(Installation View, pp. 363–374)
Photography is an archival medium. The photography ‘boom’ of the 1970s and 80s was in part driven by forty years of archival production, as photographers like Max Dupain and Wolfgang Sievers – often with the guidance of newly appointed art museum curators – returned to their vast negative archives, amassed over decades of industrial and advertising photography, to find ‘fresh’ images for their first art gallery shows. However, during the 1990s, artists began to mine other public photographic archives for material. For instance, artists who engaged in a postcolonial critique often turned to historical archives in order to rethink Australia’s dominant white settler history. Indigenous artists such as Leah King-Smith, Brenda L. Croft and Brook Andrew produced exhibitions of work based on historical portraits of ancestors and family members. Andrew mined colonial postcards and other ethnographic images for numerous exhibitions – principally as source material for larger works, such as Sexy and Dangerous, 1996. In Gun-Metal Grey, 2007, barely visible photographs were presented as large screen prints on metallic foil and cotton that, as Marcia Langton observed, ‘demand that we tilt our heads and walk around the gallery to discern their secrets and elicit meanings.’1 More recently, Andrew has incorporated postcards of Indigenous people as material objects in museological displays alongside books and sculptures. Artists of Asian heritage, such as William Yang, Aaron Seeto, and more recently Phuong Ngo, have also explored family photography collections to complicate the white history of Australia.
Photographic archives have facilitated rich explorations of often personal histories of migration. Malaysian-born, Sydney-based artist Simryn Gill has taken inspiration from the intimacy of books to produce unexpected and innovative photographic displays. In 32 Volumes, 2006, at Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Gill presented a table, stools and white gloves along with thirty-two white books that, when opened, revealed themselves as modifications of the Life World Library series from the 1960s, featuring faded cold war era representations of nations and regions, with all text and captions studiously erased. A few years later, in Inland, 2009, Gill exhibited a collection of 162 small-scale (13 centimetre square) photographs made during a road trip from New South Wales to Western Australia, presented unframed in small piles on a study table in the gallery. Actively refusing the spectacle of large-scale prints on the wall and their associated viewing habits, the installation demanded the slow absorption of the viewer, who was invited to touch and perform their own task of sifting, sorting and juxtaposing three perspectives on the land. The installation and physical handling, closer to archival research, was crucial to the work’s meaning.
New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based Patrick Pound has developed an exhibition practice based largely on collections of other people’s photographs. For instance, his 2002 installation at CCP, The Memory Room, included thousands of found photographs pasted in a vast array of scrapbooks and albums, with pages torn out and pinned to the walls in a manic flowchart of connections, from giant vegetables to miniature Tudor villages. Pound created a fictitious bedroom of a character who ‘in trying to explain the world has been reduced to collecting it’. With a passion for literary associations and puns, Pound’s interest in surrealist and conceptual practices invited viewers to piece together the collection’s organising logics. As Pound moved from sourcing snapshots at op-shops and flea markets to eBay, his idiosyncratic categories expanded – including amateur mistakes such as the photographer’s shadow (The Photographers, 1990–) or thumb appearing in the frame. He has also mined more whimsical categories (Portrait of the Wind, The Readers, and so on), with a particular attention to damaged photographs (such as figures intentionally crossed out, scratched or drawn on). By collecting with constraints, Pound willfully assembles otherwise disconnected things. He is part of an international wave of interest in such images. Scores of exhibitions and books of found photographs have emerged since the late 1990s – often blurring the roles of artist, collector and curator – as photography’s transition to a screen-based medium drew attention and appeal to the material quality of ordinary analogue prints.
In exhibition format, Pound has alternated between presenting constellations of the snapshots themselves, and large digital prints that amassed scanned images of the snapshots. Both revealed different histories of photographic paper and chemical processes, while some carry the additional historical residue of previous uses – in contrast to the shiny, seemingly ever-present and malleable digital image flow. Sometimes framed, sometimes pinned to the wall, Pound has even developed a set of terms to describe his elaborate display techniques.2 Animated by the instability of meaning, many of Pound’s series are ongoing and the same series is often altered in different contexts. Pound’s strategies culminated in a major solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 2017, ironically titled The Great Exhibition. The exhibition opened with darkened rooms with vitrines containing hundreds of snapshots arranged according to Pound’s typological connections, and another more extensive act of curating by association from the permanent collection. It also included Thoughts-of-Sorts, an online collaboration between Pound and Rowan McNaught – seeking visual congruencies and connections between found photographs in real time. Pound and McNaught had previously been invited to develop an online photo sorting machine for Judy Annear’s The Photograph and Australia at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2015.3
Various group exhibitions underlined the interest in archives and collections. In 2008, the NGV presented Order and Disorder: Archives and Photography, linking the archival turn in contemporary art to 1970s serial and conceptual approaches (based on the Robert Rooney archive). Curator Maggie Finch proposed that photography ‘is naturally associated with archives because of its inherent ability to record, store and organise visual images’ and noted that some of the artists ‘act as archivists, collecting and ordering their own unique bodies of photographs, while others create disorder by critiquing the ideas and systems of archives’.4 In 2009, Kyla McFarlane curated Photographer Unknown at Monash University Museum of Art, named after Jacky Redgate’s series (1980–83), and also including Susan Fereday, Marco Fusinato, Donna Ong, Fiona Pardington, Pound, Elvis Richardson and Fiona Tan.
Just as artists working with archives have adopted a quasi-curatorial role, curators have started to author ‘creative’ exhibition arrangements of known and unknown photographers. In a bold piece of exhibition design, Zara Stanhope’s 2007 survey exhibition Perfect for Every Occasion: Photography Today began with an array of recent international news agency photographs, depicting various current events and scenes from popular culture. Serving to remind us of photograph’s pervasive influence on how we conventionally look at the world, the exhibition itself included Pound as well as Justene Williams’ videos in which she dances robotically around a mirrored room dressed in a suit made from photographs, performing the idea of image saturation.
In their ‘experimental’ exhibition An Unorthodox Flow of Images at CCP in 2017, Naomi Cass and Pippa Milne treated the entire history of photography as a source to remix. Commencing with Australia’s first press photograph (J. W. Lindt’s image of a photographer photographing the limp body of Joe Byrne of the Kelly gang in 1880), the exhibition promiscuously mixed Australian and international imagery, historical and contemporary, authored and anonymous, original and reproduced, still and moving, generating an associative chain of images in one long line along the walls of the gallery. As the curators proposed in an accompanying ‘field guide’, alluding to networked image viewing behaviour and image sharing, their aim was to provide ‘new contexts to existing artworks whilst celebrating the materiality of real photographs, in real time and critically, honouring the shared democratic experience of the public gallery space’.5
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Marcia Langton, ‘Brook Andrew: Ethical Portraits and Ghost-scapes’, Art Bulletin of Victoria 48, 2008, pp. 47–62. ↩
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For example, the cluster hang (People who look dead (but probably aren’t); the ‘matrix hang’ (where the hang reflects or maintains a trace of the search systems that found the photographs in the first place, and ‘each line intersects with common points – to each collection’); the palindrome and the reflection; ricochet (where an image passes on a characteristic one to another); ‘snowball’ where each added a character to the next and contained that of the preceding works; arcs (e.g. a ball through an arc via a series of found photographs); alignments (where a line appears to continue through a hang. ↩
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That projection, The Compound Lens Project (2014–15), displayed dots, lines and squiggles as the software algorithm searched within boundless online databases for ‘similar’ images and then tried to draw them in real time ↩
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In a review on his blog Artblart, Marcus Bunyan noted that there were no digital photographs in the exhibition. He also took the opportunity to complain about the curious half-oval gallery space on level three of NGV International: ‘the NGV “International” is shooting itself in the foot with the current permanent photography gallery space. Small, jaded and dour it seems an addendum to other larger spaces in the gallery and to be honest photography and Melbourne deserves better.’ Online at: https://artblart.com/tag/order-and-disorder-archives-and-photography. Accessed 20 October 2019. ↩
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Naomi Cass and Pippa Milne, An Unorthodox Flow of Images, exhibition catalogue, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2017, p. 25. ↩