The NGV’s photographic survey includes striking images but will confuse many visitors
This historical photographic survey includes many important images, but its non-chronological approach is confusing.
Photographic exhibitions seem to be ubiquitous at the moment. Apart from the Ballarat Foto Biennale discussed here recently – with an AI category for the first time – and the Hoda Afshar survey canvassed in last week’s column, there are two longer-term exhibitions at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at Sydney University that I hope to write about in the coming months – The Staged Photograph and Photography and the Performative.
Meanwhile, the state libraries in Victoria and NSW are taking different approaches to the display of their considerable holdings of photographic material. In Melbourne, the State Library of Victoria’s Mirror: New views on photography is projecting a series of post-war photographs, accompanied by texts written in response to these images by contemporary poets and storytellers.
In Sydney, the State Library has just opened a new Photographic Gallery which doubles as a corridor connecting the Mitchell and Macquarie buildings; this was the last project of the retiring State Librarian, my friend Dr John Vallance, under whose leadership the library has been substantially renewed, with the opening, among other things, of permanent Picture Galleries, a works on paper gallery, a map room, greatly improved conservation facilities, an impressive new auditorium and a rooftop bar.
The Photographic Gallery is intended to display, on a rotating basis, selections from the library’s vast collection of over two million images. There are some 400 in this initial selection, hung in a sequence of salon-like grids and set out by decades from the mid-19th to the early 21st centuries. There are no labels, but the images can be looked up on a number of consoles in the centre of the gallery, just as in the Picture Galleries.
The advantage of this simple chronological arrangement is, of course, that visitors can form some approximate idea of the social as well as aesthetic sensibility of each period, while also discovering plenty of surprises and unexpected conjunctions. Thus, in the 1930s there are shots that evoke the social and technological developments of the period, but also eccentricities such as a once famous tattooed lady, and a group of people sitting in a seance. Press images are juxtaposed with art photography, and well-known images with ones we have never seen before.
It is reasonable, in most kinds of narrative, to adhere to chronological order, for the simple reason that events unfold in a temporal succession, so that relations between things that occur at different points in this sequence are fundamentally asymmetrical: an earlier event or thing may cause, provoke or elicit a later one, but not the other way around.
Conversely, a later thing may recall or imitate an earlier one, but again not the other way around. We often hear people saying carelessly that a certain work of art, for example, recalls a later one. It may “recall” it subjectively to the speaker, but objectively and historically it is the opposite: the later work recalls the earlier; the earlier may anticipate the later, but not recall a thing that does not yet exist. And even what we see as anticipation can only be defined in hindsight, after the later work has come into being, partly through assimilating elements of the earlier one.
This is the trouble with the NGV’s Photography: Real and Imagined, which represents a selection of the gallery’s collection, but organised thematically rather than chronologically. Thematic connections can be interesting and useful, but they are more effective when an entire exhibition is based on a single theme, whether it be – to take some of those evoked here – the body, landscape, architecture, or war. This allows a more significant sample of work to be displayed, and that material would normally be arranged chronologically within the overall thematic framework.
It may seem boring and predictable to exhibit things in such linear fashion, and curators who know the works well can understandably be tempted to present them in some different and less familiar ways. But the problem is that while those of us who already know the images, and who have a sound idea of the history of the last 200 years, can cope with the disruption of logical sequence, those who do not have these advantages will simply be confused.
If, for example, as in the arrangement I mentioned at the SLNSW, images are gathered according to the time they were made, we begin to infer something not only of the social realities of that time but about attitudes and sensibility. If a single work from the interwar years is marooned among others from the 1970s or 1980s, even when a plausible juxtaposition is intended, it becomes much harder for the inexperienced viewer to understand the items being brought together.
In general, history is important because it helps us understand how the present we are living in has developed out of the past. By showing us how this process has unfolded, it allows us to be intelligently critical of the present, to identify factors that have led to our current circumstances, and to conceive strategies for the future that are both useful and practicable.
Those who lack such an understanding of history take the world they are living in for granted, as though it were the natural order of things, and experience it like the proverbial goldfish, or else rail against present and past alike without an appreciation of the processes that have produced these conditions. Ignorance of the mechanics of history favours conspiratorial thinking and the personification of abstract constructs, as when people speak of “elites” or “the patriarchy”.
In abandoning chronology, we make it very hard to appreciate the historical circumstances in which art has arisen. And museums turn away from their proper didactic function, even if this may be camouflaged by various public programs aimed at a tiny subsection of the public who are already knowledgeable, and the publication of glossy catalogues full of essays that hardly any viewer will actually read.
In effect – and this is a worrying trend in many of our institutions – displays are increasingly presented as a kind of entertainment. Individual works may be striking, and certain juxtapositions may indeed be interesting, but altogether the structure is not suited to fostering any kind of understanding of history or therefore, any real insight into the images in the exhibition. More often than not, viewers leave without having learnt, or perhaps even remembered, anything.
There are of course plenty of good images here, even if there are far too many categories and individual works are not always hung with those with which they would make most sense, even thematically. Interesting pictures are included by the contemporary photographers Jeff Wall and Greg Crewdson, but not in a context that sheds light on the meaning of their work. There are 19th century photographs scattered throughout the exhibition, as well as a small space devoted specifically to 19th century photography. There are famous pictures by important modern photographers such as Brassai, Cartier-Bresson or the Australian Max Dupain, which, through inept hanging, lose impact rather than gaining it.
If anything remains in the mind from this pileup of disparate and unsequenced images, it is perhaps some of the photographs of the human body, among the perennially most interesting subjects for the camera. In the 19th century room, there is a pair of images of a naked girl with long hair, from around 1852-54; they were designed to be looked at in a stereoscopic viewer, which would have made them appear as an erotic vision in three dimensions, as though actually before the spectator – the contemporary equivalent of today’s virtual reality.
In contrast, a plate from Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal locomotion series (1884-87) has three sets of views of a naked woman performing the same series of actions: walking, bending down to pick up a shawl, and putting it on. The use of three synchronised cameras, and the development of much faster shutter speeds, allowed Muybridge to break down the phases of motion in a way that could in past centuries only be done by artists with the prodigious talents of a Leonardo da Vinci, who analysed the wing movements of birds in flight centuries before photography.
From 1912 there is a nude reclining on a couch in a mask and stockings, by the American photographer E.J. Bellocq; she smiles at the photographer in a way that hints at complicity, and the ring on her finger may explain her choice of a mask. From the 1930s there is a picture by Jacques Henri Lartigue of the Ziegfeld Follies dancers sunbathing in Monte Carlo, their long legs dangling from the edge of a pool. And from 1936, there is Edward Weston’s shot, seen from above, of a naked girl lying on a flat and blank surface which could be the floor of his studio; the simplicity of the composition captures the beauty, but also the distinctively female proportions of the girl’s figure.
Also from the 1930s are two works of surrealist inspiration, Max Dupain’s Impassioned clay (1936) and Raoul Ubac’s Penthesilee (c. 1938), a complex work using multiple negatives and solarisation to evoke the battle of Achilles with the queen of the Amazons – in what looks in the end like a surreal transformation of an engraving by Raphael. Four decades later two other works evoke more complex and perverse sexual sensibilities: Francesca Woodman’s From Space (1976) and Helmut Newton’s Big Nude (1980).
Newton’s life-size nude is striking, particularly because the woman’s attitude and expression are so masculine and stripped of the grace, seduction or movement usually associated with the female figure that we are almost surprised by the absence of male sexual attributes. The figure seems neither truly male nor female but something like an androgyne or eunuch.
Surprisingly, in what is meant to be a thematically organised exhibition, these images are not even gathered in the same section. One could say the same of another theme that would deserve an exhibition of its own: the photography of architecture, ancient and modern, from Gabriel de Rumin’s early picture of the Caryatid Porch in Athens (1859) or Robert Macpherson’s view of Rome around 1860 – which should have been identified as the Column of Trajan with the churches of Santa Maria di Loreto and of the Santissimo Nome di Maria, already the subjects of an etching by Piranesi (1762) – to Berenice Abbott’s modernist view of an apartment block in New York in 1936.
The question we have to ask ourselves is whether anyone will recall this exhibition or look back on it as revealing anything new or interesting about the history of photography. And the answer is clearly in the negative.
An effective and memorable exhibition demands clear shape and focus, and will never be produced by indiscriminate variety, an absence of historical structure and an excessive number of loosely improvised thematic categories.
Photography: Real and Imagined
National Gallery of Victoria, to January 28