Dupain and other Australian photographers explore light in the city

DREAMS and Imagination: Light in the Modern City is a small but attractive exhibition that covers a selection of Australian modernist photographers.

Mark Strizik’s Queensberry Street at Errol Street, North Melbourne (1963).

CHARLES Baudelaire, author of Les fleurs du mal (1857), was not the first to write of the dark world of the modern city but he was certainly among the most brilliant and memorable. In an almost untranslatable line — fourmillante cite, cite pleine de reves — he simultaneously evokes the ant-like anonymity of urban life and the proliferating subjectivities that jostle in the faceless crowd.

He was fascinated by the mystery of the lives of strangers, by the passing encounter of lonely individuals with others with whom they might have formed a connection — but never will — and by the relics of faded youth and disappointed hopes. In the line that follows the one just cited, he speaks of Paris as a place where ghosts accost the passer-by in broad daylight.

Baudelaire’s Paris is a kind of hell, yet one cannot imagine him wanting to live anywhere else. It is a familiar quandary that goes back to writers of antiquity: the city can be crowded, lonely, dangerous, filled with crooks and cheats, but what is the alternative? Cities have always been places of opportunity and mobility that reward talent. The city is where great careers and fortunes are made.

Since ancient times, too, city life has been thought to breed more sophisticated and refined people: urban populations — ignoring the underclasses that have also festered in great cities since Rome — are also supposed to be urbane, while rural ones are rustic.

Is there some truth in this simplistic dichotomy? To live in a city is to be surrounded by a largely man-made environment, and this frees its inhabitants to some degree from subjection to the rhythms of nature, which is the rule in country life. Those realities are ultimately just as inescapable, but the city dweller is not reminded every day and at every turn of the cycle of the seasons and their corresponding tasks.

Those who live in cities find themselves in an environment that reflects and speaks of human will and achievement. They are surrounded by the built structures of architecture and engineering, their neighbours practise a wide range of arts and crafts, and they can see that the most prosperous have built their wealth using their cleverness and enterprise.

In a general way, one could say cities inherently encourage initiative and competition; surrounded by other ambitious people, everyone strives to excel, as Giorgio Vasari said of Florence and, much earlier, Hesiod had implied in his famous passage about the spirit of emulation that drives everyone, from craftsman to beggar.

One can even argue that living in cities helps us to think in more abstract ways, especially, as Marxists will argue, because of the more complex and abstract forms of economic exchange that arise with the invention of money and then forms of banking, insurance and other practices that teach us to conceive of value in more intellectual terms.

As Baudelaire and other modern writers have often suggested, cities are places of dreams, of alternative lives; places where new identities can be forged, where lives can be reconfigured, free of the constraints that seemed inescapable in more traditional settings.

But this freedom comes with a cost. Just as the beginning of urban life thousands of years ago, with its unprecedented density of human life, led to the appearance and spread of epidemic diseases, so the new human dynamic of the city has its psychological consequences.

The struggle of combative egos fosters narcissism and the corresponding isolation, loneliness, anxiety and depression that ensue when the narcissistic ego discovers it is mismatched with the realities of its environment. The remedy for this, in turn, is the experience of nature, in which we rediscover a world that transcends the ego and dissolves the brittle shell of narcissism. Perhaps it is not as paradoxical as it may seem that it has always been, whether in Greece or in China or indeed in modern Europe, urban poets and painters who have rediscovered the beauty and spiritual potential of nature.

Dreams and Imagination: Light in the Modern City is a small but attractive exhibition that covers a selection of Australian modernist photographers — especially Harold Cazneaux, Max Dupain, Olive Cotton and Mark Strizic — and is focused on their use of light to bring the artificial and architectural environment to life. Most of the pictures are celebrations of the city, but several look to the world of nature beyond, and Strizic in particular emphasises the constraint of the urban environment.

The earliest works in style belong within the pictorialist tradition, in which light is employed to hint at affective depths and mystery in what could otherwise seem a harsh world of brick, concrete and bitumen. Typically, these images are nocturnes, for night has always revealed the dreams and imagination of the exhibition’s title, which are less apparent in the bright light and bustle of daytime.

The most effective is Cazneaux’s Archibald Fountain (c. 1933), in which the figure of Theseus slaying the Minotaur arises like a vision out of a haze of artificial lighting in Sydney’s Hyde Park. Other nocturnes include a view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge by Dupain (1946), taken from one of the pylons, a time-lapse shot in which the headlights of the cars crossing the bridge become long lines of light.

Another evening picture by Dupain, with an exposure of several minutes at least, is of Mosman Bay, Sydney. Time exposures in city streets sometimes make them look eerily empty because cars and moving figures have passed through too quickly to be registered; here a ferry has sailed through the scene, stopping at wharves on either side of the bay, leaving only the thin line of its mast light and a softer line that is the reflection of this lamp in the water.

Cazneaux’s famous picture of the new Harbour Bridge — in the same year as his very pictorialist Archibald Fountain — represents something of a change to the new industrial and geometric aesthetic of the next phase of modernist photography, which renounced pictorialist moodiness for sharp-focus factualness.

His picture is a transitional work, though, compared with other pictures by Dupain from about the same time and the subsequent years. Cazneaux still preserves a balance between the hard geometry of the engineering structure of the bridge and the subtle effects of late afternoon light and long shadows filtered through its structure. Dupain’s view of a group of silos seen across the dashboard of his car (1935) — which turns into a study of abstract synthetic forms, brightly lit with few nuances — is like the manifesto of a new industrial aesthetic.

The most uncompromising expression of this industrial aesthetic in which shades and subtleties are deliberately excluded is his view of Pyrmont silos (1933). While the most usual viewpoint in paintings and photographs — a natural consequence of the upright posture of a human being looking out at the world — is a horizontal line of sight, parallel to the ground, in this case Dupain chooses to look upwards.

This kind of perspective, known as sotto-in-su (seen from below), was used in baroque art to convey the sublimity of heavenly visions. Here it suggests the inhuman and overwhelming scale of the industrial construction, while the elimination of the horizon adds to our disorientation. The stark shadows and intense tonal contrasts, with their abstract, angular shapes, evoke an inorganic world far removed from any natural processes.

Here the photographer celebrates a brave new world of technology and progress that is felt to be a natural analog of the healthy bodies he loved to depict, most famously in Sunbaker (1937). Cotton, his wife for a time, similarly admires the scale and formal properties of industrial forms in Drainpipes (1937), but another picture of the same year betrays a realisation of the claustrophobia of the urban-industrial environment. Looking up to see sunlit clouds scudding past a blank industrial wall, she was moved to call the picture Escape.

Perhaps the most interesting juxtaposition in the show is of a photograph by Dupain and another by David Moore, who worked with him for a time before setting off on an independent career. Dupain’s looks down at a crowd in a street near Central Station in Sydney. Once again, as so often, a view up or down is preferred to the normal horizontal view, dramatising the abstract forms of the city, but inevitably depreciating the humanist viewpoint.

Dupain’s figures are silhouettes seen from above, faceless shapes casting long afternoon shadows and forming a kind of elegant ballet as they cross the road. Moore’s picture, on the other hand, is of Sydney’s Martin Place. It is a long view, so figures are reduced to minute outlines, but the view is horizontal. The result is less a dramatisation and celebration of the modernist city than an intimation of its inhuman scale and indifference to individual life.

Particularly effective is Moore’s use of light: the brightest area in the composition is a patch of sky just above the buildings on the left, and from this a shaft of light streams through the afternoon haze and strikes the pavement, spreading into a broad area of illumination between the dark structures. Without evoking a specifically religious meaning, there is a clear sense of a light of nature intruding into an environment that has become alienated from the natural world.

In this case, Dupain is content with a formalist study of urban life, while Moore’s concern for the social experience of the city leads him to perceive a tension between city and nature. Both social perspective and sense of alienation from nature are taken even further in the works of Strizic: his Queensberry Street (1963) has certain affinities with earlier pictorialist photography, yet we can already see a pattern that is common to other works, of looking out from shadow into light.

In Flinders Lane (1967), a woman backlit against the glare becomes a frail silhouette almost floating in the city street. In Contre-jour (1961), the treatment of light is even more dramatic. The afternoon or, perhaps more likely, morning sun appears as a brilliant flare between the wooden palings of a fence, while lines of barbed wire are stretched above. There is a seedy, makeshift quality to this combination, hinting at a fracturing of social life; where once a simple fence offered privacy and security, it has become necessary to resort to more extreme and hostile measures.

Here the city is no longer illuminated, no longer composed of smooth, massive and excitingly modern forms; it has become a place of darkness and confinement, a prison. Light, life and nature are elsewhere, outside, on the other side of the fence.

Dreams and Imagination: Light in the Modern City

Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill,
Victoria. Until March 1.