2006

The Camera Creates a Stage

‘every photographic “truth” is an interpretation…and is driven by desire, the desire of the operator, the subject being photographed and the viewer looking on.’

All of the exhibitors on this occasion are concerned with the human form in their imagery. Common to their selected work is the complicity between the human subject depicted, the camera’s eye, and the audience. Furthermore, the way the five photographers create a visual spectacle with their subject, takes the photograph away from conventional picture making into realms that owe much to performance art, theatre, filmmaking, and media advertising.

As most of the photographers are women, it is important to acknowledge this fact at the start. We have long been aware that when their gender is represented, it is most often at the service of the male “gaze”. Since the 1970s, feminist artists have increasingly sought to critique the long history of patriarchal dominance and its effect on visual representation. This interrogation continues, with the viewer’s consciousness raised not only to regard iconic paintings of say Titian’s Venus of Urbino with circumspection but also to bring issues of social, political and psychoanalysis into the equation.

Kate Linker reminds us that throughout the history of western art woman has been ‘placed in a passive rather than an active role, as object rather than subject, she is the constant point of masculine appropriation…’ This has altered in recent decades through the practice of many female photographers who visualise their gender in ways that are satisfying and meaningful to their own sex. It can additionally be claimed that from the late1960s, photography has become the ideal medium for women to disarm the “high art” and patriarchal emphasis of painting. And the fact that numerous leading contemporary photographers are female (from Claude Cahun to Cindy Sherman, Olive Cotton to Tracey Moffatt), testifies to their paramount success in adopting this medium.

Much theoretical literature addresses the processes of “acting out” for the camera (by Susan Sontag, Anne Marsh and others). This interaction between performer and the lens (sometimes completed by digital manipulation), results in the subject masquerading in a guise at odds with her/his everyday persona, becoming a protagonist in an imagined drama, or allowing the body to be a marker of identity and/or a territory of desire. While sometimes the intention is paradoxically both serious and fun, often there is narcissism involved, like in play-acting before a mirror.

However, within the tradition of photographic portraiture and constructed tableaux, complexities of the human condition can be powerfully revealed. Photography has made possible, for instance, the expression of personality nuances, sometimes shifts in sexual orientation, and the portrayal of people who do not fit comfortably within social stereotypes or notions of beauty. It can re-enact historical moments, mythological tragedies and humorous, comedic incidents. The camera, often twinned with advanced computer technology, is an ideal vehicle for deconstructing the past and offering new ways of envisaging the future. This exhibition proves that in the visual arts, photography is cannily equipped to deal with a range of “truths” and posit alternatives to the status quo, especially when it is used by such strong talents as Christine Webster, Rose Farrell and George Parkin, Kathy Mackay and newcomer Kate Bernauer.

Webster from the United Kingdom and Mackay from Queensland are concerned with the psychological implications of depicting the female body. In her project le Dossier, Webster, the more senior artist, either acts as protagonist herself or she directs others in voyeuristic, filmic scenarios. Intentionally erotic, her part or fully naked women are set in squalid interiors, repulsive and beguiling at the same time. Mackay takes portraits of young women, juxtaposing the potential vulnerability and liminal nature of human skin with metallic objects and reflective surfaces. The mirroring action that is intentionally set up takes us back to the “gaze” and to the status of the actor versus the spectator.

Both Farrell and her partner George Parkin employ Type C photographs to record theatrical performances created especially for the camera. They are among the most distinguished artist collaborators in Australia today, consistently addressing allegory and myth and the vicissitudes of humankind in their practice. With the series here, Random Acts and Traces of the Flood, painted props couch the human form in scenarios that in the first instance represent human folly and in the second demonstrate the “human bind” through medieval-like manipulations of the body. The pathos and almost ludicrous nature behind these symbolic works takes us to Bernauer who engagingly uses the male individual in an absurdist, strange and inexplicable world.

Anne Kirker

Anne Marsh, The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, p.13.

Kate Linker, ‘Representation and Sexuality’, in ed. Brian Wallis, Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1984, p.393.