(Installation View, pp. 375–382)
There has always been an ‘alternative’ photography. The pictorialist salons of the early twentieth century always featured gum bichromate prints and bromoil transfers, techniques derived from printmaking. In the 1930s, inspired by Man Ray, Max Dupain dabbled in photograms and solarisation. As photography programs blossomed in art schools during the 1970s, ‘alternative techniques’ of handcolouring, photograms, cyanotypes, Liquid Light, gum bichromate prints and pinhole cameras were part of every curriculum.1 In the 1970s, photographers such as Micky Allan and Ruth Maddison used handcolouring pointedly to inscribe a feminist power into the base black-and-white print. In 1986, for an exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography, the photographer Catherine Rogers used the cameraless technique of the photogram to directly intervene in one of Australia’s most troubling crime cases, the wrongful conviction of Lindy Chamberlain for the murder of her baby, based on erroneous scientific evidence. Through the bleeding of developer over darkroom projections of multiple negatives, as well as photograms of significant objects such as scissors, The Nature of Evidence directly participated in the same ‘aesthetics of the forensic’ that had convinced the jury to wrongly convict Chamberlain in the first place. As Helen Grace identified at the time: ‘each of the frames of counter-evidence … interrogates both the “official story” of the Chamberlain case and the “official story” of photography itself, since the techniques of photography (at the level of the image rather than the camera) are laid bare’.2
In the twenty-first century digital age, such ‘alternative’ analogue techniques explicitly underline their ‘historical’ or ‘essential’ exploration of the medium. For example, the Indigenous photographer James Tylor has chosen to use nineteenth-century techniques associated with colonialism, such as the daguerreotype and the tintype, as a political move to interrogate colonial history. In Whalers, Sealers and Land Stealers, 2015, exhibited at Flinders University City Gallery, Adelaide, Tylor used a twelve-gauge shotgun to pockmark a series of daguerreotypes he had made of Portland Bay in Victoria. (Tylor has a family association with the area, which had belonged to indigenous people before being stolen by the sealers and whalers, Edward Henty and William Dutton, in 1834.)
Other photographers have harnessed themselves to the optical, chemical and physical propulsions of the medium. Private collectors and institutions in Australia and abroad – including the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and State Library Victoria in Melbourne, the Lake Macquarie City Gallery in Booragul, New South Wales, and the Nevada Museum of Art, in the US – all hold framed pieces cut and trimmed square from larger sheets of fibre-based photographic paper that Harry Nankin slid under the nighttime waves of Bushrangers Bay in Victoria on five occasions between the southern summer solstice of 1996 and the winter solstice of 1997. Flash guns mounted on a gantry made life-scale photograms of churning seawater, foam, kelp, detritus and sub-marine light refraction. Exhibited at the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP) in 1997, works like The Wave were as much about the performance of photography as the final image.
Exhibitions such as the NGV’s 2003 First Impressions: Contemporary Australian Photograms, curated by Isobel Crombie (the opening photography show at the new NGV Australia) and The Alchemists: Rediscovering Photography in the Age of the JPEG, the last curated exhibition at the ACP’s Oxford Street Gallery in 2015, documented the large number of Australian photographers exploring the interaction of historical reference and materiality, where images were magically produced by the simple optical fact of the camera obscura, rather than the factory manufactured equipment of the camera. In these exhibitions, the photographic print was treated not as a neutral screen for the image, but as a physical object layered with light sensitive halides and dyes – potential eruptions of tone and colour waiting to be revealed, often with the use of handmade emulsions or darkroom techniques. Geoffrey Batchen’s exhibition Antipodean Emanations: Cameraless Photographs from Australia and New Zealand at Monash Gallery of Art, surveyed similar territory in 2018.3
The polyvalent material power of cameraless photography is exemplified by the work of Justine Varga. In 2017, she hung thick chromatic sheaves of her large-scale cameraless prints – enlarged from overexposed, marked and abraded large format colour negatives in the ACP installation Photogenic Drawing. In the same year, she also controversially won the Olive Cotton Award for Portrait Photography at the Tweed Regional Gallery, New South Wales, with a portrait of her grandmother titled Maternal Line, in which her grandmother was not ‘pictured’ but was nonetheless present in the image as a ‘signature’ of pen marks and as a ‘genetic trace’ of saliva. A portrait of the artist made the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald under the curious headline ‘Nice frame. But is it a photograph?’ – curious given the controversy was not over whether the work was a photograph, but rather if it constituted a legitimate photographic portrait.4 This was possibly the first time a photographic artist had achieved the front page of a major newspaper since the controversy surrounding the closure of Bill Henson’s exhibition by police in 2008. The judge, senior curator of photography at the National Gallery of Australia, Shaune Lakin, in a Guardian newspaper article reflecting on the ‘global furore’, acknowledged that the work’s unconventional and collaborative nature ‘might be a confounding proposition for some’, but articulated the ‘powerful … experience of the print itself’.5
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One of the popular texts was Bea Nettles, Breaking the Rules: A Photo Media Cookbook, Light Impressions, Rochester, 1977. ↩
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Helen Grace, ‘A Shroud of Evidence’, Photofile, vol. 4, no. 3, 1986, pp. 5–7. ↩
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The exhibition was a local version of Batchen’s international history of cameraless photography at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand in 2016, titled Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph. Australian artists were well represented in that exhibition, with figures such as Ian Burn, Danica Chappell, Simone Douglas, Anne Ferran, Susan Purdy and Justine Varga. ↩
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In 2019 Varga won the Dobell Drawing prize with her cameraless photographic print Photogenic Drawing without creating an equivalent amount of controversy amongst the drawing community. ↩
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Shaune Lakin, ‘Why I chose the “spit and scribble” photograph: Olive Cotton judge on the global furore’, The Guardian, 2 August 2017, online at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/aug/02/why-i-chose-the-spit-and-scribble-photograph-olive-cotton-judge-on-the-global-furore. Accessed 2 August 2017. ↩