In 1922, thirteen years before Walter Benjamin famously analysed the role of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy argued in an essay titled Production-Reproduction that the new media designed for simply recording reality were in fact potentially extremely creative. Moholy-Nagy anticipated postmodern pastiche through media sampling and, unlike Benjamin, was less concerned about how art would be perceived through the influence of these media and more with how reality would be perceived now that its reproduction could also produce a reality of its own.

But what do the photographs in the present exhibition reproduce and what do they produce?

What each set of images produces is a tension between the real and the reproduced or ‘produced’. Eric Bridgeman appears to ‘replay’ the response of Papua New Guineans to being photographically documented while actually producing a subtext of camp humour. Lauren Hewitt’s dark streets and houses purport to be frightening but are nonetheless vibrantly colourful. Philip Lawrence’s austere views of an empty London Tube station seem to document architectural emptiness but draw much of their power from the suggestiveness of their digital medium. Leyla Stevens makes snap portraits of Koreans in which the subtly strange becomes inseparable from the contrived. In Paul McCann’s photographs ordinary Brisbane starts to look extraordinary.

Colour in all of these images plays a major part in problematising, rather than simply fulfilling, their documentary function. Night vision simply does not allow the human eye to see the depth and richness of colour that Hewitt photographs; however, the Grand Guignol of Hollywood thrillers does. Is it this that says these sites are eerie, rather than any uncanniness of the sites themselves? Are we basing our judgement of them on a re-sampling of popular media rather than responding to the real, or is there no longer any difference? Lawrence’s London underground is similarly ‘produced’ rather than merely reproduced. Drained of ‘real’ colour with all its grit and grime, it instead basks in a pastel glow that makes you wonder if it’s real. Irresistibly, the digital reduction of detail in the intersecting passageways and tunnels of the Tube suggests a computer first-person shooter game such as Castle Wolfenstein or Doom.

But always, in photography, an indecision about whether something has been produced or reproduced persists. Paul McCann’s photo of Brisbane in an unusual dust storm or in a morning fog might be taken for a digital effect had we not experienced these phenomena ourselves. And clouds of fruitbats rising over the city in an evening sky might seem a bizarre improbability to someone living in, say, New York.

In Stevens’s work, a pink jacket and bluish road match a pinkish and pale blue overpass in the background. In another photograph, a young Korean girl in a turquoise tracksuit listens to a seashell as she holds a vibrant pink heart. And in yet another, a typically bored and mechanical tour guide, in an ethnic costume with a deep red skirt, gestures vacantly at some unseen monument outside the photograph’s frame. So the real tourist attraction is not the monument but the highly contrived but otherwise ordinary tour guide herself – if only the crowd looked in the right direction. The colours in Stevens’s work resonate with the Japanese-Korean popular culture that gave us Hello Kitty. But does that add to their feel of authenticity or detract from it? Again, which is the ‘real’ culture?

And should a picture be an orgy of colour? Moholy-Nagy was concerned that increased ease of manipulating colour in new media might lead to its misuse. And in Bridgeman’s work this is possibly so. The ‘natives’ posing in blackface come close, well maybe more than close, to being politically reprehensible. Whom are they mocking? Is this the exotic mocking the tourist or the tourist mocking the exotic? And is that the same as mocking the ‘real’? Or is the whole tableau created as a platform for camp posturing? Whatever the case, there is something refreshingly raw and liberated in these pictures. The garish backdrops provide a stage setting that is in radical contrast with those that feature in the more earnest and mature humour of someone like Ray Cook. Good taste they are not. But that is not always what art is about.

George Petelin
27 April 2010