Exhibitions 2010

Photography has been called “the mirror with a memory” or “the faithful witness”. Each of these assertions express some of the features that photography has historically been given to differentiate it from other forms of visual representation and it as well characterises its kinship to the way we perceive objects, actions, time and physical space. In some ways they also express the intimate relation that we have to the photographic image and our social fondness for “the most democratic of mediums”.

One could hardly imagine the effect that in 1826 the first photograph by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce had in the way we perceive reality, even more so the colossal impact that it had on the other arts, particularly painting. For almost a hundred years after the advent of photography this dialogue between panting as the preeminent form of visual art and photography came to define their differences, their attributes and their future.

In this occasionally friendly and sometimes bitter exchange the two found a way to describe their uniqueness but at the same time, by concentrating its attention on painting and its own craft, photography neglected other qualities, legacies from art forms that by 1902 had been swiftly assimilated by the latest addition to the modern arts; cinema.

By 1902 when Georges Melies made “A trip to the moon” (Le voyage dans le lune) he was not only breaking with the documentary tradition set by the Lumiere brothers when they envisioned the use of their creation, but more importantly he was bringing together the fictional traditions of theatre and literature to herald a new language; a vision unencumbered by reality or the stage, a vision that used metaphor without the burden of pictorialist ornamentation, a vision grounded in the tangible to explore what lay ahead.

While Melies opened the role of cinema to fiction and constructed narratives, photography established itself as a memorial archive in search of a unique metaphoric and poetic vision. Influenced by one of the main philosophical currents in America at the beginning of the 20th century, photography found a perfect analogy in the philosophies spouse by logical positivism and by 1936 the idea of photography as “a container of truth” was further bolstered and popularised by Henry Luce when he launched LIFE magazine.

Photography’s attachment to the past made it the medium “par excellence” for critical discourse, yet this criticality founded on the transience of the present rendered it incapable to directly express proposals or suggestions, to venture in to the realm of the possible; the future.

Nevertheless by the late seventies the perception of photography as the truthful medium started to collapse. The misuse of the medium by governments and corporations, the challenge of feminism and later post-colonial theory called into question the objectivity of photography. Concepts such as simulacra became part of the dialogue that eventually opened photography to a reality of diverse perspectives and gradually artists began to reassess the relationship of the medium to the found object and the past.

In the new millennium constructed environments and stagings have emerged at the centre of this tradition, challenging and reshaping ideas of the past and suggesting proposals for a possible future, investigating new technologies and narrative possibilities within the unique framework of photography.

It would be feasible to postulate that at the end of the 20th century the digital revolution has in some way broken the nostalgic embrace the past had on photography. Yet as we move to a society whose main form of communication is the photographic image, the true measure of what is to come can only be proven with the arrival of the future and in the same spirit that Aldous Huxley used when referencing Shakespeare its is a “brave new world”.

Maurice Ortega
Director, Queensland Centre for Photography