Between suburbia and radicalism

WE are so used to the extraordinary dynamism and rate of change in the modern Western world that we forget most cultures hardly change at all.

Carol Jerrems

WE are so used to the extraordinary dynamism and constant rate of change in the modern Western world that we forget that most cultures hardly change at all.

Survival and continuity, rather than innovation, are the highest priority for all human societies, and interruptions mostly come in the form of external invasion or conquest. In the case of subsistence cultures, nothing changes for thousands of years, which is why the study of such peoples falls under the discipline of anthropology rather than history.

In historical cultures, however, those driven by an inner dynamism of self-renewal, the rate of change tends to produce a phenomenon that one could call culture lag, which historians of ideas and art historians can tend to overlook. The first generation of modernists, for example, who created cubism, expressionism, abstraction and other avant-garde styles in the years before World War I all grew up in the 19th century; much earlier, the artists and intellectuals who made the Renaissance emerged from the world of the Middle Ages.

In studying any of these periods, we naturally tend to concentrate on their innovations, especially because contemporary authors also tend to dwell mainly on the new ideas, even while they take for granted most of the habits of thought with which they have grown up.

Thus the early Renaissance was fascinated with the new discovery of perspective, but Leon Battista Alberti's idea that a picture can be like a window on to the world is essentially a brilliant metaphor, summing up a new way of thinking about pictorial space; neither he nor any of his contemporaries thought one could make a picture simply by painting literally what was in front of their eyes.

The mind of any period in a historical culture, in reality, is divided between a set of conscious and actively lived ideas, and a shadowy background representing a vastly greater proportion of inherited and largely unquestioned assumptions. If we are to understand the period in question, we need to take into account not only its foreground thinking, which may dominate the documentary record, but the less conspicuous background as well. At the same time the active and conscious ideas of each period - because they are consciously inculcated in the young - will reshape in varying degrees the assumptions of the following one.

The culture of the 1970s and its relation to the preceding and succeeding periods is as good an illustration of this principle as any. It was a time of confusion, of self-conscious avant-gardism and radicalism, of the collapse or transformation of many traditional values across the political spectrum. Political ideology was strident, but underneath all the noise the old Left was being undermined by the failure of the Soviet model and by the rise of minority interest politics that had little or nothing to do with the dream of political revolution. In art and literature there was a certain general dereliction, as modernism fell apart and before the postmodern movement began in earnest in the following decade.

But of course the people who made the 70s had been born in the 40s and 50s; they had grown up in the conservative suburbia they would later disown for a time, but to which they would often return in the end. And in fact it is impossible to understand them properly if one doesn't see that some of their values remained deeply rooted in the world from which they came.

This is certainly true in the case of Carol Jerrems (1949-80), one of Australia's finest photographers from these years, whose career  was cut short by her untimely death from a rare disease just short of her 31st birthday.  It was   particularly clear, in the present exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, in reading the poems she wrote to accompany some of her early photographs. They are literate and articulate, yet this was the generation that would abandon the teaching of grammar in schools on the grounds that it hampered the creativity of pupils. Jerrems's generation could write because of the education they had received; but the generation that they educated in turn would be far less competent.

The same sort of perspective is necessary if one wants to appreciate the real tone of Jerrems's world, for although the ethos that she evokes is ostensibly one of freedom and rebellion against the suburban world of contemporary Australia, it also has a kind of innocence and even earnestness that are the vestiges of that environment. Yet, in the end, the immature idealism evaporated and it was the self-indulgence and narcissism of the 70s that led to the egotism, greed and materialism of the 80s.

Some of the most appealing qualities of Jerrems's work are summed up in the portrait Peggy (1968) at the beginning of the show, in which the wind blowing a wisp of hair across the girl's face is a natural symbol of freedom and joyfulness, supported by the fortuitous but evidently carefully selected presence of the gull high above. The dog captured in mid-air in Flying Dog (1973) is similarly an expression of delight in spontaneity.

The 70s loved the idea of spontaneity and freedom from constraint, but the aspiration to sexual freedom was central. And although at the time this was understood as a rejection of conservative values, it was at least as corrosive of traditional left-wing politics, which always tended to be puritanical, subordinating the individual to the collective. Jerrems's work, in any case, breathes this new ethos and sexuality is never far from the surface, although she was aware of its darker side and in 1975 made a short film about rape.

The pictures from the series titled Hanging About (1972) evoke the peculiar mix of defiance, erotic assertiveness and vulnerability of that time. Two naked girls are photographed in a narrow alleyway, posing in a way that is meant to be relaxed but actually looks touchingly self-conscious

At the same time they are undeniably natural in their unepilated, unaugmented, unmodified difference and seem like creatures from another age compared with the aesthetic regimentation of the female figure in recent years. Clearly, after decades of supposed liberation, we are still very far from being happily reconciled with the body.

If the laneway, with its dark walls and tunnel of light, is a metaphor of confinement, a similar image, only this time in the indoor version of a corridor, recurs in the Trentham Blues series (1972).

A dog waits to be taken out by a master who is seen in one frame and then disappears without explanation. This simple motif is developed, through the very minimalism of the setting and black-and-white image, which is all about light and dark, into a subtle and melancholy meditation on absence and loss.

A few weeks ago we discussed the work of Jeff Wall, who employs everything from elaborate set-building to the digital montage of multiple shots to compose elaborate photographic inventions.

Jerrems's work is at the opposite pole from such deliberate play with artifice: her small black-and-white pictures, with their emphasis on intimate closeness to the subject and the direct and unmodified transcription of the world before her, are examples of the same late-modernist naturalism that characterises the best cinema of the 70s.

This is not to say her work is not carefully composed, with close attention to framing and camera angle and, above all, to the critical moment at which the subject is suddenly most itself. But even with the greatest care, a photographer will take a number of shots from which a final selection will be made.

In this regard, it is always enlightening to see the contact sheets - the direct impression of the strips of negative - printed as a sequence of thumbnails of a shoot that produced a great image.

Jerrems's most famous picture, Vale Street (1975), shows a young woman, naked to the waist, standing in the foreground of the composition, flanked by two rather menacing youths, similarly stripped to the waist.

The story of this picture has often been recounted: the girl was an aspiring model who wanted a series of shots for her portfolio. Jerrems had been photographing a group of teenage sharpies, members of contemporary Melbourne youth gangs, some of whom were her students at Heidelberg Tech. She suggested they pose together and, in the course of experimenting with various poses, they all took their shirts off.

The contact sheet reveals several different groupings were tried out, although most were ultimately rejected. Mozart Street (1975), however, is also a very fine picture: here, the girl is seen leaning against a tree in the right foreground, while the two boys behind, smoking cigarettes, turn away from each other in a manner that feigns spontaneity but is choreographed into a memorable configuration contrasting stillness with movement, the direct with the evasive.

But this image, for all its poetic and aesthetic qualities, has not caught the imagination of viewers in the same way as Vale Street, in which the staging of the three figures evokes a tense and yet deeply ambiguous sexual relationship, complicated by the fact there are two male figures and that the female one dominates the composition, and thus also the implied human situation.

No doubt this final arrangement of the figures was arrived at, and has the erotic charge that it does, because it revealed something that was true about the subject; but it was not the truth about the model's relationship with the sharpies but Jerrems's own. She had become attracted to one of the boys, Mark Lean, in the course of photographing the group, and all the images she took of the boy are coloured by these feelings.

More directly autobiographical is the rather disturbing image of Lean clutching a fistful of straws or sticks and looking straight into the camera. He is not nearly so self-possessed as in the other images, his face revealing instead a certain brutality but also uncertainty, as though in transition between two different expressions.

Jerrems called the picture Mark Lean: Rape Game, and it alludes to a ritual he had devised in which the gang would draw straws to determine which of the boys would have the right to take the photographer to bed, although it was apparently rigged so that Lean would win. Of course the fantasy here is as much hers as his and, like the assertive figure she conjures up in Vale Street, she remains ultimately dominant, or at least a willing participant in the scenario.

In some ways these pictures are even more self-revealing than Mirror with a Memory (1977), the only colour picture in the exhibition, but they say just as much about a period whose most attractive, yet perhaps also ultimately dangerous, characteristic was its love of transgression.

Carol Jerrems, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until January 28.