Faces in the street

Street photography grew up and flourished, like Darwin’s Galapagos finches, where an economic opportunity presented itself.

Inez Hockey, 1946, Hunter Street, Sydney. Picture: Museum of Sydney. Picture: Museum of Sydney, Street Photography Exhibition

A few days ago I walked past St Mary’s Cathedral on the way to the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney and, as usual, busloads of tourists were taking pictures while the drivers hung around in a desultory way, having a smoke. Why were they there? No one was explaining to them the purpose of a cathedral, or the significance of gothic architecture or more particularly of neo-gothic in the design of Victorian religious buildings. And it is unlikely that anyone had discussed the rivalry between the Catholic Church and the non-Catholic churches in the first couple of centuries of Australia’s history.

These are not pedantic quibbles. An intelligent visitor to any country would want to understand something about the architecture of an important religious building, to learn about its historical period, its relation to the belief systems of that country, and what significance its style, location and scale had in relation to its historical circumstances and to the struggles between different groups for spiritual hegemony.

Not mass tourists, however: for them, the cathe­dral and its expansive parvis are simply a set in which to take pictures of each other. Every day, thousands of people snap other tourists grinning or adopting silly poses in front of a large and impressive stone structure whose style and meaning are otherwise of complete indifference to them. For the tour guides and drivers, this is just a break when they can get rid of the group for a while, like shopping time.

Of course these tourists are in no way exceptional: the public spaces of Italy and other countries are overrun with tourists from all over the world, including Australia, obsessively taking photographs of each other and of objects they don’t understand. It is a surprise, at first, to see the same thing happen in Sydney, but it may help us to reflect on our own behaviour overseas, including the superficiality of our engagement with the culture of the places we visit, and perhaps above all our contemporary photographic bulimia.

Why is it that we take so many pictures of places we visit? Is it just to prove to others and even to ourselves that we were there? That certainly seems to be the case in the new age of social media, less than a decade old, in which people now think of their photos as images to be published, albeit in most cases to a tiny yet open-ended audience. Even their photos of themselves are meant for publication, for social media is perhaps more than anything else a mach­ine for narcissism.

This exhibition takes us back to a very different world of photography, even though it is one that came to an end only a half-century or so ago. It was a time when photographs were scarce, and therefore more carefully taken and more highly valued. As a result, the few pictures that most of us have of our forebears, before the age of mass consumer photography, are far more resonant and poignant than the superficially beguiling but insubstantial plethora of smartphone images.

Street photography was a particular subculture of photography that grew up and flourished, like Darwin’s Galapagos finches, where an economic opportunity presented itself. In this case it was in the gap between the small and amateurish snapshots that could be taken by a family camera and the more formal and expensive studio portrait taken with professional equipment. And it was not only a matter of price: the unposed street portrait was also more living, fresh and spontaneous, and thus felt more modern.

A portrait we have of my maternal grandmother epitomises all these qualities. It was taken in 1935, when she was about 29 and already the mother of two children. She is a tall, slim and glamorous young woman, striding through George Street in Sydney near the General Post Office, in a long dress and a smart hat, carrying a small parcel wrapped in brown paper and string. She is full of life and confidence, but she could never have imagined that she would live into the following century and still be working as a volunteer in an old people’s home at the age of 100.

There are studio portraits of her, too, though none as lively as this one taken, seemingly casually, by an anonymous street photographer. But these photographers were not working entirely randomly. On the contrary, they were on the lookout for people such as this young woman: individuals who, among the drab city crowds, were smartly dressed, energetic, animated; who were perhaps on their way to or returning from some social event and happy to have a picture of themselves looking their best.

Or there could be something slightly different: street photographers were alert to the sense of a special occasion, to the meeting of friends, to moments of sentimental importance, to greetings and partings at railway stations. Here there are many such pictures, but while we are often left to speculate about what lay behind certain images, this exhibition includes many cases in which the story behind the instant captured by the camera has been reconstructed, often from the memories and records of the families who today own the pictures.

Inevitably some of the stories are sad. In one case a young man is pictured in 1938 walking down George Street in the striped blazer of the Hawkesbury Agricultural College; four years later, he was captured by the Japanese in the fall of Singapore and died, aged 25, in the notorious Sandakan prison camp in Borneo. It is hard not to read the picture in the light of this knowledge and to interpret his slightly concerned yet bemused expression as that of someone trying to discern the future where there was none.

Brian Packard with his mother, Eileen, c. 1940, Martin Place, Sydney, left; and John Nicholson Barnier, 1938, George Street, Sydney. Credit: Museum of Sydney Street Photography Exhibition

In other cases a long and uneventful future, at least again in hindsight, seems to have been preordained. There is a picture, from 1940, of a handsome young man, just out of school, walking through Martin Place with his mother. He is smartly dressed in a new suit and looks up at the camera a bit sceptically; she follows, a large mat­ronly figure. The photographer’s sixth sense told him that this was an important day, and so it was: the boy was starting work at the Bank of NSW, where he would remain for almost a half-century, until 1988.

Sometimes the potential significance of the moment was hard to miss, as in the case of a soldier pictured at Circular Quay with his wife and sister around 1943. This could so easily have been, as the mother and young wife must have feared, a last picture of her husband, but owing to a medical condition he was not sent to the front. Another is a shot of a young girl with her mother and her daughter of about two years old; this was to send to her husband serving overseas; he too came home after the war, but not until the little girl was five.

The only apparently homosexual couple is pictured on the occasion of a reunion, no doubt cannily spotted by the photographer despite the reserve that the restraints of the 1940s would have imposed. One is a handsome and animated Frenchman, a professional singer who had just returned from a tour of northern NSW; the other young man is an amateur singer and pianist with a day job as a shipping clerk.

Inez Hockey, 1946, Hunter Street, left; Anne Zahalka re-enactment, right. Picture: Museum of Sydney, Street Photography Exhibition

No doubt the young clerk behaved in a completely respectable way at work, and he looks slightly disconcerted at his private life being captured and objectified in this way and, even if not published, to some degree displayed to public scrutiny. For when the street photographer had taken your portrait, he would give you a ticket with a number; in the next day or so you could visit one of the kiosks that worked as agents for the photographers and order your picture from the proof sheets that corresponded to your number.

The exhibition has been mounted in collaboration with Anne Zahalka, one of Australia’s most prominent contemporary photographers, and it includes a video of her talking about this extraordinarily successful but short-lived variety of photography, which largely died out with the rise of superior cameras for the home photographer in the 60s. Zahalka also discusses her own contribution to the exhibition, a ser­ies of reconstructions of street photos of the past with the descendants of the original subjects or in some cases the same people. In the most straightforward re-creation of the original, two little boys snapped at Circular Quay in 1943 reappear as elderly men in the same place in 2018.

Left, Vivian Chan Shaw with her mother, Ella Leanfore, and grandmother Yuck Land Hing, c.1939, Sydney; and Anne Zahalka’s re-enactment. Picture: Museum of Sydney, Street Photography Exhibition

In one of the more complex re-creations, the starting point is a picture of Vivian Chan Shaw, who later had a successful fashion boutique in the Queen Victoria Building, as a little girl in 1939 with her mother and grandmother, who were prosperous merchants. The modern re-creation has Chan Shaw as the grandmother, with her daughter Claudia Chan Shaw and granddaughter Madison; she was on the left in the original composition and now has duly taken her place on the right of the new one.

The re-creations retain the original compositions and attitudes but often vary the relationships between the subjects. Thus a couple — smartly dressed as though about to go to the races — photographed in 1959 on the steps of what was then Mark Foy’s Emporium and is now the Downing Centre is re-enacted by the couple’s children, with one of whom the woman was pregnant in the original photograph. The photo of Earle and Nancy Waterhouse in the 30s is re-created by professor Richard Waterhouse, their son, and his own daughter.

Zahalka’s own starting point was the photograph of her mother, Hedy Zahalka, with a friend in Prague, not far from Wenceslas Square, in 1947. The war was over but not the suffering, for Hedy’s mother had died in the Holocaust. This picture is re-created in Pitt Street, with a portrait of the artist’s daughter Alice with a friend; it is a serene portrait, a world away from the tension and anxiety that must have reigned in a city that had escaped from the horrors of Nazism only to be occupied by the Soviets.

It is very still, too, and this is in general a quality of the restaged photographs. The originals were often in motion, reflecting the way that the street photographers often caught their subjects unawares. The shot of Inez Hockey in Hunter Street in 1946 is in full stride, like that of my grandmother in 1935. The image of Hockey’s granddaughter Alice in 2018, in the same spot, is posed and unmoving. The earlier pictures are literally snaps in time; the later ones, the products of reflection and memory, are still and motionless.

Street Photography, Museum of Sydney until July 21.