“What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place.” -1

Horace Smith wrote his lines after visiting Egypt in 1818 and we continue to attempt to ensure we will not be forgotten. The struggle to make meaning of our place on earth becomes more urgent whenever our sense of control is challenged. The photographs in this exhibition encourage us to consider transience and our human efforts to influence progress in the face of loss.

Francesca Rosa’s Fire Zone takes on new layers of meaning as it revives memories of the Victorian Bushfires in February. The photographs represent what is left behind in the wake of a tragic event, possibly a crime. Almost forensic, the images of destruction give no answers. The viewer is challenged to investigate, to invent. We are invited into familiar spaces only to be stopped, rendered spectators. The objects in the photographs have lost their original function, but remain, identifiable though untouchable. Their presence sharpens our sense of loss and the yearning to restore. The viewer is transfixed, haunted by a sense of absence, as the scene has been redefined. Not empty, but void of life.

The photographs of Richard Butler capture the individual impacts of community struggle. Is it journalistic documentation? Anthropological? Historical? Creative? Since 2005 a community in Tasmania has been involved in one of Australia’s most fierce environmental controversies since the Franklin Dam, with plans to develop a pulp mill in the Tamar Valley. While the state and federal governments, mill owners, environmentalists and farmers battled, local residents found themselves living every day in the reality of a world where the natural environment, clean water and fresh air compete for value with money, power and jobs.

Butler has elected to show images of the struggle as it is reflected in the faces of the community. Chosen from photographs of 450 people taken in the church halls, packing sheds and cool stores of the valley, the portraits personify the battle. In their faces the Tamar Valley becomes both less and more. It becomes a place we are part of, its inhabitants diverse and familiar and in doing so it is no longer “other”. It is “we”. In these photographs the ordinary people of the Tamar Valley community are making a powerful, silent statement of strength in a world that is ostensibly beyond their control.

The titles of Gordon Craig’s exhibition imply abundance, but the images from China cause us to reflect what our valuing of growth can mean. The photographs contrast the hope of plenty with the reality of its impact. Building blocks has echoes of our own childhood, juxtaposing words and images of progress and growth. Empty rooms inspire anticipation and hope. The absence of occupants encourages the viewer to imagine a future, to populate the space. Craig reminds us of China’s One Child Policy and its legacy in a nation which struggles to control the effects of its own progress. Prolifirate is a series of photographs of trees and flowers carefully planted in preparation for the Beijing Olympics. We see an attempt to control nature, to plant into blocks, as we organise people. There is a kind of defiance in the non-conformity of the trees, the spreading weeds along the carefully tilled channel. The humans who imposed the order of the rows, the selection of the monoculture are invisible, their labours gradually being overcome by the abundance of nature.

Georgina Campbell's images of cameras play on ideas of time and capture. The images were created with a flatbed scanner and place the camera in the spotlight as both historical artefact and the ancestor of modern digital devices. The use of the scanner suggests that the camera itself has become redundant moving from the agent to the subject of image making. It is as if even the photographer has been replaced. There is a certain poignancy to many of the images, loyal servants realising their day has come. Campbell uses cameras from her own collection to pay homage to the passing of an era. As we look into the lenses of the cameras we remember, we are called to observe the passing of our own time and possibly ask “where am I?”

The balloons that flutter and sink in Rachel Marsden’s Archimedes Field remind us of the impermanence of life. The Greek scientist Archimedes discovered the principle of buoyancy, and Marsden uses the fragile balloons to reflect life, as all of us grow, dream, then eventually die. We can read many symbols into the white balloons. Marsden notes that they signify us, our hopes and dreams and ambitions that rise and last only a short time. Expended, they lie in the field and we wait for the cycle to begin again. The images were made in her father’s old vegetable garden at Stanthorpe. Even that has gone, only a vague appearance of the rows and the tap remaining. Nature has taken back its own.

-1 Horace Smith: “On a Stupendous Leg of Granite”