And then lenses, which had been invented in antiquity – Aristophanes mentions the way they can be used to focus the sun’s rays to start a fire – and subsequently reinvented in the high Middle Ages, were greatly improved in the early 17th century, leading to the first microscopes and telescopes. These improved lenses could be used to focus images in a camera obscura, which had earlier been constructed with a simple pinhole aperture.
Thus two centuries ago, the only thing that remained to be done was to discover some way of fixing the projected image on the paper; and the means for that arose from the great leap forward in chemistry in the second half of the 18th century. So photography was in effect a composite invention, like printing, which repurposed the ancient screw-press and adopted the Chinese invention of paper, but added the all-important new technology of movable type.
Even in its earliest forms, when the photographic image was a unique print before the invention of the negative, the new pictures had the magical appeal of being direct imprints of the visual world. This had an even older, if mythical, prehistory in the tradition of “acheiropoetic” images – that is, ones made without the intervention of the human hand, like the veil of Veronica or the shroud of Turin.
The apparent guarantee of absolute veracity was always the basis of photography’s authority, and a source of anxiety to painters, even when the new technology was in its infancy and it could only produce small black-and-white images; but that very claim to truthfulness was what soon led to attempts to manipulate the photographic image, especially in the 20th century. From the Stalinist falsification of history to airbrushing and finally the free-for-all of the digital age, photography has rapidly descended from the standard of veracity to the epitome of illusion. So it is interesting to see that some of the entries in this year’s Bowness prize, like J. Forsyth, have turned away from digital and back to the analog camera and 35mm film, which require you to think before you snap. One of the most striking entries, Bill Moseley’s The Dark Voice of the Sea, is made up of a group of ambrotypes, among the earliest photographic techniques after daguerreotypes, and still unique prints. The grainy and imperfect surface of Moseley’s images enhances the sense of the dark and moody swell of the ocean that is his subject.
This year’s winner is also an ostensibly straightforward although poetic and sensitive view of a bushland scene across three panels by Katrin Koenning. The landscape is from Lake Mountain, which was ravaged by bushfire in 2009, and here we see the regenerating but still young forest in the winter mist and snow. The artist’s affection for this environment is palpable, and the division of the panorama into a triptych has discreetly spiritual overtones.
Some of the most memorable entries deal with family, culture and memory, like Simon Aubor’s photograph of his grandfather’s hands as the old man eats the traditional Jewish Passover meal, or Pesach. In fact, this is not the Passover meal as stipulated in Exodus but the alternative version that evolved during the centuries of diaspora life in central Europe – here gefilte fish, beetroot horseradish and gherkin, eaten with matzo bread, the descendant of the original unleavened loaves of antiquity. Today these dishes have become nostalgic even in Israel, where, after 1948, there was a deliberate turning away from Yiddish food, now considered a symbol of exile, in favour of local Middle Eastern cuisine.
This quite small picture reminds us of the importance of scale even in an art like photography, which can in theory be printed at almost any size. Here the image is smaller than life-size, perhaps two-thirds, which imbues it with a kind of intimacy and privacy, while still being big enough to convey the important textures of the old man’s skin, the foods and even the simple tablemat under the plate, which all speak of a humble and unpretentious family environment.
Another fine entry is by an Iranian photographer, Sofi Basseghi. She has begun with three family photographs, one of her mother at 34 with her husband; one of herself at the age of four looking through a camera; and one of the family sitting-room in Iran. She has matched these with three new ones: one of herself also at 34, with her own husband, in the same chair; one of her own son, aged two, looking through the same camera; and the last one of her present sitting-room in Australia, in which several pieces of her parents’ furniture are still recognisable.
The family and family relationships have been a central concern of photography – and undoubtedly the central concern of all private photography – from the age of formal studio portraits to today’s endless family snaps, so it is not surprising to find them still a powerful theme in this exhibition. Anne Moffat, for example, has a touching portrait of her grandmother, who is seen lying in bed and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and who subsequently passed away.
On a happier note, but still marked by the melancholy of passing time, Lee Grant has a spare head-and-shoulders portrait of his son looking straight at his father’s camera; the boy has just cut off the long hair he had worn for years as part of his life as a surfer, and now, in singlet and crewcut, seems about to move into a new phase of his life, a step closer to adulthood and independence of the family.
The body is another staple subject of photography, and it is not surprising to find it here in several variations, though mostly homosexual or intersexual. Perhaps, in today’s climate, male photographers may be reluctant to picture a female nude for fear of moral opprobrium. It’s apparently all right for David Collins to present two nearly naked youths under the title Sons of Sirens, their modesty just covered by some camp seashells. The accompanying label spins some gender-theory line to the viewer but really it’s just homosexual erotica. That’s perfectly all right: not everything has to be a pseudo-lesson in morality and politics.
Sexual ambivalence and transsexuality have been in the full flight of fashion this year, so it is not surprising to encounter a portrait of a young drag queen looking at a phone, in costume but presumably between gigs. It is a sensitive picture, honest and not overburdened with tiresome genderspeak. The same can be said of two other images, including Rochelle Marie Adam’s Milo at My Place.
As readers will already have gathered, each photograph is accompanied by one of those peculiar texts called an “artist’s statement”. Some of these are concise, helpful and clear. Others, however, are poorly written, including actual mistakes in spelling and the meaning of words, but above all bloated with ill-digested theory – largely drawn from the two great sources of bad theory as inculcated in art schools, gender and race ideology, which together form the festering amalgam of identity discourse.
Perhaps candidates could be given some simple guidelines in composing these statements: allude discreetly to the setting and circumstances of the photograph where that can be of use to the viewer but avoid offering an interpretation of their own work and especially steer clear of theoretical or ideological ramblings.
Sometimes these are just irrelevant, like an arresting picture of a fish being hung on a clothesline, which the statement claims “explores the carnality and corporeality in our eating habits, and the relationship between nature and culture, concentrating on culture’s triumph over nature through ritual culinary intervention alongside Western contemporary notions of propriety”.
Here the disconnection between the open and imaginative vision of the image and the futile vacuity of a text that could have been generated by an algorithm (just press the Levi-Strauss le cru et le cuit option) is particularly striking. At other times, however, these pointless texts actually seem to hamper the artists’ work. Thus Nathan Stolz’s Anna and Nungarrayi is almost a memorable picture; the foreground figure captures our interest and sympathy, but another in the background is simply too occluded by the first to be effective.
On this occasion, the statement is not only long and very silly, but seems to make excuses for the deficiency of the image, as though commentary could compensate for visual weakness or turn it into a virtue: “Deploying a poetic logic, the work relies on relations between charged fragments, as intricately interwoven as the politics of difference under investigation. The resulting series offers a lyrical narrative, reflecting on a febrile mix of histories and ideologies, presenting the aporetic in all its complexity.”
As this garbled text reminds us, it is also preferable to avoid praising your own work and making claims for its intellectual scope and ambition. Just concentrate on taking the picture and, if it is good, someone else will do that for you. Serious artists do not attempt to offer an interpretation of their work. They know very well that if it has any meaning, it is both deeper and more intangible than anything that can easily be paraphrased.
Many names could be cited but we need look no further than the past exhibition in this same gallery, by Australia’s greatest photographer and one of our best contemporary artists in any medium, Bill Henson. There is, in the present show, a work that clearly imitates Henson and even follows his example in being called Untitled. But Tajette O’Halloran supplements her picture of a suburban house at dusk with a wordy explanation: “Signifying the anticlimactic closure of the day, the images are set predominantly at dusk where undesignated identities appear in bleak isolated landscapes to conjure a sense of listlessness.”
It is impossible to imagine Henson ever writing anything so laboured and banal about his own work. With its painfully literal and didactic interpretation, O’Halloran’s commentary acts like a drain to siphon away any residue of poetic mystery from her work and leave it empty and hollow. Henson’s exhibition was accompanied by a beautifully produced book, but what text did he choose to include? Certainly not an “artist’s statement”. Simply a poem, written a century ago by CP Cavafy, enigmatic but, like his own work, resonant.
Bowness Prize
Monash Gallery of Art, until November 17
Diverse portrait of key moments in time
This latest exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, named for Cezanne and Giacometti, highlights the unbreakable bond between art and history.
How to fail spectacularly at unboxing
It was four boxes, not one; the ASMR was dire; and completion took more than four hours: a shambolic unboxing.
The first photographs were made in the 1830s but elements of the conceptual underpinnings and even of the technology go back much further than that. It was the new system of one-point perspective first clearly articulated in the 15th century that established the theoretical or optical paradigm for photographic vision, and this discovery dramatically influenced the development of painting over subsequent centuries.