(Installation View, pp. 337–346)
During the 1980s and much of the 1990s, exhibitions of photography explicitly framed within the documentary tradition were rarely seen in Australian galleries, although it was often critiqued in art school and university lectures. Put simply, during the theoretically led postmodernist period, documentary photography was tainted by its apparent naivety and lingering associations with heroic modernist model of the (male) photographic visionary. More practically, there was also the simple recognition that documentary photographs are often better viewed in the context of the printed page rather than the white cube. This last point was underlined in the 1980s as gallery prints grew in size and artists like Bill Henson presented their work in carefully lit arrangements (after which, according to curator Gael Newton, all photography in the gallery seemed to require ‘a conceptual installation feel’).1 At the same time, however, curators for the picture sections of libraries, such as Alan Davies at the State Library of New South Wales (1989–2014) and Linda Groom at the National Library of Australia, developed their own programs to purchase, at admittedly more modest prices, groups of assiduously captioned documentary photographs of future historical interest from several different working photographers such as Jon Lewis, Ponch Hawkes and Richard Stringer, among many others.
Documentary photography returned to art galleries in the late 1990s in both old and new guises. The potency of photography to act as a form of witness testimony had never actually disappeared among photographers and audiences, and as the postmodern critique waned (its leading practitioners ensconced in mainstream venues for contemporary art), documentary was freshly embraced by the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) and revisited by the Australian Centre of Photography (ACP), which had largely neglected documentary for fifteen years, with the exception of Mervyn Bishop’s retrospective in 1991. Photographers were also knocking at the gallery door – with collapsing incomes and opportunities available to press and magazine photographers as the internet took hold, documentary photographers sought refuge in art and the potential for exposure and print sales from gallery walls. A new wave of photography festivals – taking their cue from international models such as Arles in France – provided another important platform for new documentary practice, including slideshows, most notably FotoFreo (2002–12) in Western Australia.2
The establishment of the biennial Leica/CCP Documentary Photography Award in 1997 marked a turning point for the CCP. In fact, this exhibition was an uncomfortable fit for the gallery, which at the time was firmly positioned in the contemporary art scene and known for showing conceptually oriented video art. From the CCP’s perspective, the exhibition was both a sponsorship coup and a way to accommodate its most vocal critics in the documentary camp. The exhibition attracted Australia’s best photojournalists and documentary photographers – such as Michael Amendolia, Narelle Autio, Donna Bailey, Stephen Dupont, Ashley Gilbertson, Simon O’Dwyer, Trent Parke, David Dare Parker, Jack Picone, Dean Sewell, Matthew Sleeth, and Jason South – who were required to submit up to seven photographs scaled to fit into standardised metal frames, so the exhibition could be easily freighted to regional galleries across Victoria and interstate. Internationally, documentary photography became increasingly valued with the media space following the September 11 attacks in 2001, and the commencement of the so-called ‘war on terror’ (a resurgent interest in research-based truth-telling was marked in the art world by Okwui Enwezor’s influential 2002 Documenta).
All of this was happening at a moment when photography was turning digital, with the Leica/CCP Award stipulating that ‘no alteration of the content of photographs is permitted’. Nevertheless, for the fourth Leica/CCP Documentary Photography Award in 2003, a brave judging panel awarded the prize to graphic designer and ‘emerging artist’ Domenico M. Cozzolino, for his series Arcadia del Sud: West Heidelberg, Melbourne, Australia, circa 1966. The work takes the form of a suite of colour photographs digitally reconstructed from the artist’s teenage colour snapshots – a retrospective of his Neapolitan parents’ migration and settlement in a ‘New Australian’ suburb.3 4 The choice deeply offended some photographers, and camera sponsor Leica threatened to withdraw its support of the exhibition. As Gael Newton wrote, ‘The award of such a major prize for contemporary Australian documentary photography to a set of manipulated images from almost forty-year old negatives stress-tested the term “documentary”’.5
The documentary mode continued to produce strong work. Mathew Sleeth visited East Timor in 1999, embedded with the Australian Armed Forces, and in 2002 his slyly oblique photographs were exhibited at the CCP and also published as a book by the documentary-oriented Melbourne photo agency and publisher M.33. The book, Tour of Duty: Winning Hearts and Minds in East Timor, was the first of the very few Australian photobooks to be recognised by Martin Parr’s and Gerry Badger’s multivolume Photobook: A History, published in 2006.
In 1999, frustrated by the lack of opportunities to exhibit their work in Sydney, documentary photographers Michael Amendolia, Stephen Dupont, David Dare Parker, and Jack Picone established the Reportage Festival. Beginning at the Valhalla Cinema in Glebe with just two slide projectors screening work by the festival founders, the festival grew in popularity yearly, and in 2013 its projection sites included the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. By the early 2000s, various Australian photojournalists were simultaneously at the forefront of international press awards and showing their work in galleries. The ACP developed the touring show Witness: An Exhibition of Australian Photojournalism in 2002, including Dupont, Ashley Gilbertson, Parker and others. These photographers had been excluded from the ACP’s program for nearly two decades but its director, Alasdair Foster, wooed them back, promoting in the press release ‘the tenacity and intimacy of great photojournalism and the potent political and aesthetic strengths of the photographer’s work’. Group exhibitions such as New Australiana, 2001, Suburban Edge, 2004, and Glenn Sloggett’s solo exhibition Cheaper and Deeper, 2007, also appealed to documentary tastes. In 2003, the commercial gallery Stills showed RePRESENTING the REAL with, among others, the large-scale underwater observations of Trent Parke and Narelle Autio, Ricky Maynard’s uncompromising, metre-square black-and-white portraits of Wik Aboriginal elders, and Dean Sewell’s black-and-white essay on Aboriginal communities living on ‘The Block’ in Redfern. In 2009, ACP presented War by the photojournalist cooperative °SOUTH (Ben Bohane, Michael Coyne, David Dare Parker, Stephen Dupont, Ashley Gilbertson, Tim Page and Jack Picone). According to the gallery’s website, ‘these men … chose to collaborate and share their work as independent works of art, instead of competing as conflict photographers for hire. As such, this collaboration intended to create greater social change through their photography and draw awareness to the impact of war’.6 The following year, Dupont held a solo show at the ACP, Afghanistan: the Perils of Freedom 1993–2009, bringing together fifteen years of his work in Afghanistan. Its ‘mural-like hanging’ was described as ‘an installation of photojournalistic practice’ that ‘celebrated Dupont’s stories from the region’.7 Evidently, for exhibitions of documentary photography to achieve greater impact, a more theatrical approach to their presentation was required.
The ACP had already moved away from the modernist ‘white cube’ to what Foster described in the 2004 Director’s Report as a more ‘radical and contemporary’ black box, lending the spaces a dramatic character and better facilitating screen works.8 Trent Parke’s 2005 solo exhibition at the ACP, Minutes to Midnight, embodied the new theatrical approach to the presentation of documentary photography. Minutes to Midnight was the result of a two-year, 90,000 kilometre journey around Australia with his pregnant partner Narelle Autio (a renowned photographer in her own right), and presented a vision of Australia on the brink of social and ecological catastrophe through dark expressive documentary images.9 Setting up an overtly personal view of a looming apocalypse – viewing Australia as a kind of war zone in a scathing indictment of then Prime Minister John Howard’s ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia – Parke crafted a dense narrative extravaganza in moody, darkened gallery spaces. Photographs were presented in different sizes, both framed and unframed, at varying heights upon darkened walls. A chamber-like space contained a lightbox facing downward from the ceiling and featured a large abstract picture of flying foxes; on the floor immediately below, another lightbox featured a grainy image of a whale shark. One of the rooms even included a soundscape of rural night noises to add to the cinematic, immersive feel. Parke said that he wished to created ‘an experience for people, something on the grand scale of epic cinema’, which he felt was unachievable with ‘small pictures that are all the same size presented on white walls’.10
The newspaper photography critic Robert McFarlane recognised Parke’s ‘remarkable visual style’ and ‘deeply subjective’ approach in the diaristic documentary tradition of Robert Frank. However, he was critical of the self-conscious theatricalisation of the spaces, concluding that ‘Parke’s photography deserved a more distilled, contemplative approach that allowed often remarkable images to be seen without … such structured hyperbole’.11 From a very different perspective, contemporary art curator and critic Blair French came to the same conclusion. Writing in Broadsheet Journal, French admired some of the images – their ‘almost visceral handling of tonal contrasts’ and ‘evocative social contexts’ such as a mural-scale diptych of a boarded up outback pub bearing the banner ‘Welcome to Paradise’ – but not the ‘overdone expressionism’ (‘reminding us constantly of the authoring presence’) or their ‘theatrical exhibition garb’.[^12] French’s real target was the direction of the ACP itself: ‘Parke is a consummate image-maker. But not for the first time in recent years, the overbearing exhibition-presentation of the ACP tends to bend the images to its own purposes’.12
Audiences had no such qualms, no doubt attracted to the exhibition’s apocalyptic overtones and exaggerated authorship (apparent in all the marketing), which stressed the expressive potential of grainy black-and-white film photography (including a self-portrait of a tanned and topless Parke on a sandy beach viewing negative strips pegged out to dry on a scrubby bush). According to ACP reports, the exhibition (part of the Sydney Festival held over summer) was the best attended in recorded history. Ten years later, Parke followed up with a sprawling, equally theatrical hang through the basement galleries of the Art Gallery of South Australia, The Black Rose, 2015. Including black-and-white and colour photographs mounted on the wall and on plinths, slides shows and video, the exhibition explicitly cast photography as a medium for personal catharsis, with Parke addressing the loss of his mother, who died when he was twelve. It even included a reconstructed darkroom with an image of Parke’s face in the developer.13
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Gael Newton 2014 interview quoted in: Joanna Mendelsohn, Catherine De Lorenzo, Alison Inglis, Catherine Speck, Australian Art Exhibitions: Opening Our Eyes, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2018, p. 298. ↩
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FotoFreo, established by former mining company director Bob Hewitt, along with local photographers including Max Pam and Graham Miller, presented Australian photographers alongside photographers from Asia, Europe and North America – often digitally outputted in Perth by a local photographic sponsor – and commissioned new work by Edward Burtynsky (2008), David Dare Parker (2010) and Martin Parr (2012). ↩
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The fourth Leica/CCP Documentary Photography Award was shown at the Centre for Contemporary Photography between 20 June and 19 July 2003. It was judged by art critic Bruce James; curator of photography at the National Gallery of Victoria, Susan van Wyk; and artist Anne Zahalka. The fifteen finalists in the exhibition, selected from 350 entrants, were: Donna Bailey, Domenico Cozzolino, Dean Golja, Philip Gostelow, Jo Grant, David Lloyd, Jennifer Mitchell, Simon O’Dwyer, Selina Ou, Narinda Reeders, Steven Siewert, Matthew Sleeth, Andrew Sunley-Smith, Tamara Voninski and Thuy Vy. The award was on national tour in 2003–4. For an overview of the work, see: Nikos Papastergiadis, ‘The Space for Reflection’, Leica/CCP Documentary Photography Award, exhibition catalogue, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2003, pp. 7–10. ↩
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The earliest image was taken with his father’s viewfinder camera. The Leica/CCP Award limited submissions to seven prints at a designated size for ease of showing and touring, but the full suite included eight larger images. ↩
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See Gael Newton, ‘Art and Documentary: Photographic Biculturalism?’ in Daniel Palmer (ed.), Photogenic: Essays/Photography/CCP 2000–2004, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2005, p. 65. ↩
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Lola Pinder, ‘Creative Paddington: Stephen Dupont’, ACP blog, 2015. Online at: https://acp.org.au/blogs/news/stephen-dupont. Accessed 10 September 2019. ↩
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ibid. ↩
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Toby Meagher, ‘Developing Photography: A History of the Australian Centre for Photography 1973–2013’, Master of Arts Administration thesis, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2013. This dramatic mode, usually with dark grey walls, continued through the duration of Foster’s tenure as Director. Several documentary exhibitions fused still and moving images, such as Murray Fredericks’s series of large colour landscape photographs of Lake Eyre, The Salt Project 2003–10, 2011 – described in the press release as ‘breath-taking and awe-inspiring’. ↩
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Parke had started as a sports photographer for Fairfax Media and established a name for himself with a poetic book, Dream Life (Hot Chilli Press, Kirribilli, 1999) of black-and-white street photography featuring harsh Sydney light inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. Parke was then invited to join the prestigious Magnum photoagency, still the only Australian to have that honour. ↩
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Parke in the ACP room notes, 2005, quoted in: Belinda Hungerford, ‘Road Work Ahead: A Study of Road Photography in Australia’, Honours thesis, Australian National University, 2010. Online at: https://www.photo-web.com.au/papers/hungerford/03.html. Accessed 10 September 2019. ↩
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Robert McFarlane, ‘Gazing Upon a Decaying Nation’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 January 2005.
{^12]: Blair French, ‘Minutes to Midnight’, Broadsheet Journal, vol. 34, no. 1, 2005, p. 52. ↩ -
French was himself a former ACP program manager from 1996–99. ↩
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See: Daniel Palmer, ‘Trent Parke: The Black Rose’, Artlink, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2015, pp. 92–3. ↩