appears in a Magnum shooting script as an example to the photographer, capturing images of postwar damage in Europe, of a suitable “tear-jerker” to transmit back to base. Whatever else this tells us, it is a reminder that any ethical failings we may now discern in photographic images were not simply attributable to the photographer, or to the commissioning director or the backroom editor, but to the demands and expectations of the viewer. There is no escaping context. •

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Fronting the highway at the corner of Lacy Street, the glass building, with its curtain wall construction, repeating exposed slender steel columns, diagonal tubular bracing and bands of black and clear glass, symbolises the industrial boom of the 1950s and 60s, when Melbourne was regarded as the manufacturing capital of Australia. It is also as good an example of Mies van de Rohe–inspired architecture as you are likely to see.

I’m talking about the former ETA Foods factory, featured in a photographic exhibition in the RMIT Gallery on the work of Frederick Romberg, the Swiss-trained German architect who helped bring modernism to Australia in the late 1930s and was later a partner in the celebrated practice of Grounds Romberg and Boyd. So powerful were Wolfgang Sievers’s pictures of the administration building and factory at the time of its completion that a drive along Ballarat Road to see it firsthand became irresistible.

Sievers’s images show the administration building as architecture reduced to its very fundamentals; spare, stripped of unnecessary decoration, lightweight, airy and optimistic — a dead elegant example of modernist rationality, a building type where form really does follow function.

What you find today, however, is that the administration building and the saw tooth roof factory sheds it shields have, like some of its neighbourhood, taken a beating since its completion in 1962. Some activity appears to be going on inside and around the factory sheds, but the administration building stands empty and in disrepair.

Panes of glass are either broken or missing from the long highway façade, and much of the original minimalist garden of volcanic rocks, low plantings and trees, designed by landscape architect John Stevens, is either gone or overgrown, including a garden of succulents facing Ballarat Road, marked by a bold zigzag paving pattern in white river stones.

Completely stripped away is the cladding that once covered a long suspension canopy over the main entrance, forming a shelter for visitor car parking. All that remains of the cantilevered canopy and suspension cabling anchored into the garden behind is the bare framework.

Gone, too, are the large red moulded plastic letters spelling out ETA, attached to the building facing Ballarat Road. Placed over a clear glass box enclosing the entrance foyer and lightweight staircase on the corner of the building, the sign was an early example of the use of super graphics applied to a façade, integral to the design of a building.

In an earlier scheme, the graphic was spelled out eight times on the building’s eastern and southern facades, the design later adapted to the more refined final version. In the newly completed building the arrows formed by the diagonal tubular bracing were gilded with real gold leaf, directing the eye to the illuminated red ETA letters facing Ballarat Road.

Yet externally the building is essentially intact and could easily be restored. The glass-encased entrance foyer revealing the staircase appears largely intact, as does the large courtyard garden facing Lacy Street, also designed by John Stevens, who is best known for his modernist garden design for ICI House in Nicholson Street, on the edge of Melbourne’s CBD.

Although the courtyard is seriously overgrown, still visible is the rock pool containing a fountain by local artist, Teisustus Zikaras. This is a minimalist structure consisting  of two curving cast concrete sections placed above each other to create an upward sweep. Originally, water jets were directed from four copper discs on to the curved concrete forms to trickle into the pool below.

The ETA Foods factory has parallels with the now demolished Nicholas Aspro factory of 1956 in Warrigal Road, Chadstone, designed by architect Graeme Lumsden, which featured a glass curtain-walled administration building behind which extended a series of basic industrial shed structures

The ETA Foods factory is one of Frederick Romberg’s finest works and stands out as one of the notable industrial buildings of its era. Something needs to be done to find a viable use for it before a developer sees the potential of its terrific highway position. Melbourne, and Australia, cannot afford to lose pieces of its modern architectural history as important as this.

So, you’d have to ask, where are the custodians of our architectural heritage when you need them most? •

The former factory has since been converted for commercial use.

This is an edited extract from Harry Seidler’s Umbrella: Selected Writings on Australian Architecture and Design, by Joe Rollo, published by Thames & Hudson Australia. First published in the Sunday Age in September 2000.

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A lot went into getting everything just right with Teacup Ballet, as Helen Ennis makes clear in this absorbing biography. Ennis provides an illuminating insight into a version that Cotton rejected, in which the arrangement of the cups and saucers, more precise and regimented, failed to suggest interaction in the way the final, almost but not quite symmetrical version so triumphantly does.

With their angular handles and clean lines, these teacups are very much of their period, loudly proclaiming their modernity. At the same time they speak of more traditional, unrevolutionary pursuits, of afternoon tea in lengthening shadows and of someone taking the trouble to lay everything out just so. In one of a number of suggestive asides that gently hint at the influences on Cotton’s artistic development, Ennis notes that Olive’s mother was fond of china painting. It is recorded, for instance, that she “decorated a set of sweet dishes with images of flannel flowers.” The strength of Teacup Ballet lies in how it combines something of this sense of domestic order and civilised pursuits with a more adventurous meditation on the relationship between animate and inanimate, traditional and modern.

Geometric vitality: Olive Cotton’s Teacup Ballet (1935). National Gallery of Victoria

Cotton was to live for almost seventy years beyond Teacup Ballet. During that time she achieved early success both artistically and commercially, first in the company of husband and business partner Max Dupain and then very much on her own account. Separation and divorce from Dupain, followed by her marriage to Ross McInerney, brought a sharp change in direction, and decades raising a family under often difficult conditions meant that there was little time for photography. Only later in life did Cotton re-enter the commercial world by opening a photographic studio in the central west NSW town of Cowra. There she produced wedding and graduation portraits for the local community while tentatively seeking again the kind of wider recognition that she had briefly enjoyed many years earlier.

Although Cotton established herself independently during the war, attracting some important commissions, it was only in later life that she began to be redefined as one of the crucial pioneers of modern photography in Australia in her own right, rather than primarily in the context of her formative relationship with Dupain. Interest in the history of photography had grown, and neglected female artists were receiving overdue recognition. When that second wave of recognition came, as it did with a flurry in the 1980s, it was not so much for her recent work, then hardly seen outside the reach of her own domestic circle and her local client list, but for the images dating from the 1930s and 40s, the period when Cotton’s technical mastery and artistic range grew with remarkable speed.

Cotton always acknowledged the importance, in professional terms, of her early relationship with Dupain. Family connections combined with a shared enthusiasm for photography and the natural world drew them together from an early age. The careers of professional photographers can often be traced back to the chance gift of a camera, or of the means to buy one. In Cotton’s case it was a present from an aunt, while Dupain in his mid-teens bought a Kodak Folding Brownie with money given to him by his great-grandmother. They had both demonstrated an early artistic talent but, judging their own skills harshly (Cotton felt that any ability she may have had in drawing was far outmatched by her sister’s), they were irresistibly attracted to this newer artistic medium.

As they grew closer and spent more and more time together during their adolescent years, Olive and Max must have struck all who knew them as, to use the old phrase, made for each other. Ennis allows for the possibility that they began themselves to feel that the story of their lives had already been written, and that they were being carried along with it. Indeed in another universe we might now be reading their joint biography, the tale of a couple united by love and a shared talent who built successful and mutually reinforcing careers. But that is not the way it turned out.

Max Dupain consciously embarked on a career in photography even before leaving school, taking advantage of the opportunities for experience and advancement available to him as a man. Olive quietly absorbed his knowledge and kept pace with him in their increasingly sophisticated understanding of the capacities of the medium. But while Dupain was fast-tracking himself as a professional photographer, Cotton studied English and mathematics at the University of Sydney, reflecting “her family’s dual interests in science and the arts”; it was a fitting duality, as it transpired, for a career in photography.

The mathematics stood her in good stead: in later years, under financial pressure, she took a job teaching maths at Cowra High, where she was regarded as a gifted teacher right up until when, lacking a qualification in education, she was forced out by the rise of credentialism. At university she had also taken a course in anthropology, which was not a success: “I was too prim and proper for anthropology,” she recalled. “You had to talk about all sorts of things and I couldn’t bring myself to do it.” By her own account, she had “dodged the big questions, the things I didn’t feel I could talk about comfortably.”

This delicate allusion to her own youthful unworldliness contrasts strikingly with the freedom Cotton felt only a few years later to tackle such matters visually. Her photograph of Dupain, Max after Surfing, dates from 1939, the year of their marriage. It shows Dupain as handsome and, despite the cigarette in one hand, impressively fit-looking (his mother fed him celery biscuits, Ennis tells us, in one of many examples of her eye for the fascinating detail). Notwithstanding Cotton’s reticence in anthropology seminars, the image conveys a striking and unembarrassed eroticism. The subject poses, but it is a low-key, undemonstrative performance. The result is both subtle and frank — an extraordinarily difficult combination to achieve.

Subtle and frank: Olive Cotton’s Max after Surfing (1939). National Gallery of Victoria

But against the power of the photograph is the strong likelihood that their relationship was already beginning to disintegrate. Ennis deals sensitively with the reasons for the breakdown, acknowledging how little is known for certain and how much has to be inferred. A later, glancing comment by Olive, made in an interview in 1983, is allowed to bear much of the weight. “You grow up together,” she remarked, as “good friends. But marriage doesn’t work.” By 1941 Olive had acted on this conclusion and taken her leave.

There are many aspects of Olive Cotton’s life that we cannot really know, about her attitudes and priorities and what really lay behind her determination to pursue photography regardless of the many obstacles. “As a biographical subject… Cotton has surprisingly little weight,” Ennis says, in the first of several such references. A friend describes Cotton as by nature a “background figure,” and Ennis herself echoes this description, calling her a “distant figure.”

Her second husband, Ross McInerney, was to claim, rather implausibly, that he “never heard her speak ill of anyone, not once.” While it is clear that she was liked and loved and admired by those who knew her, there is the sense that even those closest to her detected something unknowable. She retained the manner of an observer, rather than a central participant, an essential quality perhaps for any successful photographer.

As biographer, Ennis must deal not only with the elusiveness of Cotton herself but also with the larger-than-life personalities of the men she married. It is a balancing act to give these two talkative and often charming men their place in the story while keeping Cotton very much in the frame, ever alert to the danger that she will slip into the background. One of the fundamental strengths of Ennis as biographer is that she achieves this difficult balance, giving both men their due and never rushing to simple judgement, while at the same time ensuring that the main light falls consistently on her central subject. As she reminds both herself and the reader at one point, “this is Olive’s story.”

Olive Cotton “did not travel far during her ninety-two years.” She never went abroad, or indeed ventured beyond the eastern states of Australia, essentially confining herself for the most part to Sydney and the central west of New South Wales. This apparent preference for staying close to home would have been driven, as it was for many of her generation, by circumstance as much as choice and doesn’t necessarily reflect a lack of desire or interest. In fact, within these geographical constraints, Cotton was by nature a roamer who loved the beach and the bush and who never tired of exploring familiar ground, alert always to the possibility of coming across something previously unnoticed, or noticed anew in a different light.

For most of their long marriage, which lasted from 1945 until her death in 2003, Cotton and McInerney lived on land at Spring Forest, outside Cowra, initially in a simple two-bedroom weatherboard cottage, and later in an adapted construction workers’ barracks that still stands, preserved by the family. Ennis notes, with pointed restraint, that “on some of the bedroom doors” of this “new” house, “small Dymo labels are attached” bearing the names of some of the previous occupants who had been workers on the construction of a dam at nearby Carcoar.

Ennis can’t quite conceal her surprise at the fact that Olive and Ross, despite occupying the house for decades, never once took a moment to remove the labels, even though they could have torn them off in an instant. Whether this was deliberate on their part, as Ennis implies, or merely a decades-long oversight is impossible to say. Whatever the explanation, it suggests a shared reluctance to tamper unnecessarily, and a preference for leaving things as they are.

Olive Cotton as stay-at-home, as the kind of person who would leave other people’s names on the doors of her own home for decades — who would put up with a wobbly step or a leaking roof for year after year — suggests a photographer who would favour framing and recording and preserving, but otherwise leaving the subject to speak for itself. But while for the most part Cotton avoided what might be termed technical interference with her images, they are often nevertheless highly organised, considered, arranged and complex in their apparent simplicity. She could return repeatedly to the same vantage point and wait patiently until the light she was looking for was just right. When it came to photography, as distinct from houses, she was not necessarily one to take things as she found them.

Photography for Cotton consisted of the entire process, from set-up to darkroom. In the years when she was trying to maintain her commitment to her art against the demands of domestic life, it was particularly frustrating to take a photograph and then to have to defer the development and printing of the final image until she had the time and the means and the necessary access to equipment. The taking and the making of the image were inseparable. “I like to do everything myself from start to finish,” she later explained.

If a long life spent together is an indication, Cotton’s second marriage was a success. As with many long-lasting marriages, it was never quite clear to outsiders why that should have been so. Olive and Max had seemed made for each other, Olive and Ross less so. He made too many cups of tea, his sister recalled, a sharp but not unsympathetic comment that calls up an entire postwar world, of men who returned from active service knocked sideways by the experience, who could never quite settle to anything afterwards, who began tasks with enthusiasm and stopped halfway through, who had moods and could, as the saying went, be difficult to live with.

Ross was concerned that by marrying him and moving to the country Olive would have to give up too much, “just when you have made a name for yourself.” Olive McInerney did indeed give up her name, and in more ways than one, but there is no real evidence that she felt the price of marriage and family was too high. Despite occasional storms, she remained devoted to Ross and their children, but the price was real. After 1946, when Olive and Ross moved as a married couple to the country, Ennis notes starkly, “little of Olive Cotton’s photography would appear in public, in either publication or exhibitions, for the next three decades.”

The key phrase here is “in public.” It might have been tempting to see Cotton’s career in terms of an early and a late period, punctuated by a long interregnum in which she concentrated on other things. That may be true as far as it goes, but Olive Cotton: A Life in Photography shows that beneath the surface Cotton never really wavered; it was indeed a life in photography. During her long period of isolation from the world of magazines and commissions and of contact with fellow practitioners, Cotton adapted to the circumstances, turning her photographic eye towards her own family and her immediate surroundings, which meant that when she did open her studio in Cowra she was far from being out of practice.

Towards the end of her life, when she was in her mid-eighties, Cotton created an image that shows how her fundamental preoccupations — with the effects of light and shade, with the interactions of elements within the frame, and with how pattern and a strong sense of composition can also suggest vitality and movement — never really changed. Unlike Teacup Ballet and Max after Surfing, no such vitality or movement is implied in the title of this late image. It is called simply Moths on the Windowpane. There are dozens of them, captured as they cling to the window, attracted by the light inside. Ennis convincingly places this image of these short-lived creatures in the context of Cotton’s approaching death. The light will go out and the moths will move on, but for the moment they are fixed, in a mutually reinforcing pattern that recalls those early teacups.

Near the end of this illuminating and moving account, we visit Olive Cotton’s graveside. If you are looking for Cotton here, says Ennis, you will not find her. The name on the marker instead reads “O. McINERNEY,” a subtle echo, which Ennis does not labour, of those Dymo labels on the barracks doors. It is unlikely, however, that Olive Cotton would have been unduly bothered by this brief form of identification, even with her professional last name overwritten and her first reduced to an initial. At the end of her life she could balance this version of herself with her ever-rising reputation as Olive Cotton, no longer in the background but now a figure at the forefront of Australian photography, the determined artist who, when she resumed her professional life in Cowra, had arranged for a replica of her signature, “Olive Cotton,” to be painted in bold above the entrance to her new studio. •

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The story serves to confirm the myth of Australia as an egalitarian, knockabout sort of place, a haven from the murderous, bureaucratic brutality of fascist Europe and the indignities inflicted by the British. But it’s also a reminder of the vagaries of memory. In some versions the guard goes on to teach the internees how to roll their own cigarettes; in others he isn’t having a smoke at all but is off to the toilet. According to the version recounted by the writer Walter Kaufmann at a 1990 reunion of the Dunera boys in Hay, the guard explicitly recognises the injustice of their treatment:

“Jesus,” says the digger, “I thought you were enemies, but you’re friends. Jews! Jesus Christ!”

This anecdote is among the many examples of the mythologisation of the Dunera boys, a process Ken Inglis, Seumas Spark and Jay Winter deal with deftly in Dunera Lives. The three historians don’t set out to tear down the myth as much as to gently dismantle it, replacing it with something far richer and even more extraordinary.

The “boys” were enemy aliens transported from Britain to Australia on board the HMT Dunera, a passenger ship used by the British military during the war. They were variously detained in camps at Tatura in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley, at Hay in the flat Riverina of western New South Wales and, later, at Orange on the central tablelands. Most were men rather than boys, the youngest aged sixteen, the oldest sixty-six. Dunera Lives also encompasses another 266 internees brought to Australia from Singapore on the Queen Mary, women and children among them. Helmut Neustädter, who went on to become the famous fashion photographer Helmut Newton, was aboard that vessel, as was sculptor Karl Duldig, his wife Slawa and their daughter Eva.

Karl Loewenstein and his son Fritz in the North Sea, 1927. Courtesy Monica Lee Lowen and Jocelyn Lowen

The Dunera boys are generally remembered as Jewish refugees, but this is an oversimplification. Four out of five were of Jewish background, but only a minority practised Jewish rites and customs. The Nazis had persecuted some of them simply because they had a single Jewish grandparent. The authors see them, rather, as a group of “modern Europeans” of German, Austrian, Czech or Polish origin, mostly “city dwellers” and “often bourgeois,” who “enjoyed the fruits of the Enlightenment.”

Nor were they technically refugees, as is sometimes assumed. Many of them had been living freely in Britain prior to September 1939, some having arrived there as children thanks to the Kindertransport organised by the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany after Kristallnacht in November 1938. With the outbreak of war, they were under suspicion as potential fifth columnists who might secretly assist a German invasion. Prime minister Winston Churchill declared them enemy aliens and swiftly had them shipped off to Canada and Australia.

Dunera Lives, the first of two volumes, is essentially a history told through images; the second volume will include narrative accounts of individual Dunera lives. Together, they constitute the final collaborative project of the highly regarded and much-loved historian Ken Inglis, who died late last year. Inglis’s interest in the men was stirred many years ago when he mixed with several of them as a student at the University of Melbourne. In one photograph late in the book we see Inglis with Dunera boy George Nadel and other Queen’s College residents who achieved first-class results in their 1947 examinations; also reproduced is a sketch by another of the former internees, Leonhard Adam, showing students relaxing outside Queen’s College.

The camp at Orange: Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Desolation, 1941, woodcut. University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of Mrs Olive Hirschfeld 1979. 1979.0179. Copyright: Chris Bell

The camp at Tatura: Fred Lowen, Watch Tower with Searchlights, Barbed Wire and Gum Trees, 14 July 1942. Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, H94.95/29. Copyright: Monica Lee Lowen and Jocelyn Lowen

Several Dunera boys studied or worked at Australian universities after their release from detention, and many became significant academic figures, including philosopher Peter Herbst, economist Fred Gruen, political scientist Henry Mayer, fine arts scholar Franz Philipp, physicist Hans Buchdahl and mathematician turned oceanographer Rainer Radok. Part of the Dunera mythology is that they generally went on to stellar careers as scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, industrialists, public servants and artists. As a group, they undoubtedly possessed “substantial education and cultural capital,” as the authors put it, but the story of their postwar lives “is not one of uniform achievement, but of striking variety.”

Fewer than half of them settled in Australia; the rest returned to Britain, emigrated to the United States, helped found the state of Israel or ended up in a variety of other counties. A few dozen returned to Germany, West and East. Both Walter Kaufmann and Heinz Eggebrecht chose to settle in the German Democratic Republic: Eggebrecht rose to senior ranks within the communist regime and died a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall; Kaufmann, one of the youngest Dunera boys, still lives in Germany, where he continued his writing career after reunification. He was back in Australia doing interviews as recently as 2014.

A remarkable number of visual artists, illustrators and photographers figured among the internees, and they left a rich legacy of images. Concise introductions and informative captions put the images in context, but this volume doesn’t so much tell the story of the Dunera boys as show it, in roughly chronological order, beginning with the interwar period in Europe. The affecting photograph (above) of Fritz Loewenstein (later Fred Lowen) holding his father’s hand as they stand ankle-deep in the North Sea on a 1927 holiday speaks to the forthcoming trauma that will wrench Europe apart in a manner that could not be conveyed in words.

From arrest to internment: Untitled drawing by Fritz Schönbach, c. 1940, pencil on paper. Jewish Museum of Australia collection 3067.15.4. Copyright: Schonbach family

Among the images from wartime Britain are a haunting self-portrait by the artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, and a series of compelling cartoon-like sketches by Fritz Schönbach (later Fred Schonbach) depicting the overnight transformation of refugees into enemy aliens. Then come images from the voyage itself, including Schönbach’s sketch of their “reception” by the guards who would destroy, confiscate or steal their possessions, including treasured letters from loved ones, left behind to suffer under the Nazis, whom the boys would never see again.

Fritz Schönbach, Dunera Reception, 10 July 1940, watercolour and pencil on paper. Archive of Australian Judaica, Rare Books and Special Collections, the University of Sydney Library. Copyright: Schonbach family

The ship was terribly overcrowded, and the indignities suffered by the internees included a daily limit of two sheets of toilet paper. Despite the scarcity, a stolen roll of this precious commodity was used by Gerd Buchdahl, Peter Herbst and Peter Lasky to draft a constitution for the boys to manage their own affairs once they were incarcerated on land. Based on the principles of liberal democracy and British parliamentary procedure, it was, to a large degree, implemented in the camp at Hay, which assumed, in the words of internee Klaus Loewald, “the character of a small working republic.” The camp also had its own short–lived currency, printed by the publisher of the local newspaper and praised for its artistry by the manager of the local Commonwealth Bank. Closer inspection revealed that its designer, George Teltscher, who had fought in the Spanish civil war and studied at the Bauhaus, had secreted the words “WE ARE HERE BECAUSE WE ARE HERE BECAUSE WE ARE HERE” into the curls of barbed wire decorating the edge of the banknotes. This soldiers’ lament, sung to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” was known to the internees as the Hay–Tatura hymn.

A performance of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata at Tatura on 8 March 1942. Leonhard Adam, Kreutzer Sonata, 1942, watercolour and ink on paper. Jewish Museum of Australia collection 4024

So it’s not entirely surprising to find that Tatura had its own university — Collegium Taturense — which delivered an average of 113 lectures a week attended by nearly 700 students. Concerts, theatre performances and sports matches were another feature of life in the camps, as the internees did their best not only to fill time and combat boredom but also to retain a sense of dignity and purpose in the face of an indefinite wait for freedom. As the editors of the first edition of the Hay camp newsletter, the Boomerang, put it in February 1941: “Please remember that your mind is not interned, nor is it confined to this camp.”

The injustice of the Dunera boys’ treatment was recognised early. Churchill came to regret the decision to order the indiscriminate detention of those who had sought Britain’s protection. He apologised and instigated a court martial that documented the abuses the boys endured at sea. The Dunera’s senior officer was severely reprimanded and a regimental sergeant major was discharged and jailed for theft. A fund of £35,000 was used to compensate the Dunera boys for their lost and stolen property.

Their treatment in Australia began to change too. By mid 1942 at least 1300 had been set free, hundreds of them returning to England as soon as they could. Some — including the novelist Ulrich Boschwitz — died at sea when the Abosso and the Waroonga were sunk by enemy action. Many of those who stayed joined the 8th Employment Company, a non-combatant battalion of the Australian army, which they sometimes referred to as the 8th Enjoyment Company, a reference to the fact that the numerous musicians and performers in the ranks combined their military duties with theatrical pursuits.

One of the heroes of Dunera Lives is the much-loved commanding officer who made this possible, New Zealander Edward Renata (Tip) Broughton, who even played himself in one of the internees’ colourful productions. Karl Duldig cast a bronze bust of Broughton, and one of the images in this collection is of a handwritten note from Broughton to the soldier-tenor Erich Liffmann. First in Māori, then in English, Broughton expressed, “in thoughts emanating from the depths of my soul,” the belief that Liffmann would one day “ascend to the peak of the mount of song and there dwell for ever.” The enjoyment ceased after Broughton retired, and a number of Dunera boys were court-martialled for minor indiscretions. Michael Levin was punished after he complained about “being treated like a schoolboy, herded about the parade ground by a professional soldier whose only ambition in life seems to be bigger and better wars… and who once actually had the impertinence to call me a ‘queen’ — just because I am in the habit of wearing my hair rather longer than customary.”

Baron Martin von Koblitz, a Viennese connoisseur of the arts, at Orange. Fred Lowen, Baron von Koblitz, 1941, pencil on paper. Jewish Museum of Australia collection 3419

The main tasks of the 8th Employment Company were unloading cargo from ships in Port Melbourne and transferring goods between trains on the border between Victoria and New South Wales, but a few Dunera boys were called to higher duties. Bruno Lipmann had learnt Japanese before the war and continued to study it while interned, with the aid of a Japanese–English dictionary. He was seconded to the “listening post” in the headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur. There, translating Japanese radio broadcasts into English, this one-time enemy alien became part of sensitive Allied intelligence-gathering.

The authors touch on, but don’t labour, parallels with the treatment of displaced and vulnerable people today, noting that the Dunera boys were persecuted both by the regime that they fled and by countries in which they sought protection. Many moved to Britain before the full extent of Nazi persecution became apparent, not so much in immediate fear of their lives as in the hope of a brighter future. Today they would probably be dismissed as “economic migrants.” As the authors put it, once set in motion “internment and deportation turned into a gratuitous exercise of brutality.” The Dunera boys, like millions forced from their homes today, had “no rights and no nation.” They were not incarcerated for what they had done but because they were wrongly perceived to pose a threat.

The final section of the book shows the boys’ postwar lives — marriages, careers, achievements, disappointments and, as the decades rolled on, reunions and commemorations. A “memory boom” was spurred on by new recording technologies and a few key “memory activists,” and supercharged by books and films, including the 1985 telemovie starring Bob Hoskins. In the process, a diverse group of people, thrown together by fate, were fashioned into one large family. As Inglis, Spark and Winter write, the Dunera Lives constitute a “fictive kinship group” based on “a family of experience rather than of blood lines” and the bonds “these men and women forged and continue to forge in the process of together remembering the past.”

Although the quality of the reproduction is high, not all the images in this volume are visually arresting, nor do all of them unlock a compelling narrative. In determining what to include, the authors’ editorial path has veered towards the compendious. Perhaps a slimmer, more selective volume published on slightly heavier paper stock would have better conveyed the story to a broad readership. But others with a more direct connection to the Dunera generation, or anyone wishing to engage more rigorously with the detail of its history, will have good reason to appreciate the comprehensive approach.

This first volume of visual history is like a series of snapshots, moments rooted in a particular place and time. The second volume promises to complement it with longitudinal narratives of individual lives. Separately and together, they will make a rich contribution to our understanding not only of the Dunera and Australia, but also of the complexities of migration, flight and refuge. ●

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It is a distinguished career that began, in a sense, with volleyball. As a competition player in his youth, and keenly interested in sport, Berehulak became increasingly fascinated with how photography could capture the action of the sporting arena. Sports photography gave him his start in the profession — “I learned photography by shooting sports.”

Curiously, Berehulak (born in 1975) is not the only Australian photojournalist of his generation who covers conflict and displacement but began with sport. Trent Parke (born in 1971), the only Australian full member of the iconic Magnum Photos agency, and Ashley Gilbertson (1978), a member of the prestigious VII, both began by taking pictures of people playing sport — initially, the sport they themselves played. For Gilbertson it was his teenage obsession with skateboarding that got him started, his kinetic images of fellow skateboarders gradually tipping him in the direction of a career as a professional observer. Parke, a talented cricketer, was headed along the path of a professional sportsman, but photojournalism won out in the end.

It may seem a long way from an aptitude for skateboarding or cricket or volleyball to this level of international success in photojournalism, yet each of these photographers has in different ways acknowledged the crucial role that his early experience in sport and in sports photography played in developing photographic technique, methodology and approach. One of the fundamental rules for a sports photographer is to know who and what you are photographing. The names of the players and the time and location of the event are not merely supplementary to the image, they add meaning to the image, locating it in a particular time and place.

More crucially, perhaps, the “photographic moment” in sport is not simply there to be captured when it comes along. It must be anticipated. And to anticipate the moment requires a knowledge of the sport itself, of technique and game plans and the multiple quirks and predispositions of individual players. Just as the street photographer must develop an extra sense of what may be about to happen, of who is about to make a sudden movement or enter or depart the frame, so the sports photographer must be attuned to what might be coming next.

“Everyone is different,” Berehulak has observed of what sports photography taught him. “Their techniques are different, so in order to get a certain photograph, you need to understand their movement and motion” — you need to understand your subjects as individuals and to anticipate what they might do and be ready for it. Trent Parke has made a similar point arising from his own experience of photographing cricket: “In sports photography, if you wait until you see something happen, then, by the time you take your shot, the moment has passed.”

Berehulak has remarked several times on the trouble he takes to record, wherever possible, the names and relationships of the people in his photographs, however difficult or dangerous or merely confusing the circumstances. In 2010, when he was photographing the impact of the floods in Pakistan for Getty Images, one photograph in particular, of a boy and a man walking through the floodwaters with their shoes in their hands, seemed to embody that impact. At the time he could only caption it as “man and boy,” but Berehulak’s need for explanatory context was such that he returned a year later to try to discover his subjects’ identities. He was successful in his quest, thanks to a man who recognised the two figures in the image as a grandfather and his grandson, Ghulam Qadir, fifty-two, and Mueen Ibrahim, ten.

For Berehulak, rather than a picture being worth a thousand words, it is as if a picture needs at least a few words to anchor it in reality, to tie it to individual rather than representative lives, and to avoid the sin of romanticisation, by which the photographic subject, however ugly or distressing the original context, becomes merely beautiful. In his best work so far, the photo-essay for the New York Times that won him his second Pulitzer, Berehulak is careful to record the names of the victims of Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drugs campaign as he photographs their bodies sprawled in the street.

“Killed at Home”: The blood of Florjohn Cruz staining the floor in his family’s living room, next to an altar displaying images and statues of the Virgin Mary, among other items. Daniel Berehulak for the New York Times

The heads of the victims are sometimes shown wrapped in tape, their identities disguised by persons unknown, a visual reminder that they have ceased to exist. “What I was trying to do,” says Berehulak in a podcast accompanying the photo-essay, “was to give these people a face and a name.” As we scroll over the images, we can click on a link to read more. The “more” turns out to be not very much — a sentence or two giving the victim’s name, and perhaps a reference to his, or occasionally her, family. But it is enough to powerfully reinforce the effect of the image and ground it in biographical fact.

In many of these images we are shown the sprawled bodies as if on a stage, surrounded by onlookers — witnesses, police, mourners. The onlookers seem to act as an analogue of the camera and its capacity to witness and record. In one particularly striking image, “Killed at Home,” the body of Florjohn Cruz, thirty-four, has already been removed, leaving only his blood behind to stain the living-room floor. At first the room seems quite empty, until the eye goes to the collection of images and statues of Jesus and Mary and various saints, huddled together on the top of a bookcase, the point from which they watched it all happen. •

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The gallery has issued a small, well-produced catalogue in identical format for each of those ten years, and the works of all the finalists (numbering around fifty per year, some years rather more, some years rather fewer) can be found on the gallery’s (excellent) website, along with an essay by a member of the three-person judging panel summarising trends and making an effort, not always entirely successfully, to refer at least in passing to individual finalists. Several additional features have been introduced over the years – interviews with judges and finalists, a people’s choice award – but by and large the format has remained helpfully consistent for anyone interested in digging deeper into photographic history in the making.

The judging panel – two NPG staff members and an outsider ­– varies from year to year, but certain names recur, including that of Sarah Engledow, senior curator at the NPG and one of the 2017 judges. In her years as a judge, Engledow has also contributed the accompanying essay. Her commentaries – acerbic, witty, informed, and deeply sympathetic to both photographers and sitters – make essential reading for anyone contemplating submitting an entry in future years; so, too, does her piece in the current issue of the gallery magazine, Portrait, in which she reflects on the decade and selects some of her own favourite photographs.

Engledow is not one to pull her punches – tattoos, she records with evident relief, are now too commonplace to be automatically edgy or interesting. “In the early years of the prize, there were many photographs of tattooed people, but now there are so many tattooed people that photographers have no reason to seek them out.” Other popular tropes – people posing with their pets, for example – continue to abound, but as Engledow freely acknowledges, simply choosing a common theme doesn’t rule out success. Janelle Low won the prize in 2013 with her beautifully composed image of Yhonnie and her cat Indiana, Yhonnie looking serenely contemplative and Indiana looking both contemplative and, interrupting the otherwise serene mood of the image, slightly constipated.

Among the works currently on display, the entry by Daniel Sponiar, an image of Luke the heavy-metal musician, his tattooed arms holding his pet Pomeranian Nacoya, shows that it is possible to combine several repeated motifs of contemporary portrait photography – not only tattoos and pets, but also nudity (Nacoya plays a strategic role here) and hipster beards – and still come up, against all the odds, with a portrait that is both affectionate and genuinely affecting.

This is a dilemma confronting anyone charged with judging a photographic portrait. How do you deal with the repetitiveness of certain themes and counter the criticism, often levelled at competitions like this one, that there are just too many photographs of young men “on the cusp” with their shirts off, or young women in Vermeer- or Rembrandt-like poses, stunningly lit, or people half-submerged in water, or twins. (“If someone enters a picture and it’s a wonderful image of twins, we’re not going to exclude it just because there have been pictures of twins before,” said the curator of photographs at London’s National Portrait Gallery in 2015, responding to general criticism of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize.)

On the other hand, certain trends are under-represented. Rare among ten years’ worth of finalists is an image that questions the medium itself, overtly or implicitly, or highlights how a photograph is made. For that, one has to look elsewhere, for example to the finalists for the NPG’s own 2016 Digital Portrait Award, recently on display in the gallery and still available to view on the website, and particularly to Lucas Davidson’s engaging if overlong video portrait – “13 minutes, 50 seconds (looped)” – entitled “Body Emulsion Detachment.” The artist “aims to challenge the conventions of the photographic self-portrait… [by presenting] the body as an ever-changing image held together by a thin film of photo emulsion.”

More strikingly, perhaps, very few images here are selfies or allude even faintly to this latter-day phenomenon, and few have the look of having been taken spontaneously or “on the run.” For that, it may be argued, there are now competitions in mobile or smartphone photography. In the recently announced results of the international Mobile Photography Awards, Brisbane photographer Glenn Homann won the People category for his photograph of a laughing dancer in mid-leap, caught at a point where she is superimposed on a background image of a “partner” while suspended above her own shadow. It is a complex photograph, one that implies an immediate “before” and “after” in a way that the portraits in the NPG exhibition ­­– alluding much more deliberately to established conventions of portrait photography – tend not to. Daniel Sponiar’s Luke is a case in point, with his otherwise unconventional subject posed formally against a plain cloth backdrop in the manner of an early twentieth-century studio portrait.

You can sometimes sense the underlying tension created by the need to present a single defining image while recognising that a single image can never be the full picture. This tension sometimes emerges from the titles and the accompanying text, in which finalists can be at pains to point out that the photograph on display is one of a series, or part of a bigger project. For this year’s National Photographic Portrait Prize, and for the first time since the competition’s inception, the judges chose two works by each of three photographers: Charlie White, Brett Canet-Gibson and Peter McConchie. Each of the six images stands on its own merits, but their selection does nevertheless represent a departure – a nod, however tentative, to the growing preference for favouring portfolios over the single, striking image as embodying the essence of a photographer’s work.

Over ten years of portraits by some 500 finalists, one thing is noticeable: you can clearly see the faces of almost all the subjects. This may come as no surprise, given that this is a portrait competition. Yet it does rather gloss over the fact that the practice of obscuring the faces of subjects with veils or shadows or vegetation or the subject’s own hands – or for showing cut-out holes where the faces should be, in the manner of the found polaroid images collected by Dutch photography curator Erik Kessels – is now so widespread as to be a convention in itself, a convention that for good or ill has largely passed the National Photographic Portrait Prize by.

Not entirely so, of course. There is usually one and sometimes several examples each year of the technique of obscuring to reveal. This year’s display, for example, includes Chris Budgeon’s “Ricki,” who sits shirtless with his back to us. Budgeon, here a finalist for an impressive fifth time, cleverly exploits conventions both old and new; his portrait of Ricki alludes, in pose and tonality and lighting, to the practices of nineteenth-century Australian art and art photography while referring equally strongly to more recent conventions. This serves as a reminder that photography is a creature of convention, whether the conventions date from a century and a half ago or from last week. The trick in portrait photography is not to circumvent those conventions – they are too powerful and will outwit you in the end – but to acknowledge and exploit them, and by doing so to convey the unique eloquence of the individual subject. •

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Among the “special projects” is a display of images and objects by Melbourne’s Patrick Pound, an artist who anticipated the rapid rise of curatorship from a kind of backroom service for the “real” artist to an assertive act of creativity in itself. For the past twenty years, Pound has been selecting “found” photographs (“when I click BUY on eBay – for me that’s the equivalent of taking a photograph”) and grouping them thematically, reassigning value to the often anonymously created image by linking it to similar images, and thus creating a kind of order out of overwhelming abundance. At the other end of the spectrum is a display, originated by London’s National Portrait Gallery, of one hundred works by the great American photographer William Eggleston. By means of his distinctive use of colour, Eggleston creates images of people and objects that in their combination of informality and eerie formality seem to exist in perfect isolation.

And somewhere between these two poles – Patrick Pound’s emphasis on the role of selection and context; the unrepeatability of Eggleston’s singular photographs (their Eggleston-ness, in fact) – is a display of works from 2008 to 2012 by Bill Henson. Here, the man with a claim to be Australia’s best-known and most immediately recognisable living photographer very much catches the cultural moment, assuming the roles not only of creator but also of curator of his own works.

As curator, Henson presents each image as individually striking and “stand-alone,” while at the same time encouraging the viewer to see them as commenting on and illuminating one another in a complex dialogue. Large and imposing, the pictures announce themselves as meticulously composed and hard-won.

“I am not one of those photographers who wanders around waiting for something to catch their eye,” says Henson in an interview included in the latest issue of the NGV’s Gallery magazine. He favours deliberateness over spontaneity, creating the photographic moment rather than waiting for the right photographic moment to come along. Like a number of contemporary photographers, he compensates for the sheer ease of modern photography by replicating what was once an essential part of the process, namely immense time and effort invested in pre- and post-production.

These images, drawn from a gift to the gallery by William Bowness and chosen by Henson to represent his recent work, range from portraits and nudes to highly patterned landscapes and studies of museum interiors. The museum photographs, in which blurred gallery visitors (Henson is a master of the blur) circle and observe and sometimes just walk past items of classical statuary, are in a sense the core of the exhibition, establishing a relationship between viewer and object that leads us, as gallery visitors ourselves, to consider our own relationship to the images on display.

The statues that Henson chooses to photograph – the much-imitated and immediately recognisable sculpture known as the Spinario, for example, which depicts a boy pulling a thorn from his foot – are themselves formal representations of informality and naturalness, a relationship that Henson echoes by playing on the contrast between the seriousness and formality of the museum environment and the striped polos and comfortable-looking cardigans worn by the museum visitors. The museum references extend further, to the portraits and studies of the human figure that are included here, in which the unclothed models have been directed to adopt classical or quasi-classical poses.

For many people, both admirers and detractors, these studies of youthful models are the essence of Henson’s reputation and standing. But the current display provides an opportunity to see the latest iterations of the human figure in the context of the artist’s other preoccupations: our relationship to landscape and to art, the role of light and shade in defining the subject, and the interplay of modernity and history. For all their classical allusions and formal placements, these are also very contemporary photographs. An image of a young woman with her hair trailing across her face, for example, speaks several languages at once, including those of advertising and fashion.

The most successful of the studies of the human figure shows a boy in the Spinario pose, examining his foot as if for a thorn. Of all the “posed” images, it is the most directly classical in its references, and at the same time the one that seems most human and natural and, on the part of the model, unselfconsciously engaged. It is a photograph in which the composition dominates, inviting admiration for the skill involved in achieving perfect balance. In a masterful touch, Henson captures a small oblong of light on the boy’s hair, positioning it with classical appropriateness at the golden mean.

In the exhibition catalogue, splendidly produced by the NGV, Michael Heyward provides a short, impressionistic commentary, in which he notes of the studies of the human figure that “the body in the photograph becomes the sculpture it resembles.” Yet it might equally be said that the real source of the photographs’ impact is the failure of these young models to entirely become those sculptures, and the way that their modernity shines through the formality of the pose.

Just as he does in his museum interiors and landscapes, Henson in his portraits and his studies of the human figure exploits the contrast between formality and informality, the posed and the natural, to show how they interact and complement one another. Into this visually serious space he can, very occasionally, inject a joke. In one of his museum shots – titled, like all the others, “Untitled,” which serves to emphasise the interconnectedness of the images – a visitor’s floppy sunhat in the upper right of the frame echoes a sculpted helmet in the upper left, as if to draw an affectionate connection between life and art. It is the same connection that animates all Henson’s work. •

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There was no cause for alarm, the worriers were assured. The site would remain live and searchable, even while accepting no new posts. “Vine will always be Vine,” said a company representative. Not entirely convinced, various internet archiving sites are planning their own rescue missions, but they may yet prove unnecessary: there are reports that Vine may not be cryogenically frozen after all, but will find a buyer who will keep it both alive and active.

Other users and former users of Vine are more sanguine. Concerned less with history than with what will happen next, they see the likely demise of Vine as simply part of the organic, ever-morphing development of social media. Vine came, it flourished for a while, but it didn’t respond quickly enough to changing demands – for new functions, for opportunities to monetise – and so its time was up; other platforms, Instagram and Snapchat prominent among them, have taken the baton and are running with it. But neither Snapchat nor Instagram is running particularly hard in the archiving direction, the worriers might respond. Both of them – Snapchat as part of its core appeal, Instagram via a recent addition to its functionality – instead embrace the notion of disposability.

Snapchat has disappearance built in (although images can be retained and recovered if desired; disappearance is simply the default). Interestingly, this core function didn’t play well with focus groups in the early stages of development in 2011, but it quickly became the brand essence. Now Instagram, as of a few months ago, has introduced, Snapchat-like, a Story function that allows users to post a sequence of images or videos that automatically disappears after twenty-four hours (even though, once again, it is possible for users to retain their stories if they decide they can’t bear to let them go).

And so, even while museum workers and record keepers all over the world ponder what they should (and can afford to) preserve from the vast amount of social media activity and visual exchanges via the internet, the entire concept of the value of preservation is being bypassed, in favour of routinised disappearance. Or, to put it another way, we are told, sometimes reassuringly but more often with a hint of menace, that the internet never forgets. That may be so, but it does seem as if it is becoming increasingly and very deliberately absent-minded.

@caxmee, from Life on Instagram 2017.

Instagram, perhaps more than any other comparable platform, raises the question of what constitutes the life of the image. The answer, in theory, and as long as a “disappear” button hasn’t been switched on, is forever, but as every photographer and image-maker knows, it doesn’t mean much to say that your image is discoverable and viewable if nobody is discovering and viewing it. Unless an image is tagged, found, liked, re-posted, recommended and otherwise picked out from the crowd – according to latest estimates, Instagram has 500 million active monthly users, with over ninety million photos and videos being shared each day – then the life of the image is not much of a life.

Instagram started its own life in 2010, when it presented itself as a way of displaying the moments between the moments – not the “decisive moments” so closely associated with SLR and other forms of pre-digital photography, but spontaneous, catch-the-moment photography, supercharged snapshots taken with a smartphone that individually or in short sequences or “grids” imply a story, offering a closer connection with life as it is lived. A lot has changed since 2010, and the aura of spontaneity that still surrounds Instagram (post an image, wait a while to see who likes it, post another one), its dual emphasis on both recording and moving right along, has come to seem much more complicated, not least because, as is the case with every form of creative endeavour, achieving the effect of spontaneity can be hard work.

In 2014 (or, in social media terms, generations ago), Steve Crist and Megan Shoemaker’s The Instagram Book: Inside the Photography Revolution sought to capture, using selected images from the work of selected Instagrammers, what it was about mobile photography, and the platform provided by Instagram, “that was pushing photography forward into a new era.” But, as The Instagram Book demonstrates, this is far more easily said than done. “We selected,” say the editors, “a small cross section of photographers who reflect the spontaneity, joy, playfulness, poetry and beauty that we feel are so prevalent in the photographic world that is Instagram.” This attempt at definition, in both its generality and tentativeness, reflects the difficulty, not just for Crist and Shoemaker but for all observers of and participants in the photography revolution, in defining just what about it is so revolutionary.

The photographers included in The Instagram Book are each given a chance of their own, in a paragraph or two, to define the revolution, and their responses are for the most part astute and revealing. Despite the frequent use of the word “memory,” and the instances of the now widespread habit of referring to images themselves as “memories,” few of the sixty or so Instagrammers describe the actual images – the ones they themselves have taken in the near or distant past – as repositories of or stimulants to their own memories.

The Russian photographer Zhenya Aerohockey (@aerohockey), who has a definite talent for capturing the geometrical shapes and patterns of architecture, describes the value of being “able to look at a picture taken ten years ago and remember.” But he is an exception. Much more often, the capacity to stimulate and preserve memory is vested not so much in the images as in the process of photography itself. For anyone who questions the value of habitually taking photos of what you have for dinner, for instance, these attempts by Instagrammers to explain their “addiction” offer another side to the story.

In essence, mobile photography – smartphone in the hand, ever at the ready – offers a way of seeing, a defining frame around everyday experiences. Approached from this perspective, critics who berate the Instagrammers for substituting photographs for real life, for opting for the image in preference to the reality, miss the point. Mobile photography is life: for those who willingly succumb to its embrace, mobile photography provides a way of mediating, understanding and getting the most out of the world. In The Instagram Book, Yoshito Hasaka (@_f7) refers charmingly to the “happiness” that mobile photography brings him. The act of photography allows him to look at his home city of Tokyo with new eyes. “Every day and night, I shoot ordinary Tokyo scenes as if I’m travelling the world.”

The Instagram habit leaves little time for ferreting about in the archive. On the contrary, it is striking how often the focus of these photographers is on the future rather than on the past, and on the way that photography helps them to go forward and to make sense of what they are seeing along the way. Just as the grid function of the iPhone camera helps the photographer to balance and level the image and to highlight the interconnections of the objects within the frame, so mobile photography itself can provide a sense of the structure and order that underpins the apparently random, ordinary event.

Two years on from The Instagram Book, and the tone of Instagram has changed somewhat. Though you might not necessarily think so from Life on Instagram 2017, edited by Penguin art director Jim Stoddart and intended as the first in a series of Life on Instagram annuals. In his foreword, Stoddart defines the Instagram phenomenon, and by extension mobile photography in general, as being “about you and me recording the spectacle and nuance of our own lives and imparting our experiences, joys and sometimes our sorrows as they happen.”

Instagram is about spontaneity, about living in and simultaneously catching the moment, says Stoddart. It is an essentially democratic phenomenon, open to anyone with a smartphone and a willingness to master how the phone’s camera and the Instagram platform work. “Even when taken by experienced photographers,” he writes, “these are images that anyone could potentially capture, in the right circumstances on the right day.” Instagram images need to have that slightly serendipitous look, which is why loading images via smartphone that have actually been taken with DSLR or other kinds of cameras is not seen, by the strict adherents anyway, as quite playing the game.

What, then, is the role of chance, both in the creation of the stand-out image (“that anyone could potentially capture”) and in the selection of that image and the image-maker for inclusion in Life on Instagram, or on any of the vast number of “best of Instagram” lists that can be found online? As Stoddart acknowledges, curatorial comprehensiveness is an impossible ideal. You simply cannot look at everything. “There are so many million images uploaded every day that there is no way to see – let alone appreciate – all the content on Instagram (though we did try).” Any selection of these images can’t claim to be much more than an indication of what is good or quirky or interesting online, an encouragement to explore further and to make your own curatorial selections – which means, in effect, choosing who to follow.

@piergiuliocaivano, from Life on Instagram 2017.

Life on Instagram captures something of the experience of exploring the site online by presenting its curated images both as single pages and in Instagram’s characteristic grid pattern, which encourages the viewer to detect a theme or a narrative. It also acknowledges the repetitive nature of Instagram, by including several examples of popular subjects – not just the familiar tropes of sunsets and cats and doors, but also people jumping into water, or lone figures caught against a background of looming man-made structures.

One of the main criticisms of mobile photography is that these same kinds of subjects recur and recur, yet it is difficult to see why this should create any more of a problem than the sameness of Russian icons or Aubusson rugs. The pleasure for the viewer lies in detecting what might be especially skilful or fortuitous about a particular take on a familiar subject, and the more icons or rugs or photos of doors that you see, the more adept you become at spotting the ones that stand out from the others.

Though Life on Instagram emphasises the platform’s essential and continuing quality of spontaneity, in practice Instagramming is more and more a deliberate and calculating art, at least if your aim is to get as many people as possible to like what you post. Editing tools are packed with options for giving your images and grids a particular feel and style, and the photographer’s own selective eye is applied to the camera roll in the same way as a pre-digital photographer would pore over a contact sheet with a magnifying glass.

Rather than posting unthinkingly all the shots of the day, there is increasing emphasis on curating in advance, thinking ahead as to what the overall impact of the feed will be and how as many viewers as possible will be drawn to it. To say nothing of hash-tagging, which qualifies as an art in itself. In photography as in other art forms, self-curating is the new creativity, more creative even than the making and the editing of the photograph itself, activities that have become increasingly foolproofed by technology.

But curation, of your own or somebody else’s work, may already, like editing, be in the process of surrendering its quirkily human touch to technology. The company EyeEm, for instance, offers photographers the opportunity to monetise their passion, licensing photographs “from a community of eighteen million creatives, curated by artificial intelligence.” The system of “aesthetic ranking” developed by EyeEm holds out the possibility of being able to sort and rank unimaginably large numbers of images, many more than could be assessed by the human eye. (If you’re aiming for a high aesthetic ranking under this system, the human figure is good, and water, particularly if it is blue, is good too, making all those images of people jumping into water an instinctively smart choice.)

EyeEm technology lies at the heart of the recently launched app The Roll – “find your best photos,” runs the tagline, and all with the assistance of AI. “Trained using millions of curated photos, EyeEm Vision learns and replicates the choices of professional curators and applies scores to photos from 0 to 100.” For now, The Roll concedes final choice to the human eye. It identifies your best shots, after which the individual image-maker, according to personal “aesthetic taste,” chooses the best of the best. But it is surely only a matter of time before that clunky second step is eliminated, and the technology takes over altogether.

If the editing and curating of images are increasingly guided by technological applications rather than by the eye of the individual, what happens to the part played by human creativity in the making of the image? The gloomy view is that it will gradually succumb completely to the authority of the machine, but that doesn’t account for the extraordinary adaptability of photographers and their ability to stay on top of their apps. Far more likely than the gloom scenario is one where innovations like automatic aesthetic ranking will join the growing repertoire of tools to be cleverly managed, manipulated and exploited by individual photographers keen to make their marks.

The stylist and Instagram star Aimee Song (@songofstyle) – who has an impressive 4.1 million followers – offers a surprisingly engaging take on how this can be done, in Capture Your Style. The key, according to Song, is to understand the self-contradictory nature of Instagram. It is, she says, “both organic and curated at the same time. While I always try to show real, inspiring moments throughout my daily life, I want to capture them in the best possible way, which means thinking about what I am putting out there and planning in advance.”

@songofstyle (Aimee Song), from Capture Your Style.

Song has thousands of images on her feed, but in a sense the old ones have already half-disappeared into the little-visited world of the archive. Song’s focus is relentlessly and cheerfully on the future, on what images she will make and post in order to continue consolidating her brand, her way of life, and not least her commercial success. With her instinct for tightly controlled variation (one photo in twelve should be a selfie, she advises, certainly no more and ideally no less), Song is full of tips on how to document “your incredibly cool life” by controlling the technology rather than allowing it to make every choice for you. Not all mobile photographers want to have four million followers, or turn themselves into a brand, or keep constant tabs on their selfie ratio, but they might still want to emulate something of Song’s determination to stay in charge of their chosen medium.

What is still hard to gauge about mobile photography is the full significance of the ways in which it differs from “old” photography and old ways of distributing images. Mobile photography is not just another way of making a photographic image – it is a whole other way of thinking about photographs and the role they play in our lives. We persist in referring to photographs as “memories,” even as we forget them in droves. In fact, Snapchat recently introduced a category called Memories, meaning essentially photos you can keep, and iOS 10’s revamped photo app has a Memories tab, which will automatically generate a slideshow movie of photos it selects from categories like Events or Locations. There is something of the rearguard action about all this, rather like the parallel fashion for retro photography, which has emerged in response to everything rushing so determinedly forward.

If mobile photographs are indeed analogues or reminders of our memories, then we are remarkably casual about them, carelessly letting them disappear into fathomless archives or off the grid altogether. With so many posts on Instagram and elsewhere, it remains relatively rare for an image, created under online rules for an online world, to be given an “old-style” home, to be extracted from its natural, online setting and hung, Cartier-Bresson-like, on a gallery wall or published in book form.

But whatever the ultimate fate of the individual online image, mobile photography continues to offer a way of seeing and understanding the world that for its many practitioners is immensely satisfying and rewarding. To carry a camera-phone at all times is to be ever on the alert, capturing images that will help you understand and learn from today’s experiences and anticipate tomorrow’s. But as for yesterday’s? Well, no, not really, not least because when there is so much in front of the camera to photograph, there just isn’t a lot of time left for looking back. •

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Sepia photographs of the bodies and the burnt-out hotel were taken by a mix of studio, amateur and freelance photographers, some of them commissioned by the police. But although the gang’s capture was a momentous story for newspapers, no photographs were included in their dramatic reports. It was still technically too difficult for a newspaper to print a photograph on a newsprint page.

If the police surrounded Kelly and his gang at the Glenrowan Inn in 2016, a mixture of freelance and amateur photographers would again be there taking photographs, just as they did in 1880. Many of the amateurs would be bystanders, armed with mobile phones, who had happened to be nearby when the shooting started. They could photograph the live action instead of just capturing the smouldering ruins of the inn and the aftermath of the siege.

In fact, newspapers – and newspaper websites – in 2016 would report the Kelly gang’s capture using photographs from a wide range of sources, including freelancers, amateurs and photo agencies, as well as stills from television coverage and images of the participants plucked from social media. Given the magnitude of the story, staff photographers would still be sent there as quickly as possible, but in 2016 they would not be the exclusive source of pictures, and there would be fewer of them to send than at any time in the past sixty years.

For most of the time between 1880 and 2016 successful newspapers made vast profits and employed large teams of staff photographers. Those photographers provided a unique and valued product, resulting from technical skill and artistry borne of lengthy training and experience. Not many people could do what they did, and press photographers generally enjoyed significant job security.

As longstanding press photographer Clive Hyde says, “Nobody ever left the Herald and Weekly Times” – his employer for many years – “unless you were carried out.” This meant, as Melbourne Herald Sun photographer Jay Town notes, that there were usually “way more old photographers than… old journalists.” Journalists have tended to be more mobile and move between papers, television and radio, says Barry Baker, who spent forty-two years in the industry, but if a newspaper photographer got a job, they “pretty well stayed there for life.”

The nightmare year for press photography in Australia was 2014. In its third cost-cutting announcement in two years, Fairfax Media announced it would be shedding 75 per cent of its photographers. Thirty positions were lost across Fairfax’s metropolitan papers as it moved to outsource much of its photography to picture agency Getty Images. This left only twelve staff photographers spread between Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. To put that into perspective, in 1971, just one of Fairfax’s newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald, had thirty-two graded photographers and six cadets.

Fairfax had been internationally renowned for its well-resourced and award-winning photographic teams. The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance labelled the photographic cuts “an assault on the quality journalism that has been the hallmark of the group for more than a century.” Fairfax had already shed 1900 staff in 2012. It was also revealed in 2014 that News Corporation, far more quietly, had shed more than a thousand jobs in 2012, as hundreds of its journalists, photographers and editors were laid off.

A sense of this industrial turmoil, and the vulnerability of photographers, permeates the interviews we conducted for our book, Shooting the Picture: Press Photography in Australia. Several photographers have already faced redundancies or forced retirement, or have moved on from newspapers to work for agencies or as freelancers. One asked, after we’d turned off the tape-recorder, whether we had heard anything more about job cuts at their own organisation. Several lamented the enormous loss of talent within the industry. And some spoke of waiting anxiously for the “tap on the shoulder” to come.

Newspapers’ increasing reliance on agency shots, which can be obtained at lower cost, is not only reducing the number of photographers but is also, according to some of them, affecting the quality and nature of press photography. They point out that Getty’s business is to take the photographs customers will pay for, and argue that agencies are more concerned about the market price of photographs than the art of still photography.

At the Age, Fairfax’s arrangement with Getty means that in 2016 about five Getty photographers are directly linked to the Age, some of whom are ex-staff photographers. They were given jobs through the picture editor of the Age, although Getty also has its own picture editor, who sits at the same desk as the Age picture editor. The Getty photographers do not have a direct link to journalists, which one photographer identifies as a problem because “the relationship you have with the journalist is so vital.” Another repercussion is that the collective and institutional memory of Australian photography will vanish because, like the staff photographers before the late 1980s, the Getty photographers are often not even by-lined.

For many photographers, the uncoupling of photographs from that production process signals the decline of press photography because so much is being lost along with that industrial shift, including the team work, training, mentoring, skill-sharing and creativity that came with job security, knowledge and experience.

“I’m hopeful that it will survive. I fear it won’t in the form that we know it,” says the well-known photographer Mike Bowers. “The days of having a huge department where you could get critical mass and ideas and generate unique content are over and dead. It’s gone. We held onto it here in Australia for a lot longer than we did overseas. But it’s dead and gone.”

Longstanding Age photographer Penny Stephens observes that “Australia is one of the few countries that still has staff photographers, so we’re kind of lucky that we still have staff jobs.” But she understands that it’s “not going to go on forever”: “It wouldn’t surprise me if they went the same way as the papers are going overseas and just hiring freelancers when they need somebody.” Another photographer observes that in London they “put out a word that they need a shot of something… and a whole stack of people turn up and whoever gets the shot that gets published gets paid… Frightening.”

One photographer predicts that “there’ll be a little bit of room” for photographers at Australian newspapers. But another refers to rumours of further cuts to photographic staff at newspapers in 2016, and to the use of freelancers by new players such as Huffington Post and the Daily Mail in Australia, ominously declaring that “the days of staff photographers [are] pretty much over.” Our book has been an attempt to bring some of those photographers, their stories and their work out from behind the lens, and to reflect on the past, present and future of their profession. •

This is an edited extract from Shooting the Picture: Press Photography in Australia, by Fay Anderson and Sally Young (Melbourne University Publishing).

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When sixteen-year-old Brooklyn Beckham was chosen last month to photograph the new Burberry campaign, the protests from professional photographers came as a brief flurry. Almost anyone can take impressive-looking photographs nowadays, particularly with a little help from the sidelines. While he lamented Burberry’s blatantly commercial decision to employ young Beckham, the professional photographer Jon Gorrigan was philosophical about the likely outcome. “People who are undertrained can get a good result with an Instagram filter,” he remarked in the Guardian. You don’t really have to be a photographer to be a photographer.

Meanwhile, the most surprisingly unsurprising photographs, made with the aid of a repertoire of professionalising tricks, can achieve a new kind of iconic status, if iconic means fetching a million dollars or more. In 2015, the Australian-born photographer Peter Lik – “I just want to see the beautiful side” – reportedly sold his odd-looking image Phantom to a private collector for US$6.5 million, though this record-setting price has been difficult to verify. What hasn’t been hard to confirm is the outrage among all kinds of people who are serious about the practice of photography. Since then, the celebrity photographer Kevin Abosch’s photograph of a potato – Potato #345 (2010) – has been bought for a reported $1 million, once again by a private collector. Potato #345 shows a self-contained and confident-looking potato posed against a pure black background, its knobbly surface lit to lend it a vaguely galactic air. It might be a nice photo, but a chorus of “I could do that” can be heard echoing away in the background.

When a single photograph can be singled out for no obvious reason by a collector prepared to pay a lot of money, there is something exhilaratingly old school about the exhibition currently showing at the National Gallery of Australia. It nails its monochromes to the mast and aims to demonstrate, using about a hundred images drawn from the gallery’s impressive collection, that certain photographs have a certain something that can’t be easily replicated, a certain something that continues to have a powerful impact on generations of viewers. They are images that deserve to be called iconic.

The exhibition title, The World Is Beautiful, might easily be taken as referring to the increasing sentimentalisation of photography, to the exponential growth not only in selfies but also in images of sunsets and waterfalls, or to the routine glamorisation, in genres such as “poverty porn,” of otherwise distressing subject matter. But it is in fact a reference to the influential book of that title, produced in 1928 by Albert Renger-Patzsch, in which the German photographer sought to increase “the joy one takes in an object” and to demonstrate the ability of photography to elicit satisfying patterns of order from the natural and constructed worlds.

Divided into three main parts, “Near,” “Middle Distance” and “Faraway,” according to the distance between the subject and the photographer, this exhibition emphasises the role of the individual behind the camera in making photographic decisions and photographic choices. It “takes the viewer on a journey,” says Shaune Lakin, senior curator of photography at the National Gallery and lead curator of the exhibition, “beginning with extreme close-up views of botanical specimens, and then moving further and further away from the subject until, after one hundred or so photographs, we are looking at images of the open sky and of transcendental phenomena.” There are no found photographs here, no images plucked from anonymous collections discovered on eBay or at suburban garage sales, no unacknowledged and unnamed geniuses. These are iconic photographs by name photographers.

In the photograph used to publicise the exhibition, Robert Doisneau’s Un Regard Oblique (A Sidelong Glance, below) from 1948, we look out of a shop window and see a couple looking in. The implied presence of the photographer, lurking within the shop in order to catch his window-shopping subjects unaware, is just one aspect of the extraordinary complexity of the composition and the fact that the photo constantly gives us more to see. A great deal has been written about this photograph over the years, much of it in the kind of late-twentieth-century-speak that has not survived nearly as well as the photograph itself. But the reason a lot has been written is that there is a lot to see and a lot to say.

Robert Doisneau’s A Sidelong Glance (1948, printed 1990), gelatin silver photograph, 24.1 x 29.5 cm, purchased 1991. National Gallery of Australia

The relationship of the man and woman in the right foreground can be read in multiple ways, their middle-aged formality and their hats (where would photography be without hats?) contrasting with youthful, hatless life going on in the background, all played out within an abundance of oblongs that serve to frame pictures and windows and doorways. The slight tweeness of the title, the man sneaking a sidelong glance at the racy picture to his right while the woman looks at another picture that we can’t see, doesn’t really do justice to the image’s depth of humanity and to its ability, like all good photographs, to suggest life outside as well as inside the frame.

From its very beginnings, photography has divided itself into genres and sub-genres – from capacious categories like portraits and landscapes, or street and studio photography, to more defined areas of focus such as scientific or architectural or even wedding photography. And somewhere alongside all these categories, occupying a kind of parallel dimension, sits avant-garde or experimental photography. The World Is Beautiful draws its selected images from many of these categories. The exhibition includes several of the many precursors of Abosch’s potato, for example, chosen from the long historical line of photographic close-ups of vegetables and flowers and plants. Renger-Patzsch himself, the source of the exhibition title, is represented by two images, one of them of Sempervivum Percarneum, a genus known commonly and unromantically as “houseleek,” or rather more romantically as “liveforever.” This image has a cool, scientific beauty, but it would be a confident observer indeed who, without the benefit of any other information, could look at Renger-Patzsch’s leek and Abosch’s potato side by side and pick the icon. Knowing the date makes a difference – 1928 for the Renger-Patzsch image, 2010 for the Abosch. Getting in early is important – which is only to say that the stature and standing of the image comes not only from the image itself but also from its place in the development of photography.

The images grouped under the heading “Near” demonstrate the capacity of the close-up to both unsettle and enlighten the viewer, while at the same time evoking the person behind the camera. That sense of an intelligence behind the image can be felt strongly in the photograph Skeleton Leaf by Olive Cotton (below), made in 1964 in Cotton’s home near Cowra in New South Wales. The leaf, its pulp stripped away to reveal the skeleton, has been carefully positioned, with the natural world blurred but visible through the window in the background. The image is a pleasing combination of the scientific and the pictorial, but most striking of all is how the leaf has been prepared and then photographed in such a way as to imitate the tree from which it came.

Olive Cotton’s Skeleton Leaf (1964), gelatin silver photograph, 50.4 x 40.8 cm, Purchased 1987. National Gallery of Australia

This fascination with pattern and repetition, characteristic of so much of Cotton’s work, is also characteristic of many of the photographs in the exhibition. It can be seen to startling effect in Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Lucia at the Breakfast Table from 1926, with its elaborate arrangement of crosses and circles and shadows, or in one of the images displayed in the “Middle Distance” category, Christmas Shoppers, Near Macy’s, New York (1954, below), by the great William Klein, with its repeat motifs of window frames and spectacle frames and collars and corsages, to say nothing of the splendid hats worn by the shoppers of the title.

William Klein’s Christmas Shoppers, Near Macy’s, New York (1954), gelatin silver photograph, 29.7 x 40 cm, purchased 1993.
National Gallery of Australia

The patterns in Cotton’s and Klein’s images speak to the viewer without the need for explication and explanation. In the case of Moholy-Nagy’s breakfast table or the French artist and photographer Annette Messager’s Mes Voeux (My Vows), made in 1989, it does help to know rather more than the image alone is able to tell us. With Lucia and the Breakfast Table, some knowledge of the “grammar” of the art movement Suprematism and the symbolism of its various shapes, while not exactly essential, will add an extra dimension. The work by Messager, however – a photograph of an installation that is in turn made up largely of photographic fragments depicting body parts – will not rise very far on the impact scale without resort to the gallery’s explanatory notes: “The bodily fragments in Mes Voeux are intended to recall ex-votos – objects, often in the shape of limbs or torsos, left as offerings to saints in fulfilment of a vow or in gratitude for recovery from an illness or injury – that Messager encountered as a young woman in southern European churches.” It is, in other words, a photograph of an icon, but the kind of over-contrivance involved in producing it does not necessarily make for an iconic photograph.

Messager’s is one of the relatively few images in the exhibition to deploy colour. When it comes to achieving iconic status, monochrome rules. Even today, when colour is pretty much universal in vernacular photography and almost universal in art more generally, there is nothing quite like black-and-white for conveying seriousness and weight. Monochrome emphasises pattern, and seeing these photographs together, with each photographer represented by only one or perhaps two images, brings home the extent to which so many great photographs derive their force from the kind of visual pattern and counterpoint that black-and-white so effortlessly underpins. Colours, on the other hand, are naturally assertive, a quality recognised by that most influential of colour photographers, William Eggleston.

In Eggleston’s Greenwood, Mississippi (1973), sometimes known as The Red Room, colour and pattern fight it out – it is an unrelaxing image. Eggleston deliberately tackles the most competitive colour of all, red (a colour that is “at war with all the other colours,” he once remarked in an interview), using a dye-transfer process to capture the creepily rich red of a ceiling criss-crossed by rather dangerous-looking wires. The white wires and the ceiling’s coving (painted partly black and partly white) struggle to impose a pattern on all that redness. In Eggleston’s “iconic image,” as it is often described, black-and-white is no match for red.

The exhibition’s emphasis on the physical position of the photographer – close to the subject, or a little or a long way away – highlights how important stance is to the way we see the photograph. Close-ups, for instance, draw us in – we know that what we are looking at is only part of a whole, but at the same time we are led to take the part for the whole. Eggleston’s image of the garishly coloured ceiling is a clear example, its alternative titles suggesting something larger and more comprehensive than what we actually see – a town, “Greenwood, Mississippi,” or simply a “red room.” In fact, what we do see is a mere fragment of these larger things. But the strength of the image lies not in its representation of these larger things but in its status as a subject, a close-up, worthy of attention in its own right.

Something happens, though, when the photographer steps back. As the exhibition notes have it, the “further away we move from a subject, the more it and its story open up to us.” Photographs shot from the “middle distance” have a way of encouraging the viewer to look for stories both within and beyond the frame. As the selection of images makes clear, this is a particular characteristic of the golden age of American street photography from the fifties, sixties and seventies, where the viewer is quite deliberately led to look outside the photograph’s rectangular border.

In Helen Levitt’s wonderful image from 1972, for example, titled simply New York (below), of children playing on a New York street, a young boy gazes off beyond the left-hand edge of the frame, his eye following along the line of his pointing elbow. In another famous and, yes, “iconic” New York image, Garry Winogrand’s World’s Fair, New York (1964), a row of people sit on a long bench. The man on the right is cut in half, suggesting that the bench, with people sitting on it, extends forever. “As always in Winogrand,” says Geoff Dyer in The Ongoing Moment (2005), “there is a sense of other photos going on elsewhere.” In both the Levitt and the Winogrand images, one in colour and one in monochrome, the human subjects manage to appear both randomly positioned and posed in a pattern, implying a repeating motif that extends further than we can see.

Helen Levitt’s New York (1972), dye-transfer colour photograph, 23.9 x 36.2 cm, purchased 1984. National Gallery of Australia © Film Documents LLC

When it comes to the final category of photographs, long shots, the rationale underpinning the three divisions within the exhibition seems rather to fall apart. “Faraway” is taken here to mean not only the distance between the subject and the photographer but also the geographical remoteness and unknowability of the subject. Photographs taken at a distance, or of subjects that are remote or inaccessible, may well have the “capacity to make faraway places accessible to us,” to quote the exhibition notes, but that is not the overall effect of the images on display. Instead they tend to emphasise the monumentality, the inherent drama and the essential strangeness of their subjects. They are the kinds of characteristics that can, in the case of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Radio City Music Hall (1978), for example, or Trent Parke’s powerful image of technology meeting the outback, A Rally Car Leaves a Trail of Dust (2003), be reinforced by the use of long exposures, resulting in images that lead us to see differently.

The World Is Beautiful is predominantly and unabashedly an exhibition of individual “great photographs” at a time when the so-called democratisation of photography has made many people sceptical of photographic greatness, and particularly the greatness of the individual image. There is much more emphasis now on the cumulative impact of photography, on the way in which a set or collection of photographs, whether by a named or an unnamed photographer or group of photographers, can provide insight into individual lives or political events or simply into aspects of the way we live now. The contemporary prevalence of what might be called “project” photography, in which the photographer pursues a theme across multiple images, invites the viewer to respond to the interconnectedness of collections rather than to an individual, standout photograph. But the works on display in The World Is Beautiful, drawn from the National Gallery’s impressive collection, make a powerful case for the continuing relevance of the iconic image, the one that among all the others really does deserve to stand out. •

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The exhibition at Arles, Total Records: The Great Adventure of Album Cover Photography, emphasised the historical link between the illustrated sleeve and the disc inside, both of them physical objects, the one contained within the other, the aural within the visual. The curators decided to show the album covers, some 600 of them in all, complete with overprinting and artwork, rather than the images alone, thus making the point, if it needed to be made, that the covers are artefacts from another age. The message on the archived website is clear – the age of the LP cover, the second half of the twentieth century, was a time when “photography mattered more than anything else,” and when there was a clear and mutually reinforcing link between the image and the sound: “looking at an album cover, you can almost hear what you see.”

It’s a definition of music photography – the image evokes the sound –that raises as many questions as it answers. Indeed, the very term “music photography” contains an implied question mark. How, in the end, do you photograph music? The implication of the Arles exhibition is that the direct link that once existed between photograph and music, so characteristic of the late twentieth century – when you could look at an album cover and hear what you saw – is now lost among a complicated mix of new technologies, new business models, new ways of listening, and changing notions of stardom, both photographic and musical.

In London, We Want More: Image-Making and Music in the 21st Century concentrated on the originality and inventiveness of the past fifteen years of music photography. As the exhibition’s website notes, “The traditional frameworks that once upheld a distance between photographers, fans, stars and their labels have collapsed to allow for new routes and territories in which music photography is produced, shared and consumed.” Musicians now routinely commission or enter into direct partnerships with photographers, not simply recording or ratifying a musical identity controlled from elsewhere (typically the record labels or that catch-all category of “management”) but rather partnering with the photographer to take charge of building and regularly rebuilding the visual brand. In contemporary music photography, the image does not so much evoke the music as concentrate on the endlessly fascinating subject of performance itself, on what it means for a musician to create and sustain a visual, as much as an aural, identity.

While some would lament the disappearance of a traditional system of financial and creative support for photographers – magazines buying and commissioning photographs, labels using images to create identities for their music – We Want More sees the change as essentially a good thing, empowering photographers, musicians and audiences alike. Instead of being bound to the commercial priorities of the magazine or the label, photographers “are now more in control of context and creative direction.” It’s a new world, in which everyone – the musician, the photographer and the audience – has a share in creative control.

Writing in the August issue of the British Journal of Photography about her experience of putting the exhibition together, the curator Diane Smyth notes how the final display seemed to fall of its own accord into two halves, one containing images of musicians and the other images of fans. As photographic access to musicians becomes ever more controlled, aspirational photographers turn their attention, almost by default, to photographing the audience. Rather than leading to second best, there may be a sense in which audiences are the new big subject, as photographers, almost invariably fans themselves, explore the nature and the attractions of fandom. Just as Lady Gaga, to take an obvious example, dresses up, then so – crucially – do her fans, turning themselves into photographic subjects.

In other words, the golden age of music photography is over and isn’t coming back, or another golden age has just begun, fuelled by the shifting relationships of musicians, photographers and audiences. Take your pick. At first impression, What a Life! Rock Photography by Tony Mott seems to plump squarely for the former. Along with a comprehensive photobook, Tony Mott’s Alphabet A–Z Rock ’n’ Roll Photography, published to coincide with the exhibition, this enjoyable and lovingly constructed overview of Mott’s work makes clear that there was indeed a golden age, that it peaked during the 1980s and the early 1990s, and that Tony Mott was very much at the forefront.

Less convincingly, the notes to the exhibition adopt an elegiac tone that sits rather oddly with the life and energy of the photographs themselves. For the curator, Louise Tegart, Tony Mott’s highly successful four-decade career has been due to a happy conjunction of talent and the times, and the times have been changing. “Rock photographs,” she remarks in the free broadsheet catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, “have become harder to sell now that everyone at a concert has a digital camera or a mobile phone. The scene has become more competitive, and skill levels have gone down.”

The rock journalist Toby Creswell puts the same sentiment more trenchantly in an entertaining essay in the catalogue. “Now everyone is a photographer,” Creswell laments. “Perhaps there is a Tony Mott app. Music is everywhere. Everyone is a critic and everyone is a musician so the world has become flooded with amateurism.” It is a familiar argument – photography mattered once, but it doesn’t quite matter any more, largely because everyone is doing it and standards have slipped. Against this gloomy assessment is the belief that there will always be opportunities for talent to make a mark, no matter how many people are taking photographs or making music (or writing, for that matter, another creative activity in which the lines between amateur and professional have become increasingly blurred).

Tony Mott was born Anthony Moulds in Sheffield in 1956. By the early 1980s, after a peripatetic decade working mainly as a chef, he settled in Sydney and began spending all his free time combining his twin interests of music and photography. “On Monday nights,” Tegart tells us, “an unsigned band, the Divinyls,” featuring the then pre-legendary Chrissy Amphlett, “had a regular gig and twenty-eight-year-old Tony started to take photos of the band in action.” Mott recalls of this period that “for four months, I practised, on Chrissy Amphlett, the art of rock ’n’ roll photography.” One of his images of Amphlett – in Mott’s judgement, “the greatest female performer in the world” – was taken up and used by the Divinyls as a publicity poster, and Tony Mott was on his way from being an enthusiastic amateur to an in-demand professional.

To mark the happy conjunction between his twin obsessions of photography and music, he changed his surname to Mott, after what was and still is his favourite band – Mott the Hoople. By this act of homage, Mott was signalling his own fandom, marking himself as someone who could record the world of rock music from the outside while simultaneously being totally immersed in it. What this has meant in terms of recognisable style is an approach that is deferential in the best sense, allowing the personalities of the subjects to come through without the art-directed look of much rock photography of the 1970s and 80s.

The digital revolution, when it came, had little initial effect on Mott’s practice. When he did embrace the new way of doing things (if embrace is the right word), it was an unsettling experience. Speaking of images he made of Rihanna in 2008, he recalls that it “was the first gig I shot with a digital camera. I was shocked I got so many great shots that I had a sense I was cheating.” Elsewhere, he has referred to digital photography as “too easy,” rather reinforcing the idea inherent in the construction of the exhibition that something irreplaceable about photography has been lost.

And yet, by providing this opportunity to look at Mott’s work as a whole – a mood-lifting mix of album and magazine covers, posters and flyers, interspersed with a large sampling of individually mounted images – the exhibition also shows how Mott’s work prefigures the casual, seemingly accidental approach that is characteristic of much digital photography. And on the evidence of the more recent images included in the exhibition, Mott has not lost his touch. He has responded to changes in the industry by taking on more work in film and television, but he also continues as a practising music photographer. The recent in-concert shot of P J Harvey (2011), fighting back against the visual weight of her guitar and the microphone, keeps drawing the eye, and an image of Daniel Johns, taken this year against a characteristic background of blurred, post-industrial grime, is a model of sympathetic portraiture. “He looks wise,” Mott comments of Johns in this image and he’s right, he does.

But simply being sympathetic, and involving subjects as collaborators, doesn’t always work. In Mott’s offstage photographs, there can sometimes be a bit too much face-pulling on the part of the subjects, which is meant to signal spontaneity but can come across as contrived. Mott is aware of the risks. He aims for naturalness and a strong sense of the individuality of his subjects, and can be hard on his own work if he feels that it does not meet these criteria. His portrait of the Clouds from 1999 has an intriguing air of formality that contrasts with the majority of the images on display, the backdrop curtain evoking a photographic studio – unusually for Mott, who generally prefers “found” locations. (Taken “at Central Railway Station,” he says of his 1996 image of Smudge, “as good a location as any.”) The plain, unpatterned clothing worn by the two members of the band in the left of the frame forms a satisfying visual contrast with the two on the right, both of whom sport more striking patterns. Yet for Mott, this image, perhaps because of its suggestions of deliberate construction, doesn’t quite work. “I shot the Clouds many times for Australian and US record companies,” he remarks in the wall notes, “but never felt I captured the essence of the band despite my love of ’em.”

Like all professional photographers, Mott had clients to please. In a funny and self-deprecating talk delivered at the State Library of New South Wales during the opening weeks of the exhibition, he referred to the standard and clichéd shot, often favoured by magazines, of the musician’s hair swirling in the air, the kind of shot he has taken on more than one occasion. His photograph of Lenny Kravitz (1994), displayed in the exhibition in larger than life-size format, in which Kravitz’s expression seems to suggest a high degree of self-consciousness about the hair, is a good example. “A bit of a Hendrix wannabe,” says Mott, in an unusually astringent comment. On the other hand, in that early image of Chrissy Amphlett from 1983 (“the first photo I ever sold”) the wildness of Amphlett’s hair seems at one with her look of total, unselfconscious absorption in the song. The thing about standard shots is that sometimes they work.

Mott’s photographs eschew glamour. Certain kinds of backgrounds occur again and again. Often they seem random in the extreme – a security grille, a brick or a sandstone wall, a sick-looking shrub. For location shots, he favours empty theatres or run-down railway stations or the disused warehouses that were common in the former industrial areas of Sydney in the 1980s. “Taken in a derelict warehouse in Chippendale,” says Mott of his 1997 image of the band Front End Loader, a warehouse “that was destined to become another block of flats like so many buildings I’ve used as backdrops.” Often the background, in the onstage and offstage images alike, is so blandly unglamorous as to be unidentifiable, appearing either blacked out or blurred. When Mott uses recognisably iconic structures – the Harbour Bridge or the Opera House or, in the case of a 2010 photograph of Angus and Julia Stone, the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House – these photogenic feats of architecture and engineering are made to seem ordinary, somewhere on a par with a brick wall.

Mott’s world is almost exclusively urban, but he does occasionally photograph his subjects against a natural background. “It is a dramatic setting,” he says of a 1988 shot of the Venetians in which the band is standing in front of the Kiama blowhole, but in fact this dramatic setting looks more like a painted backdrop, against which the band members stand out all the more. “We were waiting for a beautiful sunrise,” Mott comments laconically in Alphabet, “but it never happened.” This characteristic downplaying of the background encourages the viewer to concentrate on the main subject.

In his group shots, Mott elicits the personalities of each of the band members, who will often be positioned at some distance from one another. In some of the images – The Vines (2003), for example – each individual occupies a different depth of field. Yet despite this internal distancing, these images still manage to convey a strong sense of interconnectedness. In the Vines’ portrait this effect is enhance, as in many of his other images, by Mott’s use of a favourite device, the fisheye lens, which helps to link the band members by placing them on a continuous curve and enclosing them within the same visually distorted space.

For Mott, the photographic encounter is generally a positive experience. As we learn from the wall notes to the exhibition and from the captions in Alphabet, the musicians Mott photographs almost invariably impress him as likeable and funny and charming, even on the occasions when he doesn’t necessarily expect it. Lou Reed, for example, is “surprisingly pleasant company.” There is no reason to doubt these positive assessments, but they also suggest something about Mott’s manner as a photographer and his ability to put his subjects at ease. Unlike actors or professional models, musicians may not feel comfortable with the camera, or even like having their photograph taken at all, particularly when they are starting out on their careers. “Relaxing them is imperative,” he says in Alphabet.

Mott’s capacity to draw the best out of the musicians he photographs is evident; the exceptions all the more striking for their rarity. “My father always told me,” he says in the wall note to his 1992 image of the Beastie Boys, “if you have nothing positive to say about someone say nothing, so what I’d like to say about the Beastie Boys is…” The ellipsis is Mott’s. Yet even without the benefit of the commentary, the effect of the image is less than warm. A stretched-out, sneakered foot takes up the bottom half of the frame; the Beastie Boys themselves adopt poses that are both defensive and aggressive. And yet, for all that, it is an effective composition, demonstrating that a bit of tension, between difficult subjects and a photographer who maintains his equilibrium, is not necessarily a bad thing.

One of the many inspiring aspects of this exhibition is how Mott’s vast portfolio of photographs reflects the many definitions of success. His subjects range from superstars to musicians whose fanbase never extended much beyond inner-city Melbourne or Sydney. “Why, oh why are they not bigger?” he asks of You Am I. The same question could no doubt be asked of many photographers, then as now. By his own account, Tony Mott did not set out with a deliberate strategy of becoming a successful rock ’n’ roll photographer. Instead he set out to pursue his twin enthusiasms for music and photography, and by a combination of commitment and good fortune and, of course, talent, was ready to grab the opportunity, when it came along, to turn himself into a professional.

He didn’t so much fall into photography (an expression commonly used by people when reflecting on their successful careers, and almost never exactly true) as throw himself into it, becoming so absorbed in the intricacies of his chosen medium that it took somebody else to show him he could make a successful living out of it. It is probably the case, as the exhibition catalogue suggests, that there is little chance of quite such a scenario developing today in quite the same way, when the competition is greater and ambition is more conscious and more overt. Yet there are still many photographers who manage to break through from amateur to professional, navigating new commercial realities and distribution platforms to get their work out there. And in that respect, though the times were different then, Tony Mott’s work provides a template. •

The post Sound and vision appeared first on Inside Story.

The sisters rapidly acquired reputations as brilliant portraitists working in a style they had developed well before they left New Zealand. A Moore photograph could usually be recognised by head-and-shoulders framing, the frequent use of “Rembrandt lighting” (the face lit from a single artificial source to one side, creating a triangle of light on one cheek), a pencil-thin streak of natural light highlighting the sitter’s profile, rich sepia tones, highly textured decorative mounts, and a likelihood that the subject was a performer or a writer.

May had nursed a passionate interest in theatre and the arts since her youth, and for the whole of the sisters’ careers this influenced their choice of studio location, pictorial style and subjects. May’s decision to set up temporarily in the same building as the Bulletin gave her instant access to the stream of writers, artists and liberal-minded politicians who visited the magazine. Her subsequent moves, first to George Street and then to King Street, ensured that the business was always adjacent to the city’s most important theatres, including the Grand Opera House.

The sisters’ decision to open their Melbourne studio in the new J. & N. Tait Auditorium at the Paris end of Collins Street was no less astute. The Tait brothers were theatrical entrepreneurs, and their building included a concert hall for operas, plays and orchestral concerts. Rehearsals and recitals brought a steady stream of people past Mina’s studio, many of them seeking promotional portraits. Over the next few years Mina’s trade expanded in line with the growth of an “arty” set attracted to that part of Melbourne by its wide, gracious boulevard, the paved flagstone paths fringed with busy clubs and cafes, and the recently relocated Georges department store, with its modish couture garments and copies of the latest Paris fashions.

The Moores’ contemporaries described them as typical “modern women.” They were seeking economic independence and social mobility in what was still considered an unusual industry for women. Even in America, which had experienced the greatest growth in the number of women opening their own photographic studios, women comprised less than 20 per cent of the profession. The Moores’ feminist sympathies were especially evident from their decision to employ men only as darkroom assistants, with women not only taking all managerial and executive responsibility but also wielding the cameras. And when Mina retired from the Melbourne arm of the business she sold it to Ruth Hollick, a woman noted for her feminist sympathies and activities.

Between them the Moores produced hundreds of stunningly beautiful portraits. Most were of Australia’s theatrical performers and leading writers, artists and politicians, as well as other prominent local and international celebrities. The list includes the stage actresses Lilian Birtles, Lily Brayton and Ada Reeve, silent movie actresses Sara Allgood, Dorothy Cumming, Dorothy Lowand Dorothy Dix, opera prima donna Maria Pampari, actors Graham Marr and Edmund Burke, Australia’s second prime minister Alfred Deakin, journalist Howard Ashton, painters Petrus van der Velden and Frederick McCubbin, writers Ted Dyson and Dame Mary Gilmore, poets Henry Lawson, Zora Cross and David McKee Wright, the artistic Lindsay brothers, and Hugh Ward, the famous American-born actor and theatrical entrepreneur who, along with Julius Knight – the most popular figure on the stage in Australasia – had urged May and Mina to make the move to Australia.

The Moores’ Australian venture was so successful that Mina was able to retire comfortably after less than eight years in business, at which point she married the poet-cum-businessman William Tainsh and began raising a family. Her photographs of hundreds of Australian first world war soldiers had added substantially to the sisters’ income between 1914 and 1918, making it a large factor in their financial success. Mina didn’t allow the soldiers’ military status to influence the quality of her work; in keeping with the sisters’ motto, each portrait was executed in the same style they used for stars. May also married; unlike her sister, she kept working, more out of love for her craft than from necessity.

What was it about the Moores’ approach to portrait photography that guaranteed their success over that of many of their rivals? And why was their work so appealing to many members of the public as well as to the artistic set? The sisters were working at a time when, owing to a vast expansion in the numbers of available commercial photographers, fortunes could no longer be made from the trade in ordinary photographic portraiture. Mass production of cameras and printing equipment meant that portrait photography was soon being practised by professional and unprofessional alike.

To survive in this highly competitive environment, ostensibly commercial portrait photographers like the Moores were compelled to offer their clients something special, which invariably meant a signature artistic style. With both originality and individuality at a premium, the realisation that photography could be as highly expressive as painting was often a key to success.

New cultures of modernity were also generating a large audience for images of celebrities. Many of the stage and screen celebrities photographed by the Moores were moving freely across the English-speaking parts of the globe as they sought out new appreciative audiences for their artistic skills, and this invariably brought them to the relatively new urban centres of Wellington, Sydney and Melbourne. The constant publicity that these stars received from the press meant that not only did serious art lovers like the Moores follow the lives of these celebrities, but many members of the general public did so too and they demonstrated their interest by snapping up the Moores’ photographs.

What fascinated the Moores was the human face and what it revealed of the sitter’s personality. This is hardly surprising at a time of growing interest in alternative religions, including the occult, and in the new field of psychology, with its focus on interiority and the psychic life. Also influential around this time were the Aestheticist and Symbolist movements, with their love of art for art’s sake and their rejection of what they saw as the inhospitable, uncaring world of “nature.” Perhaps what should surprise us is the fact that the Moores succeeded in making a comfortable living among this minority element in Australian society.

Among the many highly talented artistic subjects who visited the Moores’ studios was the famous British stage actress Lily Brayton. As the historian Veronica Kelly has written, Brayton’s flair for costume and stage design played no small role in setting the tone for the seasons’ fashions in Australia:

Brayton’s dresses were analysed and consumed as fresh material in the on-going Australian uses of fashion as a vital aspect of self-enunciation and social message… Flemington racecourse, no less than the Theatre Royal, was a public stage, [where] Brayton performed her social role as fashion icon with distinction and personal flair.

A glance at the Moores’ many photographs of actresses bears out these claims and confirms their photographic contribution to an emergent set of fashions based on the elegant and imaginative styles of the theatrical world. The Moores were at the centre of this development, writes Daniel Palmer, because they worked in the period when the influence of theatre costume on men’s and women’s fashions was at its most powerful. The sisters’ photographs of Brayton and other actresses appeared in women’s magazines such as Home as well as in widely circulated literary publications such as the Triad and the Lone Hand.

Brayton singled out the Moores to do all her publicity work in Australia, complaining that the local press was constantly privileging her beauty at the expense of her considerable business skills and remarkable talent for design. She herself never explained what it was that she liked about the Moores’ work, only that, “other things being equal, women can photograph women best.” Besides highlighting the lavishness of Brayton’s costumes and her physical beauty, the Moores emphasised her ability to convincingly play prominent female characters from literature and history. For example, in the famous full-length portrait of 1913 in which Brayton poses as Cleopatra, the overhead lighting falls on her powerfully out-thrust arms and on her sumptuous, Gustav Klimt–style costume, while her legendary lovely face is contorted by a look of feigned anger.

In another portrait from 1913, Brayton is captured playing the role of the unloved Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, her statuesque body and pose providing the perfect foil for the long, graceful lines of her Roman-style toga, with one end hanging elegantly from a shoulder while the other trails delicately along the floor. Brayton, with her right arm thrust behind her head in a melodramatic gesture, is portrayed here as the consummate actress whose every move is aimed at arousing the audience.

A third image produced in 1916 captures Brayton’s facial expression as she plays yet another lead female role, glaring fiercely into the lens of the camera. (This photograph appears in full in the gallery accompanying this article.) By placing the actress against a pitch-dark background and highlighting only one side of her exotic-looking headpiece and her pallid face with its flashing dark eyes, May has captured the atmosphere of passion and intrigue that surrounded the world-famous actress and was one of her hallmarks. It was an effect that was further enhanced by having Brayton only half turn her head toward the camera, since this resulted in the other half remaining tantalisingly in shadow.

Another very colourful personality of the day photographed by the Moores was the woman who in 1923 was crowned Australia’s Queen of Bohemia. This was Dulcie Deamer, a fellow New Zealander (whose portrait appears in the galley above). Taken in 1920, the Moores’ photograph is not as well known as the famous shot taken by a press photographer in 1923 at the Sydney Artists’ Ball, which showed Dulcie wearing a stylish leopard-skin outfit. Nor can it be said to be one of the Moores’ most striking photographs in either an aesthetic or a technical sense. But it is significant for what it reveals of some of the more nuanced and less well-researched aspects of portrait photography in Australia as it emerged in the early years of the twentieth century, and in particular of the sort of personalised portrait photography that was evolving through women’s subjective responses to the more destabilising effects of colonial modernity.

Like the Moores, Dulcie had left her country of birth in order to seek fame and fortune on the international stage; like them she had ended up trying to make it as an artist in Australia. Born in Christchurch, she had already performed several times on stage and had experienced success when at age sixteen she won a prestigious writing competition advertised in the Lone Hand. When published, her winning story was accompanied by illustrations by Norman Lindsay. Less than a year later she was in New York, married to a Sydney-born theatre director named Albert Goldie, who had promised her a career on the stage and engagements in all the leading cultural centres of the world. Unfortunately for Dulcie, Goldie’s theatre company was soon bankrupt. Seven years and six children later the couple divorced and Dulcie was domiciled in Sydney writing journal articles, poems, plays and bestselling novels while her mother raised her children. Dulcie published a total of five novels of which the best known was The Sutee of Safa: A Hindoo Romance (1913) – a fanciful romantic tale partaking of exoticism and sensuality and featuring a passionate heroine who succumbs to a devastatingly handsome but imperious male.

The Moores’ portrait was taken by May when Dulcie, still with Albert, was thirty years old and living back in Australia. A silver-gelatin print carrying all the hallmarks of the Moores’ classic style, including the dramatic natural lighting and velvety sepia tones, it captures Dulcie’s vivacious, irrepressible spirit and something more besides. We see at the back of her striking dark eyes (she claimed to have Spanish and Italian blood) what can only be described as a slightly disconcerted expression, like that of a startled fawn caught in the glare of car lights and uncertain about which way to turn, suggesting that despite being talented, ambitious and extremely attractive there were still aspects of her life over which she had little control.

This returns us to the distinctive feature of the Moores’ style, often remarked on by critics, that sets their work apart from that of many of their contemporaries – their uncanny ability to capture something of their sitters’ thoughts and emotions in addition to their character or personality. What they have captured in Dulcie’s face is something resembling the fragile “lost” look of a person who, despite her best efforts, has not realised her ambitions and does not know why.

We do not know what May, as the photographer, thought of Dulcie, and the latter makes no mention of the sisters in her famous autobiography. Indeed, her only comment about photography was to say, “I’ve never kept photographs, they clutter up the place.” But the sisters may have recognised something of their own inauspicious origins in her life story, as well as something of their own female ambition. They too were from a small town in New Zealand, in their case Wainui, a tiny rural community situated near Wellington; and like Deamer, they had both pursued a career that did not sit easily with motherhood and which involved abandoning New Zealand for brighter lights. On the other hand, unlike her they had confined their ambition to Australia and to a craft with more obvious commercial potential than either acting or writing, and had consequently achieved greater success in both financial and artistic terms.

May and Mina Moore were among a minority of outstanding early Australian photographers who took their passion for art and theatre and used it to produce a thriving commercial practice. Not only did they photograph artists, writers, popular entertainers, actors and theatre people from different parts of the world at a time when new technologies were allowing people to travel faster and more freely across the globe, but they also used their skills to create portraits of well-known people who shared their own cosmopolitan tastes. The increasingly fluid boundaries of trade and the more expansive business and cultural opportunities that characterised colonial modernity meant that for a period of more than twenty years the Moore sisters were able to expand their business without having to move outside the elevated forms of art, the social circles and the kinds of subject matter that interested them most. •

This is an edited extract from Shifting Focus: Colonial Australian Photography 1850–1920, edited by Anne Maxwell and Josephine Croci, published by Australian Scholarly Publishing.

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There is a further note of triumph in those first few words. They seem to contain a reference to her earlier critics, usually photographers themselves, of the kind who value details and accuracy and precision and were not at all impressed by someone who seemed unconcerned with any of these. For such critics, the phrase “Mrs Cameron’s Photography” would typically preface a condescending reference to her inexpert handling of light or focus, or to her very evident mistakes with the photographic process itself.

Julia Margaret Cameron was born in India in 1815 and educated in France and England. In 1834 she returned to India and four years later married Charles Hay Cameron, who was employed in the Law Commission in Calcutta. Hay Cameron, who was twenty years his wife’s senior, retired in 1848 and the couple returned with their children to England. There, they were immediately introduced to the literary circle surrounding Julia Margaret’s sister Sara and her husband, and to luminaries such as Browning, Darwin, Tennyson and George Frederic Watts. Cameron was thus both outsider and insider, brought up mostly abroad but rapidly absorbed, in her early thirties, into London’s most exalted literary and artistic circles, an aristocracy of intellectual and creative endeavour.

Cameron exploited her connections to become one of the first celebrity photographers. But she also subverted notions of celebrity and entitlement by choosing housemaids and porters as her models, demonstrating that nobility of face and bearing were not necessarily confined to a particular social class. “Boatmen were turned into King Arthur,” her grand-niece, Virginia Woolf, remarked, and “village girls into Queen Guenevere.” Order was inverted in the interests of the image. “The parlourmaid sat for her portrait,” added Woolf, “and the guest had to answer the bell.”

When Cameron wrote that the viewing public had validated her work – had given it confidence and power – the “it” is clearly intended also to be read as “me.” Julia Margaret Cameron certainly acquired greater confidence – in herself and her technique – as her career progressed, but she seems to have started out with a fair measure too. From the very beginning she was able to rise above her literal-minded critics, partly because of her own innate determination and strength of character but partly too because she had the backing of those prepared to see the new medium as capable of producing art rather than being solely an instrument of record. In the same article, Cameron refers to photography quite simply as “the art,” but as to where the artistic impulse resided she was never exactly clear. Sometimes it seemed to come from her, sometimes from the camera – “it has become to me as a living thing,” she famously said of that cumbersome instrument – and sometimes from happenstance.

Cameron was fond of playing up the role of accident in the making of her photographs, sometimes telling stories against herself, of overexposures and smudges and scratches on the negative image, of printing the wrong way round and inadvertently coming up with something better, more evocative and more alive than the unsmudged, unscratched, right-way-round “original.” She recalled accidentally effacing her first attempt at a portrait “by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass.” Just as Julia Margaret Cameron continues to give inspiration to late starters everywhere – she began her career at the age of forty-eight, after receiving her first camera as a gift from her daughter and son-in-law – so she continues to inspire the less technically assured of photographers by her demonstration of how it is possible to make a gloriously successful photograph without knowing, quite, how to make a photograph.

With this rather casual approach to the details of photography, Cameron was also deflecting attention away from technical matters, away from the importance of predetermined process, in favour of highlighting the role of chance in abetting the artistic eye. She gave due acknowledgement to chance because she understood, in a deeply instinctive way, that it is the very stuff of creativity.

In her catalogue of the exhibition of Cameron’s work showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Julia Margaret Cameron from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, curator Marta Weiss makes clear that where Cameron’s photographic practice is concerned, there are accidents and there are accidents.

In a letter of 1869, Cameron expressed concern “about the problem of the ‘honey comb crack’” that had appeared on certain of her negatives and was, by a process “beyond any power to arrest,” relentlessly compromising them. Weiss points out that the cracks are visible in two images included in the exhibition, The Guardian Angel and The Dream, while noting drily that in the case of The Dream, Cameron, although “distraught by the cracking that befell the surface of the negative… seemed not to be bothered by the two smudged fingerprints in the lower right, which form a kind of inadvertent signature.” But Cameron’s interventions could also be deliberate: as an example, Weiss draws the viewer’s attention to So Like a Shatter’d Column Lay the King (below), one of Cameron’s illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, in which the photographer has stepped into the development process and scratched a moon onto the negative.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s So Like a Shatter’d Column Lay the King, from a series of illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, taken in 1975. Victoria and Albert Museum

It is this interplay of chance and deliberation – did she mean it or didn’t she? – that helps to give Cameron’s photographs their power and depth. In her portraits and studies and tableaux, her subjects are posed and lit to emphasise stillness and continuity, dressed in costumes that evoke the past or in cloaks that evoke no particular time at all. We sense the director behind the camera, dictating the pose and the expression and keeping her subjects to their marks. The expressions are serene and contemplative, the eyes looking into the camera, or into the space to the right or left of the frame (Cameron returned often to profile studies – like that of Mary Hillier as Sappho, reproduced above), or downwards, as if to highlight the subject’s temporary withdrawal from the busyness of life.

In this sense, Cameron’s photographs seem to reject the bustle of the contemporary in favour of a dreamy, out-of-focus, semi-historical world where the women are beautiful and demure and the men are authoritatively thoughtful. And yet, with a combination of assertiveness and accuracy, Cameron would frequently annotate the printed image with the words “From the Life,” or variations on that phrase.

This quality of aliveness is what distinguishes Cameron from many of her contemporaries, and continues to underpin her reputation today as one of the greats. A photograph is inherently melancholy and backward-looking – it has been made in the past and it records the past. In a way, Cameron seems to embrace this quality in the way she poses and dresses and lights her subjects – almost invariably, they look pensive and vaguely sad. And yet we know they are acting, that these subjects have lives and preoccupations of their own, that they are not mere “subjects” but participants in a creative project. They are neighbours or nieces or friends of the photographer, elements in a network of connections that includes us as viewers.

Just as we know that actors have their own lives outside the play, so Cameron’s photographs remind us of lives outside the photograph. The very absence of accompanying visual detail concentrates the viewer’s attention on the face and the imagined life of the sitter, who has been captured in a moment of remission from that life, posing for the photographer and playing dress-ups. Cameron’s “mistakes” – the thumbprints and the smudges and the scratches – may have been accidental and may have been deliberate but either way they reinforce rather than detract from the overall impact of the images. (Marta Weiss quotes an early comment by the poet Coventry Patmore: “her mistakes were her successes.”) They contribute to the paradox that these formally composed photographs manage somehow to speak forcefully of the random exigencies of life.

Cameron’s Annie; ‘My First Success’, 1864. Victoria and Albert Museum

Cameron was ambivalent about giving due credit to her actors. In what she called her “first perfect success,” Annie Philpot, the young ward of temporary neighbours of Cameron and her family, is pictured in a coat that seems a bit too large for her. She has the look of having been firmly buttoned into it, ready for her close-up. Her hair looks hastily and imperfectly brushed. (Cameron, like so many of the great portrait photographers, paid close attention to hair and headgear.) The light on the child’s hair and face is balanced by the glint of the second button on her coat. Annie and her coat dominate the frame; the background is a blur. The individuality of the girl is striking; it is a remarkable image, made all the more so by the knowledge that when Julia Margaret Cameron made it, in January of 1864, she had owned and operated her camera for less than a month.

In this sense, Cameron began as she was to continue; her early work includes some of her finest pictures, so much so that a mere year and a bit after she took up photography, the South Kensington Museum, predecessor of the V&A, purchased sixty-three of her images. That was in May of 1865, and was soon followed by the acquisition of a further seventeen a few months later and a further thirty-four a few months after that. Many of these images are included in the current exhibition.

Annie Philpot – the eternal child and “my best and fairest little sitter” – had a special place in the pantheon, a place which she retained, in Cameron’s eyes, throughout the ensuing years. Writing of Annie a decade later, Cameron went further. “I felt,” she recalled of that exciting day, “as if she had entirely made the picture.” Cameron seems here, if only for a moment, to relegate her own role to something analogous to the indifferent mechanism of her camera. But only for a moment. Weiss, in quoting this remark, goes on to balance it by referring to another assessment by Cameron of a favourite sitter, this time the dramatist and man of letters Sir Henry Taylor, who had also been a neighbour of the Camerons and with whom they remained lifelong friends. Sir Henry sat for over thirty portraits, evidently with patience and good humour. “He consented,” writes Cameron, “to be in turn Friar Laurence with Juliet, Prospero with Miranda, Ahasuerus with Queen Esther… and to do whatever I desired of him.” Virginia Woolf put it rather more astringently, describing Sir Henry, ever amenable to direction, as being habitually “covered in Tinsel.”

Sir Henry Taylor, a favourite sitter of Cameron’s, with Mary Ryan and Mary Kellaway in King Ahasuerus and Queen Esther, 1865. Victoria and Albert Museum

In his illuminating study Photography and the Art of Chance, Robin Kelsey devotes a chapter to Julia Margaret Cameron and her complex relationship to happenstance. In a world in which photography was becoming ever more regimented and rule-bound – “the mid-century portrait studio was engineered to subdue all forms of accident; head clamps and supporting stands limited unwanted bodily movement, and mirrors concentrated lighting to minimise obscuring shadows and permit sharp focus” – Cameron opened the image up to possibility, posing her clamp-free subjects for so long that they were bound to move, creating small shivers of vitality and aliveness in the final image.

Most persuasively of all, Kelsey identifies the central paradox of Cameron’s work, by which images of nostalgia and play-acting engender in the viewer, “despite the antimodern air of her sad madonnas,” feelings of hope for the future and confidence in the “irrepressibility of life.” Cameron seems to have anticipated, moreover, how crucial performance was to become as a way of negotiating modernity, how play-acting would increasingly be a means not of suppressing the self but of defining it. (Not that Cameron’s subjects always saw it that way; one child described her as a “benevolent tyrant” concerned only with extracting the best possible performance from her subjects.) Kelsey quotes a comment by the critic Janet Malcolm that will strike many viewers as true to the experience of looking at Cameron’s photographs: “we are always aware of the photograph’s doubleness – of each figure’s imaginary and real persona.”

Cameron was modern in other ways too, anticipating many of the characteristics and practices that were to be essential for a successful career in the new art of photography. She was relentlessly self-promoting, ensuring not only that the V&A would acquire examples of her output from early on in her career, but nudging, often quite hard, friends and acquaintances to praise her in public and preferably in print, thereby helping her to attract new clients and, even more importantly, enhance her reputation. She joined the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland to bolster her professional identity. She curated her own work, producing albums of her prints for presentation to friends and possible patrons.

Although she took pains to distinguish herself from the world of commercial photography, she understood the importance of endorsements, of competitions, and of having her work included in the international exhibitions that were held from time to time in various parts of the world – including in Australia, where photographs by Cameron could also be seen by visitors to Government House in Sydney. A guest in the 1870s, fortunate enough to get as far as the drawing room, would have been able to admire twenty or so of Cameron’s images belonging to the governor, Sir Hercules Robinson. Robinson also sat for Cameron; his portrait survives as a gold-bordered carte de visite, the miniature format that she was fond of using to advertise her wares.

Cameron understood the importance of copyright. The Copyright Act of 1862 had ensured that photographs were eligible for registration. “From May 1864 to October 1865,” Marta Weiss notes, “Cameron registered 508 photographs.” Even as her reputation, whether among her critics or her admirers, rested on her preparedness to overlook or simply bypass the “rules” of photography, when it came to asserting her rights as an artist, including her right to be identified, she was scrupulous in her attention to detail. When she wrote, on the day she completed her photograph of Annie Philpot, that she was her “best and fairest little sitter,” she also took time to note down the details of the image for posterity, and in the process unequivocally staked her claim to authorship. “This photograph,” she wrote, “was taken by me at 1pm January 29th Printed Toned – fixed and framed all by me and given as it now is by 8pm the same day Jan 29th 1864. Julia Margaret Cameron.”

Cameron may have occasionally left an inadvertent signature on her images – caused by her thumb, perhaps, or the brush of her clothing or her elbow against the plate – but she would also intentionally mark the plate to achieve a particular effect or, in at least one case, highlight her Madonna’s eyebrows with ink on the finished print. By her habit of intervention Cameron would in effect impress herself on the image, just as she would record her name on the plate or the print or the mount. In that sense, her signature was very advertent indeed. •

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The result is that photography seems almost to exist in two parallel universes. In one, we are being overloaded with images to the point that it is all becoming a bit of a blur, and we find it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish one image from another. In the other, photography is being talked up as an ever more collectible art form, a sure bet for the astute investor. The inaugural photography fair Photo London, for instance, which was launched in May this year as a declared rival to Paris Photo and the Los Angeles Photographic Art Exposition, aims to open up new audiences, showcase new talent “and promote the concept of photography as an asset class.”

These “new” audiences must be drawn from the existing one, of course, to which we all belong – an audience practised at taking in images at a glance, perhaps making a judgement or perhaps not, and then moving on. We have grown accustomed to seeing photographs as a stream rather than in an album or hanging, painting-like, on a wall. The slide show of the olden days, which might have taken up a whole evening of quiet (and growing) desperation, now rushes by in a matter of moments. The arrow on the right hand side of the screen warns against lingering to award any single photograph primacy over the others. Accompanying these new ways of making photos (smart phones always at the ready) and looking at them, often referred to as the medium’s “democratisation,” is a certain democratic impatience with the idea of the “name” photographer and the iconic photograph – exactly the kind of photographer and photograph that slots comfortably into the asset class.

Something of this increasing disjunction between art photography and vernacular photography can be seen in an exchange between two of the best and best-known writers on the subject of photography, Janet Malcolm and Geoff Dyer, in a recent issue of Aperture magazine. During their back-and-forth of comments on the state of the medium, it becomes increasingly clear that they are approaching the subject from quite different angles. The conversation eventually turns to a major retrospective of the work of influential street photographer Garry Winogrand, whom Dyer greatly admires and Malcolm, it transpires, does not. In being awarded the accolade of a touring exhibition on sequential display in five of the world’s major venues – including the Met in New York and the Jeu de Paume in Paris – Winogrand seems in no danger of losing his star status, democracy or no democracy.

And yet, says Malcolm, exaggerating no doubt for emphasis, “I have to confess that over the years, I have changed my mind about Winogrand’s photographs,” to the point where she now finds them “consistently and uniformly uninteresting” and difficult to distinguish from “any snapshot.” In expressing her scepticism, Malcolm catches a mood, the same mood that is reflected in the current revival of interest in “found” and archival photography – all those snapshots and family photos that have somehow become detached from their families to survive without history or much in the way of identifying notes, including any record of who actually took them in the first place.

On these questions, the 2015 Head On Portrait Prize, currently on show at the Museum of Sydney, manages to have a bet each way. Since its inception in 2004, the competition has specified that all entrants will be judged anonymously – that the names and details of the entrants won’t be available to the judges until the conclusion of the judging process. This must be treated as more of a statement of intent than a guarantee; after all, photographers have their signature styles. And besides, many of the submitted images will inevitably have appeared elsewhere, online or in exhibitions, or in some cases in earlier photo competitions. Yet the highlighting of anonymity in the selection process has a way of setting the mood and extending itself to the photographers’ choice of subjects, who are typically “unknown” in the sense that they are not the kinds of people already visible enough to bring with them the trappings of other images we may already have seen.

This turns out to be quite important. Where photographic portraiture is concerned, it can be very different looking at an image of a celebrity taken by a star photographer and at an image of someone we don’t know taken by someone we haven’t heard of – when, in other words, we have minimal information on what Geoff Dyer refers to, in that exchange with Janet Malcolm, as “the old who by/what of.” Among the forty photographs selected as finalists in this year’s competition, the subjects of only a handful could be described as well-known figures – an image by Paul Green of Madam Lash, for example, looking like a racier version of the robot woman in Metropolis, and George Fetting’s strong, straightforward portrait of the artist and photographer George Gittoes (below).

Fetting has made something of a specialty of celebrity photography, sometimes producing images in which the subject seems to have been given too much leeway to pose in a way that suggests a contrived sense of fun or daring or difference. But here the pose works – Gittoes’s arms are held awkwardly and protectively across his chest and torso, suggesting a vulnerability that is belied by the strength of his expression and the directness of his gaze. That strength is emphasised by Fetting’s decision to place his subject against a blank canvas, unencumbered by quirky props or anything that might divert the viewer’s attention.

One of the great challenges facing any portrait photographer is whether to use props and, if the decision is yes, what form they might take. Hats have been relied on since the very beginnings of portrait photography, or indeed of portraiture generally, but even so, what are the odds against two of the forty finalists in this year’s exhibition choosing to capture their subjects wearing hats and veils of the kind favoured by beekeepers? (A third such image, Beekeeper 1 by Neil Bailey, is included in a slide show of commended entries that didn’t quite make the final cut, and is part of an appealing series of Bailey’s showing beekeepers in full regalia posed to resemble space explorers.)

In Craig Proudford’s Rolf (below) we see the subject, “a retirement-home resident in Sydney,” wearing the trademark headgear of his hobby, posed casually and self-effacingly with his hands in his pockets, in a mauve polo shirt and crumpled trousers. Rather in the manner of Fetting’s Gittoes, Rolf is relatively prop-free compared with others of Proudford’s portraits viewable online. Rolf is posed well back in the depth of field, surrounded by a plain grey floor and plain cream walls that suggest an institutional setting. The hat and veil seem to add to the understated warmth of the portrait, emphasising rather than obscuring the personality of the subject.

The veil works in a similar way in Matthew Abbott’s double portrait of John and Julie (below), taken in Lightning Ridge, in which he succeeds in making his subjects seem both comic and sympathetic. “It took me three days to convince John and Julie to allow me to take their portrait,” explains Abbott in the wall notes. “I was drawn to their unique solution of wearing mosquito nets as headdresses to combat the relentless flies.” Abbott has tended to concentrate on photojournalism and documentary photography, winning favourable attention for a series taken in Arnhem Land, which led to a Sydney Morning Herald scholarship as an emerging documentary photographer in 2013. The Arnhem Land sequence required considerable patience – it was a year, by Abbott’s own account, before he felt sufficiently established there to begin photographing the people and the landscape. These attributes of patience and persistence serve him well in John and Julie – there is a quality of complicity in John and Julie’s expressions, with each other and with the photographer, that seems to make them partners in the enterprise rather than merely subjects.

A number of the common tropes of contemporary portrait photography appear in this exhibition, some more than once – subjects photographed in the pose and attire of classic paintings, or shown with their faces and features either partially or completely submerged in water, or obscured by a splayed hand held in front, or illuminated by rays of light filtering through branches and leaves. Each has assumed the status of a convention – making it difficult to play successfully on the convention and to reanimate it. Eva Christina Schroeder’s rendering of Girl with a Pearl Earring, entitled Girl in a Plastic Bag 1, is one of many such homages to Vermeer’s painting made in recent years, instances of which can be seen in Awol Erizku’s photograph of the Girl with a Bamboo Earring or in the ambitious series by Dutch photographer Hendrik Kerstens. Schroeder’s version only half succeeds – the black and white image of her daughter wearing a plastic bag as a headscarf doesn’t quite convince as an ecological statement about “the current trend to recycle.” But for all that, the young girl’s contemporariness and individuality are more than a match for the constraints of the costume.

In another re-creation of a classic painting, Ben Scott’s Girl at the Bar, a kitsch and clever reworking of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergères, the aesthetics of advertising are proudly displayed; the image stands out as the only one among the forty finalists to openly glamorise its subject. The second place-getter in the competition, student of photography Glyn Patrick, also confidently reworks photographic convention – in her case the use of light filtered through trees to illuminate the subject – in her portrait of John, who has recently undergone facial surgery and who consequently “turns his back on the sun he loves.” Despite the fact that he is facing away from it, the image links the subject to the natural world. In fact, John seems to be standing in a kind of illuminated crop circle, lending the image an otherworldly quality and an aura of serenity.

Patrick takes a sympathetic, even protective approach in JOHN (shown at the top of this page). Others among the finalists are more interested in exposing imperfections and searching out vulnerabilities in an attempt to identify the essential humanity of the subject. None more so than the winner of the first prize in the competition, Molly Harris, with her portrait, Being Sandra (below). This initial photograph in a projected series shows Sandra, formerly John, a veteran of thirty-seven years in the Air Force, as she prepares in front of the bathroom mirror prior to leaving home to attend an Anzac Day commemoration. We are given something of Sandra’s background and perilous state of health in the wall notes, but in some ways these notes are superfluous.

This photograph’s capacity to convey both vulnerability and an uncertain future comes in large part from its confident handling of light, a light that seems here to derive entirely from the bathroom cabinet, creating a powerful and unsettling mood even as it fights an unequal battle against the gloom. Other portraits by Harris, who has already received significant recognition in her short photographic career, are viewable on her website, and show a similarly sophisticated way with light and its capacity to engender atmosphere and suggest complexity of character.

One of the great mysteries of portrait photography hinges on whether we can successfully read character and biography into a single image. Or perhaps the more important question is whether we believe that we can. It is partly a case of the right subject taken at the right moment and in the right light by the right photographer. But it is also the case that photography favours the old, in the sense that personality and character seem to be more discernible in the lines and infirmities of age, if only on the grounds that lines and wrinkles betoken experience, and experience, by one definition at least, is character.

It is more complicated with photographs of children. When we look at childhood photographs from the past we sometimes know what happened next – what happened when the child grew up – but more often we do not. And in the case of contemporary childhood portraits, such as the ones included in this exhibition, it is in the nature of things that we can’t know the rest of the story – character and personality, in their fully formed state, lie in the child’s future and also in ours.

Samantha Everton, in Sawat (above), from her Sang Tong series, which has been awarded third place in the competition, alludes to the formation of biography and character in her carefully staged photograph of a young child who, we are told in the wall notes, has been adopted from Thailand into an Australian family. In this and other images from the series, Everton takes as her theme

children who live in two worlds. They identify themselves as Thai but they’re also everyday Aussie kids. I wanted to show both the harmony and the tension between their dual realities.

The elaborate and sophisticated way in which this photograph has been designed, with its careful and precise use of colour and pattern, and with the child suspended dream-like among familiar or beloved objects, renders it both child-like and grown up, which may well be true of all the best photographs of childhood.

And so the Head On Portrait competition begins in anonymity and ends by naming a small number of photographers who could one day become – or may already, like Everton, be well on the way to becoming – “names.” It is one of the many such competitions, in Australia and internationally, that attract thousands of entries. Which shows that the democratisation of photography does not necessarily mean its standardisation. It just means that there are many more photographs, and many more photographers, to choose from. •

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The static composition and its clear purpose as an ethnographic document are of a piece with the elaborate and very un-immediate process by which the image came into being. Everything we learn about the creation of this photograph points away from immediacy towards artificiality and distance. In fact it is not, strictly speaking, a photograph at all, but a lithograph based on a daguerreotype made by the French studio photographer Louis-Auguste Bisson and his brother Auguste Rosalie Bisson in the early 1840s.

Louis-Auguste had the adventurous spirit – he famously climbed Mont Blanc, followed by a string of porters charged with carrying his cumbersome photographic equipment – but he didn’t get as far as the Torres Strait. Instead his daguerreotype captures not the men themselves but life-casts produced in the late 1830s by Pierre-Marie Alexandre Dumoutier, a phrenologist who accompanied the French explorer Dumont d’Urville on one of his Pacific voyages. Dumoutier’s moulds were sent back to Paris to be turned into impressions, to be photographed, and to then form the basis of an easily reproducible lithograph.

The image on the gallery wall is thus a lithograph of a daguerreotype of a life-cast, itself an impression from a mould – image built upon image. And yet, despite the many removes between the subjects in the frame and the contemporary viewer, the expressions on the men’s faces convey an individuality that no amount of formality and process can contain. Their eyes are closed but we know they are not asleep. They are thinking and wondering and waiting for it to be over, for the gypsum to be removed so that they can resume their lives. And in this imposed stillness the man on the left, in particular, appears mildly amused at the absurdity of it all.

The curator of this fascinating exhibition, Judy Annear, has divided the display into four main themes – settler and Indigenous relations, exploration, portraiture and transmission. Their breadth belies the extent to which we are led – or nudged perhaps – into drawing all kinds of connections across eras and genres, and into seeing quite disparate photographs in the context of one another. We are also led to question the sharp distinction still routinely made between “documentary” and “art” photography, and to see how these categories can overlap or simply swap places, according to the context in which the image is presented to us – in a scientific database or on a gallery wall, for example – or perhaps just to our mood on the day. The exhibition includes a number of images that were originally made in the interests of scientific documentation but here assume a parallel life as aesthetic objects inviting contemplation. “Hand,” a very early X-ray photograph made in Launceston in 1896 by Frank Styant Browne, demonstrates the way in which photography could not only document the visible but also show what was previously unseen.

Double act: Gerard Krefft and the Alfred Manta, Manta Alfredi (1868), by Henry Barnes, holotype. © Australian Museum

By including scientific photos, The Photograph and Australia alludes to photography’s status as the most mechanical of the arts, and to the way it marries the scientific and the aesthetic, often to the point where they are barely distinguishable. In some of these “scientific” images, we can quite clearly see how the photographer has consciously invited an overlapping perspective. In the extraordinary set of images by Henry Barnes entitled Gerard Krefft and the Alfred Manta, Manta Alfredi (1868), Krefft and the manta ray perform a double act, each adopting quite different poses in each of the four frames. As Kathleen Davidson points out in her essay on colonial scientific photography in the exhibition book, the fact that we see the manta ray from front, back and both sides is perfectly in accordance with the conventions of scientific documentation.

Rather less scientifically, Krefft appears in a variety of poses that seem to have been thought up on the spur of the moment, thereby emphasising the quirkiness of the object of interest – the manta ray – and the strange incongruity of this vast sea creature appearing as it does, preserved and carefully placed on the stone floor of a room that barely contains its full span. The modernity of the images derives not only from Krefft’s showy informality but also from the fact that he, as a museum curator, is present and on view, a reminder of the role the curator plays in determining what we see and how we see it.

Indeed, the curatorial function is inherent in the practice of photography itself, in the sense that all photography involves selection, from choice of subject to choice of final print. “I find 99.9 per cent of the frames on the contact sheet are mistakes one makes while photographing,” says the New York photographer Leonard Freed in the absorbing, recently reissued book Magnum Contact Sheets, a reminder that every photograph we see has typically been chosen from an array of other contenders that we do not see but that survive somewhere, in physical or electronic form.

In one of two photographs by Robyn Stacey in The Photograph and Australia, Chatelaine (2010), the curatorial and photographic impulses combine to convey the essence of an historical collection of objects and artefacts and the lives it represents. The nineteenth-century world of Vaucluse House in Sydney, former home of the Wentworth family, is conveyed through an arrangement of objects belonging to or associated with the house. The title of the photograph points the viewer to the chatelaine in the bottom left-hand quadrant, the “feminine version of a Swiss Army knife” that belonged to Sarah Wentworth and was designed to be worn around the waist, its scissors and other handy household devices being easily available if required to modify or trim or otherwise enhance the overall domestic display. The flowers, also selected for their association with the house and with the gardening fashions of the time, are reminders both of life – somebody cut the flowers, somebody arranged them – and temporality. The way in which these “old-fashioned” flowers have been arranged, in a more casual-seeming contemporary way, seems to link the present day to the formality of an earlier time.

Arrangement and understanding: Chatelaine (2010), by Robyn Stacey, from the series Tall Tales and True, type C photograph.
Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased with funds from the Photography Collection Benefactors Program 2011. © Robyn Stacey. 

Robyn Stacey has built a significant reputation on her practice of photographing collections, not as a comprehensive, “scientific” process of documentation but as a process of arrangement and distillation. Her beautiful, dramatically lit images, with their allusions to the fashion for staged photography, position the essence of a much larger collection within a single frame. Stacey applies to Australian history a methodology that early Australian photographers applied to the contemporary sights and subjects that confronted them, collecting and placing and arranging as a means to understanding. Examples of “arranged” photographs abound in the exhibition: in Fred Kruger’s artfully organised collection of Victorian Aboriginals’ War Implements, Coranderrk (c. 1877), for instance, or Charles Bayliss’s Eight Lawrence Hargrave Flying Machine Models (1885), in which Hargrave’s models are grouped together for their family photograph, like bugs in a cabinet of curiosities.

By contrast, in the several examples of composite (or mosaic) photography in the exhibition, we can see how this process of arrangement followed by photograph – line up your subjects and then take the picture – is reversed. First comes the image (or rather images), then the arrangement. In 1867, Patrick Dawson photographed, in his Warrnambool studio, the members of the first Aboriginal cricket team to tour England. He then arranged the individual oval images within a larger oval, which is further contained within a conventional rectangular border: frames within frames. Some of the men are in cricket whites – one man bowls, another bats. Others are shown in a variety of sporting gear, holding a boomerang perhaps, or a spear. The poses seem highly staged to the modern eye, the visual references – to Indigenous culture, to Europeanisation, to cricket – are all over the place, but for all that Dawson’s Aboriginal Cricket Team of 1868 is among the most successful of the composite images of the period.

New South Wales Contingent. Soudan Campaign. 1885 (c. 1890), by Barcroft Capel Boake. Australian War Memorial

The variations of costume and pose emphasise the individuality of the men, while the formality of the arrangement points to their interconnectedness. We can see they are a team. A more ambitious, and more overwhelming, example of this composite or mosaic technique can be seen in Barcroft Capel Boake’s elaborately over-the-top concoction made up of individual photographs of members of the NSW military contingent to the Sudan campaign of 1885 (above) or, even more startlingly, in Henry Jones’s arrangement of oval portraits of Old Lady Colonists, completed in 1871. Jones has placed “hundreds of tiny paper photographs” of these pioneering women in rows of varying length, one above the other. The process took years. The final, composite image is both celebratory and anonymising. The effect is of a very early example of concrete poetry, in which form competes with content for the viewer’s attention, with neither quite gaining the upper hand.

These early composite photographs highlight, in a rather theatrical way, the natural human impulse to group photographs, and to use photography as a way of imposing order. Settlers in a new and unfamiliar landscape would have been particularly susceptible to this impulse to document and define, to capture individual moments and create pattern out of them. Indeed, the exhibition as a whole places a welcome emphasis on the interconnectedness of photographs, raising the question of whether a single image can ever really be seen in isolation. In an essay in the exhibition book, Martyn Jolly considers the extraordinary popularity of the photograph album in nineteenth-century Australia. Collections placed in albums were a means by which the owners also placed themselves, summarising their lives and their interests in order to be seen as they wanted to be seen. The global phenomenon of the photograph album became a means of locating its owner in the new world.

The images so carefully displayed in albums were typically in the form of cartes de visite. These small photographs, stuck onto stiff card, were originally intended as calling cards but rapidly become collectible for their own sake. Images of friends and family members, or of people one admired, envied or just liked the look of, interspersed perhaps with landscapes or architectural photographs, were combined between hard covers to form a curated version of the album’s owner. But just as photostreams and Flickr albums and Instagram accounts can’t hope to organise and contain all the images available online, so only a proportion of the vast numbers of cartes de visite would end up trapped in albums – the rest floated free, subject to no particular organising principle.

Here, on the gallery walls, surviving examples of these small images from the second half of the nineteenth century are displayed in grid formation, with the viewer left to make connections and comparisons as the eye is drawn to one image or another from among the many to choose from. Seen in this way, it is clear how the size of the images serves to contain the subject – individual portraits, family groups, landscapes and buildings, all are effectively miniaturised. It is no surprise that in this form they were eminently collectible.

At the same time as photography was capturing the Australian landscape and the resulting images were being stuck onto small pieces of card, it was also showing how vast and uncontainable that landscape could be, and how easily it could be imagined as extending well outside the frame. This effect can be seen in scientist and photographer Walter Baldwin Spencer’s wonderfully evocative View of Roper River, Northern Territory, Australia (1911), in which the river dominates the lower two-thirds of the frame as it can be seen extending to vanishing point in the background, or in the American Melvin Vaniman’s Panorama of Fitzroy Vale Station, Near Rockhampton (1904), in which the positioning of the trees suggests a repeat pattern that will stretch on forever on either side, far beyond the metre-long print. In the Spencer image, the landscape is in its natural state. In the Vaniman, it has been improved. Trees have been felled and houses built. Yet the serenity of the image suggests the full meaning of the word “improvement” – it is nature made even more aesthetically pleasing by human intervention.

Monumentality: Spirit of Endurance (1937), by Harold Cazneaux, gelatin silver photograph. Art Gallery of New South Wales, gift of the Cazneaux family 1975

Other, chronologically later photographs show a very different relationship to the landscape. Harold Cazneaux’s Soil Erosion Near Robe (1935), with its baldly factual title, demonstrates its theme by means of an aesthetically pleasing composition. A group of shells, appearing out of their natural element “forty to sixty feet above sea level,” is shown in sharp focus in the foreground, as if the shells have been brought there by a combination of natural forces and artistic intent. In one of Cazneaux’s most famous photographs, also included in the exhibition, we are clearly directed by the title – Spirit of Endurance – to see the huge gum, its roots exposed, its trunk hollowed out and its monumentality emphasised by the angle of the shot and the severe cropping of the image at the top, as an analogue of the resilience required for human habitation of this land, even as it may also lead us to reflect on the damage that human habitation can inflict. To the contemporary viewer, Cazneaux’s dramatically anthropomorphic image of the Australian landscape may seem to be overdoing it rather, particularly in the context of more recent work by artists such as Anne Ferran and Rosemary Laing, who aim to elicit a more reflective and cumulative response in the viewer.

Anne Ferran’s five large-format, monochrome photographs, taken from her 2008 series Lost to Worlds, show repeated views of a minimally differentiated patch of ground that occupies almost the entire frame. It is not certain that we would understand even this much without the benefit of the information in the exhibition book. We could, perhaps, be looking at the moon. What we are looking at, in fact, is the ground on which stood the Female Factory in Ross, Tasmania, which evokes the presence of the “women and children who lived and died there” between 1847 and 1854. Just as we are led by Cazneaux’s title, Spirit of Endurance, to see his photograph in a particular way, here we are led to infer the human presence that once occupied this site, and the reality of the suffering that was endured by those who were consigned there; the shadowy shapes on the ground become traces of that suffering. Ferran’s work reminds us of how difficult it can be to interpret an image based on the image alone.

Devoting more than passing attention to any single photograph will prompt us to wonder what happened before and especially after the photographic moment. Sometimes, with images of famous people or iconic landscapes, we roughly know the answers, but for the most part we do not. In that sense, photographs naturally encourage speculation. “When we look,” writes Judy Annear, “we inevitably compare – what a place or person was like then, with what they are now.” We imagine other photographs, in the form of a sequence that focuses on the same subject and stretches over time. Or, as Annear puts it, “we consider how these things might be next time they are photographed.”

Nowadays, putting that consideration into practice couldn’t be easier. The Everyday app (“life goes fast – capture it”) will remind you that it’s time for that daily selfie. Progression videos or flipbooks abound on YouTube and other platforms, compiling daily self-portraits that show the subject ageing over time – a year, two years, ten years. (The record so far seems to be twenty-seven.) Given that these compilations do answer our question about what happened next, to say nothing of next and next and next, it is curious how difficult it can be to resist the temptation to jump ahead and get it over with. The sequences lasting two minutes seem to run for a very long time and the five-minute ones feel like eternity. They tell us we are getting older, which does not in the end seem quite enough for a photograph, or a series of photographs, to say.

Sue Ford’s series Self-Portrait with Camera, comprising forty-seven images of herself made at intervals between 1960 and 2006, must be seen now through the prism of this current fashion for regular visual updates. Given the speed with which the practice of re-photographing has become a cultural cliché, it might be expected that Ford’s sequence of self-portraits would suffer as a result, but in fact her work gains by the comparison. It would not convert easily into a flipbook; instead, it is a meditation on the photographer’s relationship with the camera, with family and friends and subjects, and with her own photographs. In many of the images Ford’s face is obscured, by vegetation, by her hand or her hair, by her camera, and once by a joker from a pack of cards that she holds up in front of her face. The poses suggest a combination of self-deprecation and determination, of the blurred lines between photographer and photographed. The process of ageing itself seems secondary to the project – it is something both more complicated and more satisfying for the viewer, an autobiography in pictures.

Certain photographic genres are under-represented in this exhibition. Photojournalism, for instance. Not to mention glamour shots, mug shots (there are two, both of a certain Edward Kelly, one with beard and one without – “scar top and crown of head, eyebrows meeting”), aerial shots, or snaps of families and of holidays and of families on holiday, untold examples of which are held in archives across the country. Some might find that these relative absences, together with the emphasis on the nineteenth century, and on nineteenth-century portraiture in particular, unbalance the story of how “photography invented Australia.” But another way of looking at it is that a keen curatorial eye and expert knowledge of Australian photography have rebalanced the picture.

In our current fixation with the ubiquity of photography (updates on the total number of images in existence are now given in the trillions), we can forget that photography has tended towards over-production from quite early on in its history. The exhibition’s coverage of the carte de visite phenomenon provides a clear example. All of which makes choosing difficult. An exhibition that looks at the relationship between Australia and the photograph cannot possibly be comprehensive, or anywhere near comprehensive, but it can, as The Photograph and Australia successfully does, make new and illuminating connections across the full range of Australian photographic history. •

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The photographic image, once created, belongs immediately to the past. But aftermath photography adds further layers to this quality of pastness, inviting the viewer to pause, and to acknowledge and reflect on events that once, a little or a long time before the photograph was taken, caused great suffering and are still, in a variety of ways, causing suffering today. Images of the precipitating event – the battle or the bombardment or the natural catastrophe – rarely appear in aftermath photography; attention is paid instead to the results, which may be obvious from the subject of the image – a ruined building, for example – or may be elusive and even impossible to discern without accompanying explanation. Even with the benefit of additional information, the import of many aftermath photographs may remain oblique, to be inferred or guessed at or imagined. Such photographs often work by inviting us to compare the apparent ordinariness or serenity of the subject with what we are reminded once took place on that spot – the effect of the image is thus significantly altered by what we are told, in the exhibition captions or catalogue notes, or in some cases in text that is included in the image itself.

Aftermath photography capitalises on another inherent quality of the photographic image – its stillness. In contrast to the destructive action that has occurred at some point in the past, the aftermath photograph typically captures the stillness and the silence of what came next, whether that “next” is, to adopt the organising terminology of the exhibition, moments or decades later. Conflict, Time, Photography includes several images that were made just moments after the main event, among which is Luc Delahaye’s US Bombing on Taliban Positions from 2001. The title suggests action, but in fact it is if anything a landscape picture, its stillness and bare beauty enhanced and even exaggerated by the size of the print. Made with a large-format camera, the print stretches almost two and a half metres across the wall, the landscape it depicts bisected on a semi-diagonal by a trench that runs the full length of the frame. It is an aesthetically satisfying image, formal, composed, restrained. In the upper centre of the frame is the “aftermath,” the plume of residual smoke that betrays the bombardment that has just taken place. The sky behind is streaked with cloud. To the right, and far back into the exaggerated depth of field, are several more wispy plumes rising from the plain.

Luc Delahaye, US Bombing on Taliban Positions, c. 2001. © Luc Delahaye

This photograph from 2001 marks a deliberate change of direction for Delahaye, a Magnum affiliate who had been dashing from trouble spot to trouble spot as a successful photojournalist and war reporter. In an exhibition of his more painterly, post-conflict images, held at the Getty Museum in 2007, he was described as being newly focused on the “long-term implications of current events that go well beyond their initial moments in the headlines.” It is not an uncommon story, the action photographer whose interest turns to outcomes. At the same time as the action photograph was progressively ceding ground to film and video – from which, after all, a screen grab can always be extracted as required – photographers like Delahaye were looking to reinvest the still image with its capacity to hold the viewer’s attention over time, and to encourage contemplation. In this respect, the increasing popularity of aftermath photography is a function of the changing technology over the past fifteen years, and of professional photographers’ desire to retain the power of the still image to keep us watching. The moving picture does this – keeps us watching, that is, at least for a little while – almost by default, as it dances around on the screen. The photograph has to work harder to capture and retain our interest.

Other factors have also been at play, as suggested by an image in the “Moments Later” category of Conflict, Time, Photography, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s The Press Conference, June 9, 2008, The Day Nobody Died (2008), part of a sequence with the overall title of The Day Nobody Died. Broomberg and Chanarin travelled to Afghanistan in 2008 as photographers embedded with the British armed forces, a process widely believed to have left the practices of conflict journalism and photojournalism irretrievably compromised. “Embedding,” according to the exhibition notes, “is a system invented by the army to control the way journalists report from the theatre of war, and has led to a far more sanitised reporting” (a charge that has assumed the truth of repetition, without necessarily having being proven). Yet in reading Broomberg and Chanarin’s commentary on their own work, it is not always clear whether it is the practice of embedding that is the problem in this case, or the super-saturated age we live in, by which images that might once have been expected to shock or discomfit are no longer capable of evoking sympathy, even when, or perhaps particularly when, that is the clear intention. For Broomberg and Chanarin, “images that are constructed to evoke compassion or concern, pathos or sympathy” have become “increasingly problematic.”

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, The Day That Nobody Died, 2008, installation view. Broomberg & Chanarin

Of all the photographs in the exhibition, The Press Conference, June 9, 2008 is the most removed visually from the events it is inviting us to acknowledge and to reflect on. Viewed in isolation, it offers the fewest clues to the nature of its subject. In fact it is not a photograph at all in any conventional sense, but the result of exposing, in the burning Afghan sun, a roll of light-sensitive photographic paper. “On the first day of our embed,” the photographers recalled not long afterwards,

a BBC fixer was dragged from his car and executed and nine Afghan soldiers were killed in a suicide attack. The following day, three British soldiers died, pushing the number of combat fatalities to 100. That was followed by a suicide attack on a group of Afghani [sic] soldiers killing all eight. On receiving the news of his brother’s death in that ambush, another Afghan National soldier turned his M16 to his chest and pulled the trigger. The title of the project refers to the fifth day of our embed, the only day in which nobody was reported to have been killed.

In responding to these and other events, Broomberg and Chanarin “removed a six-metre section of light sensitive paper from our box, in the back of an armored vehicle which we had converted into a mobile darkroom, and exposed it to the sun for twenty seconds,” resulting in an image that almost, if not quite, creates itself, by relying not on the photographer’s eye but on “the temperature of light on that day, at that moment, in that place.” The image that was made by this method, on the day that nobody died, consists of bands and blobs of blue and white and orange stretched out across the gallery wall; it represents not so much a response to an event as a response to its absence. By Broomberg and Chanarin’s own account, the image constitutes an act of resistance against their official status as embedded photographers. It is an “invitation to contemplate,” an injunction “to look harder.”

During the period of their embed, Broomberg and Chanarin produced a half-hour video, also called The Day Nobody Died. It follows the journey of the box of photographic paper from London to Afghanistan, as it is first of all loaded on to the baggage travelator in London, then retrieved from the carousel at Baghdad airport, then lifted and transported by serving soldiers from one conflict zone to another. The journey of the box is described, in tune with the times, as a “performance,” and as a component in a kind of “Dadaesque stunt.” At the same time, it is clear from their commentary on the entire Afghan experience that Broomberg and Chanarin were not simply detached observers, playing games with the system, but were moved and unsettled by the events they witnessed, and stuck for an adequate response.

Their answer is, essentially, a political one. Faced with the much-remarked fact that there are an awful lot of photographs around these days, competing for our attention, Broomberg and Chanarin stress the need “to realise that even though so many are made, they are still so carefully controlled, by newspapers, by news agencies, by the state. We see very little of what’s really going on unless we look hard.” The Press Conference, June 9, 2008: The Day Nobody Died, to give it its full, deceptively precise title, encourages us to see what is really going on, ironically enough by showing us an image that could, without the context that the photographers provide, be about almost anything. It is the context, including the display of the image in an exhibition called Conflict, Time, Photography, that sets us thinking. Looking hard at the bright colours of the image, it is not entirely fanciful to see a blue sky overlaid by a white cloud, an analogue of the clouds and the plumes of smoke in Delahaye’s US Bombing on Taliban Positions.

Toshio Fukada, The Mushroom Cloud – Less than Twenty Minutes After the Explosion, 1945. Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo

Clouds and smoke recur frequently in aftermath photography, as embodiments of the traces left by the cataclysmic event, traces that have already changed and re-formed and that will continue to change and re-form over time. The Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, in memorialising the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sixty-five years later, photographs the sky every morning from the balcony of his apartment. In an image taken from Araki’s series “Tokyo Radiation August 6–15, 2010” (2010), date-stamped in the bottom right-hand corner, we are encouraged to read, in an otherwise unremarkable image of a cloudy sky, allusions both to the cloud of memory and to the immediate aftermath of the bombing itself, when a huge cloud, described by survivors as pink and orange, dominated the sky. This “late photograph” by Araki alludes to predecessor images by Toshio Fukada, made shortly after the bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. The Mushroom Cloud – Less than Twenty Minutes After the Explosion (1945), seems to pack all the consequences of the destructive force of that day into the thick, dense cloud that fills the frame.

The images on display in Conflict, Time, Photography span almost the entire history of the medium, underlining a contradiction in the exhibition as a whole that is never quite addressed. Aftermath photography is presented both as something new – a genre about consequences that is itself a consequence of recent changes in technology and the changing way we interact with images – and as something old, with roots in the early days of photography. As is the case with almost all photographic genres, examples of aftermath photography appeared very early on. Several of the images in Conflict, Time, Photography date from the mid nineteenth century, when photography was a laborious business, involving heavy equipment and delicate, time-consuming processes of image capture and development, with the prospect of rapid action shots still very much in the future. These limitations meant that photography was largely confined to recording stillness rather than action, the aftermath – or the prelude – rather than the event.

Aftermath images of the Crimean war, made by the photography pioneer Roger Fenton, continue to exert their influence on practitioners of the genre today. Fenton’s images of Valley of the Shadow of Death (1854–55), taken “two months later,” show a desolate, unpeopled road that had been relentlessly bombarded by Russian cannon. In one of the photographs (below), cannon balls are scattered across the road and alongside it. In a companion image, the cannon balls are largely absent, with only a relative few lying in the shallow ditch beside the road. Which of the images reflects the scene as it was? Had either setting, or both, been “dressed” beforehand? Were some cannon balls deliberately added between times, or some taken away? Such questions, when applied to photojournalism or street photography, genres that are predicated on the overriding importance of catching the true and “decisive” moment, continue to be urgently debated. Yet when applied to aftermath photographs the questions seem less urgent, even irrelevant. Indeed the exhibition contains many images that have been manipulated, amended or elided in some way in order to engage the viewer and elicit a response.

Roger Fenton, Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1854–55. Victoria and Albert Museum

Meanwhile Fenton’s road, extending as it does through the valley and on into the middle distance, continues today as a powerful trope of aftermath photography and the complex and never quite finalised outcomes of war and conflict. In Don McCullin’s The Battlefields of the Somme, France (2000) or Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s images from her series Train Stations of the Hejaz Railway (2003), we can see newer versions of Fenton’s early work, where the events that took place on this spot must be reimagined, and some sense made of what has happened since. Similarly themed photographs, not included in the exhibition, such as Paul Seawright’s Valley, taken in Afghanistan in 2002, can be read as direct homages to Fenton. Seawright’s image is both a prelude and an aftermath, alluding to violence that has happened and, in its depiction of ordnance on the ground, violence still to come. In all these photographs the sky, whether cloudy or clear, takes up the top third of the frame, suggesting our capacity to acknowledge and remember past catastrophes while looking beyond them, past the clouds and the smoke. But when the sky is excluded or squeezed out or almost entirely darkened over – as it is in the images derived from Sophie Ristelhueber’s series Fait (1992), a project she undertook seven months after the end of the first Gulf war – the effect is more claustrophobic, less reassuring, as if we are deluding ourselves if we think that we have learnt anything or that the future offers better prospects.

Looking at aftermath photographs, one thing is clear: with a few exceptions, they do not work by themselves. When they do, it is partly because of their iconic status – we already know the story without having to read the notes – and partly because the image is so strong in itself that the “story” is contained within it, without the need for explication. Don McCullin’s Shell-shocked US Marine, Vietnam, Hué (1968), included in the “Moments Later” section, meets both these criteria. It conveys its powerful impact without the need for explanation or context, without even the need for the caption. Shomei Tomatsu’s 1960s photographs of the aftermath of Nagasaki, particularly those showing the keloid scars on the faces and bodies of survivors, have a similar, stand-alone impact. And the same might be said of Pierre Antony-Thouret’s Reims After the War (1927), with the ruins of Reims Cathedral on stark display, the contrast between the building’s still obvious grandeur and its subsequent destruction making its own powerful point. But for the most part some context and explanation are required, if the viewer is to successfully make the link between the unseen, singular event – the conflict of the exhibition’s title – and the depiction of its aftermath.

Don McCullin, Shell Shocked US Marine, Vietnam, Hue, 1968. © Don McCullin

In this respect, many of the photographs, and the series of which they are often a part, smack too much of an idea, a thought-up project that meets the definition of aftermath photography but fails somehow to involve the viewer, as we feel we should be involved, in the process of memorialisation and remembrance and regret. Extracts from two projects by Taryn Simon illustrate the risks of this approach. In one of them, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2011), Simon documents the “impact on one bloodline” of the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. Some of the many components of what is in effect an installation are listed in the exhibition notes: “the large panel on the left orders members of one family directly related by blood.” Interspersed among small-format portraits are “images of bone samples and the reassembled remains of those who were killed,” followed by text and footnote panels, and film stills. Simon travelled the world for four years, pursing the aftermath of the massacre, researching bloodlines and the stories that arose from them. Her website lists some of the disparate subjects that came out of this period of intense and comprehensive research: “test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India.” In contemplating these disparate yet connected narratives, we are invited to also contemplate “the space between text and image, absence and presence, order and disorder,” which in the end seems almost too general and sweeping, too remote from the specific and terrible event.

Where aftermath photography is concerned, the space between intention and result is a particularly difficult one to bridge. Sometimes an aftermath photographer will articulate his or her personal passion for the project, as though something of that articulated passion might transfer itself to the images and heighten their impact. In the notes to Sophie Ristelhueber’s photographs of the aftermath of the first Gulf war, when the desert had been turned into a “scarred and damaged landscape,” we learn that Ristelhueber had “become obsessed” with her subject. Similarly, we are told in the catalogue how Paul Virilio “became fascinated by the monumental concrete bunkers” that remained as evidence of German coastal defences from the second world war. Photographs that Virilio made between 1958 and 1965 of these massive, proto-brutalist structures went on to form the sequence Bunker Archaeology, published in 1975 to accompany an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre. Not everyone is equally fascinated. For Alex Danchev, reviewing the exhibition in the Times Literary Supplement earlier this year, “‘bunker archaeology’ is boring,” suggesting how difficult it can be to transmit fascination, or obsession, from photographer to viewer.

On the other hand, the archaeology of the photographs themselves can hold its own interest. Virilio’s bunkers are monumental and a bit scary, even if the scariness is rather like something out of early Doctor Who. The distance in time between the end of the war and the taking of the photographs, some fifteen to twenty years, is not very great, not even half a generation, not long enough for these evocative structures to lose entirely their air of threat and danger. But in a much more recent photographic rendering of the same subject, arising out of what can be assumed to be an equal fascination with coastal defences, Marc Wilson’s photographs from a 2014 exhibition show these second world war bunkers and other oddly shaped, assertive concrete structures in a more benign, even nostalgic light, as they seem to be relaxing their vigilance and folding slowly back into the landscape.

Many of the photographs in Conflict, Time, Photography are drawn from longer sequences, which might have first appeared in books, for example, where the impact of the images is typically both cumulative and complementary. Isolated from their fellows on a gallery wall, they do not always work as well as they might. Others lose nothing, and perhaps even gain, from being singled out. Two photographs by Chloe Dewe Mathews, for example, are part of a larger sequence entitled “Shot at Dawn” (2013) in which Mathews records the sites where Allied soldiers were executed for desertion and cowardice during the first world war. Even without their companions, these two large-format images strike a note of high drama that fills the gallery space. On the other hand, Walid Raad’s My Neck Is Thinner than a Hair: Engines (2000–03), a composite image of one hundred photographs complete with notations, which harks back to the Lebanese civil war of 1975–91, gets a bit lost, despite its size. The individual photographs that make it up, hung together on the wall, are too small and too far away.

Atlas Group, Walid Raad My Neck is Thinner than a Hair: Engines, 2000–03. © Atlas Group and Walid Raad, courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery

When we look at My Neck Is Thinner than a Hair in the gallery, we are looking at an idea rather than a complete and realised work. But look at it online and the impact is quite different. The installation as a whole still seems a long way away, but when it is displayed digitally we can zero in on each of the hundred components and expand it to fill the screen. Raad has culled from the files of contemporary newspapers images of tangled metal and destroyed engines, the mechanical detritus of the epidemic of car bombs that plagued Beirut during the civil war. By the side of each photograph, the name of the photographer, if known, is recorded, and the date of first publication. In many of these photographs we see groups of men gathered round, half looking at the wrecked engine, half posing for the camera; the engines seem to act as surrogates for these men, foreshadowing their possible fate.

The individual photos, recovered from daily newspapers, were first collected and deposited with the Atlas Group, an online archive founded by Raad and others for the purpose of storing documents connected with the history of modern Lebanon. Included among the group’s digital files are some photographs taken by Raad when he was a teenager. Following the invasion of west Beirut by Israel in the summer of 1982, he set out with his mother to photograph the aftermath of the initial action. “I was fifteen in 1982,” he recalls, “and wanted to get as close as possible to the events, or as close as my newly acquired camera and lens permitted me.” In aftermath photography there is the crucial gap between the event and the making of the photograph. But there can also be a gap between making the photograph and making sense of it. “This past year,” Raad wrote in 2002, “I came upon the negatives from that time, all scratched up and deteriorating. I decided to look again.” In one striking image, its surface faded and damaged, we see a row of bombed-out buildings, with a plume of smoke rising from behind and up into the sky.

Raad’s anecdote suggests how the word “aftermath” can be applied not only to the period between the event itself and the time the photograph was taken, but also to the photograph’s continuing life, and our continuing propensity to respond differently and with greater understanding, according to how much time has passed. Against the increasingly common cultural perception that photographs are disposable – they are of the moment and the moment moves on – aftermath photography makes the case for the capacity of certain images to re-engage us over time. In that sense, the decision to arrange the photos in Conflict, Time, Photography according to how soon after the event they were made also has the effect of inviting us to reflect on what it means to “look again.” •

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We can follow the interactions of a group of scientists, Italian, American, Turkish, Iranian; we take in their talk around the water-cooler and coffee machine. Some have refugee histories, some did many other things before choosing this career; the brightly elegant Fabiola Gianotti, who will take over as head of CERN from 2016, once began to be a ballet dancer. The other woman in the central group, the younger Monica Dunford, is the most absurdly healthy screen presence you could imagine; when not in the main workplace, she is bicycling furiously or pounding the treadmill in the gym. Gaining virtual knowledge of them, we can still know little of the processes they are setting off, nor can we imagine what it means to talk of mass in sub-atomic entities. The images of the great ATLAS detector show us something of the actual machinery of discovery; the visible complexity is a marvel, stirring memories of old future-fantasies, the dreams of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. But we can get very little idea of how it works, and the film would have gained from some attention to engineers and technicians alongside the scientists.

All we can do is go with the flow. The film was co-produced by David Kaplan and Mark Levinson, both physicists, and directed by Levinson; they, with cinematographers Wolfgang Held and Claudia Raschke, and editor Walter Murch, turn the pursuit into intelligent entertainment. The film’s own daring resounds with that of the scientists’ project; Kaplan said, “You have to ignore how irrational it is to think that you make a documentary film about science when you have no idea what the ending is going to be, and you just plunge ahead and believe that at some point you’re going to get a compelling story out of it.” The compulsion is in the quest, and in the palpable shared obsession. At the point of arrival, the film-makers are saying that with the crucial particle identified, these scientists have gained the top of the mountain; and here they call in Beethoven, with the climactic passage from the Ninth. Some viewers found this quite offensive; I’d call it a bit of overly triumphalist excess. While the Collider itself is international and European, this film is American – profoundly so: a romantic affirmation of exploration as a major human right.

The part that matters comes a bit further on, when lines of speculation are explained. There’s some play with opposing views of the universe: “supersymmetry” (yes, there is something out there that loves us) versus the sprawling multiverse (no, there isn’t; there’s only indefinite, formless chaos). Along lines of connection that only these master-physicists understand, the determination on the mass of the Higgs boson will point us one way or the other. The needle settles in the middle. The implications, so far as they are explicable, will give comfort neither to believers, nor to such fiercely devout atheists as Richard Dawkins; but the confirmed agnostics, those who can believe only in deep uncertainty, may find it an intellectually satisfying outcome.

There are numerous explanations for the general superiority of New Zealand’s film-making over Australia’s. My own preferred theory is that their film-makers are blessed with better confidence than ours have in their home audience; they’re not looking sideways towards Hollywood, or away toward the sensitive European art film. Another part of it is the strength of the Maori presence, something the film industry inherits: you can go back, if you want, to the Treaty of Waitangi, and ask what kind of difference such a treaty (long called-for, delayed and therefore denied) might have made to Australian filmic storytelling. (Consider: if some Aboriginal directors – Ivan Sen, Warwick Thornton, Beck Cole – make stronger films than most, this could be because they’ve got better stories to tell, and a greater need to tell them.)

The questions are provoked again by The Dark Horse, a close-to-true story written and directed by James Napier Robertson about the troubled life and work of Genesis (Gen) Potini, played superbly by Cliff Curtis. Gen, diffident and incurably bipolar, is fatally at odds with the masculine Maori world of the small town where, stumbling around in search of a track for his life, he spends time in residential care. Emerging from the institution, he finds someone he wants to look after, his unhappy adolescent nephew Mana (James Rolleston, who had the central role in Taika Waititi’s splendid Boy in 2010). Mana, like others in his age group – both boys and girls – around the small town of Gisborne, is adrift; he is also threatened. The big tattooed bullies of his hapless father’s gang want to induct him into their version of manhood, a culture of violent bikie rebellion.

In thrashing rain, Gen sleeps under a sheet of plastic on the ledge of a monument. He wanders at night, compulsively muttering to himself; he’s an overweight shambles, his front teeth knocked out. There are theories about mental instability and skill at chess, but if they come into play here, it’s not to offer solutions. Despite his own homelessness, Gen manages to pull the kids together into a determined chess group. From the fast montage of the ensuing games, you could learn little more about chess than you might about advanced physics from Particle Fever; no matter, what we do know is that the tournament becomes a stiff contest of Gen’s young Eastern Knights against privileged young pakeha teams from well-resourced private schools. There’s grist here for your class antipathies; but think longer about the centre of the story, and the stark pain enacted by Wayne Hapi as Mana’s father Ariki. His ways of looking are enough to communicate the sadness of an adult male caught between the claims of his fatherhood and the need for approval from his own cohort. The gender issues are half-submerged; alongside Ariki, the women are marginal but vivid presences as teachers and mothers, and the girls are bouncing around, defiantly holding their own among the chess players. The issues are powerfully unstated; what matters is the conflict over what it can mean, in that world, to become a man.

The Dark Horse has won several well-deserved awards in New Zealand – best film, best direction and screenplay, best actor and supporting actor, best score for Dana Lund. Find it if you can; the dawn of Christmas means the silly season on the cinema circuits – “it’s a positive desert!” cried one cinephile friend. “There’s absolutely nothing to look at.” True, but not for long. Finding Vivian Maier should also be sought, a beautiful, complex, meandering work which, more darkly than Bill Cunningham New York, brings photography and cinema together. Co-directed by John Maloof with Charlie Siskel, the film is the story of Maloof’s own obsession; he made the recovery of Vivian Maier’s vast archive of great city photographs, and that of her own story so far as it can be known, his project. She lived from 1926 to 2009, working as a servant, a carer for children and the aged, and taking photographs in her time off with a Rolleiflex, always held waist-high. As she looked at her subjects from above the camera, she could meet their gaze, and the results are utterly remarkable. She left images of children, strays and layabouts, of anger, resentment, rock-bottom poverty, and their vitality is in the way they return the gaze and look back at us through her.

Maloof says that some of the art establishment still ignores her, but for others she is named along with Cartier-Bresson and Diane Arbus. If she really wanted to remain unknown, she has failed in the end, not only because the photographs communicate her great skill in perception, but also because there are so many of the worker herself – self-portraits, using mirrors and other reflective surfaces – in the 1950s and 60s; she is still young, clear-eyed, determinedly isolated, and manifestly lacking in the kind of feminine vanity taken in those years to be proper and normal. Then there’s the darker thread; the witnesses – mostly her long-past employers and charges – come out with their memories of her savage and punitive moments; and there are the French connections, offering other insights altogether. It’s clear that it’s the work, the enormous load of it, that has its claims, not the fragmentary and undramatic biography. There Maier, perversely as you like, sets her own heavy question-mark against our period’s major cultural obsession: the tireless burrowing into authorship, the relentless probing of love lives and pathologies. Curiosity granted, we could do with a great deal less of it.

Finally for Christmas, a salute to those valued confrères who have left the televisual scene. No matter how often I and others might have disagreed with Margaret or with David, or with both, their responses have been at all times worth having. I have regretted that they didn’t make more room for documentary, but then the program has always threatened to burst at the seams with filmic variety; the lineup of classics has been marvellous. The two have done everything to build and sustain a general consciousness of cinema as a vast array of works worth taking seriously, worth maintaining as a local industry and local culture, and always worth arguing over. That said, they’ve been great TV as well (though I have at times wanted to say: please David, that tie should be taken out and shot). I hope Margaret gets to keep all those fabulous little numbers, and the shoes. The dynamics were terrific, she with her passionate enthusiasms and great humour, he with his unfailing, gentlemanly liberalism and encyclopaedic knowledge. They’re irreplaceable. •

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With the centenary this year of the beginning of the first world war, the subject of memory and memorialisation – what should we remember and what should we forget? – has been very much in the air. The story of Hubert Rochereau’s bedroom has played directly into that debate. It has been picked up by news outlets around the world and continues to appear in a variety of publications and on social media. In one of a number of clips viewable on the web, we can see a television reporter from the BBC entering the room and being struck by the way it evokes a life. She smells the cigarette tin that contains cigarettes once rolled by Rochereau, and marvels that the odour of tobacco is still present. In a video clip from the London Telegraph, the present owner of the house, Daniel Fabre, speaks of this unusual legacy. When Rochereau’s parents reluctantly gave up the house, in 1935, they tried to impose a condition on all future occupants, that Hubert’s room would be preserved exactly as it was, for 500 years. As Daniel Fabre points out, the condition has no legal standing. But he abides by it all the same, just as his predecessors have done. “Whatever happens after me, I couldn’t care less,” he says at one point, but it is clear from the expression on his face that he does indeed care.

Wherever it appears on the web, this story tends to attract a lot of comments. Apart from the usual instances of comment-humour – is that a flat-screen television I can see in the corner? – most by far of the contributions from readers are reverent, reflective, a touch sentimental. The creation of this memorial to a son’s death may be untypical and extreme, but at the same time it is ordinary and perfectly understandable. What is 500 years, after all, in the face of so terrible an event? (This private and, until recently, little-known memorial echoes a more famous one to be found not far away, in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, where 642 citizens were murdered by the Waffen-SS in 1944; the village has been left exactly as it was, a memorial to the dead, the only changes being the slow and often imperceptible ones wrought by the elements.)

In several of the many photographs and videos of Hubert Rochereau’s room that can be found online, we can see, hanging above his undersized bed, an oversized, full-length photographic portrait of Hubert in the uniform of the Dragoons. He has that quasi-confident pose typical of such photographs, his moustache making him look, as was the point, older than his years. Such photographs were intended for the families and loved ones left behind, to function as reminders and mementoes during long absences and, should the worst happen, as memorials. The photograph, presumably placed in that resonant spot by his parents after his death, serves as a memorial within a memorial, linking the adult’s fate to the unfulfilled promise of childhood. The cigarettes and the items of military uniform draped around the room coexist with those schoolbooks neatly arranged in the bookcase, and the child and the adult merge. The purpose of such memorial spaces – arising from a need to keep things looking just as they were – is not so much to freeze time; not even in the extremities of grief is it easy to believe that time can be stopped. It is rather to force and reinforce the act of contemplation and to ensure that the past and those who lived in it remain meaningful and immediate in the present.

The photograph and the untouched room function in similar ways – they preserve the past and invite us to contemplate it. Indeed a photograph is a kind of analogue of an untouched room – the two seem to go naturally together. The Melbourne-born photographer Ashley Gilbertson, best known for his images of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has taken this conjunction as the subject of his most recent work, which has appeared in a number of exhibitions in the United States and Europe, as well as at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, and has now been collected in book form as Bedrooms of the Fallen. After a career spent in documenting action, Gilbertson has chosen to focus on inaction, on the stillness of the space that the dead soldier has left behind, never to return.

In this transition from action to stillness, Gilbertson is tracing in particularly clear lines a path that is followed in one way or another by many who pursue photography as both a profession and a calling – it is a path designed to regain for photography the quality of stillness by creating an image or images that give the viewer pause and demand something more than a glance. It is not so long ago that action photographs – the kind that Gilbertson himself took many of in Iraq and Afghanistan and other conflict zones – could achieve that arresting quality, but that time is passing rapidly. The action shot now typically creates not contemplation and imaginative entry into the scene, but rather an expectation of the next frame, as if it is just one frame in a film or a video sequence.

Gilbertson has articulated this dilemma directly, even to the extent of calling into question the validity of his own earlier work. In a brief but revealing interview he gave in 2011 to the New York Times, the paper for which he has worked consistently for over a decade, he responds candidly to the question of where his idea for a series on “bedrooms of the fallen” came from. “The whole project” – of photographing the preserved bedrooms of young soldiers and other military personnel who have been killed in action or otherwise died as a result of war – “was in response to my failed work in Iraq.” Gilbertson’s “failed” work in Iraq had by this stage received numerous awards, including Time’s Picture of the Year in 2004 and the Robert Capa Gold Medal, the latter placing him securely in the pantheon of photojournalism. Yet, as he says in the same interview, “I have a book called Whiskey Tango Foxtrot from the war, and I have trouble connecting with the images myself… and I shot them.”

When Gilbertson laments the fact that “as time went on, people became less and less engaged with pictures of war,” he is referring not only to his own pictures but also to the genre of war photography itself, and to the difficulty in an image-overloaded world of saying anything new, or of having any meaningful influence on outcomes. A few years earlier, in 2007, in an essay written with Joanna Gilbertson to accompany a sequence of his Iraq images that appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, he was already expressing disillusionment with his own work, while continuing to look for some greater impact in the future, expressing the hope that “people who don’t recognise it now may one day look back at my pictures and see the war for the mistake-riddled quagmire that it was.” But in Bedrooms of the Fallen he is placing his faith in another kind of picture, one that forgoes action for consequences.

Given that Gilbertson began with action as his subject, and it made his career, this is a significant departure. During his teenage years in Melbourne in the nineties, he photographed what he knew – the world of skateboarding, of young life on the street – developing all the while a strong if unworked-out sense of vocation and a determination to travel to the trouble spots of the world to document oppression and injustice. There was a stint in Kosovo, and then another, clandestine one in Irian Jaya. And then, by a process that he has described as accidental, he found himself turning into a war photographer, a transformation that occurred at the very moment when the nature of war and the nature of photography were both undergoing profound and irreversible changes.

The bedroom of Army Private First Class Karina S. Lau, 20, who died when her helicopter was shot down by insurgents on 2 November 2003, in Falluja, Iraq. She was from Livingston, California. Her bedroom was photographed by Ashley Gilbertson in December 2009.

By 2002, at the age of twenty-four, Gilbertson was in Northern Iraq, focusing more and more on photographing scenes of combat. His work from that period quickly drew wider attention and by 2003 he was employed by the New York Times, from where he rapidly established a reputation as one of the best contemporary combat photographers. He returned repeatedly to war zones, principally Iraq, risking injury and death on many occasions. And yet, by the account contained in his afterword to Bedrooms of the Fallen, Gilbertson was already questioning the validity of a twenty-first-century career as a war photographer. He saw himself as following a model from the past, one that no longer applied. “As I worked through Iraq over the years, I thought of images by photographers like Matthew Brady, David Douglas Duncan, Capa, and James Nachtwey, and the impact they had made.” But times had changed – it was now the age of the “embed,” of the photographer not as free agent and impartial witness but as just another actor in the drama, controlled and manipulated by “the system” much like everyone else. “I was the next generation of photographer trying to act like one from a previous era.”

Many of the great photographers of war and conflict, of both the present and previous generations, have worried out loud that in the end their photographs have no real impact – that the wars go on regardless. What is newer is the link Gilbertson draws between the failure of impact and the changing nature of photography itself. The world is awash with photographic moments, many of them depicting much the same thing, slightly different versions of photographs that have already been taken. Gilbertson has lamented that during his time in Iraq he was increasingly feeling as though “I was doing … the same picture over and over again.” Not only, by his own account, were his photographs too much like other people’s, too much in the shadow of past masters, but they were too much like one another. It might equally be said that Gilbertson is doing the same picture over and over again in Bedrooms of the Fallen; the difference here is that the sameness is part of the point. The sameness does not diminish the impact but heightens it. The similarities of the rooms, and of the way they are photographed, encourages us to look more closely and to uncover in the details of the compositions the differences in the lives the soldiers have left behind.

“Today, photographers often prefer to wait until an event is over,” says David Campany in his study of the shifting relationships between still and moving pictures, Photography and Cinema (2008). Far from capturing the fast-moving moment as it happens, “they are as likely to attend to the aftermath.” In Bedrooms of the Fallen, Ashley Gilbertson is attending to the aftermath. It is one of the characteristics of “aftermath photography” that, from the photographer’s perspective, most of the effort is expended before the photograph is actually made. It can take years to set up a shot. Bryan Adams’s candid images of British servicemen and women who have suffered terrible injuries, for instance – published in Wounded: The Legacy of War (2013) and currently on display at Somerset House in London – were in preparation for five years. Many of the subjects “were hesitant,” recalls Adams, “and understandably so… For many of these people it was the first time they had ever been photographed, never mind exposing their wounds.”

For Gilbertson, it was the parents of the dead soldiers who needed to be certain of the wisdom of the project, and in order to provide that certainty he needed to be patient. By contrast, the actual business of capturing the images amounted by Gilbertson’s own reckoning to only “5 per cent of the process.” Indeed it sometimes seems as though he is dismissing altogether the operational aspects of taking the photograph – he can be vague, for instance, about the equipment that he uses or prefers to use, as though that does not really matter all that much. For Bedrooms of the Fallen, he says only that he “decided to use a panoramic camera and an extreme wide-angle lens.” And, he adds, he also decided to present the images in black-and-white, in order to emphasise his own neutrality, though this neutrality did not preclude a capacity and a willingness to intervene and to set the rules.

From the time when the idea for a series was first mooted, in 2008, Gilbertson determined that he would photograph only the bedrooms of people who were still “at home” at the time of their deaths, rather than those who had gone on to have homes and families of their own, and only bedrooms that had not been substantially altered, or given over to siblings, or remade for other uses within the home. Importantly, they would only be bedrooms where the custodians – the parents – understood and supported what it was Gilbertson was trying to do, and were willing to make the necessary leap of understanding and to give permission for their child’s life to be documented in this way. The result, in Bedrooms of the Fallen, is forty double-spread photographs, most of them of the rooms of American servicemen – and two women – with a leavening of others from coalition partners: the United Kingdom, Italy, France, the Netherlands. One from Germany, but none from Australia; even though Gilbertson is on record as hoping to have included an Australian component to the series, it has not eventuated here. (Though we do glimpse a possible Australian connection in the room of Dutch Soldier First Class Timo Smeehuijzen, where a boomerang perches high up on a wall.)

The panoramic lens makes the rooms seem both spacious and squashed up. Where windows are included in the shot we cannot see very much out of them. When it is not completely blocked out by drawn curtains or blinds, the outside world usually appears as white light, with perhaps the faint impression of a tree branch just discernible. The rooms have a safe but claustrophobic air. In most of the photographs we cannot see the doorway. Where we can, the door is closed or opens onto darkness. An exception, the image of the bedroom of Airman First Class Carl L. Anderson, appears first in the series. Here the doorway is open, and we can see the hall and another door beyond. The hall is brightly lit, and within the bedroom the two portrait photographs we can see of Anderson, one on the wall and the other on his dresser, show him smiling broadly.

We get a strong impression here of the energy and adventurousness that led him out the door, but in most of the companion images any such impression is outweighed by the evidence of lives suddenly stopped, right on the border of youth and adulthood. The photographs, most of them taken between 2007 and 2012 (sometimes after years of back and forth with the families) already have an historically dated air – as dated in their way as the images of the bedroom of Hubert Rochereau. The technology, predictably, is what most clearly gives the game away. The televisions, computer monitors, boom boxes, speakers, all of them contemporary or nearly contemporary with the time when the rooms were last occupied, now seem squat and unfashionably clunky. CD and DVD towers (Stargate SG-1, The Shield) likewise speak of a world already in the past.

In many of the rooms there is at least one soft toy, alluding to the childhood of the room’s occupant, and placed carefully on the bed or visible on a bookcase or a desk. The soft toys most clearly contribute to the generally arranged impression that the rooms give, an impression that seems to complicate any idea that these bedrooms have literally been left “just as they were.” Not only the parents but also the soldiers themselves are likely to have contributed to this effect. Gilbertson speaks of the practice of “editing,” whereby those about to leave home on active service will, in preparing for any eventuality, edit or curate their rooms to ensure that families will not come across anything embarrassing or distracting; to ensure, in other words, that they leave behind the best impression. Each of these rooms, once lived in, is now on display – the items we can see, from uniform jackets to trainers to talcum powder, are functioning as exhibits, representing a life. We are invited as viewers to conjure up that life, its reality and its potential. The arranged stillness of these rooms does not, paradoxically, make them lifeless – instead it helps to put the life back into them. •

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Such is the case with the photographs that make up the exhibition Remember Me: The Lost Diggers of Vignacourt. The exhibition draws on a vast collection of glass-plate photographic negatives – as many as 4000 of them – taken during the first world war in the small village of Vignacourt in northern France by a young man called Louis Thuillier and his wife Antoinette. It was in Vignacourt that Allied troops, many of them Australian, were granted brief respites from the relentless fighting just a matter of kilometres away.

The story of how Channel Seven’s Sunday Night program discovered this treasure trove, which lay largely undisturbed and surprisingly undamaged for almost one hundred years, fits the traditional pattern of such quests for hidden treasure. The moment of revelation, when the chest (in this case, three of them) is opened and the jewels are found glittering inside, came only at the end of a long and arduous journey, full of disappointments, false leads and obstacles strewn along the way. Ross Coulthart tells the story in The Lost Diggers, a book that includes many of the photographs developed from the rediscovered plates, together with biographical information on some of the men whose images have been preserved, in such astonishing detail, by means of emulsion on glass.

As an experienced journalist, Coulthart is alive to the story’s inherent drama. It is a classic tale of loss and recovery, with resonances that go far beyond the photographs themselves to the lives and deaths of the people depicted in them. For the most part, it is soldiers we see, although civilians, including women and children from the village of Vignacourt, appear in some of the shots – as do, in an intriguing subset of perhaps half a dozen images, men dressed as women, actors from a visiting theatrical troupe.

Always implicit in the story Coulthart tells is the possibility that the photographic plates could have been lost forever – that their survival can be put down to a series of chances. Coulthart describes the moment when he and his colleagues opened the three chests that had been stored, as lost or forgotten treasure often is, in the attic, waiting to be discovered, long after the original owners had died or moved on. “We could hardly believe what we were seeing,” Coulthart recalls. “The battered boxes were filled with glass negative photographic plates, and for hours we held them up to the attic window light, revealing often perfectly preserved ghostly negative images… of Australian diggers, British Tommies, Indian Sikhs with massive turbans, and French, Canadian and American soldiers.”

Fittingly for a story about the recovery of lost photographs, this moment in February 2011 is itself captured on film. Coulthart – along with colleagues from Channel Seven, and with specialist help from Peter Burness, a historian from the Australian War Memorial, and other experts – had by this time been on the trail for two years, ever since his interest had been stimulated by an article in the London Independent describing the unearthing of another, if far smaller, cache of photographs from the first world war that included several images of Australian troops. The story of what Coulthart and his colleagues found and how they found it, told in a pair of documentaries screened on Sunday Night in 2011 and now relayed in The Lost Diggers, turned out, as such stories usually do, to involve far more than following a map and, in due course, finding the missing treasure.

For one thing, the treasure had already been found, some twenty-five years earlier, by an enthusiastic young Frenchman named Laurent Mirouze, a businessman, part-time journalist and history buff. Mirouze had tried by various means, including direct contact with the Australian embassy in Paris, to stimulate wider recognition of the significance of what he had come across. No one appeared particularly interested. “Laurent never heard back from anyone at the Australian embassy,” Coulthart records, registering, in an understated way, his surprise that such a potentially significant find could fail to attract even a nominal response. But perhaps it is not so surprising. A quarter of a century on, as the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war approaches, there is a new and ever-growing interest in the war and Australia’s part in it, together with a comparable growth in people’s interest both in family history and in revisiting the photographic past. Perhaps buried treasure is successfully unearthed only when the times are ready for it.

Recognising this mood of public readiness, Channel Seven made much of the discovery. In addition to the documentaries, it created what became and remains a popular Facebook page, on which the images were posted and comments – particularly comments that might help to identify some of the men in the photographs – were invited from the public. The response, records Coulthart, was overwhelming. Kerry Stokes, chair of the Seven Network, lent his personal support to the project, as a result of which “the entire Thuillier collection of around 4000 glass photographic plates was purchased from the living descendants of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, the couple who had supplemented their farming income during the war by selling pictures to passing Allied soldiers.”

Stokes has given 840 of the plates – most of them directly related to the Australian involvement in the war – to the Australian War Memorial. Of these, almost all, with the exception of forty or so that are too silvered or otherwise damaged to produce discernible images, can be viewed on a large touchscreen mounted in the exhibition space, as well as online at the War Memorial’s website. Many more images can be seen on Sunday Night’s website, which links to the Lost Diggers Facebook page. But the heart of the display at the War Memorial – and what makes a visit so worthwhile – lies in the seventy-four prints taken from the plates, impeccably conserved, developed (using mainly traditional methods), framed and hung. Presented in this way, on fibre-based paper that contributes to the extraordinary level of clarity and sharpness of the images, the prints communicate with a directness that is difficult to replicate on the screen.

IT’s important to remember that the images we see, whether online or displayed on the walls of the War Memorial, are not the images as they were seen by the subjects of the photographs, or by the friends and family in Australia who received their copies in the post. The original prints were in the form of postcards, hastily and cheaply produced before being sent on their way, sometimes with a brief annotation, sometimes without. While the photographic plates have survived remarkably well, the postcards have not; a few of those that do survive, yellowed and faded, are included in the exhibition, serving to emphasise even further the remarkable quality of the newly printed versions.

The postcards were proof that the men pictured on them were alive and well, at least at the time of dispatch. In an article about the exhibition in the spring 2012 issue of Wartime, the Australian War Memorial magazine, curator Janda Gooding notes how soldiers also “collected and traded photographic postcards as mementoes of friendships, and perhaps of mates lost.” In later wars, the men would take these kinds of photographs themselves. (As it happens, the article preceding Gooding’s in Wartime gives an overview of the vast number of photographs, official and unofficial, taken during the Vietnam war. “There were a lot of cameras in Vietnam,” we are laconically informed in the article’s sub-heading.) In France during the first world war, however, Australian soldiers were specifically forbidden, on security grounds, from carrying their own cameras. For any enterprising young French photographer, it was a ready market.

Louis and Antoinette Thuillier fitted the bill; they were enterprising in the manner required, and Louis in particular knew enough about photography for the couple to set up a courtyard studio and supply their customers with photographic postcards. First, they photographed the French troops who were billeted in the town or passing through; later came Allied soldiers granted their brief reprieve from the front. At some point, the Thuilliers introduced an added touch of professionalism: a painted canvas backdrop that has, miraculously, survived along with the glass plates, and is now hanging among the printed photographs, an exhibit in itself. The canvas backdrop, which appears in so many of these images, shows a double set of arches, lending a classical and even vaguely ecclesiastical air. The combination of the classical backdrop and the startlingly modern faces of the soldiers pictured in front of it acts as a visual embodiment of how we have grown to understand the first world war as an overwhelmingly disastrous clash, not just between opposing sides, but between the forces of tradition and modernity.

Most strikingly of all, and unusually for the substantial sub-genre that is studio portrait photography, in many of the images we can see the canvas backdrop in its entirety, with the floor of the courtyard and the brick or stuccoed wall against which the backdrop has been pinned acting as a kind of additional border. In some images, we can even see a doorway to the right of the backdrop, echoing the archways on the canvas, and leading who knows where. (This effect, of a backdrop against a background, generally found its way from the plates to the postcards without being cropped out or otherwise disguised.)

For reasons that are hard to specify, the images in which we can plainly see the boundaries of the backcloth against the workaday background of the Thuilliers’ farmyard studio are among the most moving and effective of all. The canvas functions as a kind of frame within a frame or, in several of the images, as a curtain, its left edge curling inwards and on to itself as if the whole thing, in its classical serenity, is about to be pulled aside to reveal the chaos and the bloodshed that is going on behind.

In many cases, the subjects of the photographs, sometimes on horseback or perched on motorcycles, sometimes grouped together in fours or fives or in even larger numbers, extend well beyond the borders of the backdrop, as if poised to burst out of the picture itself. The men on motorcycles seem to be emerging from the archways behind them, caught by the camera in a momentary pause in their journey from the past to the future. In one arresting image (above) – of a trio of soldiers, one sitting and two standing, and each of them wearing the sheepskin vests that were issued to soldiers to combat the severe winter of 1916–17 – we can glimpse, to the right of the main subject and beyond the canvas backdrop, the blurred outline of another soldier, presumably waiting his turn to be photographed.

OCCASIONALLY, what seems to be an upturned chair or a jumble of furniture lurks in the near-darkness, ready perhaps to be brought on as a prop for the next photograph. Farm animals and small children – including in some instances the Thuilliers’ young son – are sometimes drafted in to complement the composition, lending an extra element of informality. As is the case with many, perhaps all, of the best photographs of people, we get a sense of life beyond the frame. Here, the effect is complicated by the knowledge that, for many of these young men, there was not much remaining of their lives to be lived outside the photograph.

The composition of the images suggests a mixture of the professional and the amateur, a concern for some level of artifice and artistic control coming up against pressure from customers and the commercial imperative to just get on with it. For the Thuilliers, the lines of people waiting their turn must have severely limited the thought they could give to each composition. Yet, by a happy chance, this combination of professionalism and pragmatism, the artisanal commitment to doing the best job possible while still meeting the realities of the production line, seems entirely appropriate for capturing something essential about the Australian soldiers they are engaged in photographing. Image after image has an energy and a life to it that are not characteristic of studio photography of the period, as though the formal constraints imposed – or half-imposed – by the Thuilliers were not quite enough to damp down the personalities of the individual subjects.

The small repertoire of formal and fairly conventional “art director” touches – a chair here, a jardinière there – does not dominate; the overall impact remains one of naturalness and immediacy. This must be partly because the photographs were taken quickly, without elaborate preparations or set-ups. And while the exposure times necessary to complete the capture of an image would not have been counted in the nanoseconds of today, neither would they have been significantly longer; not time enough anyway for the poses to freeze into woodenness and immobility. A large element of spontaneity remains, as well as a discernible quality of fellow feeling from within the double portraits and the group photographs.

We do not get the impression that the participants have been thrown together at the last minute, as a way of making the queue move faster. Instead we get the sense – confirmed in some of the surviving correspondence to families, in which friends already mentioned in earlier letters are identified from within the same group portrait – that they have chosen to be photographed together. This is so even when the composition looks especially contrived, as it does in a photo in which five Australian soldiers, complete with apparently unlit cigarettes as props, act as a semi-circular frame or border to a smartly uniformed if slightly uncomfortable-looking Frenchman seated in the middle. Even here, despite the contrivance, a powerful air of good humour and goodwill emanates from the entire group.

The solitary Frenchman in this photograph acts as a reminder that the Thuilliers’ clientele was much wider than the prints at the exhibition can fully show. As Coulthart points out, their subjects came from across the full range of Allied troops and support personnel (including, for example, members of the Chinese Labour Corps, recruited by the British to undertake manual work). Remember Me acknowledges this aspect of the Thuilliers’ work by including among the printed images a small but representative sampling of these more “international” group photographs, and others can be seen as reproductions in Coulthart’s book and online. Looking at them alongside the images of the Australians raises questions about the extent to which we see photographs on their own terms and the extent to which we bring our own histories and preconceptions to the experience.

When we look at the portraits of the Australians, do we detect – beyond the obvious differences in clothing and appearance that tell us (usually) that they are not British or French or Indian or Chinese – a distinctive Australianness of character and bearing, or are we imposing it? The answer is probably more of the latter than we would generally care to acknowledge; but for all that, there is definitely something there, both in the way the Australians relate to one another and in how they present themselves to the camera, professional and soldierly on the one hand and yet faintly humorous and even a touch self-mocking on the other. Sometimes the humour is quite overt, as in the picture of the man with a duck on his lap; this droll soldier is identified as Private Herbert Alexander Mouat, 6th Battalion, who was destined to die, on 28 September 1918, of wounds he incurred in action.

The kind of humour explicitly displayed by Private Mouat, or implied in many of the other photographs, is not always present, of course; in some cases, the horror of what has been experienced is just too dominant in the men’s expressions to allow room for anything else. But overall, the Australian photographs do have something that is uniquely characteristic, distinguishable from the immediate impact on the viewer of the other national groupings – the splendidly uniformed dignity of the Sikhs, for example, or the quiet reserve and stoicism conveyed by the pictures of Nepalese soldiers, or the elegance and élan of the French.

Portrait photography – or, more specifically, pictures of people whose identities have been lost, rather than of historical figures or celebrities – encourages speculation. Who was that person, where did he come from, where did she go? (Many of the comments on vintage photography websites ask these often unanswerable questions, or versions of them.) This is particularly true of a Thuillier photograph, where, as Coulthart puts it, “the sharpness and clarity” of the image, “as well as its informality and good humour… invites the viewer and draws you into the story behind the faces.”

Yet the answers, the details of the story, where they do come to hand, can be strangely unsatisfying, perhaps because they can explain only so much. Coulthart’s The Lost Diggers includes a deal of biographical information gleaned both before and after the posting of the images on Facebook, yet as important as this process of identification and elaboration is – important for adding further to the historical record, for giving the men their full due, and for providing their descendants with as much information as possible – the real and lasting impact lies with the images themselves and the way that, individually and together, they encourage us to imagine ourselves into past lives.

LOUIS and Antoinette Thuillier appear to have given up photography after the war. Their life stories are as elusive as those of most of the people whose photographs they took, and as likely to remain so. Coulthart reveals that Louis died in 1931; echoing the violence of the war, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Unlike other famously “discovered” photographers, the Thuilliers are not likely to be raised to the pantheon of photographic genius; not in the manner, for instance, of Vivian Maier (1926–2009), documenter of Chicago street life over more than forty years, or the studio photographer known as Disfarmer (1884–1959), both of whose works were made known, and whose reputations were established, only after their deaths, and after their archives had come dangerously close to disappearing altogether into irretrievable obscurity.

But nor is the output of the Thuilliers of interest solely because of its subject matter. There is more to it than that. The Thuillier collection, created by chance and preserved by chance, is an example of what can result from a mutually supportive conjunction, in a particular place at a particular moment, of artist and subject, photographer and sitter. Louis and Antoinette Thuillier’s work suggests a combination of professional discipline and relaxed goodwill, both maintained under undoubted pressure. Their sensitivity to their subjects’ humanity emerges clearly from within the accepted conventions of a commercial photographer of the time, paralleling the same kinds of characteristics that coexisted within their subjects – that mixture of military professionalism and frank irreverence that so many observers of the Australian troops commented on at the time. Thanks to the Thuillier photographs, that mixture can still be seen, powerfully coexisting today. •

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Partly as a result of this striking photograph, McCullin’s early work was noticed and taken up by the London Observer. His career moved quickly from then on. First with the Observer, and later with the Sunday Times, sometimes on his own initiative and sometimes on assignment, McCullin travelled to many of the world’s trouble spots throughout the following two decades – Berlin, Cyprus, Biafra, Lebanon, Vietnam, Cambodia, to say nothing of many other sites of natural and manmade disasters, the names of which were not always familiar then and are largely forgotten now. But times changed, and he found that he could not go everywhere after all. He missed the Falklands war, for instance, when he was denied accreditation by the UK Ministry of Defence on the grounds that by the 1980s, with his career and reputation as a documenter of conflict now solidly established, he was too wily and experienced a professional for the ministry to be confident of keeping him under control.

It was an act of exclusion that continued to rankle for years afterwards. “I was heart-broken,” McCullin recalls in his autobiography, Unreasonable Behaviour. His reputation for getting at the visual truth had begun to count against him. In the 1960s and 1970s McCullin had been the man who, through a combination of courage and talent, could be entrusted with the task of penetrating conflict zones and bringing back images of what it was really like. In fact, he would bring them back quite literally, typically carrying the rolls of film himself and developing them when he got home, thus continuing through the whole process of producing a photograph and remaining physically close to the images of cruelty and suffering he had captured. “Even my darkroom is a haunted place,” he says in Jacqui Morris and David Morris’s revealing film of 2012, McCullin, in just one of many references he has made, in interviews and in his own writing, to his inability to let go of the horrors he has witnessed.

Having thrived throughout the golden age of photojournalism, McCullin has continued to bring a distinctive eye to scenes of human tragedy and resilience using a larger range of photographic genres, including landscape, portraiture and social documentary. Over 150 examples of McCullin’s work, taken between 1958 and 2011, can be seen in the exhibition Don McCullin: The Impossible Peace, curated by his friend and colleague Robert Pledge and now showing for an all-too-brief period at the State Library of New South Wales. It is the first time that McCullin’s work has been shown in Australia as part of a curated exhibition. The images on display also appear, with accompanying text, in a book of the same name, published in 2012 to coincide with the staging of an earlier version of the exhibition at the Palazzo Magnani in Italy, itself a sign of the increasing regard in which McCullin is now held.

This recognition comes at a time when the impact of the photographic image, and particularly images of violence and inhumanity, is much discussed. On the one hand, we now almost routinely question the capacity of the single image to hold our attention or to influence us one way or the other beyond, at most, a small moment of engagement. We are entirely overwhelmed by images – so the argument goes, and has gone for some time now – to the point where it is difficult to distinguish one from the other, or to retain any of them in our heads. A never-ending photostream rushes on, leaving no residue. “It has become a cliché of the cosmopolitan discussion of images of atrocity to assume they have little effect,” wrote Susan Sontag in 2004, going on to express scepticism over an opinion she had once held herself. On the other hand – runs the counter-argument – the single, stand-out image can, on occasion, and despite all the competing images that we come across every day, still have the power to shock and to motivate into action.

Yet even accepting that images, or certain images, can “have an effect,” it is difficult to define exactly what that effect might be, and what action it might lead to. Viewers can be moved enough by photographs to become donors, for example, to organisations providing disaster relief or support for refugees and for people displaced by conflict. They might even participate directly in relief programs and, in some cases, dramatically change their lives in the process. And an image can, if it strikes enough people in the same way, be a spur to political action. It is widely assumed, for instance, that Nick Ut’s photograph of a young girl fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam war helped to end that war. But such instances are not common, and are arguably less common today than they were then. And even when it can be shown that a photograph has had an impact, the impact is not always positive. In very recent times we have seen the disturbing ways in which photographs and videos, shocking in themselves, can be both created and deployed by combatants – participants in conflict rather than professional observers – to frighten and provoke their ideological enemies.

Watching: An East German soldier looks back at a West Berliner over the newly constructed Wall, West Berlin, August 1961. Don McCullin/Contact Press Images

McCullin has always been very aware of the question of what difference, if any, and in particular what positive difference, a photograph can make – of whether a picture of human aggression and suffering can play any part in preventing such aggression or alleviating such suffering. He has given voice to these doubts even as he has been repeatedly drawn to document scenes of violence and conflict. “I wouldn’t like to go through a year without being in a war,” he said in an interview earlier on in his career. (Sontag, a great admirer of McCullin’s work, said something very similar about herself: “I guess I go to war because it is my duty to be in as much contact with reality as I can be and war is a tremendous reality in our world.”) McCullin is also very aware that not everyone will see his photographs in the same way, that some will feel compelled to look and some to look away. As one who is himself compelled to look, McCullin often describes how his photographs are almost drawn from him, by subjects wanting to make contact, to have their often life-threatening predicaments recorded – and perhaps, in doing so, to prevent the inevitable, the moment of death that the photograph tells us is just about to occur.

“In the corner of my eye I could see the albino boy,” he says of the subject of one of his most unsettling photographs, taken in a Catholic mission in breakaway Biafra in 1969, where nuns and medical personnel were struggling to help the injured and starving victims of the civil war. “He was haunting me, getting nearer,” recalls McCullin, until the boy got close enough to touch the photographer’s hand. Only after that, when he has given the boy a sweet from the small stash in his pocket, and the boy has moved away, does he photograph him. It is the kind of story that McCullin often tells, of a physical or emotional connection that he feels with his subjects, and from which he derives a kind of unspoken permission to capture them on film. Human sympathy combines with professional determination, out of which comes the photograph. But to what end? “I would like to think” he said of the pictures he took in Biafra, “that these images brought help to the beleaguered hospitals with their dying children,” but he thought then and continues to think that whether they did have that effect is an unanswerable question.

McCullin is of course far from being the only “photographer of conscience” to wrestle with these issues, and to question his own motivations and practice. The Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, for instance, asks if we can “really point to things that have actively changed because photographs were made.” Her own answer to that question amounts to an expression of hope for the future, that we will get better at using photographs to influence social policy and encourage political involvement, that we will get better at using photographs “to create possibilities for engagement,” a phrase which in its hopeful vagueness seems to taper off into the unknown. McCullin has offered various answers over his long career, but in recent times he has favoured almost religious terminology in trying, retrospectively, to define what he was after in photographing people in extremity. “My ultimate aim,” he says in an interview included in the book of The Impossible Peace, was “to show the shame of the destruction of human beings who have committed no offence, no crimes. I wanted to portray the dignity of their suffering.”

McCullin’s interest in photography began when, as a national serviceman in Kenya during the time of the Mau Mau uprising, he was assigned the routine task, back at base, of operating a bulk-processing machine to develop aerial photographs that would provide RAF crews with detailed and up-to-date information about prospective targets up country. “The intelligence people used these pictures for next day’s offensive against the rebels,” he explains in Unreasonable Behaviour. The dilemma, which he has faced throughout his career, was thus there from the very beginning, even before he recognised that a life as a photographer was where he was heading, namely that photography is quite as capable of facilitating human suffering as it is of exposing and alleviating it. It is an issue on which he has shown some sensitivity. In interviews he has bristled at the possibility that people might think that, by his presence in places where terrible things happened, “I was okaying it,” or that the presence of the camera around his neck might in fact produce an event that would not otherwise have taken place.

These are the kinds of impossible questions that McCullin has returned to again and again over the decades. This has had the paradoxical effect of focusing attention even more closely on what is, after all, only one aspect of his work – the photographs of war – while the other genres he has worked in have received relatively less attention. “I am always trying to throw off the cloak of this title of ‘war photographer,’” he says. Yet even here, in relatively less controversial, “safer” genres, he gravitates towards subjects – famine, homelessness, displacement – in which suffering is exposed (as in his 1969 photograph of the homeless Irishman, which appears on the cover of the book of The Impossible Peace), or violence and threat lurk beneath the apparently placid surface. It seems that, even in the classical beauty of his unpopulated photographs of ancient Roman sites, the thought of war and human suffering is never far away. “While I was admiring these amazing monuments, extraordinary, fantastic, romantic spots, I was feeling that beneath the sands there would be the souls of people who had been felled, or starved in the fulfilment of a dream.”

Seeing numbers of McCullin’s photographs together, in an exhibition or in one of the many book collections of his photographs, is a reminder of how structured they are, how thoughtfully if instantaneously composed. McCullin’s photographs often play on a kind of double perspective, whereby we the viewers are watching somebody else engaged in watching. The act of looking is present within the photograph itself, emphasising our own distance as viewers – standing in a gallery, gazing at a framed image on the wall, or paging through a book or a slide-show – from what is going on in the photograph. He is particularly strong at photographing small groups of people, often with one or more individuals visually separated from the others, either looking or being looked at. These photographs appear as both spontaneous and staged. We might be tempted to see one of his most arresting images, from Northern Ireland – of two women, half shrouded in what appears to be their own doorways, watching riot troops storming past their houses – as a lucky accident, a moment in time that could not have been anticipated, were it not for the fact that the structure of the photograph carries McCullin’s signature within it, whereby people are caught watching, often in trepidation, events over which they have no control.

It is sometimes said, of McCullin and other photographers who document human suffering and vulnerability, that the effectiveness of an image will depend on its capacity to pull the viewer into the photograph and convey something of what the inhabitants of that image must have felt at that moment. But the great strength of McCullin’s photographs is that they do not play to our capacity for sentiment or easy emotional identification – if anything, they emphasise the distance between the reader of a newspaper or browser in a gallery and the documented event. They challenge us with the difficulty of making connections. McCullin, while avoiding fatalism, manages to imbue his photographs with a kind of realism that runs against any idea that things can somehow just be fixed. In three otherwise quite different examples from the 1970s, all included in the exhibition – of people in deckchairs sunning themselves on the promenade in Eastbourne, of children in a bedroom of a rundown house in Bradford, and of two Catholic boys being arrested in Londonderry – the composition is strikingly similar. Four figures in a row, with one of them to one side, slightly separated from the others.

Whether danger is obviously present, as in the photograph of the boys in Londonderry, or present only in the shadows and the clouds in the otherwise benign shot of people relaxing in Eastbourne, the eye goes inevitably to the separated figure, the one who does not quite seem part of the group. It is this fact of separateness, of what it might take to bridge the gap between ourselves and others, that animates McCullin’s work. He is on record as objecting to having his work defined as art, fearing perhaps any implication that he has seen the people he has photographed merely as subjects, facilitators of his own artistic vision. But in a passage in his autobiography he seems more comfortable with the definition, if being an artist means bringing to people’s attention the things they need to attend to. “I felt,” he says of the photographs he took during the Cyprus conflict, “as if I had a canvas in front of me and I was, stroke by stroke, applying the composition to a story that was telling itself.” •

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Now in her late eighties and with her memory fading, Bown nevertheless retains her eye for the telling detail. Early on in Looking for Light she recalls a visit she made to Paris with a friend when they were both in their mid-twenties. Her friend “wore a green hat,” Bown remembers, “and I wore a red hat.” Later in the film she recalls, with a mixture of stoicism and regret, her youthful presence at her mother’s funeral. Again she retains in her mind the telling detail, and again it is a hat. “I was wearing,” she says, appearing to conjure up the scene in her mind, “a little black beret.”

Hats and hair have always fascinated Bown. “She loved the tops of people’s heads,” says the photography scholar Patricia Holland in one of a number of illuminating comments she makes in the film. Hair, in Bown’s images, whether luxuriant or sparse or somewhere in between, frames and crowns and defines the face underneath, appearing in some cases almost to have a life of its own. Individual strands are discernible, the light bouncing off them to convey texture and substance. For many years Bown used the same Rolleiflex camera, long after that particular model was superseded, for “its remarkable capacity to capture every little detail and texture,” including the detail and the texture of hair. (In 1964 she changed to an Olympus SLR – “I take two cameras and indoors I generally have them set at 1/60th at f/2.8,” she said in 2000, in one of her typically spare comments on the technical details of what she did for a living. She hit it off with Elia Kazan because he knew immediately, by watching the way she prowled the room looking for light, what settings she would use.)

Occasionally, the sitter in a Bown photograph appears wearing headgear of some sort. It may be a fanciful observation, but it often seems that the hatted among Bown’s many subjects – as distinct from the hatless majority – are the truly super-sized personalities, the self-created and the very much larger-than-life, the ones who required something extra to hold them within the frame. Among these are the images of Boy George (1995) in an outsize black hat, decorated with bejewelled horns, or Eartha Kitt in a headband (1970), with her trademark stern yet sultry expression, or Cecil Beaton looking arch and manipulative in an astrakhan (1950), some of them viewable in full-screen mode at the Guardian webpage dedicated to “Jane Bown: A Life in Photography.” Hats can be seen as a component of the personality of the sitter, and Bown clearly saw them that way, but when it comes to what might be called external accessories – chairs, for example, or mirrors – she only rarely introduces them into the frame. She does quite often make use of the subject’s hands, however, in rather the way that she uses hats to position or help to define the head, as in her famous portrait of Björk.

Jane Bown’s portrait of the singer Björk. Hot Property Films

The portrait, which is lingered over in the film and also appears on the cover of Bown’s book Faces: The Creative Process Behind Great Portraits (2000), shows the singer’s head in extreme close-up, with only her eyes, and of course her hair, visible. The remainder of her face is covered by her hands, the freckles on her nose visible between splayed fingers. In Faces, Bown provides a brief paragraph of commentary on this photograph, as she does on each of the 300 or so portraits included in the book; often these comments are rather flat and suspiciously academic-sounding, as though channelling someone else’s analysis of what Bown herself has instinctively just gone ahead and done. The comments on her photograph of Björk, however, do seem to carry her tone of voice, modest with a hint of steeliness, providing an insight into the contradictory – and splendidly productive – nature of her methods.

On the one hand, she says, Björk “did all the work.” This is the kind of phrase that is characteristic of Bown when commenting on her own output – the idea that the photographer is there simply to catch the right moment, that it is in fact the subject who will “produce” the image for the photographer to capture. The journalist Andrew Billen, who often worked with Bown on assignment, recalls in Looking for Light that “her great phrase was ‘ah, yes, there you are,’” as if to say that her methods – calm and patient, exploratory but efficient – would unearth what was already present and make it visible. But even in the brief paragraph of commentary on the Björk photograph in Faces, we get the distinct impression that it was rather more complicated.

“You could take a hundred pictures of her and every one would be different,” she says, going on to describe the singer, with acerbic affection, as “very unusual and theatrical.” Bown sensed, when she took that shot of Björk, that it would be the one. It was “quite obviously the best,” she says in Looking for Light, suggesting that she recognised how going some way towards anonymising her subject was the key to revealing her; by dampening down Björk’s theatricality she would uncover something more natural and unforced, something more real.

As with all great artists who claim that what they do is really very simple, Bown’s simplicity – the unassuming woman who turns up to photograph a celebrity, spends ten minutes on the task, shooting one or two rolls of film at most before leaving as quietly as she arrived – seems less and less simple the more you look at it. “I was self-effacing and apologetic,” she recalls in Looking for Light; “I wasn’t threatening.” Friends and former colleagues speak affectionately of how, particularly when she became something of a celebrity herself, she often had no idea who the famous people were whom she was photographing, or what they were famous for. No doubt this version of Bown is accurate as far as it goes, but there is also a strong impression of a myth being built up and reinforced until it takes on its own life.

Other comments, by Bown and others, suggest an approach that was rather more deliberate, a feigned unworldliness designed to lower the defences of her subjects. “She was good at putting people at their ease,” says the journalist Polly Toynbee, recalling the occasions when she worked in tandem with Jane Bown in the seventies. “She lulled them into a sense of false security,” says Gary Woodhouse, who was picture editor at the Observer during much of Bown’s tenure. But however deliberate she may have been in her strategies, the “sense of security” that Bown instilled in her subjects was not false.

They were right to trust her. Her portraits do not trap people, or trip them up. Neither do they flatter; instead they convey the sense that we the viewers are seeing them truly, whether or not they are looking directly into our eyes. (Only two people, she says, ever objected to her version of them; the novelist and journalist Martha Gellhorn, and Svetlana Stalin, who felt Bown made her look like a frog.)

Though much is made of Bown’s quality of human sympathy, and her ability to connect with her subjects even in the brief time that was frequently allocated to her, it is something of a paradox that some of her best images were obtained when the session did not go at all well. Her most famous portrait, the one that appears at the top of this article, is of Samuel Beckett. Taken in 1976, it shows Beckett full-face, with lips set, his eyes looking not-quite-directly ahead. The picture glows with the multiple tonal variations of Bown’s beloved black-and-white. Beckett’s silver hair seems almost over-lit, giving the impression of some kind of natural geological formation rather than mere hair. The Auden-like creases in his skin make him if anything more rather than less handsome. He was, Bown recalls, deeply uncooperative and ungracious, allowing her time for only three shots – in the end she managed five before her time was up. With one of those shots she hit what she sometimes refers to when discussing her photographic methods as the “jackpot” – the Björk-like moment when she knew at once that she had what she was looking for. It is both her best-known photograph and the photograph that defines Beckett.

As the title of Dodd and Whyte’s film suggests, light was everything to Bown, as perhaps it is for most photographers. But she pursued light with an unusual degree of single-mindedness. Famously, Bown never used a light meter, instead checking the available light by looking at the way it fell on the back of her hand. If she was concerned that it might be getting dark by the time she arrived at her assignment, or that the location might not have access to sufficient natural light, she might take along a 150 watt bulb to fix into an obliging table lamp. Or she would, according to Andrew Billen, sometimes bring along her own Anglepoise lamp, thrust into a shopping bag to be drawn out as required. These stories of the bulbs and the lamps seem to sum up her approach – artisanal and low-tech, responding to the moment.

She would buy her cameras secondhand and keep them for ages, feeling no particular need to upgrade or to try out the newest model. In a way she kept on taking the same sorts of pictures for fifty years or more, eschewing phases or periods or distinct shifts in photographic direction or any tendency to adopt the latest technical breakthrough. Bown stuck to the rails, in the words of photographer Don McCullin, doing what she knew best, resisting any temptation she might have felt to seek out new and radically different kinds of subject matter. The co-director of Looking for Light, Luke Dodd, who has spent recent years helping to collate the vast repository of Bown images as archivist for the Guardian/Observer, recalls in his introduction to a book of her photographs, Exposures (2009), that “she once told me how she thought it impossible to take a bad picture abroad.” Dodd interprets the comment as “acknowledging the easy exoticism of images from other cultures.”

It is also a kind of coded warning on Bown’s part, not to take too literally what she has often said elsewhere, that the subject makes the photograph. Sometimes too much choice – the availability of ever more interesting or unusual subjects to photograph, using ever more inventive methods and techniques – is a constraint on creativity rather than an artistic liberation. It was important to Bown’s success as a photographer that she rarely chose her own subjects – most of the time she was on assignment, photographing what she was told to photograph. This regular but not overly demanding pattern of work – two assignments or so a week, often in people’s homes, or in hotel hospitality rooms that became very familiar to her over the years – seemed to fire her creativity rather than dull it.

She had her methods – her rails, as McCullin calls them – and she stuck to them, sometimes repeating devices or motifs to get what she wanted. Her superb portrait of the actress Diana Dors, for example, taken (or “made,” to use Bown’s preferred term) in 1970, echoes a studio portrait of a “Mrs Gestetner” from twenty years earlier. In each of the portraits (they both appear in Bown’s book Faces) the subject is shown touching the end of a string of pearls she is wearing, as though she is actively participating in the creation of the composition.

The impression of human depth in these photographs of women in pearls comes partly from the combination of artifice and naturalness. Dors has adopted a pose, holding on to those pearls with forefinger and thumb, in a way that conveys deliberateness and forethought. Yet the overall impression is one of naturalness and vulnerability. In photographing celebrities, Bown was engaging with people who knew the rules of the game, people who were difficult to catch “off guard.” It is one of her great strengths as a photographer: the fact that she did not attempt anything so underhanded as to trick her subjects. As Patricia Holland puts it, she does not look for “that crude moment of exposure that some photographers go for.” Rather she is able to draw out, in image after image, the qualities of naturalness and humanity that can be found within the poses that all of us, celebrities or not, instinctively adopt when we know we are being photographed.

In Looking for Light and elsewhere, Jane Bown refers to her career as having come about by accident. The stories, as such stories do, hone themselves by repetition. In recognition of her wartime service in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, she was offered a grant to study for two years in order to gain a professional qualification. Unsure what she wanted to do, she took up the suggestion of a friend to “try photography,” studying under Ifor Thomas who was, along with his wife Joy, an inspiring and influential teacher at the Guildford School of Photography in the postwar period. A picture editor admired Bown’s portfolio, particularly a disconcertingly close-up photograph of a cow’s head, in which an eye dominates the frame rather like the eye in Buñuel’s early surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (1929). Before long, says Bown with typical self-depreciation, “I found myself working for the Observer.” Her long association with the Observer, and those increasingly regular assignments to photograph famous people that it entailed, has inevitably come to define her work.

But the people Bown photographed during her career were not always famous, and often the photographic subject did not include people at all. “When I first started I used to photograph funny things,” she has said, “like cabbages and snow.” In 2007 the Guardian staged an exhibition of Bown’s lesser-known work entitled, a bit cutely, The Unknown Bown, using images drawn from its Bown archive. In her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Germaine Greer remarks admiringly that “it goes without saying that Bown never uses flash,” the clear implication being that Bown herself is never flash, never one to be seduced by special effects or tricksy lighting – nor, by extension, by the easy lure of celebrity, in herself or in others.

Her early, non-portrait work, much of it dating from the 1950s, is particularly effective at conveying a kind of romantic down-to-earthness, the cabbageness of a cabbage, the leekness of a leek or the snowiness of snow. This quality remained in the portrait photography that, from the early sixties, she was increasingly to concentrate on. “She has no truck,” says Greer, speaking of this later work, “with the generation of glamour images, and hence her portraits seem truer than those of other photographers.” One of Bown’s great strengths is the ability to photograph people – people whose biographies lay claim to some kind of distinction – in such a way as to humanise rather than either glorify or undermine them, to take her subjects, as it were, at face value.

Looking for Light captures Bown’s self-effacing single-mindedness as a photographer, to the extent perhaps of over-emphasising her lone way of operating. In fact, as we learn from snatches of interviews, her early and complex family life – she was “illegitimate,” without knowing for many years who her father was – led her to place a particular value on relationships and particularly on family life, her own and other people’s. One of the reasons she stayed so long at the Observer – her entire career, in fact – was that she regarded it as family.

An aspect of her approach to photography that is not much explored in the film is the effect on her work of the practice of working “in tandem,” the journalist and the photographer sent out together on assignment. Often Bown had to stake out her ten minutes where she could, at the beginning or the end of the interview. (Though as Bown’s own fame grew, people’s attitudes changed; her colleague on the Observer, Nobby Clark, tells a tale of being sent as a last-minute substitute for Jane Bown, only to be greeted with extravagant disappointment by the judge who was the subject of the shoot.) Sometimes, if the journalist and the interviewee were both agreeable, Bown would sit in on the interview and catch her subject in mid-flight. Her portrait from 1977, of Mick Jagger laughing, was obtained in this way. “Shots of people laughing do not often work,” she commented, “but I like this one.”

Among Bown’s professional partners at one stage of her career was John Gale, a former foreign correspondent who was later assigned to duties closer to home, including background features and celebrity profiles. Gale, referred to briefly in Looking for Light as “a big, jokey man,” was, like Jane Bown, someone for whom, despite his wild ways, family was paramount. His account of a half-year-long journey through Africa, Travels with a Son, was published in 1972, only two years before his death by suicide. Travels with a Son – the “a” in the title hints at Gale’s quirky point of view – is a movingly unsentimental depiction both of Africa and of his own relationship to his family.

Earlier, in 1965, Gale had produced an autobiographical volume, Clean Young Englishman, which chronicles among other things his flights of derring-do as a foreign correspondent, and the later onset of madness. It contains, towards the end, a single reference to Jane Bown, with whom he had been sent on an otherwise unexplained assignment to Blackpool. (“You knew,” says Gary Woodhouse in Looking for Light, “that if you sent them out together you’d have got something”):

One sunny afternoon we walked down the pier and watched fishermen catching plaice.

“See that man over there in a baseball cap and glasses?” I said to Jane. “He looks just like Epstein, doesn’t he?”

Jane agreed. She had met Epstein several times.

We walked back from the end of the pier, and by the turnstiles we saw an evening paper hoarding: “Epstein dead.”

The man that looked like Epstein had vanished.

In Jane Bown’s beautiful portrait of Jacob Epstein, taken in 1958, not long before he died, the sculptor is shown in his studio, where he is kept company by a variety of heads in progress. He is wearing a cap, as was his habit. It would be nice to have on record more of the conversations that Bown and Gale engaged in while on assignment together, of likenesses and caps and the art of catching the essence of someone before they vanish. •

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Google Street View, by now a way of life, made its first appearance on our screens in 2007. In the company’s characteristically casual and upbeat account of those early days, things just sort of happened. “We packed several computers into the back of an SUV, stuck cameras, lasers and a GPS device on top, and drove around collecting our first imagery.” Those pictures of thoroughfares and laneways and suburban streets, captured in overlapping sequence by cameras stuck on cars, now account for nearly half the world. In more recent times they’ve been supplemented by increasing numbers of images from other sources: on- and off-street views contributed by members of the “street view community,” and images created through partnerships between Google and organisations both public and private, thereby allowing us to click on multiple views of the same street and in many instances to penetrate the street façade to see what lies behind.

This unimaginably large cache of images, each one morphing into its successor as we make our virtual way down the online street, forms a seemingly endless series of panoramas, allowing us to look up, look down, and swirl around places we have never been to, and may never see, other than on the screen. We can pause at any point, in effect creating a still photograph, ready-framed by the computer. (And if accessed via Google Earth, these views of the street can be toggled back and forth from 2-D to 3-D, a slightly unnerving experience.) We can embark on guided tours – of Angkor Wat, or Marseille by night – or we can just drift where the mood and the street take us, our perspective that of an SUV or a hatchback or perhaps a snowmobile or a launch. In many ways these self-guided walks, with no particular destination in mind, seem to echo what the great champion of urban studies, Jane Jacobs, saw as the essential quality of the ideal city – that there would always, just up ahead, be a corner, and around that corner would be a visual surprise. With Street View, there is always something new up ahead.

Many locations on Street View have now been photographed more than once. As of last April, we can “time travel,” comparing the differences between earlier and later views, spotting the obvious and the subtle changes that have occurred during this compressed aeon we all inhabit, this latterday common era that began in 2007. We could see the progress towards completion of the 2014 World Cup stadium in Brazil, suggested the Google Street View blog (and, as of this month, Google provides “360 degree street view access to all twelve stadiums”) or we can just as easily check on the rate of growth of that tree that the neighbours planted a few years ago, and try to predict how long it will before it is overshadowing our front garden. Or we can trace the differences between screenshots of the same location, differences that might be attributable to the weather or the season or the light, or to the presence or absence on the day when the photograph was taken of people and vehicles, or merely to the fact that, by the very nature of things, every view is new.

New, yet after a while, not so very surprising. Street View images, whether created in-house or outsourced, tend towards a very similar look. (This is not entirely by chance, given that “trusted photographers and trusted agencies are trained and certified by Google.”) The more corners you turn, the more the street in front begins to look like the one you’ve just left. Rather as one selfie, despite the infinite variety of human faces, can very quickly begin to look much like all the others – same expressions, same tilt of the head – so these streets can begin to blend into one another, making it difficult to retain any memory of their distinctiveness. The parallels between the rises of the Street View and the selfie don’t end there. Together they embody much of our confused thinking about the opposing impulses towards privacy and display.

Something new up ahead: Google Street View at the World Cup.

In the selfie, it is all about the face. Its owner is recognisable, even if the face is a deliberately silly one, while the background setting is mostly blurry or non-specific. It’s exactly the opposite with Street View – the background is sharp, sharp enough to assume the foreground, but any people who happen to have been caught in the shot are simply there as extras, placed like the little figures in architectural models, dropped in to suggest an approximation of scale. And thanks to technology deployed by Google since 2008, the faces of anyone likely to be identifiable have been rendered as essentially featureless. “If one of our images contains an identifiable face (for example that of a passer-by on the sidewalk),” runs an undertaking from Google, “our technology will automatically blur it out.” And if the technology slips up, there is a mechanism by which the identifiable individual can apply to be made faceless. You can, in effect, opt for an unselfie.

A long session spent scrolling through images on Street View is like watching one of those real-life documentaries, the ones in which every so often a face, usually of someone in the background who is visible only for a moment, has been blanked out. The difference is that on Street View the blanked-out faces are the norm rather than the exception. Street View, in fact, is all about anonymity. Even the images are created anonymously, the cameras sitting alone on the vehicle roof taking pictures automatically at preordained intervals.

What does it mean to photograph a street? Can a street be a street in the full sense of the term if the people have had their faces blotted out? For contemporary practitioners and aficionados of the genre known as “street photography,” the answer would almost certainly be no. “Street photography” means something a long way from the kind of images that appear on Street View. To begin with, the street is the least of it. The “street” bit has instead become code for something else, for a way of capturing the human face as it appears in a (usually) unguarded moment, for the determination of the photographer to catch that moment when private expression and mood interact with the camera to produce an arresting image.

A street photographer needs to be ever alert for that moment, and for that he or she must travel fast and travel light, and be ready to shoot regardless of location. The Wikipedia entry for street photography puts it baldly. Street photography, we are told, “does not necessitate the presence of a street.” It might once have done, but street photography has moved on from its origins in depicting the urban landscape, with or without human figures, to become a way of photographing people wherever they might be, on or off the avenue.

Meanwhile, the street, no longer an essential component of the photographic genre named after it, has sought refuge elsewhere, under the umbrella of what is more often called urban (or urban landscape) photography. Here, the focus returns to the built environment, an environment in which people are present, if at all, as extras rather than leading players. The urban photographer also seeks to capture mood and expression, but in this case it is the mood and expression of the city and its streets, rather than of individual inhabitants.

The distinction between street and urban photography is also a distinction between different kinds of photographers. Street photographers often have, and just as often cultivate, something of a frontline image, presenting themselves as confident and fearless, prepared to enter dangerous places and potentially volatile situations on our behalf in order to send back images to those of us who spend rather a lot of time inside. Websites dedicated to street photography will typically provide advice on how the would-be practitioner should approach people who might potentially be subjects, emphasising the importance of behaving in a self-assured, professional manner and not as a diffident bumbler, weighed down by too much equipment.

The alternative, to photograph the city and its actual, non-metaphorical streets while steering clear of anyone who might prove difficult and who might object to your intrusiveness – to be, in other words, an urban photographer – is by implication seen as a lesser calling. After all, photographing a street without people in it, or without people as the intended subject, is something that a car, with a camera on the roof and its shutter set to automatic, can easily do.

But urban photography can be risky too, particularly if you change the point of view from ground level to somewhere much higher. Which might explain why there are so many aerial shots around nowadays. Not only does the aerial shot provide a perspective that is not part of normal everyday experience for most people, thereby leading us to look anew, but also recent iterations of aerial photography will often emphasise the daring and the danger involved in capturing these images from above.

The photographer George Steinmetz, for instance, a contributor to National Geographic, takes pictures from a motorised paraglider. The first time he went up he was nervous. “It was really quite petrifying. And I thought, wait a minute, I’m up here, I’m really determined to get this picture, so I better take the fucking picture! If you’re going to die, at least get the picture first. Don’t die for nothing.” A picture, in other words, is worth dying for, which is certainly setting the paraglider very high.

Steinmetz’s aerial shot of the remains of Leptis Magna, the largest Roman city in Libya, clearly delineates the layout of the streets below and provides a perspective that could never be captured by a camera on the ground. Added to that, and in the back of our minds, is the knowledge that the image was taken, not by a satellite or aircraft-borne device set to auto, but by a man hanging in the air in a flimsy machine, above a land in the midst of post-revolutionary turmoil.

Yet the fact is that we can also zero in on Leptis Magna via Google Earth, where we will be presented with both satellite images and links to other photographs taken at ground level, and thus with the opportunity to create our own composite view of Leptis Magna. For the moment the satellite images cannot quite match the quality and resolution of one taken by a professional photographer from a paraglider, but one day soon they will, and then an awareness of how the images were created – by a satellite or by a man in a paraglider – will become an even more important element in the overall impact of the individual, photographic image.

But then it has probably always been the case that the story around the photograph is an essential component of the story that we make from the photograph. “A photo becomes fictional on the basis of the text beside it, or the photos that precede it or follow it,” says the novelist and photographer Teju Cole, discussing his photographic novel on life in Lagos, Every Day Is for the Thief. Context is everything. The photographs taken in the early 1850s by one of the first and the greatest of urban photographers, Charles Marville, recently on exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, derive much of their continuing impact from our knowledge that their subject, the streets of pre-Haussmann Paris, were soon to be swept away and their inhabitants unceremoniously forced out.

The images created in the 1940s by a much less well-known photographer of the urban landscape, Fredrik Bruno, show, in quietly contemplative and bleached-out colour compositions, the streets of various Swedish towns and cities, some with people and some without, as they appeared during the years of the second world war and immediately afterwards. The serenity of these streets takes on a more complex cast because we know that, in neutral Sweden, they were an exception among the devastation that was taking place across the rest of Europe. In both cases, our knowledge of context helps us to animate the still image, and to imagine the lives of the people whose streets they were.

Amid the devastation: Fredrik Bruno’s “Vasagatan street towards Tegelbacken in Stockholm city” (c. 1943). Swedish National Heritage Board

For aspiring urban or street photographers today, a large part of the context for their work is the ever-growing presence of Street View, Google Earth and Apple Maps, and other applications that depend for their raw material on huge numbers of automatically generated images, taken from satellite or aeroplane, car or Google Trekker, and how this multiplying mass of images makes it ever harder to claim attention for an artisanal, distinctive and distinguishing view of the urban landscape, or indeed of any landscape.

For increasing numbers of photographic artists, the answer is to mine these seams of images, selecting carefully from the vast array and putting their stamp on a chosen few. Benjamin Grant produces Daily Overview, where he posts enhanced aerial images derived from Apple Maps that chime with ideas or themes that he wants to explore, concentrating, as he explains in an interview, “only on the areas where humans – for better or worse – have impacted the landscape.” Grant likens himself to an explorer, searching Apple Maps for just the right images, which he then manipulates, changing the angle of perception and enhancing the depth of colour and, it could be argued (though he does not), making them his own.

Something more: From Jon Rafman’s series, Nine Eyes of Google Street View. Ars Electronica/ Flickr

It’s the same on the ground. “Who’d have thought,” asks the novelist and photography writer Geoff Dyer, “that you could be a stay-at-home street photographer?” But as he points out, you could and you can, by searching Street View for just the right image to appropriate, re-format and even to rephotograph. Practitioners of this sub-branch of the photographic arts, like Jon Rafman or Michael Wolf, will look to draw something more from the house style of Street View, with its mechanical recording of architecture and topography, than it initially seems to offer. Sometimes what they are looking for is the Street View image that suggests a theme, such as urban decay, but more often it is the occasional shot that, despite the blanked out faces, still manages to bring to the foreground the human element that underpins the character of any street.

These occasional images might be of a couple embracing, or having an argument; they might be of an individual collapsed in the gutter, or a prankster who has spotted the approaching car and is acting up for the camera. What is required of the rephotographer is not so much a spirit of derring-do as the capacity to spend the long hours required to sift the archive, always with a highly developed curatorial eye open for those images that, with a bit of help, will stand out from the crowd. •

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We have a strange relationship with the past. Obsessed with collecting, documenting and archiving, it seems we are less able to deal with loss and transience in our own lives. Reminders of the past – monuments, statues, plaques and street names – are enmeshed in the places we inhabit, but the pastness they relate to doesn’t appear to have much in common with our own lives in the here and now.

The past, it seems, is something that belongs to the museum, to the archive and increasingly to the digital world of Google, which stores our every virtual move with the same precision as it stores major historical events. French historian Pierre Nora famously argued that modernity’s over-preoccupation with history has broken our relationship with the past, moving us from a solid and steady past to a fractured one. “Given to us as radically other,” he writes, “the past has become a world apart.” In a world that continuously strives forward, the confrontation with absences – with people, things and places that are not here – leaves us speechless, frightened, baffled.

It is of such inexpressible moments of memory and forgetting that Katrin Koenning’s photographs speak. Through her diverse body of work, the German-Australian artist uses a powerful visual language to lay open the paradoxical interplay of past and present in everyday life. Through images of Australian landscapes, or fleeting moments in Melbourne’s laneways, or the stories that continue to shape her own family history, her photographs touch on some of the most deep-seated silences that seep into our engagements with people and places. In finding ways to speak of the stories that remain untold, Koenning’s images have something profound to say about life and living in contemporary Australia. In their quiet persistence, they also manage to raise broader questions about photography, memory and the human condition.

View Over the Pacific Facing West from Amity Point.

Interestingly, the very moment that initiated Koenning’s passion for photography could be described as an act of memory-making. Born in the post-industrial town of Bochum in the German Ruhrgebiet, she grew up dreaming of becoming “a painter, a singer or an astronaut.” But a tragic event changed everything. A few weeks after she finished high school, Koenning’s best friend died in a plane crash over Iceland. He had been a keen photographer, and she inherited his camera and all his lenses. “I took that camera and left for Iceland,” Koenning tells me. “I needed to find a place to get my head around it, I just needed to be where he died.”

Being near the place where her friend had died and taking photos there made her feel near him. Close to the entanglement of memory, place and photography that still features in Koenning’s work many years later, this act of memory-making had nothing to do with the often-criticised tendency of photography to freeze a moment in time. Instead, she used the camera to question time’s inescapable power. Taking photographs allowed her to follow the traces of what had been lost and make the past an active part of the present.

Upon returning from Iceland, though, the young photographer was confronted with the elusiveness of images and memory. “When I took out the film in Germany, all the images I had taken came out pitch black,” Koenning laughs. “There was nothing on it, not a single picture.”

About a decade later, having migrated to Australia and having had her photographs exhibited in major international festivals from New York to Delhi, Katrin Koenning’s images don’t come out pitch black anymore. But she continues to use the camera as a means of understanding the world she finds herself in. Dealing with such large themes as memory, movement and loss, she doesn’t shy away from looking deep into her own life. True to the documentary tradition in photography, which her work links into, Koenning approaches her subjects from an experiential point of view. She forms her understanding through the small gestures, stories, objects and sensations that form our everyday engagements with the world around us. As quiet, intimate and unexciting as these layers of experience may appear to be, in her photographs they receive a poetic authority to speak on their own terms.

This engagement with memory as a lived experience becomes particularly apparent in a recent body of work entitled Dear Chris, which was shown at the Edmund Pearce Gallery in Melbourne and the Queensland Centre for Photography. In this multi-layered photographic installation Koenning confronts the tremendously difficult and notoriously concealed topic of suicide, death and mourning by giving insight into a painful chapter of her own family history. The entire body of work is a tribute to Chris, the husband of Koenning’s cousin Alana, who in 2010, at only twenty-nine years old, ended his own life.

Throughout his life, Chris had battled with depression, a “front row battle,” as Koenning puts it, which was marked by constant struggles with medication, conflicting doctors’ opinions and, in the end, a growing silence. Yet his life was constituted of much more than this pain. “Chris loved many things, I wonder if silence was one of them,” Koenning writes in the introductory notes to the exhibition. “He loved Alana, nature, his dogs, the Simpsons. His Hilux, Nirvana, cigarettes. Dreamt of being a pilot, of doing other things.” For the people left behind, these aspects of Chris’s life retain a strong presence. Made material through objects, photographs, the daily paths he used to walk and even the landscapes he inhabited, the everyday memories of Chris that continue to accompany the photographer’s family speak of everything but an absolute absence.

Consequently, Dear Chris depicts the many traces the past leaves behind – traces that have the power, the photographs suggest, to form and transform the present. Composed of three interchangeable chapters, the installation shows vernacular pictures from Chris’s childhood photo album, photographs of some of Chris’s objects kept by Alana, and photographs of places of significance to Chris. In showing these intimate layers of memory and forgetting, of hope and loss, and exhibiting them in their lived messiness, Koenning has succeeded in removing suicide from its dark narrative conventions and making us think of it in new ways.

From the Album # 1.

Dear Chris was driven by a deep sense of urgency to tell stories that would otherwise remain unheard. Almost immediately after the artist heard about Chris’s death, the idea of creating a body of photographs began forming. “As a society we don’t talk about death, let alone about suicide, so I felt a sense of responsibility,” Koenning explains. “But I was also aware of the fact that out of the family I was probably going to be the only one who could do that, because as an artist I had the right tool kit.”

About a year later, she approached Chris’s wife Alana, who immediately supported the project and supplied the photographer with the objects that came to form a crucial chapter in the project. Alana’s openness to sharing some of the objects she kept after Chris’s death lends the work an intimate immediacy. Depicted against colourful backgrounds, seemingly mundane things such as a pair of trousers, a wallet, a tool kit or a tie take on a life of their own. In Chris’s absence the objects have lost their original function, hovering somewhere between life and death.

In The Invention of Solitude Paul Auster writes about the ghostly life objects take on after the people who possessed them die. “They are there and yet not there,” he writes, “tangible ghosts, condemned to survive in a world they no longer belong to.” It is this spectral dimension of the past – the paradoxical ways in which people, things or stories that ought to be absent leak into the present and, if only for a split second, come to touch us – that Koenning’s photographs depict.

Toolbox #1.

The Veil.

Koenning’s work isn’t just remarkable for its visual poetry and its courage to speak of things that are almost beyond speech. True to the young photographer’s love for photography as an art form, her work also pushes boundaries and questions established visual conventions. In Dear Chris the artist quite consciously breaks with the taboo of intermingling text and image. Art theorists and photographers still disagree over the extent to which words and images are two separate means of representing the same end, or whether, in fact, the narrative subverts the visual and vice versa.

In most contemporary photography galleries, descriptions, captions and artists’ statements are kept separate and sparse. In Dear Chris, Katrin Koenning consciously ignores this dichotomy between words and images, and puts the interplay of showing and telling to her own use. As well as the beautifully crafted background story that introduces the exhibition, the poetic captions accompanying some of the images add new layers to the photographs.

A photograph showing a clearing in an Australian forest, for example, is entitled “Beerburrum State Forest (you used to ride your bike through here).” Another photograph, depicting clouds in the sky, carries the caption “The sky above place of death.” These words, as sparse as they are, give an image of a forlorn forest or of an open sky a radically different appearance. They link the audience into a story and transform seemingly innocent places into sites of meaning. The forest is not any forest. It is the forest Chris used to love and ride his bike through. Likewise, the sky is not any sky. It is the sky above the place where Chris took his own life.

Beerburrum State Forest (You Used to Ride Your Bike Through Here).

Rather than weakening the photographs’ visual strength, Koenning’s use of words opens the doors to layers of imagining and seeing that would otherwise be inaccessible. Seeing, her work shows, is never absolute. Instead, her photographs hint at a way of experiencing the world that goes beyond the mere visual and yet challenges the predominance of words as the ultimate tool for meaning-making.

Or a Pilot.

As well as intermingling words and images, Katrin Koenning has developed a distinct visual language that is built on a deep understanding of light. Because she literally and metaphorically draws her subjects in and out of the light, many of her photographs bear a close resemblance to paintings.

This comparison isn’t as far-fetched as it might first appear to be if one considers the roots of the word photography, which derives from the Greek photos, which means “light” and graphos, which means “drawing.” Photography, then, literally means “drawing with light,” a description befitting Koenning’s photographic practice. In the spectacular series Thirteen: Twenty Lacuna this play with light and dark, memory and forgetting, movement and stillness best comes to the fore. During one of her daily walks around Melbourne to take photographs, Katrin discovered that in a specific laneway in the CBD at a specific time of the day, and only for twenty minutes, the light is so powerful that it illuminates everything it touches. The photographs that result from her engagement with this very place and light show people rushing in and out of their offices, in and out of the laneway, in and out of the light. Illuminated by the stream of light falling into the street, they appear as if on a stage; as if they weren’t office people caught up in the humdrum of life in the city, but tragic figures in a play. Using the backdrop of the symbolically important shadow as a means to portray the interplay between past and present, the images could also be read as depicting a stage on which questions of memory, history and forgetting are played out.

The Marchers.

The real importance of Koenning’s work lies in her ability to depict complex questions concerning the human condition with a lightness and quietness that is captivating. This sets her apart from many of her contemporaries, who are still caught up in dominant postmodern visual conventions that are led by an urge to shock their viewers into a political consciousness. Whether it’s through her images of movement and transition, or through her ongoing engagement with the Australian landscape, Koenning doesn’t attempt to capture with an aggressive loudness, but with silence. This fills her images with a tenderness that is heartbreaking. Under Koenning’s eyes the Australian landscape, often depicted as tough, impenetrable and unforgiving, turns into something fragile and shy. And the beach, often portrayed as the stereotypical space where Australianness is acted out, turns into a stage for intimate encounters.

The silence that runs through all these images doesn’t hint at an emptiness, or stand for a lack of interest in political questions. As the Australian historian Greg Dening so poignantly puts it, silence is never empty, but always a relationship: “Silence always has a presence in something else.” It is of such a silence, a silence that is full of potential meanings, that Koenning’s photographs speak.

Elwood Scene #1.

A body of work Koenning is currently working on carries the title, A Country Big Enough to Disappear In. In this project she depicts her relationship to the Australian landscape, a relationship that is still growing. Despite having lived in Australia for eleven years and studied here, and with many family members having migrated here, she wouldn’t call Australia her home. While many people laugh about the ugliness and grittiness of Bochum, the town where Koenning grew up, and congratulate her on her decision to migrate to Australia, to her it is still home. Home, the photographer says, is almost like language: “You don’t even really think about it because it’s such a part of you and always will be.” While she is still learning the grammars of being Australian, this absence shouldn’t be misunderstood as a shortcoming. The experience of being new to a place has also opened the door to look at herself and the world in new (displaced) ways.

Fowlers Bay Camp #1, from the series A Country Big Enough to Disappear In.

In the end, this experience of transition, of feeling somewhat in-between, has enabled Koenning to depict life, both in Australia and beyond, from a unique perspective. Like a second pair of eyes, the camera allows her to look into the surrounding world, being both part of the moment depicted and removed from it. It allows her to zoom in on, highlight, exaggerate or dissolve fragments of what appears in front of her. The great Hungarian photographer André Kertész once said, “The camera is my tool. Through it I give reason to everything around me.” In similar ways, Koenning’s photographs bestow meaning on the world they depict; together they form a landscape of intimate moments, details, places and stories – a world that is small enough to feel grounded, and yet big enough to disappear in. •

The post A country big enough to disappear in appeared first on Inside Story.

Sam Hood began his photographic apprenticeship in the mid 1880s, when he was barely into his teens. He was still working as a photographer on the day he died, at the age of eighty-one. That adds up to a long career, and it made for a lot of photographs, many of which can be seen on the websites of the State Library of New South Wales and the Australian National Maritime Museum, among others, and on Trove and Flickr. The State Library’s Hood archive alone – evocatively described in the catalogue as “Sydney streets, buildings, people, activities and events” – comprises some 11,400 images. This sounds like a large number, and if Sam Hood had been a painter rather than a photographer, it would have been a very large number indeed.

But photographic legacies routinely run into the tens and even the hundreds of thousands. The recently rediscovered Chicago street photographer Vivian Maier is survived by an archive of 100,000 images, saved from probable destruction by sheer chance. The photographer and photographic historian Jerry L. Thompson, in his recent polemic Why Photography Matters, tells us that the archive of Garry Winogrand, whom many would nominate as the best of all twentieth-century street photographers, runs to almost a million items, not a few of which Winogrand has never seen.

Yet archives of even these astonishing proportions can blend, unremarked or overlooked or passed over, into the vast cache of photographs already in existence, or about to be brought into existence by people whose careers are photography and by the many more people who just like taking photographs. And as we take more and more photographs, on our compact cameras and our smartphones, so we are taking less time to look at them. The contemporary photograph is no longer so much a record of the moment as a part of the moment itself, an integrated component of whatever it is we happen to be doing. Taking a photograph is something you do when you’re already doing something.

At the other end of the photographic spectrum is the singular photograph, the work of art that might hang on a gallery or a loungeroom wall. It is made with the intention of engaging us, persuading us to pause and reflect on its content, to look at it more than once, and to remember it.

Unlike the smartphone photo, which typically favours for its subject the spontaneity (or apparent spontaneity) of the fleeting moment, the photograph-as-art will often highlight its own contrivance, by being elaborately and obviously staged, for example, or by juxtaposing people and objects in ways that emphasise the stylised formality and artificiality of the image. This kind of juxtaposition can be seen in the work of the many contemporary photographers whose elaborate “sets” and staged incongruity seem designed to distance the work from the smartphone culture and the inherent forgetability of the typical digital image.

Gymnastics on Parsley Bay beach c. 1929, photographed by Sam Hood. State Library of New South Wales

Contrivances like these are an attempt to give substance to our casual, and often misleading, habit of describing photos as “memories” by staging and photographing an event that is not part of the flow of life but a deliberate and striking intrusion into that flow, something that will be remembered for its very intrusiveness. Sometimes this can work to undeniable effect, as in Richard Renaldi’s photographs of complete strangers – strangers to him and to one another – who have been persuaded to pose in attitudes of intimacy, with arms linked or wrapped around shoulders or encircling waists, in imitation of a relationship that does not exist. It sounds faintly gimmicky but it can also produce some affecting – and memorable – images.

Not everyone would agree. Jerry Thompson, for one, has little patience with this kind of consciously artistic or staged photography. He dismisses those photos that imitate iconic paintings as “decorative self-indulgence,” for example, which seems a bit harsh, but the question he then asks is one that goes to the heart of our expectations of photography and of photographs. “Shouldn’t photography – which began as a hyperdetailed record of our shared visible world – provide a close, critical examination of that world, the kind of jarring irritant able to rouse viewers out of a complacent, forgetful slumber, and into a wakeful regard of what is?”

It is a plea for the kind of photograph that sits – perhaps somewhat uncomfortably these days – in the middle of the photographic spectrum, with the smartphone snap at one end and the photograph of complete strangers touching one another or the super-saturated tableau of people dressed up in renaissance costume, at the other. It’s the kind of photograph that manages to bring an artistic eye to the world as it is – or was, at the time when the photograph was taken. It assumes a world that can never be completely contained or managed by a photograph or a photographer, however skilled he or she may be. Chance always plays a part. “Pictures by even the greatest photographers,” observes Thompson, “insist on containing elements of the outside world that just happened to be there.”

Sam Hood was that kind of photographer – perhaps the most common kind in the history of photography – the kind who brought a photographic eye to the “world as it is.” As Alan Davies describes in his 1991 book about Sam Hood and his work, Sydney Exposures, he grasped whatever opportunities there were to take photographs and be paid for it. He photographed ships in Sydney Harbour and sold the images to sailors as mementoes of their voyage. He took studio portraits, and he supplied images to a dozen or so different newspapers in the twenties and thirties. He undertook commissions to document buildings and events – public ceremonies, sporting matches, first nights, weddings. In all this, it is doubtful that Hood ever thought of himself as an artist rather than as a working photographer whose work was his life.

Two young girls holding hands, c. 1920. Australian National Maritime Museum

And yet in many ways he behaved like an artist. He was obsessive about every aspect of photography, overseeing the entire process to ensure that the final image was as it should be. He survived many setbacks, including the prospect of reestablishing his studio after it was burnt down on two separate occasions. He pressed on, inseparable from his camera – the same one for forty years, as Davies reports, despite opportunities to upgrade. It reached a point where the camera had been repaired and patched so often, and had acquired so many tics, that “no one else could use it.”

It is difficult to know how to “read” Hood’s photographs today, just as it is difficult to know how to approach any photographic collection or archive. We are caught between our habit of scrolling through the albums on our screens – usually so quickly that it can almost be like watching a film – and the demand of the single iconic image that we pause and contemplate in isolation. But there is also a middle way. Sam Hood, and photographers like him – artisanal rather than consciously, or self-consciously, artistic – are best appreciated and understood by means of a hybrid of these two extremes, a kind of slow scrolling.

Individual photographs by Hood don’t generally stand out immediately, at least not in a way that invites us to brand them as particularly representative or “iconic,” as we might brand a Max Dupain or a David Moore, for instance. They need to be taken as a whole or, given that tens of thousands of images are difficult to take in as a whole, in chunks, further defined and refined by sub-categories of chronology or genre or subject. In this way, we can build up a sense of a particular time and place, as captured by a particular photographic sensibility.

Admittedly, not all of Hood’s photographs encourage us to scroll slowly. There are, for all but the most enthusiastic of maritime enthusiasts, only so many ships one can look at in one session. Hood also had a weakness for photographing people with animals – women with cats, men with elephants, a girl with an angora rabbit, images that fit neatly now with the web’s fascination with cuteness, but don’t encourage us to linger.

On the other hand, Hood had a special talent for observing and photographing people, and especially people in groups; sometimes in their hundreds, lined up in quasi-military formation or squashed together at a town hall hop, but more often in compositions of two to a dozen figures. The photographs are posed, reflecting the technical capacities and photographic conventions of the time, but for all that they convey a sense both of natural intimacy and of an occasion shared, while preserving the individuality of the people who make up the composition.

In the photograph of “two young girls holding hands” (above), which forms part of the Samuel J. Hood Studio Collection at the National Maritime Museum, the young girls of the caption, who are clearly twins, are posing face-on to the camera. In his characteristic way, Hood conveys naturalness within formality, individuality within likeness. The background is quite geometric – a long strip of an unidentified and unidentifiable building forms the upper border. Below that is a hedge and some vegetation, carefully clipped and tamed, that stretches across the frame. In the foreground, in contrast to these vaguely modernist horizontal lines, are the two girls, barely containing their exuberance and enjoyment of life. Most strikingly, and against the long tradition of photographing twins and look-alike siblings that owes so much to Hood’s near contemporary, the great August Sander, who emphasised likeness and encouraged the viewer to spot the subtle differences, the girls here, while dressed alike and, as far as we can guess, identical, have quite different facial expressions. They are together but also themselves.

Politicians lolling on the grass at Canberra (1927). State Library of New South Wales

The same mixture of naturalness and formality is struck in Hood’s photograph of “politicians lolling on the grass at Canberra,” taken in 1927 and now held by the State Library of New South Wales. At first and perhaps even second glance it is not an especially remarkable or distinguished photograph. And yet, in looking beyond its undoubted historical interest – the figure second from the right is the Indian politician Sir R.K. Shanmukham Chetty, who was visiting Australia as part of a Commonwealth parliamentary delegation and only a few years later became India’s representative at the League of Nations – we can see a number of Hood’s characteristic touches.

These politicians lolling on the grass of Lanyon Homestead – particularly the two in the middle – have clearly been directed, but for all that there is a relaxed if sober conviviality about the scene, and a humanising contrast between the important business that brings them together and the fact that they are sitting on the grass, chatting, staring into space, smoking a cigarette or drinking tea.

As is often the case with Hood, the background is formal, with a structured, almost geometric feel to it. The view of the verandah is divided, along classical lines, into three panels; there is even a column two-thirds of the way across to break the horizontal flow, in a way that is pleasing to the eye. In the middle panel, seated on a sofa, are two men, observing the main subject of the photograph from behind. Their presence sets up a mild visual joke, as these two rather more conventionally seated and suited figures observe their comparatively frivolous (these things are relative) colleagues lolling on the grass. The right hand panel contains a set of French doors; we can see nature reflected in the glass.

Against the formal background and complex perspective, we can also spot, to the right of the frame, a detail that seems to have crept in unnoticed: a lone briefcase and a hat, also lolling on the grass but bereft of their owner. No one is looking directly at the camera, or indeed at one another. And yet the overall impression – reinforced by the domestic touch provided by the teacups – is one of amiability and professional goodwill.

Charles Parsons & Company, 1935. State Library of New South Wales

Hood’s way with photographing groups can also be seen in an image (above) featured in Alan Davies’s monograph. It shows six men, all quite formally dressed, engaged in their work at a fabric warehouse in Sydney in 1935. The long line of a cutting desk stretches diagonally across the bottom third of the frame. In the upper background we see more long lines, in the form of rows of shelves extending into the left hand distance, each shelf piled high with neatly wrapped bolts of material that rise to the very ceiling and threaten to push their way through. In front of the shelves are the men, going about their business.

What strikes us first in this photo is that none of them is looking at any of the others.  They are shown engaged in their various tasks – measuring and cutting material, making entries in a ledger. One man is retrieving a bolt of material from the top shelf. Another man – a buyer, a customer? – appears to be examining a sample. Some elements of the photograph’s composition seem to work against any suggestion of intimacy or camaraderie, and yet that is precisely what is conveyed. This impression is helped, perhaps, by the fact that on the faces of three of the men, particularly the one who is cutting material, there are signs that laughter may not be far away.

This sense of enjoyment, or ease, in one another’s company is characteristic of Hood’s group photographs. Sometimes the enjoyment and the relaxation are palpable, sometimes implied. Either way, we as viewers don’t feel as if we could enter easily into the group, becoming its next member. Instead we witness, and almost envy, its cohesiveness, which seems to spring from the kind of naturalness and lack of affectation that is difficult to replicate in these more knowing times. There is nothing “knowing” about Hood’s photographs, despite the often sophisticated nature of his compositional sense. For that reason alone, they belong quite clearly to another age.

This is not simply a function of the times in which the photographs were made; old photographs can sometimes feel surprisingly contemporary. Hood’s photographs, however, do not give us a clear line to the past. If anything, they announce their pastness, if only because they come so clearly from an age in which people’s self-consciousness in posing was an essential part of their naturalness. In Hood’s world, people seem connected with each other rather than with us as viewers; groups provide consolation; individuality is downplayed. Although Hood’s portraits of individuals can sometimes express uncomplicated good cheer, as in his engaging photograph from 1938 of the wrestler Jack Gacek (below), it is also noticeable how often the individual in a single, observant portrait by Hood will seem lonely and uncertain, displaying rather less of the strength and vitality that seems to come from being photographed in company.

Jack Gacek, wrestler (1938). State Library of New South Wales

In one of Hood’s better-known photographs (below), a portrait of a woman standing in the doorway of her corner shop, the woman is almost secondary to the shop itself, which takes up most of the frame. Her stance is a combination of assertiveness and defensiveness – she has one hand on her hip; her other hand rests protectively against her neck, in a once-common social gesture that betrayed anxiety.

The inside of the shop behind her is in near darkness, while the outside, including the windows and even the footpath, is covered with hand-written signs, advertising the goods within. All this visual chatter threatens to dominate the image, quelling the figure of the woman who, despite her squared-on stance, seems in danger of being overwritten by the words that have her surrounded.

Riley & Fitzroy Streets corner grocery store, 1934. State Library of New South Wales

But if we move on, continuing to scroll slowly through the photographs of Samuel Hood, we will soon tack away from such sobering thoughts. In his group photographs in particular, Hood’s subjects appear with a kind of awkward confidence, their general optimism, and ease in one another’s company, captured by a remarkably humane and sympathetic eye. •

The post The humane and sympathetic eye of Sam Hood appeared first on Inside Story.

IN THE early years of the twentieth century, the NSW Bookstall Company – a pioneer, incidentally, of the mass-market paperback – began producing a series of picture postcards under the general heading of Past & Present. As the example below shows, a picture from the early days of the colony – based perhaps on a line drawing or an engraving – was set beside a present-day photographic image of the same scene. The postcards were popular, documenting as they did a satisfying tale of improvement, of muddy streets paved over and dark ones illuminated, of the formerly blank walls of buildings being more lately overhung with signs and awnings, behind which shops and businesses could be imagined, contributing to the general air of progress and prosperity. A similar series, called Old & New… (followed by the name of the town or city), was issued in Victoria by the stationer Robert Jolley. These early postcards show how, from its very beginnings, photography has offered a way of comparing the present with the past, of comparing the way the world looks now to the way it looked then. Not only that, but they also imply a narrative for the new country: of creativity and resilience, of a world in which things are better than they were.

The once “new” photographs from the early 1900s are now very old, but the genre of “past and present,” or “old and new”, is still with us. It is more commonly referred to these days as "then and now" or "now and then", and it is once again catching the collective imagination. In one popular variant on the traditional format, an old photograph, typically of young siblings or youthful friends, is restaged and reshot, down to the details of clothing and backdrop and facial expressions. The crucial difference is, of course, that everyone in the newer version is ten or fifteen or thirty years older, a fact of life emphasised rather than disguised by the replication of setting and props. Beginning in 2010, the Argentinian photographer Irina Werning has produced several series of photographs in this then-and-now style, which she calls Back to the Future. They have become hugely popular on the internet, and remain distinguished from the legions of similarly constructed photos, submitted to sites like Young Me/Now Me, by their greater attention to the details of art direction and composition.

It’s not entirely clear why this genre within a genre – in which we scroll through sets of images of adults behaving like children, set against images of their childish selves – can have such a hypnotic effect. Any more than it is clear what prompts a grown man to take off his clothes at the instigation of the photographer (in this case, Irina Werning for her second Back to the Future series), lie down on a rug, arch his back and mimic for the camera the expression captured in his baby photo of forty-one years earlier. It is a bit of fun, of course, and the resulting side-by-side photographs raise a smile, but there is also something unsettling about these stories of irretrievable childhoods. Missing from Werning’s photos, or from the many others that employ essentially the same method, is the confidence in progress that marks those postcards of one hundred years ago. The implied narrative that links the two photographs is not as much one of progress as regret for the disappearance of the past represented by the earlier photograph, tempered perhaps by the satisfaction of seeing how visual traces of the younger self, traces that go beyond the poses and the props, do indeed survive in the elder, and that the past may therefore not be quite so lost after all.

The contemporary fascination with then-and-now photography can be seen as part of a wider photographic trend in which the demarcation lines between films and photographs, between the moving and the still image, are becoming increasingly hard to define. In all kinds of ways, photography is highlighting its capacity to be cinematic, to suggest movement, and with it a narrative that continues over time. From the photographer’s point of view, says photographer and commentator Taylor Davidson, the trajectory is away “from ‘editing’ individual images and toward editing series of images, or in an easier-to-understand sense, toward storytelling.” In one sense this focus on storytelling is nothing new. Photographs have always told stories, and there are plenty of contemporary examples in which movement – or action, or narrative – remains, in the time-honoured way, implicit in the single, still image, but increasingly it is being made explicit; not only by the pairing or sequencing or “curating” of images to suggest a story, but also by the use of such hybrid forms as the cinemagraph and other methods of subtly animating a still image.

The possibilities for this kind of photographic storytelling now go well beyond the side-by-side format favoured in the early 1900s by the NSW Bookstall Company, or today by the creators of “young me/now me” photographs. They include photographs in which one image is superimposed on the other (old on new, or new on old), sometimes without evidence of human agency, sometimes with a hand inside the frame holding one photograph over the other. And there are photographs that have been blended and morphed and otherwise combined in ever more ingenious and seamless ways, to say nothing of creative versions of those “before and after” or “makeover” shots familiar from design magazines, or the increasingly inventive use of stop-motion and time-lapse photography.

A huge proportion of the then-and-now photographs we see today, the ones that invite us to compare one image with another, are following these newer, more inventive patterns. The Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov, for instance, has attracted a lot of attention recently with images that combine photographs from various second world war archives with his own contemporary location shots. Nazi or Soviet troops from the “original” photographs inhabit the same space as modern-day tourists (often seen with cameras around their necks), or urban citizens going about their ordinary business. “I take all the modern images myself,” says Larenkov, “because the most important part is finding the desired point to shoot… It’s very interesting to find the point where another photographer once stood. Suddenly, you see an old world with your very own eyes. You are transported back in time; it’s almost as if you’ve stepped into a time machine. Sometimes, this is scary.” By Larenkov’s definition, photography itself becomes a kind of re-enactment, an attempt to enter history not directly through the archival image but through imitating the photographer who was there before him.

IT IS a technique that has caught on. The Anne Frank Museum has produced a mobile app intended primarily for children which includes among its functions an introduction to Anne Frank’s Amsterdam by means of blended images created by the digital media organisation LBi. “It is a powerful way in which the past and present come together,” we are told, but as is the case with all such mergers of images from both the present and the past, the effect can be to keep them apart as much as to bring them together. The declared intention of these photographs is to encourage people – viewers – to journey into the past, to see Amsterdam through the eyes of Anne Frank, and to match it against what we could see now, on the same spot, with our own eyes. But the contrasts that compete within the frame, between monochrome and colour, between men in uniform and people in civilian dress, tend to highlight rather than bridge the gaps. In fact, the underlying point of then-and-now photography is that there should be a gap, a disjunction between the two component images that provides the buzz of interest and engagement.

For other kinds of then-and-now photos, the differences between the two images need to be highlighted rather than minimised. ABC Open’s Now and Then project, which ran from 2010 to 2012, invited contributors from regional Australia to send in images in which an old or vintage photograph is held up and rephotographed against a latter-day view of the same scene. Whatever the similarities between the two photographs, what counts is the change, because change is what delivers the story. But it is a fine line, because if the change has been too great, if there are no longer any clear markers from the original, the entire point evaporates. There are no links to make a story. The objective is not simply to recover the past, but also to reflect on what has happened since, and to make connections. Rephotography is a form of re-enactment, and it is the process of re-enactment, rather than merely looking, that provides a key to understanding. “By holding a historical image in its present day location and rephotographing it, you can create a window into past events and the lives of people who’ve stood on the same ground as you,” says a contributor to the site. This is photography defined as a warm medium, one that draws you in and changes your perceptions of yourself and your neighbours.

Inspired by the Flickr group Looking Into the Past, the project has gone on to inspire local communities to mount exhibitions of their photographed history and its relation to the present day, in centres from Hay to Hobart, Wagga to Warrnambool. The ABC’s own exhibition of then-and-now photographs, selected from public submissions to series 1 and 2 of the project, was mounted at the Museum of Sydney in 2012 and has recently been seen at the gallery of the Newcastle Region Library. The project’s top contributor, Pete Smith from Metford in the Hunter Valley, has spoken of his enthusiasm for the project, and for the way in which it prompted him to revisit and sort through the family’s store of photographs taken by his grandfather, selecting some superbly evocative examples with which to begin the process of rephotographing the past. “When I saw how my first now-and-then photo turned out, I felt really connected with the image that my grandfather had taken,” says Smith. “Before the Now and Then project these photos were just photos, they didn’t sort of have another dimension. Using this method, it brings them to life again.” By superimposing the past on the present, “you can see into the past.”

This is a common theme among practitioners and admirers of this form of photography: the image that results from holding an older photograph up in front of the original location, and capturing the visual conjunction in a second, composite image, is the route to understanding the past, and is presented as more successful and more satisfying than, for instance, the less technologically driven act of examining the vintage photo in isolation and imagining your way into it. The method emphasises the nostalgia inherent in looking at old photographs, and indeed the overriding impression that comes from contemplating a group of twenty-first-century now-and-then photos, like those that make up the ABC project, is one of loss, or regret for a simpler time. (The Chilean-born, New York–based Camilo José Vergara, widely acknowledged as one of the pioneers of the art of rephotography, describes himself on his website Tracking Time as “an archivist of decline.”) An Eden contributor to the ABC project, Peter Whiter, makes that sense of decline and loss eloquently explicit: the practice of rephotography reminds him of “how shameful it was for us to lose [Eden’s] Customs House built in 1848, demolished to make way for the Mobil fuel depot… Thankfully the hideous tanks are gone… but worst of all we lost a signature building.” Similarly, a photograph showing Les Lewis from Hay waterskiing down Lachlan Street after a heavy rain storm, taken by local photographer Gavin Johnston in the sixties and rephotographed by an anonymous contributor, includes the laconic note that the original image was taken “outside the Hiberian Hotel which was burnt down.”

BUT the optimism apparent in the NSW Bookstall Company’s postcards of one hundred years ago is not altogether absent from these more recent comparisons of past and present. A now-and-then photograph submitted to the ABC Open project by members of Hunter–Central Rivers Catchment Management shows an image of a derelict building – the schoolmaster’s house on Ash Island in the Lower Hunter River – overlaid on a latter-day rendition of the same building, now fully restored, including “its cedar doors and architraves, baltic pine ceilings, tallowwood floors, and Italian marble fireplaces.” The image is disconcerting at first because we have come to expect, as viewers, that the narrative of these composite photographs will be one of decline, yet here we see the ruined building as belonging to the past, and the pristine one as belonging to the present. Perhaps because it works against these expectations, it is somehow less convincing as a composite. It is the older, tumbledown version of the building that holds centre stage and sticks in our minds.

Then-and-now photographs can, like the one showing the rehabilitation of the house on Ash Island, be created by placing one image on top of another, larger one, and photographing the result. But the methodology preferred by the ABC project is to physically hold the old photograph up in front of the original location, and snap. This can be tricky, because the photographer is also having to concentrate on lining up the two elements so that the “markers” – the things that the two scenes have in common – match as accurately as possible. (“This is really hard,” concedes the ABC’s tip-sheet, “if you’re trying to hold the camera in one hand and the photograph in the other!”) There’s another option, but that creates more problems with lining up your markers: “you could get a second person to hold the photograph, but you’ll have to direct them carefully for positioning.” What this means, whether it is the photographer’s hand or a friend’s holding the older photograph, is that the final image has a winningly low-spec, low-tech quality to it, the hand holding the photo an overt and deliberate visual reminder of the presence and personality of the photographer, and the part he or she is playing in linking the present with the past.

In contrast to this (literally) hands-on quality, other then-and-now photographers are taking full advantage of technical innovation – sleight of hand, if you like – to highlight and dramatise the contrast between old and new, between before and after. Various clever means of transitioning or “sliding” or eliding one image into another, (methods which in many cases have roots that extend far back into the history of photography and more particularly of cinema), are deployed to establish both connection and contrast between present and past. In a Photography Then and Now series recently introduced by the Guardian newspaper, “you can leap through time as if by magic. Tap or click on the [historical] image to reveal the modern view, and drag or swipe to control the speed of its transformation.” The overall impact is different from that of viewing the two images side-by-side, or looking at a then-and-now photograph in which one image has been superimposed on another. Instead we watch as the first image, at a speed designated by us, slides into the second.

A purist might say that the sliding adds little, that the story is already there, in the individual photographs and in the viewer’s act of comparing them, and that to create a sense of movement and the passing of time by eliding one into the other is superfluous and even distracting. The Czech photojournalist Jan Langer embarked on a project, culminating in an exhibition held earlier this year in Vienna, in which he photographed, individually and in black-and-white, a group of centenarians, and compared his version of them with studio portraits taken in their youth. Langer shows the photographs side by side on his website, but they can also be seen in a format that blends the past and present images together. By means of a wipe effect, for instance, we can move a vertical bar back and forth across the frame, revealing more or less of the subject’s younger and older selves as one appears to grow out of and then subsume the other. We can stop the bar in the middle of the frame to create a composite portrait of young and old, a technique which probably now qualifies as a photographic genre in its own right, rather than a mere sub-branch of then-and-now photography. Yet in the end it is the stillness of the two photographs, placed side by side, that invites us to imagine the story of what happened in between. The process of eliding the two – the old photo of the young subject with the new photo of the old one – speeds up any biography we might imagine, and turns a 100+ life into a kind of instant makeover.

Whatever form it takes, then-and-now photography can be seen not just as a way of understanding history via a third party – photography – but also as a response to the problem of originality, of how to be new in an overcrowded and intensely competitive field. It is a problem that is probably starker in the practice of photography than in any other branch of the creative arts. A photographic idea, an idea like the one of combining younger and older selves into a single image, is no sooner thought of than copied, often within nanoseconds, making it impossible to establish who thought of it first. Then-and-now photography tries to bypass this disappointing fact by openly conceding originality to the earlier photograph. Instead it takes as its real subject the contemporary photographer’s response to that originality, of trying to see things as someone else saw them while knowing that the image – of the face, the street, the trees – can never be replicated, because time has moved on. Meanwhile, we as viewers are invited to fill in the spaces in between. •

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Here were photographs that recorded a “life and culture” – most notably the life and culture of the goldfields of Hill End and Gulgong in western New South Wales – that had become part of the remote past, a kind of ancient civilisation. Here, wrote Burke, “were incredible numbers of negatives, records that were in due course to disclose every detail of the lives of our goldfields pioneers – the men, the women and the children, their homes, their business enterprises, and their mining shafts, their populous towns and larger cities.” In 2013, sixty years after Burke first entered that Egyptian tomb, photographs from the trove, newly and painstakingly brought to life from the glass-plate negatives using high-end digital scanning techniques, form the core of the State Library’s restored collection.

From the beginning, even before Bernhardt Holtermann came on the scene as patron and financial supporter, the photographs were intended to be a comprehensive record – of Australia, of a new landscape and of a new way of life. The primary motivation was, of course, commercial. Merlin, having tried his hand as an actor and a theatrical entrepreneur, had latched onto the new art of photography in the 1860s and, assisted as the business grew by the youthful Bayliss, established the American and Australasian Photographic Company. (In addition to adding an alliterative touch, the “American” appears to have served the same purpose as “international” or “global” would today, implying a broad sphere of activity and a worldly clientele.) Under this banner the two men travelled throughout southeastern Australia, lugging their cumbersome equipment and photographing people and places as they went.

Stealing a march on Google Street View by a century and a half, Merlin had the brainwave of documenting the streetscapes and individual buildings of Melbourne and the country towns of Victoria, and later of New South Wales, building up a portfolio of images that could, for a fee, provide would-be settlers and investors with an idea of what they could otherwise only imagine. “You could go into their studio in Sydney,” says the State Library of NSW’s Alan Davies, “pay a shilling, and look at their photographic library of Goulburn.” For the people who had no need to imagine Goulburn because they were already there – or in one of the many other towns that the photographers visited – these images, generally produced in the small, carte de visite format, were a record of the lives they had made and the buildings they had built, the success they had found or, standing upright for their portraits in their best Sunday suits or borrowed outfits, the success they hoped to find.

While Merlin and Bayliss were travelling and taking pictures, Bernhardt Holtermann, a young emigrant from Prussia, struck it lucky on the goldfields of Hill End and made his fortune almost overnight. A man with an eye to posterity, he began to think of ways to celebrate the country that had made him rich, and to encourage others to follow his example by leaving the old world for the new. It just so happened that Beaufoy Merlin was in town, plying his trade to the goldminers and shopkeepers of Hill End, Gulgong and surrounding areas, and so one of the great patron–artist relationships in Australian history was born, between a man who instinctively understood the power and potential of the new medium, and a man who understood exactly how it worked.

What became known as the Holtermann collection was intended at least partly for an international audience. Photographs taken by Merlin and Bayliss, at the behest and often the specific direction of Holtermann, were exhibited to considerable acclaim at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and the Paris Exposition Universelle Internationale in 1878. For all his focus on the future, it seems clear that Holtermann was also aware that the rapid changes he was part of – and that his project was so comprehensively documenting – were rapidly becoming part of the past.

Not only would many of the people captured in the photographs die early from accidents and illness and lack of available or competent medical care (indeed, Merlin, Bayliss and Holtermann were themselves all destined to die in their forties) but also the streetscapes and urban panoramas that formed a substantial part of the collection would very soon be historical documents. In the case of Hill End, the buildings that went up quickly to service the new gold town went down again almost as quickly, after the rush was over and the caravan had moved on.

Despite the rapid pace of change, what strikes a viewer now is the quality of stillness in the photographs, the way time seems to have stopped to allow the images to be captured with such sharpness. The deliberate and posed nature of early photographs can be unsettling, not least because we have gotten out of the way of stillness and have become used to the kind of photography, whether of wars or weddings or the natural world, that puts us into the middle of the action and invites us to continue animating it in our minds. The capacity of modern digital photography to record the instant has meant more and more photographs of more and more instants, sometimes staged, sometimes drawn from nature.

Add to this the popularity in recent years of such innovations as the cinemagraph, in which a portion of an otherwise static image can be made to move continuously (hair blowing in the breeze, champagne bubbling); or the one-second video (contestants in the Montblanc Beauty of a Second competition of 2010–11, which ran under the oversight of film director Wim Wenders, were invited to “seize the moment”); or the up-to-six-seconds format of the recently launched Vine, a visual companion to Twitter “that lets you capture and share short looping videos.” This blurring of the distinction between still and moving pictures seems like a logical extension of our expectation that the photograph should convey a sense of movement, a sense that everything is going unstoppably forward.

The formal pose has come to seem artificial, or a deliberate aesthetic choice on the part of the photographer, rather than being dictated by the limitations of the medium. At the most basic level, there is no longer any need for the sitter to sit still. Keast Burke admired Merlin for his ability to capture his subjects with “little sense of strain” in their bearing or expressions, despite the requirement for them “to ‘hold it’ for five or ten seconds.” (Burke put this down to Merlin’s habit of being “always gentle, persuasive, artistic and confident.”) To achieve that level of composed stillness today, to recapture something of the insight of the traditional studio portrait by exploiting or perhaps bypassing the self-consciousness of the modern, media-savvy sitter, calls for increasing inventiveness on the part of the photographer. Indeed, some of the best contemporary photography does just that, reworking the portrait and reinventing stillness – by echoing older practices of dressing the subjects in costumes or arranging them in tableaux, for instance, or by catching the subject unawares, as in Tim Hetherington’s Afghan war photographs of sleeping soldiers.

IN HILL END, in the early 1870s, this quality of stillness was inherent in the very business of producing a photograph. These photographs were made rather than taken, by means of a long process that stretched from the coating of the glass plate, itself a delicate and laborious business that was not always successful, to the development in sunlight of the final image. It was taxing work, requiring enormous skill and patience on the part of the photographer. In one such composition, a wedding portrait (below) of the seventy-one-year-old Dr John O’Connell, medical officer at Hill End Hospital, and his twenty-four-year-old bride Theresa, née Cummins, the figures seem pasted onto the background, unconvincingly linked to one another by means of the bride’s hand resting lightly on the groom’s shoulder, their pose of intimacy and physical connection telling us that this portrait shows not a father and daughter, as a first glance might suggest, but a couple about to embark on married life.

Dr John O’Connell, medical officer, and his twenty-four-year-old bride Theresa, née Cummins, at Hill End. State Library of New South Wales

Because blue or very light-coloured eyes did not reproduce well in photographs of the day, Theresa has something of a blank, almost frightened and otherworldly look, in contrast to her husband, whose darker eyes and fixed stare suggest self-confidence and purpose. That impression is almost certainly false: the library’s label quotes an item in the Hill End Observer lamenting O’Connell’s professional shortcomings, including the “lack of ‘a firm, steady hand.’”

While the doctor appears nailed to the floor, Theresa’s otherworldliness is compounded by the fact that she seems on the point of floating upwards to the ceiling – an effect that probably derives, ironically enough, from the lack of a ceiling to float up to. The absence of a roof meant that natural light, all-important to the making of a photograph, could stream in unimpeded. In what was in effect a pop-up studio, there may even have been reflectors in use, or some kind of device that allowed the intensity of the light to be managed according to whether the day was sunny or overcast. The result is an almost over-illumination from above of Theresa’s face and a corresponding darkening of the area below the hem of her dress, producing the impression that, rather than holding onto her husband, she is about to let go. Theresa was to die seven years later, at the age of thirty-one, following a stillbirth.

So important was it for the subjects of the photographs to remain still for the duration of the exposure that they were literally clamped to the spot, by means of an instrument that resembled a hatstand. The device can be seen most clearly in a portrait of Bernhardt Holtermann (below) from 1875, in which he stands proudly beside the height-adjustable device, his hand gripping and thus obscuring the small padded wings that fitted to the back of the subject’s head to hold it firmly in place. A second set of metal feet is visible behind him, presumably part of the contraption holding up the background screen but also, it is tempting to think, helping to hold up Holtermann. The photograph was part of a dummy run for several montage images of Holtermann standing, with proprietorial air, next to the so-called Holtermann Nugget. The actual nugget had long since been crushed and dispersed but not before it had been photographed for posterity shortly after its discovery by employees of Holtermann’s mine.

The wealthy, larger-than-life visionary Bernhardt Holtermann, who funded much of the two photographers’ work. State Library of New South Wales

By substituting the nugget for the head-clamp and adding a more impressive background – the veranda of Holtermann’s North Sydney mansion, built with the proceeds of his success on the goldfields – Holtermann’s permanent association with the nugget was assured. But in the context of the making of the entire collection, it is not so much this proto-Photoshopped image of Holtermann and his nugget that commands our attention, as the original template of Holtermann and the “hatstand,” which serves as a reminder of the effort – on the part of both photographer and sitter – that went into these photographs.

Nowhere else in the collection do we see the head-clamp so clearly and entirely, but there are occasional hints and glimpses. Sometimes the device is covered by drapery; more often it can be inferred as lurking behind a false skirting board. A gap between the board and the wall served to accommodate the feet of the device; sometimes this gap is made visible by the angle at which the subject – the diminutive Miss Jeffree, for example – is viewed by the camera. And sometimes, as in the portrait of the young August Godolf on his top-of-the-range tricycle, or that of On Gay, a snappily dressed Hill End shopkeeper – shown with one hand holding an umbrella, thus affording himself additional stability –  the trunk of the clamping device can just be seen, not quite hidden by the human subject in front of it.

Children, then as now, found it particularly difficult to keep still, whether clamped or unclamped, to the extent that many studios of the time charged double for photographing anyone under the age of four. For parents, the price was worth paying, not least because the resulting photograph acted as a kind of hedge against the real possibility that their child would not survive into adulthood. The State Library exhibition that launched the restored photos included a greatly enlarged digital image of the children of Hill End School, taken in 1873, the year after the school was built; the resolution of the photograph is so fine that it is possible to zero in on the faces of individual children, separating them from their fellows and singling them out from the crowd, leading us to wonder what became of them, and whether they survived into adulthood.

All 3500 images from the Holtermann collection can be viewed online. Many are of buildings or open country rather than people, but a surprising number combine human figures with views of the built and the natural environments, something of an innovation by Merlin. People are photographed outside their homes or shops or pubs, or pausing in the middle of the street; in the latter case, when there was nothing handy for the townspeople to lean on, it was harder to keep still and the faces as a result are often blurred. The facades of buildings, on the other hand, could serve as a kind of outdoor head-clamp, as shopkeepers and customers leant for support against the structures behind them. In the Hill End and Gulgong photographs in particular, the people and the buildings seem almost to be propping each other up.

AFTER Beaufoy Merlin died, in 1873, Bayliss stepped naturally into the role of lead photographer. With Holtermann’s encouragement, he became even more adventurous technically, producing large and sometimes gigantic glass plates of up to a metre by a metre-and-a-half, the largest ever made. The urban and harbourside panoramas of Sydney and other places that Bayliss, often actively assisted by Holtermann, captured with these super-sized plates still have the power to thrill today, with their comprehensiveness of detail and their extraordinary level of resolution, impressive even by the standards of twenty-first-century digital imaging technology. The collection itself, including these startling panoramas, nevertheless represents a mere fraction of the images that were made by Merlin and Bayliss. The vast majority have disappeared, and it is highly unlikely that there are any more garden sheds.

But the images that have survived make up a remarkable resource, for historians not only of photography but also of economics, agronomy, architecture, manners, costume and food, as well as, more generally, for anyone interested in Australia’s past. For that we should thank Holtermann, as the enthusiast and visionary and provider of crucial funds; Bayliss, who progressed from a sixteen-year-old apprentice to Beaufoy Merlin to an outstanding photographer in his own right; and most of all Merlin himself, who was the one who started it all. He died before the jumbo plates and the panoramas brought international attention to the enterprise, but the entire project grew out of his talents as an entrepreneurial, an artistic and a technical wizard. It is no wonder that after toying early on in his career with various spellings of his name – Murlin, Merling, Muriel – he settled on Merlin as the one that seemed the best fit. •

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Not everything about Facebook or its pervasive rise is unique to the twenty-first century. More than a decade before Alan Turing’s influential 1936 paper setting out the blueprint for the modern computer, the first “facebooks” appeared. They were created by students not at Harvard but at elite French universities and, like their present-day counterpart, they were the product of the irresistible rise of another technology: photography.

The story can be sifted from massive collections of secret files on individuals held by the French National Archives. Earlier this year a thought-provoking exhibition at the archive, Fichés?, made use of the sensitive material to trace how attempts to identify individuals evolved with technology. It asked the simple question: how did the photographic portrait come to be the most ubiquitous key to personal identity?

The earliest photographs date back to the 1820s. As techniques were refined, the potential to produce exact reproductions of the visual world piqued the interest of more than just a handful of artists. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Parisian police force had seen their potential, and began to use photographic portraits to register criminals. Physiognomy – a technique based on the belief that a person’s character was reflected in their appearance, and particularly their face – was still influential. One police officer, Alphonse Bertillon, developed an elaborate anthropometric system so that photographic portraits assembled by the force could be standardised.

It was the repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 that gave impetus to the rise of the mug shot. Police sent photographers into the prisons to photograph those arrested, and then they composed the first criminal record cards to include a photographic portrait. At about the same time, improvements in technology made it possible for police agents to take their own shots. A single bureau was established to oversee a central “database” of record cards. Photos of wanted criminals were distributed in a bulletin and also published in the press.

By the end of the Great War it had become commonplace for French people to have their photograph taken for administrative purposes. The portraits were required for a whole range of new identity documents. Entitlement cards for war veterans and driver licences were introduced at this time, as were identity cards for foreigners on French soil. (Passports as we know them did not yet exist.) Before long people attached photographs to the most innocuous official documents.

It was at this point that the first “facebooks” appeared. Students at elite French universities produced yearbooks made up of a photo of each member. The practice soon spread to government departments and large companies as those students stepped into influential positions. Some eighty years later Facebook initially followed a similar trajectory. After a successful launch in Harvard, it was introduced first into other Ivy League universities and then into major corporations before being made available to the general public.

The exhibition also examined a darker side of the growing use of photographic portraits. Archival records show that when French police began to build collections of individual record cards, not all parts of the population were catalogued with the same fervour. Roma and other nomadic peoples served as “models” for what was ostensibly the refinement of the anthropometric standards developed by Bertillon.

As state-sanctioned racism built to the crescendo of the second world war, the photograph became a tool of control and repression. In 1935 the French government set up a sophisticated central record agency to “administer” the increasing number of refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. The first French national identity cards were issued by the Vichy regime in 1940, and they included racial descriptions as well as information, where relevant, on how and when the bearer had attained French citizenship. The cards facilitated the work of the Nazis.

The worst abuses of the Vichy regime seem an age away, but vestiges of that early craze for attaching photographic portraits to anything and everything remain. In France it is still common for job applicants to send off their curriculum vitae with a photo attached. Despite claims that the practice has made it possible for employers to discriminate, subconsciously or not, against candidates of foreign and particularly Arabic appearance, most French people continue to put a face to their name. Those who choose not to run the risk of a potential employer suspecting that they have something to hide.

It takes an exhibition like this to remind us that the photograph played a role in building professional and social “networks” well before the word was applied to groups of people, let alone a group of computers. And in a world where photo ID has become so common, it is worth reflecting on the remarkable fact that only a century ago many people considered having their photo taken to be an invasive and even dehumanising experience. The expression “to shoot a photo” dates back to the nineteenth century. Were those people right to be concerned, given what we now know about the eerie negatives of the pre-digital age photograph?

Because French archival law protects documents relating to individuals for fifty years, the exhibition could not make use of any records from the 1960s onwards. But the truncation of the story only makes the contrast with the present-day abundance of photographs all the more stark. On sites like Facebook, portraits – when people choose to post one at all – are just a pixel in a kaleidoscopic representation of life. It would seem that we are in the process of polishing a new facet in the history of visual identity. •

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IT MAY seem hard to believe, but for the first three orbits they were so busy carrying out their scheduled tasks that none of them bothered to take a peek out the window. Only on their fourth trip around the moon did one of them chance to look up and see what they had all been missing. Commander Frank Borman can be heard exclaiming on the mission’s in-flight recorder: “Oh my God! Look at that picture over there!”

It was Christmas Eve 1968 and NASA’s Apollo 8 was just returning from the far side of the moon and coming back into radio contact with Mission Control in Houston. What Borman saw made him, and his crew – Command Module pilot Jim Lovell and Luna Module pilot Bill Anders – put aside their duties and scramble to find a camera. The creative impulse had trumped astronaut discipline.

First in black and white, and then in colour, they clicked away on a Hasselblad like tourists, and captured one of the most profound images in human history. It was the decisive moment par excellence.

From the cramped confines of their tiny craft – and further from home than anyone had ever been before – the three watched as a blue-and-white jewel, partially in shadow and set in a background of deepest space black, slid majestically from behind the desolate surface of the moon. Rising from the lunar horizon was, of course, the Earth; and no one had ever experienced it like this before.

In the end the Apollo 8 mission took 150 photographs of the Earth, but one picture in particular – NASA image AS8-14-2383 – a colour snap taken by Anders and later dubbed “Earthrise,” quickly asserted itself as the image of the mission.

The men on Apollo 8 were the first humans to slip the bounds of Earth’s pull and give themselves over to the gravitational field of another celestial body. They orbited the moon ten times and were the first of our species to gaze directly upon its far side. The work they did laid the basis for the first moon landing just a few months later in July 1969. There would have been no small step for Neil Armstrong, let alone a “great leap for mankind,” without the bravery of Borman, Lovell and Anders. But for all these achievements, it will be for those rolls of film that the crew of Apollo 8 will be best remembered. They were the first of our kind to see the whole of the Earth – and because of them we all got to see it too.

Before Apollo 8 there had been other pictures taken of the Earth from space, but they were uninspiring, in blurred black and white, captured by remote control from satellites or unmanned rockets, and unavailable to the public. “Earthrise” had been composed and executed by a human eye and a human hand. It was transformative, emotional; it was art.

The year 1968 was a famously tumultuous one in human history. Apollo 8’s crew members had photographed a planet which in the previous twelve months had witnessed the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King; the Battle of Khe Sanh, the Tet Offensive, and the My Lai Massacre; the brief bloom of the Prague Spring and the student riots in Paris; the black power salutes by two American sprinters at the Mexico Olympic Games; the opening on Broadway of the musical Hair; a pitched battle between police and anti-war protesters on the streets of Chicago; and the election of Richard M. Nixon as the thirty-seventh president of the United States.

But also occurring on Earth in 1968 was something far more momentous than any of these events. It might not have been widely recognised at the time, but the planet itself was in the midst of a great change. And an early intimation of this change was about to appear in an obscure publication produced in San Francisco’s Menlo Park.

WHEN “Earthrise” was released by NASA in early 1969 a thirty-year-old counter cultural entrepreneur called Stewart Brand had reason to celebrate. Brand was a Stanford-educated biologist and former paratrooper who had “dropped out” to pursue the Haight-Ashbury dream. He befriended Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, organised light shows for the Grateful Dead, and started surfing the early wave of environmentalism. A few years before Apollo 8 blasted off – in February 1966 – he had been sitting, wrapped in a blanket, on the gravelly rooftop of a three-storey apartment block somewhere in San Francisco’s North Beach. As he gazed at the city skyline he was suddenly gripped by a vision – which was not surprising, really, as he’d just dropped a hundred micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide.

“The buildings were not parallel – because the earth curved under them, and me, and all of us: it closed on itself,” Brand wrote of this experience decades later. “I remembered that Buckminster Fuller had been harping on this at a recent lecture – that people perceived the earth as flat and infinite, and that was the root of all their misbehaviour. Now from my altitude of three storeys and one hundred miles, I could see that it was curved, think it, and finally feel it.”

But this was no ordinary acid trip; it actually brought forth a useful idea. What humanity needed, Brand decided during his drug-induced epiphany, was a colour picture of the whole of the Earth from space. “There it would be for all to see, the Earth complete, tiny, adrift,” Brand explained, “and no one would ever perceive things the same way.”

But how could he convince NASA to take such a picture? Not surprisingly, Brand chose a typically sixties method to publicise his cause: he produced a button. And on it he posed a question that was quintessentially sixties in its hint at conspiracy: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”

Brand sent his buttons off to NASA, to all the members of Congress, to Soviet scientists and diplomats, and to officials at the United Nations. And he also sent one to the man who inspired the whole quixotic enterprise: Bucky Fuller himself, the part-crank, part-seer inventor of the geodesic dome, whose personal motto was “Dare to be Naive.” Brand then took his message to the people.

“I prepared a Day-Glo sandwich board with a little sales shelf on the front, decked myself out in a white jump suit, boots and costume top hat with crystal heart and flower,” he explained later, “and went to make my debut at the Sather Gate of the University of California in Berkeley, selling my buttons for twenty-five cents.”

For this act of street clowning activism Brand got kicked off the campus. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the incident, and his one-man campaign was off to a flying start.

Whether Brand’s lobbying effort had any great influence on NASA is probably a moot point. Though NASA had not planned for the crew of Apollo 8 to capture an image like “Earthrise,” it was quick to let the world see it. When the image was published in January 1969 it caused a sensation. From his psychedelic vantage point almost three years earlier, Brand had seen more clearly than even the crew of Apollo 8 themselves what such an image would mean. As he expected, from space the Earth looked fragile, alone and breathtakingly beautiful. It looked like something that needed protection.

The timing of Apollo 8’s snap happy trip around the moon couldn’t have been better for Stewart Brand. In late 1968 he was just beginning the project that would make him famous: the Whole Earth Catalog, a sort of DIY handbook for nascent greenies who were into self-sufficiency. It was one of the very first sources of practical information about alternative energy, appropriate technology and organic farming. It was broad-ranging, a little slapdash in execution, but inclusive and fun: if you wanted to build a yurt, the catalogue would tell you how.

The cover of the first Whole Earth Catalog featured a mocked-up picture of the Earth which Brand had originally used on posters in his campaign to persuade NASA that such a photo was worth taking. By the second edition – which came out in the early part of 1969 – Brand was able to use “Earthrise” itself.

In the editorial of the first Catalog, Brand attempted to explain the motivation and function of this strange new publication. It was here that he came up with the striking and now famous line: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” In other words, the stewardship of the Earth is in our hands; we’d better not stuff it up.

It was Brand’s promotional genius to pair this evocative phrase with a picture of our only home seen in all its glory and isolation, as if from the perspective of God in heaven.

FROM space, the Nukuono Atoll in Micronesia looks like an amoeba under a microscope. Munich’s International Airport looks like a computer chip. The Bestibah Estuary in Madagascar looks like the tendrils of a seaweed caught in the tide, the Escondida Copper Mine in Chile’s Atacam Desert like a forensic close-up of a bloodstain on a linen shirt. On a clear night the East Coast of the United States looks like a constellation of stars.

Look up the NASA websites Visible Earth, Earth from Space or The Gateway to Astronaut Photography and you’ll find thousands and thousands of breathtaking images of the surface of the Earth – all of them taken by astronauts. Yet if we imagine a similar collection of pictures taken from space at the time of Copernicus 500 years ago, things would look very different.

When the father of modern astronomy was writing On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres many of the events and features visible from space today did not yet exist. There was no haze of pollution rising over Asia, Greenland was still dazzling in its whiteness, there were no massive human-made lakes, and there was less land under cultivation and vastly more hectares of natural forest. The great city of Rome in the 1500s, even on the clearest of nights, would not have emitted enough light to resemble a faraway star.

The difference between the Earth of Copernicus and the Earth of our time is down to one thing: the fecund creativity and computing power of the human mind. By the twenty-first century, intelligent life had become as powerful a force upon the Earth as photosynthesis, or the movement of tectonic plates. Our species’ huge brain has enabled us to foment an industrial revolution, build and light cities, cultivate enough food to feed billions, and alter our planet’s atmosphere.

If you possess the technology necessary to take a picture of your home planet from thousands of kilometres out in space, the question arises: have you got the place as a time share with all the other species, or do you own the joint outright? Copernicus lived on a planet dominated by nature; we are living on an increasingly artificial world. In fact some scientists now argue that we are living in a completely new geological epoch. They argue that the Holocene – the warm period of the past ten or so millennia – has been superseded by the Anthropocene – literally, a new age of humans.

IN THE east-wing of a Palladian mansion on Piccadilly a series of meetings will be held over the next several years which could redefine the geological epoch we are said to be living in. Burlington House is home to the Geological Society of London and the Geological Society is home to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the little-known committee of scientists which decides when one geological epoch ends and the next one begins. The commission is currently in the process of trying to decide whether the Holocene has run its course. Should the Anthropocene join the Carboniferous, the Jurassic, and the Pleistocene on the geological timescale? It may sound like an abstruse academic argument, but it’s not; as the Economist noted in May 2011: “It is one of those moments where a scientific realisation, like Copernicus grasping that the Earth goes round the sun, could fundamentally change people’s view of things far beyond science.”

The Anthropocene is not a new scientific idea. As early as 1873 the Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani had written of the “anthropozoic,”in which humans represented a “new telluric force which in power and universality may be compared to the greater forces of the earth.” Stoppani expounded this view at the time the Industrial Revolution was just picking up speed. It was from 1763 to 1775, after all, that James Watt had laboured to make the steam engine energy-efficient enough to become economic. But in the modern era the term is most associated with the Dutch Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen – the atmospheric chemist who “discovered” the hole in the ozone layer.

“I was at a conference where someone said something about the Holocene. I suddenly thought this is wrong,” he once explained. “The world has changed too much. No, we are in the Anthropocene. I just made up the word on the spur of the moment. Everyone was shocked, but it seems to have stuck.” He first used the term in print (in an article he co-authored with E.F. Stoermer) in 2000.

The key proponent of the Anthropocene in Australia is Professor Will Steffen, executive director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University. When I spoke to Steffen earlier this summer he explained that defining the Anthropocene requires a thought experiment on the part of today’s geologists. They must ask: what would geologists of the distant future find in the sedimentary record of our time that would convince them that an epoch-making change had occurred sometime around the twentieth century?

Of course, anthropogenic climate change is the most obvious manifestation of the Anthropocene. If the geologists of the future examine ice cores – “assuming there will be some ice left,” Steffen jokes, a little darkly – they will show not just higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but also increased levels of dust particles, evidence of longer drier periods in some parts of the world.

But, as Steffen points out, there would still be a strong case for redefining the geological epoch even if we had not been changing the Earth’s climate by releasing large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Many of our other activities are also altering the Earth in significant ways.

For a start, a lot of plants and animals won’t be turning up in the post-Anthropocene fossil record; many species have become extinct as a result of human predation and habitat change. As humans cut down native forests and increase the amount of the Earth’s surface dedicated to agriculture, many species are dying out for want of a home to live in. At the same time the fossil record will show that domesticated animals, privileged by their usefulness to humans, will have spread across the globe. The bones of cows, pigs, chickens will far outnumber the remains of wild animals.

The human genius for digging and reshaping the surface of the Earth will also be noticeable to the geologists of the future. From the megacities where most of us now live, to the roads and railways that crisscross the continents, we have scarred and transformed the planet. More importantly, humans have intervened in the planet’s water cycle on a hitherto unimaginable scale by constructing tens of thousands of large dams in the last fifty or so years. The huge lakes created by these concrete cathedrals to engineering have all but stopped the flow of sediments to the sea in many cases, leading to the accelerated erosion of the world’s great river deltas. The oceans have also been altered by human hand. They will grow in size as their levels rise owing to ice melt in places such as Greenland. They will suffer from increasing acidification due to climate change. And the marine life that lives within them will be affected by our need for protein; there have already been collapses in some fish stocks because of over-exploitation.

So when did the Anthropocene start? William Ruddiman, a scientist at the University of Virginia, would date it from the beginnings of agriculture eight thousand years ago. Crutzen would date it from the invention of the steam engine. Steffen plumps for a starting point in or around the second world war. Hiroshima, after all, marks the beginning of the nuclear age. In 1945 there will be a “golden spike” of measurable radioactivity discernible to the geologists of the future. The immediate postwar period also marks the beginning of what Steffen calls the Great Acceleration. From the end of the second world war a whole range of human activities grew in intensity. Industrial production, economic growth rates, global population, car ownership, international air travel, for example, all started to climb and just kept on going.

It could be a while before the Anthropocene is officially accepted by science, however; like the processes it studies, geology doesn’t tend to move very fast. It took decades for the discipline to decide on the definition and timescale of the Holocene. The present process could take at least five years of meetings and committees and argument. The Anthropocene Working Group of the Geological Society is currently preparing its case through peer-reviewed papers and conferences. Eventually the working group will have to convince a lot of sceptical geologists.

If the Anthropocene becomes an established scientific fact, what are the implications? Well, for starters it will mean kissing the Holocene goodbye, which is a pity because the Holocene is the period where we got our start as a species. According to Steffen, “We like the Holocene very much; the Holocene is the sweet spot for humanity.” But unfortunately, “there is a cogent argument that the Holocene state of the planet is the only one we know for sure – for sure – that humanity can really thrive in. Now it may be that we can adapt ourselves to others, but we don’t know this for sure.” Like everyone else, Steffen is not sure how benign the Anthropocene will turn out to be.

We have been clever enough to change the planet we live on – and maybe clever enough to recognise that we have done it – but will we be clever enough to understand what this new god-like status means? “Well, we have been clever, yes,” Steffen tells me, “but perhaps not wise.” The term Anthropocene is clearly both a putative scientific category, and a warning.

LATE on the afternoon of 1 November 1941, just outside Hernandez, New Mexico, an old Pontiac station wagon skidded to the side of the highway and an agitated man leapt out yelling to his companions, “Get this! Get that, for God's sake! We don't have much time!” The urgent man was a photographer and he had just seen the image that would shortly become his best-loved work. In the near distance, spread before him in the twilight, was a scene of transitory beauty. A church cemetery – its white crosses starkly lit by the fading light of a low slung Sun – was overhung majestically by a rising moon. Though he raced to set up his tripod and camera, the photographer had time to take just a single frame before the light went and the spell was broken. The resulting photograph was named “Moonrise” and sixty-five years later a print of it would sell at Sotheby’s for over $600,000.

“Moonrise” is the best-known work of the great American landscape photographer and pioneer environmentalist Ansel Adams. There has always been a strong relationship between environmental activism and photography: a beautiful picture is worth a thousand pamphlets printed on recycled paper. Adams, for example, collaborated in the creation of the Sierra Club Exhibit Format Series which helped to generate public opposition to damming the Grand Canyon. Adams believed that people would respond to the natural wonders of the world with awe and understanding if only they could experience it – even if vicariously through his photographs. “I believe in beauty,” he wrote. “I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate.”

There is an obvious connection between Adams’s “Moonrise” and NASA’s “Earthrise” – both captured something awe-inspiring and transitory. But has beauty alone ever been enough to change how we think about the world?

Like Adams, his fellow American photographer J. Henry Fair is an artist and an environmental activist, but Fair’s political and artistic strategy is very different. Wanting to record what was going on behind the fences keeping him out of America’s factories, Fair took to the air – in light aircraft and helicopters. From this vantage point, he created pictures that looked like beautiful abstracts. But, of course, as the detailed captions of his photographs reveal, Fair’s images are all too real. What looks at first glance like a Photoshopped composition of rust-coloured reds, chemical greens and high voltage blues is in fact an astronaut’s view of industrial America.

Fair’s style has been dubbed “the toxic sublime”; it records the scars and suppurations created by our paper mills, power plants, coal mines and oil fields. Some of Fair’s most beautiful images are of the by-products left over from the manufacture of fertiliser. From the air they look like the surface of some strange ice planet in another galaxy; in reality, of course, they are vast green-and-white slurries called “gyp stacks” chock full of gypsum, phosphorous, and radioactive material. From such local disasters comes the fertiliser that allows us to feed a global population of seven billion.

For most of our history as farmers we relied on good old fashioned faeces to fertilise crops. Then, in the early twentieth century, the German chemist Fritz Haber developed a process that synthesised ammonia from nitrogen. A few decades later another German chemist, Carl Bosch, worked out how to upscale the process to an industrial level. In giving mankind the ability to fix nitrogen in massive quantities at an economic cost, the Haber-Bosch process also gave us the Green Revolution, which feeds a third of the world’s population. And according to Will Steffen, the Haber-Bosch process also altered the Earth’s nitrogen cycle to such an extent that it is yet another marker of the Anthropocene. But where does all this fixed nitrogen go when agriculture is finished with it? Very often, down the world’s rivers and out into the world’s oceans, where it fundamentally changes the nature of the marine environment. The famous Mississippi Delta Dead Zone, for example, is one of just dozens of such zones around the world. Fertiliser and effluent surging down the Mississippi have left thousands of square kilometres of water in the Gulf of Mexico in the permanent grip of an algal bloom-induced hypoxia – there is less oxygen in the water and life struggles to survive there.

The modern fertiliser factory may be the pre-eminent symbol of humanity’s grand bargain with the planet. By helping ourselves to perpetuate the success of our species, we change the planet itself; by bringing our science and culture to bear on a problem, we create unintended consequences that then require an even more impressive technological solution. And repairing the nitrogen cycle might be the sort of technological innovation – also known as geoengineering – that might come to define the Anthropocene era.

NOW in his seventies, Stewart Brand lives on a tugboat called Mirene, which he moors at Sausalito, just across the Bay from San Francisco. “Tugboats,” according to Brand, “are the largest thing in the world described as ‘cute’.” Since lobbying NASA all those years ago he has gone on to create a career as a countercultural maven, internet pioneer and contrarian commentator.

In 2009, at the age of seventy-one, Brand published Whole Earth Discipline: An Eco-pragmatist Manifesto. In this work he makes a small but significant change to the aphorism he coined as a young man back in 1968. “We are as gods and have to get good at it,” he says now. As for many of his fellow environmentalists – such as James Lovelock, George Monbiot and Mark Lynas – the alarming prospect of climate change has forced Brand to reassess some of his most cherished and long-held convictions.

In Whole Earth Discipline Brand utters a number of heresies against mainstream environmental opinion. He argues in favour of nuclear power because it is less carbon polluting. He advocates the use of genetically engineered crops because they will have a smaller impact on the nitrogen cycle. He maintains that megacities enhance sustainability. But Brand’s biggest leap of faith concerns geoengineering. The Anthropocene could be defined as the time when humans began to geoengineer the Earth without fully understanding the consequences of our actions. Intervening in the water cycle, fixing nitrogen far beyond the ability of nature, creating the greenhouse effect – they are all examples of unintentional geo-engineering. But now Brand, and others who think like him, believe it is time to seriously consider the use of intentional geoengineering. According to a paper published by the Royal Society, this type of geoengineering is “the deliberate large scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change.”

Science has known for some time that large volcanic eruptions, which spew enormous amounts of sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, can reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface of the Earth so effectively that it cools the planet. It has been estimated, for example, that the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 cooled the Earth by 0.5 degrees Celsius for over a year.

Some scientists argue we could replicate this naturally occurring effect on the Earth’s albedo – the reflectivity of the planet – by using high-flying aircraft to pump sulphur dioxide gas into the stratosphere. Other even more outlandish schemes propose distributing trillions of reflective discs in space halfway between the sun and the Earth. My favourite involves a fleet of 1500 so-called Albedo Boats sending up huge plumes of water vapour into the sky to create large fluffy white clouds to reflect the sun’s rays away from our warming planet.

Maybe Brand is still under the influence of the technological optimism associated with his early mentor, Buckminster Fuller. But he is not alone in calling for geoengineering to be taken seriously. The man credited with coining the term Anthropocene is also willing to contemplate that such schemes might be necessary in the future. If we can’t lower the emissions of greenhouse gases by changing our behaviour, even a scientist of Paul Crutzen’s standing is willing to contemplate geoengineering as humanity’s Plan B.

Of course, the obvious response to such schemes will be: isn’t this just an example of moral hazard? If polluters think the Earth can be bailed out by a technological fix, won’t they lose any incentive to change their behaviour? And more basically: why should we believe that geoengineering could actually work? Will Steffen, for example, is not convinced. The malignant aspects of the Anthropocene can be overcome, he would argue, but by international cooperation, the development of sustainable energy sources, and teaching new ways of thinking about the Earth and how it works as a system.

At the heart of the debate about geoengineering is an often unacknowledged difference of opinion about human nature itself. One side sees human behaviour as incorrigible; the other believes we will recognise enlightened self-interest when we see it. One side sees a composition of bright colours and calls it abstract art; the other side sees the same picture and sees an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

AT FIRST glance it looks like a mote of dust in a sunbeam. Yet on closer inspection, that tiny blue speck turns out to be the Earth, though the sunbeam actually is the light of the sun.

The image, known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” was captured on 14 February 1990 with a remote-controlled camera on the Voyager 1 space probe as it was leaving our solar system. Because of the way the sun’s light was scattered off the surface of the spacecraft, the Earth looks like it is sitting in its own special column of light. At the time, Voyager 1 was over six billion kilometres from Earth; nothing human-made had ever been so far from home.

Though travelling at the speed of light, it took nearly five-and-a-half hours for each pixel in the image to reach NASA. When all the information needed to assemble the completed grainy image eventually arrived on Earth the cosmologist Carl Sagan had reason to celebrate. Sagan had proposed a decade earlier that Voyager 1 should attempt to take such a photograph. His purpose was not scientific, but philosophical. “I thought that – like the famous frame filling photos of the whole Earth – such a picture might be… useful as a perspective on our place in the cosmos.”

Sagan was famously inspired by the “Pale Blue Dot” to write:

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Sagan was convinced that an image like the “Pale Blue Dot” would put all our Earthly squabbles into perspective. It would help, he hoped, to change the way humanity thinks about itself, and its relationship to the planet it lives on. Even in a geological timeframe, there are decisive moments. As we plunge headlong into the Anthropocene, maybe it’s time to confront the challenges and potential dangers of this new epoch with the same sense of urgency that grips photographers when they reach for their camera. •

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Lake Pedder was a favourite destination, a place where Truchanas and his family camped and Hobart’s artistic salon convened for many summers. The jewel of Tasmania’s southwest, Pedder was first mapped in the 1830s; by the end of the nineteenth century it was being spruiked as a tourist drawcard. A walking track was cut through soon after, and the first light plane landed on its magnificent quartzite beach in 1946. Despite this, Truchanas felt that few Tasmanians were aware of the lake’s majesty or prepared to defend it in the face of an uncompromising political vision of hydro-industrialisation. Despite Pedder’s inclusion in a national park in 1955, the Hydro soon began investigating the catchment’s potential for power generation, and in 1967 state parliament legislated the lake’s destruction.

Truchanas once asked his friend, the Hobart artist Max Angus, for a painting of Lake Pedder. As Angus retells it, “He said to me one day, ‘I want a dream of Lake Pedder. Anybody can take a photograph.’” That request, with its portent that future generations might only dream about the lake, frames the narrative of Natasha Cica’s superb Pedder Dreaming: Olegas Truchanas and a Lost Tasmanian Wilderness.

Truchanas was born in 1923. A keen sailor, he was chosen for Lithuania’s sailing team in the 1940 Tokyo Olympics, but war and the occupation of his homeland by Soviet troops dashed his Olympic hopes. When his family fled Lithuania for Germany, Olegas remained behind to participate in resistance activities. He was reunited with his parents and sister at the end of the war but travelled alone to Australia as a displaced person. After a stint in Bonegilla Migrant Camp, he settled in Tasmania, serving his two-year labour contract with the Australian government in Hobart’s Electrolytic Zinc Works. His family joined him in Hobart.

Truchanas’s dangerous life had taken a psychic toll. One of his earliest Tasmanian friends recalls him looking nervously around when they first went bushwalking. Soon, though, he was at home in the rugged Tasmanian landscape. He climbed Federation Peak in 1952, in what was possibly the first solo attempt, and a few years later kayaked from Lake Pedder to Macquarie Harbour, navigating the Serpentine and Gordon rivers. Strahan residents were astonished to see the small kayak heading towards the wharf, propelled by wind in a makeshift sail, Truchanas steering with a cord attached to his toe while he reclined with a book. The kayak is now a prized part of the National Museum of Australia’s collection.

Truchanas cultivated his interest in photography through local camera clubs and soon had work published in Australian photographic journals. He worked in 35mm format, first in monochrome and later in colour, capturing the changes in light and tone that make southwest Tasmania such a dynamic landscape. We now associate Tasmanian wilderness photography with the precise, large-format work of Truchanas’s friend and protégé Peter Dombrovskis; Truchanas’s work is softer, perhaps more subtle, but his themes and composition were hugely influential.

In 1956, Olegas married Melva Stocks, Launceston born and a keen bushwalker. While it’s easy to romanticise Truchanas’s life, the job of raising a young family with Olegas frequently absent – bushwalking, campaigning, volunteering as a sailing instructor for the National Fitness Council – could be difficult, Melva told Cica. After fifteen years or so, Truchanas had assembled an unrivalled visual archive of Tasmania’s wilderness at his West Hobart home. In February 1967, when bushfires engulfed much of southeast Tasmania and fire raged through Hobart’s bush suburbs, Truchanas was at the Hydro office in the city centre. Pregnant with their third child, Melva attempted to control the flames, but fled as they took hold. The archive was lost, along with their home and possessions.

As new Hydro planning threatened the Gordon River area as well as Lake Pedder, Truchanas made numerous trips to re-photograph these areas. He also deepened his commitment to Tasmania’s nascent environment movement, and his growing profile as a conservationist put him at odds with his employer. Other Hydro employees, including Truchanas’s friend, engineer Ralph Hope-Johnston, were similarly conflicted. Cica discusses the surprisingly civil relations between the Hydro and conservationists at that time, describing how the Hydro’s long-serving chief executive Sir Allan Knight attended a fundraising exhibition of paintings and photographs for the Lake Pedder campaign in 1971 and bought a Max Angus watercolour of Pedder on Truchanas’s advice. But the conservationists posed no political threat to Knight at that stage. It was the formation of the movement’s political wing, the United Tasmania Group, which fought (albeit unsuccessfully) the 1972 Tasmanian election, that marked the turning point in the debate.

By the end of 1971, with work proceeding on the three dams that would eventually impound the largest inland body of water in Australia and submerge Lake Pedder, Truchanas commented to friends on his growing exhaustion. At the age of forty-eight he planned another arduous solo trip along the Gordon River. He had just been offered a job teaching photography, canoeing and bush skills at the new Tasmanian College of Advanced Education, and the prospect of leaving the Hydro’s employment delighted him. But he never took up the position. On 6 January 1972, preparing to launch his kayak into the Gordon River, he slipped, became trapped and drowned.

Cica notes that Truchanas’s artistic legacy became known to the wider Australian public through the 1975 publication of The World of Olegas Truchanas. The publication was compiled by the Tasmanian salon, undeterred by lukewarm responses from prospective publishers. The cosmopolitan Truchanas may have been amused by one publisher’s cringing advice not to include his name in the title. The first edition sold out in six weeks. In total, it sold a remarkable 40,000 copies and pioneered wilderness publishing in Australia.

Pedder Dreaming is a beautiful book, richly illustrated with Truchanas’s photography and the art and photography of his friends. Cica offers us much more than a biography; the book describes an important period in the development of Australian environmentalism, and it is a cautionary tale about the destructiveness of unchecked power. Truchanas escaped a brutal form of totalitarianism in Lithuania to find another, milder version in Tasmania. Has the susceptibility to a simple economic prescription changed? Contemplating the current battles over the Tamar Valley pulp mill, Cica recalls Truchanas’s speech at a Lake Pedder rally:

“If we can revise some of our attitudes towards the land under our feet; if we can accept the role of a steward, and depart from the role of the conqueror; if we can accept the view that man and nature are inseparable parts of the unified whole – then Tasmania that is truly beautiful can be a shining beacon in the dull, uniform and largely artificial world.” •

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IN THE early sixties I had a professional photographer friend, whose work I admired, who insisted that I look at the photos of Wolfgang Sievers if I wanted to see something truly special. And I did and it was.

Sievers’s monumental images, created for a range of industrial and architectural clients, are technically breathtaking. The wide tonal range, the almost inconceivable depth of field, the fineness of the grain, the control of perspective and the dramatic compositions were all marks of a craftsman who knew and had mastered the physics and chemistry of photography.

A Sievers photograph was the very antithesis of Henri Cartier Bresson’s “decisive moment” – the ephemeral image caught in a fraction of a second and forever preserved. Sievers’s photos are constructed. They are static tableaux, first imagined and then planned and arranged, dramatically lit and executed. His famous photos taken in the Vickers Ruwolt plant at Richmond, in Melbourne, were staged at night when the workers had gone home and the huge gears could be hauled into positions that were totally inappropriate from an engineering point of view but pictorially magnificent.

He cleaned up the machinery, the product and the solitary worker or engineer. He carried a razor to give them a quick shave and occasionally swapped his clean shirt for their dirty one. He was creating images of industry and worker uncannily like those coming from Stalin’s Soviet Union, except in his case they celebrated the brutal hubris of capitalism at its most optimistic and triumphant rather than the glories of the Soviet Socialist Republic.

Sievers was a product of the New Photography school, which had its origins in Russia and Germany before 1939. Until 1938 he studied at the Contempora School of Applied Arts in Berlin, where the guiding principle was the concept of art united with industry in the service of society. There was no place for the wispy romanticism of Pictorialism in this school; here everything was sharply in focus, meticulously composed and tonally (monochromatically) perfect.

Blown to Australia by the ill wind of Nazism, Sievers had no trouble finding commissions in his new country. His work was admired and his services were sought by confident postwar industries. These days his photographs are like a splendid memorial to industrial glories past. We no longer make gears (the Vickers Ruwolt site has long since been built over with flats) or matches or Kiwi boot polish.

The National Library of Australia, which holds the Sievers’ collection, has published this monograph by photographic historian Helen Ennis. It is a fitting tribute to an important artist. The works reproduced are a cross-section of his output, showing his strengths and weaknesses.

His weaknesses are on display in the portraits and informal shots – he was more in sympathy with machines and buildings than with people, and more at ease with the static than the mobile. His best works have no humans in them at all. They are cold, hard and brutal. Those that do show people, such as his colour photos for hotels in Melbourne and Queensland, are amusingly dated and quaint.

Sievers’s politics were left-leaning – he alienated some clients when he opposed the Vietnam adventure in the sixties – and towards the end of his life he came to reflect on the contradiction between the work of which he was most proud and the ethics of his corporate clients. He worked for some of the biggest mining companies, and he was not unaware of the issues involved.

“I am quite aware of the moral problems confronting a responsible photographer in industry,” he wrote. “Should he be working for multinational companies at all if he believes – as I do – that Australia should have retained 51 per cent ownership of its resources? Should he use his skills to hide the terrible pollution and despoliation of our country – as I have? In creating beautiful images I have glamorised industries which have often been heedless of their sacred trust to use resources wisely and take care in the interest of future generations. In my defence, so far, I have found no valid answer to these problems.”

In his defence we must say – looking at his majestic photo Gears for the Mining Industry: Vickers Ruwolt, Burnley, Victoria 1967, for example – who would have predicted where it would all end up? We were all optimists in 1967. Green was just a colour.

Today, Wolfgang Sievers’ photographs seem old fashioned. His plate camera was large and heavy and mounted on a tripod. There was not much scope for taking the spontaneous, lively picture. Where he was constrained by the cameras and chemistry of his time, the contemporary photographer can work with a digital camera, or at least a 35mm film camera, that functions like an extension of the eye. The digital single lens reflex with its lightning fast auto focus and metering is so responsive that in the moment an event is seen and registered in the brain the photograph is already taken – even, given the speed of the burst mode, taken several times. We expect to see life and movement. And, most characteristic of modern documentary photography, emotion.

THE DOMINANT emotion seen in and evoked by the photographs in Beyond Reasonable Drought is fear. This book is the work of thirty-eight photographers collaborating under the group name MAP – Many Australian Photographers. They set out to document the drought that had the country in its grip in the first decade of this century. As Andrew Chapman, the president of MAP, writes: “Dryness now inhabits our national psyche, and there is a fear that things may worsen…”

There is no doubt that misery makes great art. Hordes of kangaroos bounding through the dust; dead sheep, killed by heat and hunger; farmers walking across the dry river and lake beds – there is a heart-breaking beauty to the fear that this might not be just a climatic blip, but rather a permanent state of affairs.

Ponch Hawkes contributes a series of photographs of subjects contemplating “the one thing that they would save” when water becomes so scarce that horticultural triage is an imperative. Ian Kenins contributes a moving picture of Doreen Oliver, who makes oilskin coats in Geelong for farmers who no longer need them. Julie Milowick photographed a woman at Fryerstown in Victoria who saves water by bathing in a plastic tub and doing the laundry with her feet at the same time. It hasn’t been all gloom: water tank makers and installers are thriving, and they also get their pictures in the book.

Beyond Reasonable Drought was published in 2009 when we feared that it might never rain again. There are dramatic photos of the Black Saturday fires and the aftermath. There is despair in the faces of farmers who can neither sow nor reap.

Well, it did rain. Too much! When I first saw this book we were still looking for a promising cloud and fearing that Al Gore might be right, that this was not cyclic drought but permanent climate change. Now, revisiting the photographs, they read as a vivid, superbly captured historic document, a bit like the famous American Farm Security Administration photographs of the 1930s.

Beyond Reasonable Drought is also a showcase for the new photographic technology. Not all the photos were taken with digital SLR cameras, but many were and it shows. The pictures have spontaneity and movement. These cameras, as quick as an eye, catch the fleeting expression or the momentary event. Colour, once so difficult and expensive to use, process and reproduce, is now easy and cheap.

Every photo in Beyond Reasonable Drought is a story to be “read” – quite different from the work of Wolfgang Sievers, who has done all the reading for us. And if we presume to read Sievers’s pictures we are likely to be deceived because they are artful arrangements intended to astonish, rather than reveal the truth. Marshall McLuhan characterised the photograph as “the brothel without walls” – a frozen moment of voyeurism. That’s true of the MAP photos but not of Sievers’s compositions. But you wouldn’t want to miss either. •

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But Dubotzki left a record of his time in internment that has only now become visible. When he was deported he took with him most of his photographic collection, including hundreds of photographs from his time in internment. And now those photographs have resurfaced.

Working in the archives of the Trial Bay Gaol Museum, near the NSW coastal town of South West Rocks, researcher Nadine Helmi came across “several stunning black-and-white photographs” taken by a certain “Dubotzki.” By circuitous means, she contacted his descendants in Germany, who shared his trove of photographs. They provide a vivid portrait of life in internment and form the core of the remarkable book, The Enemy at Home, and an exhibition showing at the Museum of Sydney until 11 September.

Dubotzki grew up near Munich. In 1913, aged twenty-two, he left home, having been engaged as an official photographer on an expedition to China and Sumatra. He then made his way to Adelaide, where he lived in Rundle Street. After war broke out he was arrested as an enemy alien and interned on Torrens Island, formerly a quarantine island, in the Port River. The internees had to erect their own tents for shelter, and in a photo he composed on Torrens Island (above), Dubotzki stands cigarette in mouth in the middle of seven men and their tent. They sport caps or wide-brimmed hats and look confidently at the camera. At this early point in their internment they might have felt almost like pioneers.

Camps like Torrens were soon closed and internees moved to New South Wales. Dubotzki spent most of his time in internment at Trial Bay, named for a nineteenth-century shipwreck. The camp was on a headland with a single access road and comprised a jail and outbuildings stretching down to the beach.

At Trial Bay Dubotzki photographed a compelling self-portrait. His sparse belongings are set up in a corner of the barracks; sunlight from the window falls on him. He looks questioningly at the camera as if asking, “What is going to happen now?” Neither he nor anyone else knew how long incarceration would last or what would happen afterwards. In front of him is a desk with a white cloth, as blank as his future. It is a haunting portrait of the artist as internee.

Nearly 7000 people were interned as enemy aliens in Australia during the first world war. The vast majority were resident in the country when war broke out. There were no hearings or appeals. Unsubstantiated denunciations and German or Austrian heritage were enough to get people arrested. People long settled in Australia were interned, had their naturalisation papers cancelled and were torn away from their families. Even the members of a group that was in Australia at the invitation of the government to address the Congress for the Advancement of Science were locked up when war broke out. Among them was Dr Peter Pringsheim, the brother-in-law of Thomas Mann.

Some internees opposed the measures but to no avail. The internee Frederick William Meyer, for example – a naturalised Australian with an Australian-born wife and son – railed against being interned, a fact that was noted by officials censoring internees’ correspondence. After the war ended he was kept in internment until the camps were closed; then he was released into the community only to be informed in a single-sentence letter that his naturalisation had been revoked and he would be deported. When he appealed to the High Court in an eleventh-hour bid to stave off deportation, the defence minister, George Pearce, hurried to draw up a formal deportation order. But he needn’t have bothered. The court dismissed Meyer’s challenge, finding that the government didn’t need to give any reasons for his denaturalisation and didn’t need to issue the deportation order to him – no more was needed than a ministerial minute on the departmental file. Meyer was deported on 5 June 1920.

Anti-German animosity, fanned by the government, was so strong that life inside the internment camps was preferable for many people of German or Austrian heritage. During the war 1500 people chose to be interned voluntarily. In mainstream society they faced surveillance and unemployment; inside the camps they at least had food and camaraderie and could earn a little money by working.

In fact, internees had a surprising measure of control over activities within the camps. In the early days they organised and asserted themselves during stand-offs with camp authorities, winning considerable autonomy over their own affairs. Elected committees of internees were essentially responsible for the internal management of the camps.

The camps had a rudimentary economy of their own. Prisoners could, for instance, run businesses closed to them outside the camps. Although enemy aliens were not normally allowed to possess cameras, Dubotzki ran a photographic business. Seamen who had been taken off ships into internment continued to draw salaries from their companies and could pay for services. Internees could earn money working in labouring gangs organised from the camps.

Also among the internees at Trial Bay was a group of internees who had the remnants of former affluence – people arrested in British colonies such as the Straits Settlements, Ceylon, Fiji and Hong Kong. The colonies wanted to deport these people, who had suddenly become unwelcome because of their heritage, but needed somewhere to send them. In a curious reversion to the days of convict transportation, the Australian government agreed with alacrity to accept and intern them. Altogether 1000 people were sent to Australia for internment in this way; they brought with them whatever money they could. In 1918, in an even more curious footnote to these events, the Australian government established an enormous new camp at Molonglo in today’s Australian Capital Territory to receive 5000 internees it had agreed to take from Africa. The plan was only scuppered when the German government got wind of it and threatened retaliatory measures against British POWs in Germany.

Trial Bay had the richest cultural life among Australia’s several internment camps. Dubotzki’s photographs are an eloquent record of artistic, sporting and business activities in the camp. They capture plays, cabarets and orchestral music. From salvaged materials the internees constructed elaborate sets to stage productions, and threw themselves with gusto into theatre. They even produced posters about shows and promoted them to a truly captive audience.

Dubotzki himself took up painting at Trial Bay. One carefully composed photograph shows the photographer among a quartet of men in the camp’s art studio. In the centre sits a man next to his own portrait. Dubotzki is beside him, and his own portrait hangs top centre. Some of these paintings have survived. A self-portrait by Dubotzki, similar to the one in the photograph, was found in a hut at Trial Bay long after the war.

The Trial Bay camp was shut down suddenly in May 1918 when a wild rumour spread that the German raider Wolf, running amok in waters around Australia, was going to land on the coast and liberate the internees. In panic the military transferred the internees inland to the large German concentration camp at Holsworthy near Liverpool. Conditions there were far less favourable than at Trial Bay. The internees spent a year there before being deported.

The last photograph Dubotzki made of Trial Bay shows the haste with which the camp was closed. A window has been left wide open. Furniture has been thrown out of the barracks in the rush to pack. The place looks like it’s been ransacked.

But the photograph does more than show the chaos of the departure. Amid the disorder one thing has been carefully arranged: a hat atop a pole. The hat itself is blurred but its shadow is perfectly focused in the brightest part of the photograph. Inexorably, it draws the eye, reminding the viewer of Dubotzki’s presence.

The shadow of the hat is a poignant touch. It is as if Dubotzki is saying to the viewer, “There is abandonment all around but I have taken the trouble to place this hat on a high stand. You cannot see me but the hat shows that I am here now taking this photograph. I was one of the people who lived here for years. I will leave my hat behind as a reminder of my presence.”

In fact Dubotzki left far more behind than that. He left a unique collection of images from the years of internment that he and thousands of others spent in Australian camps. •

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Berenice Abbott’s monument is her photograph New York at Night 1932. When Susan van Wyk, curator of photography at the National Gallery Victoria, designed a catalogue for the exhibition Luminous Cities it wasn’t surprising that this was the photo she chose for the cover.

After spending eight years in Paris and Berlin, part of the time under the tutelage of avant-garde photographer Man Ray, and profoundly influenced by the Parisian photographer Eugène Atget, Abbott had returned to New York in 1929. She came back to a city being transformed by the skyscraper building boom and also about to be plunged into the crisis of the Great Depression.

From Atget she had gained a deep feeling for the city as subject. Although she had been doing well as a portrait photographer in Paris she didn’t pursue that form in New York, except when the need to earn money dictated that she take flattering photos of the plutocracy, most of whom she thought to be self-absorbed and uninteresting. Her real interest lay in the city itself and the points where the old was being swept away to make space for the dazzlingly new.

Eugène Atget’s (1857–1927) project in Paris had been much the same – recording the remnants of the ancient city before they were destroyed to make way for the realisation of Baron Haussmann’s dream of creating the most beautiful city in the world (which involved brutally removing the old and displacing the inhabitants). Abbott, who photographed Atget just before he died, bought his archive of negatives and prints and took them back to America. Without her intervention it is possible that they would have been destroyed. She never stopped speaking and writing about the Atget legacy and in 1969 she deposited the treasure with the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

For New York at Night she had to make careful plans. She wanted to capture the moment at dusk when the office lights are on but there is still enough daylight to see the buildings. She decided that the shortest day of the year would be her best opportunity, and she selected a shooting position high up in the Empire State Building. Because she planned a long exposure she needed an evening without wind so that her view camera would not move on the tripod. The result of this meticulous planning and preparation is beyond doubt her monument photo.

When I look at it it stirs in me admiration for her deliberate artistry – she wasn’t one to take twenty-seven spontaneous shots hoping that one might be worth keeping – and for American audacity. The world had never seen anything like these mountain-sized buildings. Possibly no one but Americans could even conceive that it might be possible to construct a building more than 100 storeys tall. The Empire State, Chrysler and Rockefeller buildings were breathtaking then, in the 1920s and 30s, and they still take the breath away.

Abbott’s literary collaborator, and possibly lover, Elizabeth McCausland, interpreted the city images differently. To her they were a record of the destructive power of American capitalism in all its flashy vulgarity. McCausland was that rarest of American characters, a Marxist critic. Sometimes she seems to have imposed more interpretative words onto Abbott’s images than they can bear.

But when it comes to superfluous verbiage she doesn’t hold a candle to Terri Weissman, whose monograph The Realisms of Berenice Abbott piles layers of turgid academese onto photos that are simply isolated frames filled with edges, angles, shadows and light. Abbott herself was an advocate of simplicity and unadorned realism. She didn’t like the prissy pictures of the pictorialists and she had broken completely from the silly extravagances of the avant-garde. She returned again and again in her speeches and writing to the importance of “realism” (her word) in photography. She was a recorder, not a commentator or interpreter.

Weissman’s discussion of Abbott’s simple portraits of the rich and famous is risible. Of a studio photo of Princess Murat, she writes: “This portrait operates outside a merely psychological or psychologising framework in that the plurality of gazes (Abbott’s, Murat’s, the spectator’s) paralleled by a seeming plurality of subject positions (feminine, masculine, both feminine and masculine and neither) situates this work in a social field that extends beyond the visible and beyond the specifics of Murat to a world that remains open to investigation, where there exists no simple expression of one’s self.” In other words it’s a picture of a plain woman who dresses like a bloke and smokes, shot against a featureless studio background.

It’s hard to believe, but New York at Night – one of the greatest photos ever taken, an image that marks Abbott as one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century – doesn’t appear in the book. Perhaps it’s just as well, because the quality of reproductions is poor and they do not do justice to the works that are included.

Fortunately there are many other sources of information about Abbott’s work, among them two documentaries, New York and Paris: The World of Abbott and Atget, screened by the ABC last year, and Eugène and Berenice: Pioneers of Urban Photography, screened at about the same time on SBS and now released on DVD. Watching these two programs, in which the commentary on the photographers’ work is made by art historians and photographers who revere the artists, gives an insight that is completely missing from Weissman’s book.

Eugène and Berenice begins by looking at the extraordinary work of Atget who, even into the twentieth century, continued to carry a twenty-kilogram camera around Paris and then make his prints using the albumen method of coating paper with silver suspended in egg white. The prints were then exposed to sunlight before developing and fixing. As a result his images have an ethereal beauty, enhanced by his practice of shooting early in the morning.

Atget rejected the appellation of artist – he insisted that he was a documenter, taking photographs to sell to painters who needed reference pictures from which to paint. Man Ray was one of the first of the young expatriates to recognise Atget’s photographs as works of art in their own right, and it was he who introduced Berenice to Eugène.

In interview footage in the film Berenice speaks of her work with profound intelligence and simplicity. Her photographic philosophy, if we may call it that without offending her spirit, is: “Whatever you photograph has to be visually important – otherwise you write about it.” In her book A Guide to Better Photography: “Photography is a new vision of life, a profoundly realistic and objective view of the external world… What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.” I think she is saying that the “straight” (her word again) photo speaks for itself. Words are superfluous if the photo has done its job. Pompous commentary is an insult to the photographer. I prefer the simple tribute by one artist to another when, in New York and Paris: The World of Abbott and Atget, a British photographer says of New York at Night: “I look at that image and I think, ‘I wish I had taken that photograph.’”

The last part of Berenice Abbott’s working life was spent as a technical photographer in the laboratories of MIT. She said that she enjoyed the work, but she also spoke in private of the hostile male atmosphere in which she was operating. The physicists whose experiments she was photographing found women “difficult” and in any case thought that a few Polaroid snaps would do the job. Yet she produced photographs that are both aesthetically pleasing and at the same time instructive records of laboratory events.

She died in 1991 and is considered, along with Eugène Atget, to be a pioneer of urban photography and an artist without peer in her field. The link between the two photographers is preserved forever in the touching portrait Abbott took of Atget just weeks before he died.

Would-be photographers are warned: looking at Abbott’s photographs might leave you asking, “What is there left to do?’ Or it might be a lesson in the art of photography that inspires you to try harder. •

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