Forgotten suburbia in Sydney photographic exhibitions

A NUMBER of photographic exhibitions in recent years have been occasions to reflect on photography and its complex relation to truth.

Car crash, North Sydney (1958). From the exhibition Suburban Noir, Museum of Sydney, to April 6. Pictures: NSW Police Forensic Photography Archive, Justice and Police Museum, Historic Houses Trust of NSW

A NUMBER of photographic exhibitions during the past couple of years have been occasions to reflect on photography and its complex relation to truth. The first such images, more than 1½ centuries ago, were small and rudimentary compared with the richness and refinement of contemporary painting, but they had a seemingly indisputable claim to literal truth, as direct imprints of the world itself — via reflected light — on to a prepared surface.

Painters were understandably alarmed and painting would never be the same again, although the truth is not nearly as simple as the cliche we still hear, namely that painting no longer needed to concern itself with appearance and could turn instead to expression. Painting had, in reality, never been exclusively concerned with visual appearance, and indeed the very notion of literal realism posited in this account is, as I have said before, an anachronistic projection into the past of a kind of naturalism that did not exist before photography.

Through the century that followed the invention of photography, painters responded in different ways: academic realists sought to demonstrate that painting could outgun photography in the production of enormous, highly detailed and, perhaps most important, coloured images; the impressionists, on the other hand, sought to capture the truth of optical experience; and then their followers turned away from optical appearance and towards symbolical and expressive visions of the world.

During the same period, however, as photography developed, the technology advanced and the ambitions of photographers grew, its status as straightforward witness to truth became more qualified and eventually compromised. It was not only pictorialism that manipulated camera and darkroom effects to emulate painting, but even the more naturalistic artists who rejected pictorialism and still used filters and darkroom techniques to enhance and dramatise their images. The very selection of the moment of the photograph — among all the other possible moments — was a matter of artifice.

Then there was the manipulation of photography for commercial or political purposes; the claim of photography to truth made it the most plausible vehicle for lies. In the digital age, the potential for falsification has not simply increased, it has permanently tipped the balance, so today photography has become quintessentially the art of illusion — a fact recognised and exploited by many of the most significant contemporary practitioners, but one that should also make us reconsider the potential of the art of painting to tell a truth that can no longer be told through mechanical imaging.

It is against this background that the police photos from the 1950s and 60s selected by Peter Doyle for the exhibition Suburban Noir are particularly interesting. For the police photographer, in principle at least, has no objective other than literal truth. A photograph of a crime scene is intended to record its exact appearance, to document the precise location of furniture in a room, for example: it may only be much later that the direction in which a chair was tipped over, or the placement of a bottle on a sideboard, will be recognised as the crucial piece of evidence that supports or discounts a hypothesis about what happened.

And this is a feature of police photography. It is not concerned with what is happening, with an unfolding reality that, like everything in the world of the living, suggests possible consequences: of a future, a denouement. In the police photograph the event has already happened, the denouement has been enacted but is not understood. The dimension of extension into the future has been abolished, just as it is in death, and of course many of these crime scenes are places where a life has been cut off.

Thus the police photographer is not, in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s formula, searching for the decisive moment. That moment is, by definition, gone. It occurred before the photog rapher arrived. What he encounters is a place where something has happened that has left behind traces and clues in the stillness.

The aesthetic of the police photograph is thus not temporal but spatial: it is concerned to record the appearance of a site — whether interior or exterior — the location of furniture or other objects, for example, especially any that show signs of disturbance and may offer clues as to the movement of now absent figures through this space as the crime took place.

It is also concerned to show how spaces lead into other spaces: where is the entrance from the outside landing into the apartment, or the hallway or door that leads from the living room to the bedroom? How many steps away was it? Was there another way out, an escape route? For this reason there are numerous shots in which rooms are framed by doorways or taken from the different angles of vision.

Part of this aesthetic is the necessary emphasis on clarity and sharp focus; everything is in crisp, factual black and white, brightly lit by the flash, which illuminates gloomy corners but also bleaches out any subtleties of natural lighting. If these interiors once had any kind of welcoming domestic ambience or erotic intimacy, it is abolished in the radical tonal reading of the camera, and this itself seems almost like a metaphor of the way anger, despair and violence have already destroyed the humanity that may once have reigned in these homes.

The vision is bleak but not sensationalised, and the effect is enhanced by the presentation, not as a series of prints on the wall but edited into a documentary-like sequence projected on to the wall.

This format allows for the inclusion of many more images than would have been possible in a show of prints, but also makes it easier to understand the context of and connection between individual images.

The sequence is accompanied by Doyle’s outstanding narration, which is concise and even terse, in a style that echoes the dry, laconic style of classic crime fiction. In a few well-chosen words, Doyle manages to set the scene — naming the suburb, for example — and briefly characterise the situation, the kind of people involved and the presumed course of events. Frequently, he draws our attention to one of those small details of the setting that turned out to be significant.

Every now and then Doyle allows himself a brief reflection, wry or wistful, on the meaning of what has happened, or on the time and social circumstances. For these images, in their dispassionate recording of anomalous events in very ordinary settings, offer us a window into the culture of Australia in the 50s and 60s.

It’s a depressing spectacle: a time of growing wealth, the spread of suburbia, the obsession with cars and other status symbols. Religious and spiritual life are at low ebb in a world of obtuse materialism, and indeed religion seems to survive largely as bigotry and puritanism, which help to make the materialistic life even more wretched. Aesthetic culture of any kind appears to be utterly lacking in the lives of these suburban people who have come to rely on mass-produced entertainment instead.

We are only half-surprised, under these circumstances, to hear of inexplicable murder-suicides or other brutal crimes; they seem, after a while, like random but inevitable outbreaks of despair on the part of people who have dimly recognised the futility and simultaneous constraint of their existences. Nor should we be too complacent in reflecting on the lives of this earlier period; we have developed enormously in superficial sophistication during the past half-century, we have become much more affluent, and we have largely freed ourselves from the moral inhibitions of that time. There are far more alternatives available in a pluralistic society; yet these advances have come at the cost of greater class polarisation and new technologies of alienation.

Doyle’s photographic documentary is so compelling it is hard to tear oneself away from it; yet the exhibition also includes a collection of paintings and other works that are well worth a look. Some are inspired directly by photographs from Doyle’s research, others are more generically concerned with analogous subject matter. Artists include Bruce Latimer, with disquieting nocturnal views of parks; Ken Searle, who paints the backs of industrial buildings covered in rubbish and graffiti; Peter O’Doherty, whose innocuous suburban houses seem full of menace; and Michael Lewy, whose computer-generated interiors hint at things that may have happened or be about to happen.

Charles Cooper’s windows reflect the streetscape, as do those of Chris O’Doherty, whose suburban houses are in sharper focus than those of his brother, and worrying in a different way. Di Holdsworth’s little doll’s house models of interiors that are apparently about to become crime scenes are particularly suggestive, and a separate display contains fine sketches by Doyle in a variety of media, pencil, ink and wash, not surprisingly all emphasising tone.

Doyle is also curator of an exhibition at Sydney’s Police & Justice Museum — open only on weekends — that was originally mounted in 2005 and is dedicated to images from the police archives from 1912 to 1948. This exhibition, equally fascinating, employs the same photodocumentary technique with voiceover but is divided into three sequences, titled Rogues’ Gallery, Our Dark Places and The Beat.

The exhibition of this forgotten material in 2005 led to new discoveries about the events represented in the pictures, sometimes as a result of communications from relatives and sometimes by matching newspaper reports of events with images on the old glass negatives. Here it is a forgotten Sydney between the world wars that emerges into the light — far more raffish and colourful than the bland suburbia of the later period but no happier. The dispiriting impression one is left with, indeed, is of the extraordinary number and variety of the city’s lowlife, from brutish thugs to outwardly respectable confidence men; scavengers and parasites who preyed on the weak, greedy and gullible in what Doyle calls a city of shadows.

Suburban Noir, Museum of Sydney, to April 6

City of Shadows, Justice & Police Museum, Sydney (weekends only)