Glory in the old-time analogue photography at this exhibition
The work of American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is one of the standout attractions at this year’s Ballarat Foto Biennale.
The last Ballarat International Foto Biennale (2023) included for the first time, and possibly the first time in the world, a category dedicated to images produced by generative AI, also called “promptography” because it is produced simply by giving verbal instructions or prompts to an AI program, without the use of any kind of photographic device or even now-conventional digital editing application.
This is a field of technology in which, as everyone knows by now, extraordinarily rapid developments are taking place day by day; less than a year after the last Ballarat exhibition, Open AI demonstrated its video generator Sora in February 2024 (it was commercially released in December last year) with a striking clip of mammoths galloping through a snowy landscape – doubly evocative because it also alluded to another theme at the frontier of science: the possibility of bringing animals like this back from extinction through DNA cloning.
A year or more later, the real-world effects of AI are becoming more apparent, if unevenly in different sectors: it is already clear how useful such tools are going to be in medical imaging and diagnostics, while on the other hand authors and singers are alarmed to find pastiches of their work dumped on the market. Not surprisingly, it is the most formulaic categories of popular writing and music that are the most vulnerable to such exploitation, since they are already little more than superficial variations on the same kitsch product.
AI is only just beginning to have a significant effect on employment, but the elimination of low-level white collar jobs should accelerate over the rest of this decade. Meanwhile, the effects are already dramatic in education, where, as I observed a couple of years ago, it has become pointless to assign essays and research projects as homework. There are useful ways for students to employ AI in their work, but assessments can once again rely only on supervised examinations and oral interviews to determine if anything has actually been learnt.
As with other forms of technology, including the internet and search engines, AI has the potential to help hardworking, intelligent and energetic students achieve a greater extent and depth of knowledge, while leaving the lazy and less able even further behind. But this whole question of AI and assessment has also revealed more clearly than ever the deep and perhaps fatal crisis of the contemporary university. In becoming degree factories, increasingly reliant on commercial income from foreign students, universities have relentlessly devalued their degrees. Once the award of a bachelor of arts signified a certain level of learning; today a non-Honours BA is virtually worthless, and even PhD degrees have become increasingly flimsy.
This degradation of university education has resulted from a combination of factors: low entry standards, mediocre teaching, an emphasis in some subjects on social indoctrination over free enquiry, and perhaps above all the emphasis on production. The real value of education is not in the facts you learn, but in the development of a strong, open and agile mind, and ultimately a sense of moral orientation and spiritual awareness. The paradox is that you learn these intangible things only through applying yourself at a high level to difficult and demanding disciplines.
This year’s AI-generated images remind us of such themes, and particularly the difference between the wisdom acquired through process and the banality of mere product. For actually these generated images are surprisingly unmemorable. Writing this a week after visiting the exhibition, I have vivid recollections of dozens of photographs I saw in the course of my day in Ballarat, but curiously only a dim recollection of the “promptographs”.
They are nonetheless worth looking at as examples of how images can be either manipulated or produced out of the great ocean of online visual data dredged by the image-generating software, and it is important that each entry is accompanied by details of the software used in its making. If this were demanded of the Archibald Portrait Prize entries, we would quickly be rid of countless cheats who currently infest that exhibition. As was the case last time, images that look like real photos tend to be more effective, although AI does not always understand human anatomy: in Brent Leidhertz’s photo of a singing woman, the nose is grossly out of place, and the more closely we look, the more her features are like a Frankenstein collage of dissonant elements.
There are many other parts to the Biennale. Considerable prominence is given to Campbell Addy’s work, which is exhibited in the cavernous Mining Exchange building, but it is ultimately too camp, commercial and predictable to be worth dwelling on at any length.
But there are two outstanding exhibitions that are worth the train trip to Ballarat on their own, one of Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-89), the other of someone far less well-known, the French war photographer Catherine Leroy (1944-2006).
Edward Enninful’s selection from Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre, especially in contrast to Addy’s hugely oversized and colour-saturated images, reminds us how much more effective art is when it concentrates on reality rather than effect. These modestly sized black and white photographs are poignant in their directness and simplicity even when they are artfully and indeed self-consciously posed, from the self-portraits to the images of Lisa Lyons, the still-life shots of flowers, or the touching – and intensely memorable – portrait of Mapplethorpe’s lover in early life, Patti Smith squatting naked and holding onto the bar of a radiator.
Another unforgettable sequence is a series of self-portraits from 1980, when the artist was only about 33 or 34 years old. In the first he is bare-chested, looking straight at the camera, a masculine figure but wearing lipstick and makeup that evoke a fragile sense of androgyny. In the second of the sequence displayed here, he presents himself as a young tough in a leather jacket, smoking a cigarette; in the third, he appears in drag with a fur stole. Long before and far from today’s prescriptive gender ideologies, this series evokes a true fluidity between masculine and feminine polarities within a single individual.
On a formal level, it was a pleasure to see real hand-enlarged analogue prints on photographic paper, made from negatives taken with a high-quality analogue camera. It was in fact surprising and almost shocking to be reminded how much more substance and texture such prints have, compared to the bland ink-jet prints that are made from digital photography. Nor is there any photoshop here, but there is a real craft in the enlargement process and the enhancements of light and dark that can be produced in the darkroom.
Two examples will illustrate the point: one is the nude torso of Lydia Cheng (1985), which is not only anatomically beautiful and intelligent, but like a kind of masterclass in the handling of edges, tone and formal modelling in photography. It illustrates again one of the mysteries of art, that the most penetrating insight comes at the meeting point of artifice and reality. Equally impressive, in a different way, is the portrait of Norman Mailer (1985): unlike so many more recent photographers who grotesquely enlarge the features of their sitters, Mapplethorpe finds the point of equilibrium between conveying Mailer’s character as a whole and suggesting the materiality and consequent vulnerability of separate elements of his physiognomy.
The other outstanding exhibition, in the entirely different mode of reportage, is a series by the French photographer Catherine Leroy, who at only 22 years of age turned up in Saigon in 1966 with a handful of US dollars and a camera and, with no previous experience or training set out to become a war correspondent. It was a far more free and easy age, not yet stifled by policies, processes and procedures as we are today, and she almost at once obtained a press card and found opportunities to show what she could do. It is worth remembering too that in those days everyone spoke French in Vietnam and very few knew English.
Even more surprisingly, perhaps, she was readily accepted by the American army, who allowed her to accompany troops on missions against the Vietcong; in 1967 she was even given permission to parachute into battle – as the only civilian photojournalist – with the 173rd Airborne during Operation Junction City, on February 23, 1967. Leroy had in fact gained her parachute licence in France when only 18, but she was so small and light that they had to attach weights to her body for the parachute to function properly.
Leroy was, as she herself observes, the same age as many of the young men among whom she spent weeks at the front, and they, too, soon trusted her; the result is some simple but touching portraits of young soldiers sitting in the jungle with their guns. Others show the same men on search missions in the jungle or at an improvised religious service among the trees. There are also images of the indigenous people who still lived in the mountainous areas, who were known in French as “les Montagnards”. There are shots of warfare and bombing taken from helicopters, but in one of the most harrowing series of photographs she follows a Marine who is crawling up a hill under heavy gunfire in a vain attempt to save a dying comrade.
Leroy appears in a couple of pictures taken by others, but her presence and experience are implicitly felt in several sequences, as on the occasion of the parachute drop, where she photographs the man immediately before her as he jumps from the plane, and then moments later, after her own chute has opened, takes pictures of the all the men around her slowly drifting down to the earth. She told an interviewer from the LA Times in 2002 that she used to feel guilty because she could always go back to Saigon, have a hot shower and go out for dinner to a good French restaurant with a nice bottle of wine, while they were left on the front line. But she faced her share of serious danger in battle; she was eventually seriously wounded by shrapnel, although she recovered and was back with the troops six weeks later. Then she was captured by the Vietcong, but by good fortune they decided to let her take pictures on their side of the war; these subsequently appeared in Paris Match.
Copies of this as well as other publications in which Leroy’s photographs were published are included in the exhibition, as well as a number of letters to her family (in French with English translations). There are also several of the special envelopes in which negatives were sent by agencies in Saigon to the papers that would publish them, accompanied by caption details and credits, gritty relics of a world far removed from the figments of AI software.
Ballarat Foto Biennale
Around the city to October 19
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