$44.95

Newspaper photography in Australia from glass plate negatives to digital.

Photographer, teacher and writer Kathleen Whelan pays tribute to the men and women with cameras who every day add meaning to the bald newspaper narrative with their pictures. Her book, Photography of The Age: Newspaper Photography in Australia from Glass Plate Negatives to Digital, is a history of photography in this newspaper, a description of the process of assignment and picture selection and biographies of many of the paper’s outstanding photographers. It is a lesson in the art and process of photojournalism.

More info

Book review by Terry Lane

Ian Potter Museum of Art. Melbourne
until 15 March 2015

As a photographer invested with fame, Avedon (1923-2004) coursed through the high echelons of the literary and cinematic world in which the US is both prolific and monopolistic. Occasionally he included stars from beyond, like the Beatles.
They’re excellent portraits, with subtle expression, which you can examine at the Potter museum, curated by Christopher Chapman of the National Portrait Gallery. They seldom appear strained or star-struck. If anything, they’re often a bit deadpan, thanks to a white backdrop that Avedon used as a default, unless shooting on location.

While Avedon’s world was busy faking it, the photographer sought realities that are untouched by the publicity machinery in which he was enmeshed. Since the 1940s, he photographed street life in New York, a project for which he turned down a commission by Life Magazine to pursue the vision autonomously as an artist.

By Robert Nelson

Accompanying photograph: Kate Moss. New York 1996 by Richard Avedon

More at The Age

PHOTOGRAPHY MEETS FEMINISM: AUSTRALIAN WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS, 1970s-’80s
Monash Gallery of Art, Victoria
Until 7 December 2014

In any epoch, it was easier to be male. In the 1970s and ’80s, for example, a male painter could feel supported by a feeling of greatness, as if his daub carried the canon forward in landscape or abstraction, popism or neo-impressionism.

To be female in the epoch meant living alongside this self-sustaining fantasy of grandeur, which even reached into ideological practices. All enlightened fields were full of charismatic boys, who swiftly embraced non-material genres, like performance, social sculpture and installation.

The period brought special pressure upon art history. As feminism took on among intellectuals of both sexes, art history would sometimes be interrogated to account for the reasons why there were relatively few great female artists.

While art historians would create reasonable apologies and impute the deficit to centuries of disadvantage to women, it was left to women artists to construct a view of art that redefined the stakes. They sought a vision that didn’t see art as line-honours in transcendent inventions but a conversation that furthered the sympathy and consciousness of the community.
A well-curated exhibition at the MGA lets us examine the epoch through women’s eyes. Called Photography meets feminism: Australian women photographers 1970s-80s, the exhibition is one of those huge undertakings that could always have been huger.

Much of the photography belongs to a documentary genre but it usually manages to make a point. An example is Helen Grace’s images of Women at work from 1976 and her wilfully monotonous washing lines with a wicked title: Women seem to adapt to repetitive-type tasks from ’78.
A touching expression of female solidarity is Ponch Hawkes’ series Our mums and us from ’76. It portrays female artists together with their mothers, mostly in unglamorous suburban locations. The first-name titles, like Margaret and Micky, reflect usage among family and friends.

These unassuming pictures are also profound in defying the archetypical hostility by which psychoanalysis defines the mother-daughter relationship. Instead of castration, we have unabashed intimacy. This inter-generational sweetness is also seen in Christine Godden’s works like Joanie Lynny and baby from the early ’70s, where an artist or artist’s friend is the mum.
Perhaps because of a wariness of greatness, few of the works are iconic, including the uncomfortable and messy visions of Julie Brown-Rrap as a kind of crucifix. Rather, most women in the exhibition used photography to reach out to people.

Photography is the ideal medium to connect with the community generally, not just women, because photography ranges inclusively across different classes. An example is Ruth Maddison’s Vehicle Builders Union Ball, Collingwood Town Hall from ’79.

There are clever pockets of critique. The collection of popular imagery by Sandy Edwards is witty, putting sexualised women in a box, where the stereotypes are secreted in a kind of photo-tomb.

The series by Virginia Coventry is also conceptually challenging. Titled Miss world televised, Coventry’s images from ’76 capture portraits from a beauty contest on TV. Alas, the high shutter speed doesn’t sync with the cathode-ray tube on the old television set, and a blank glitch intervenes in the field. This coincidental defacement seems somehow poetic, as the organ of mass-diffusion of a tacky female stereotype turns out to be a black mark against natural beauty itself.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the show is that many of the best works are not about feminism. Pat Brassington’s photography is psychologically profound and symbolises much unconscious discomfort; but it isn’t political in any dimension.

Another artist with photographic monumentality is Robyn Stacey, whose hand-coloured photographs are both historicist and transfigured. The uncanny country picnic with an FJ Holden seems like a memory, both extremely sharp and present as an experience and yet remote as a historical reality.

Perhaps it’s a record of childhood, which in other ways Stacey possibly sought to re-create by going on a tour of country towns as a mature woman together with her mother. Her itinerary of shacks and stores is again touchingly hand-coloured, with a glow of pathos that could almost sum up the gesture of so many female artists to connect in an alienating world.

From The Age

Leigh Lambert, Matthew Coleman, Marc Morel and James Ruff at the Large Format Day 2014.
Photograph by David Tatnall.

Unsensored14
Collingwood Gallery
Until 24 September

The eighth annual group print show Unsensored14 at Collingwood Gallery has a wonderful selection of photographs from forty members of Melbourne Silver Mine Inc.

For me the standout photographs in this un-curated show were: Gary Sauer-Thompson’s Sea/Sky a beautiful colour photograph from a 5 x 7 camera; Leigh Lambert’s Observant Light and Cone Crusher two beautiful black and white industrial landscapes from a 4 x 5 camera; and, Malcolm Gamble’s The Styx and Croajingolong Dreamtime two black and white 4 x 5 pinhole photographs.

Coinciding with my visit to the gallery was the third annual Large Format Day. Visitors on the day were treated to a collection of large format cameras with photographers Marc Morel, Leigh Lambert, James Ruff and Matthew Coleman who were on hand to ‘show and tell’.

The exhibition is on until 24 September 2014. It’s a great show, and already on day two there are a lot of red dots!

David Tatnall
More info at Melbourne Silver Mine and
Collingwood Gallery

Power House Books. 2013
AUD $65

The mystery surrounding Vivian Maier and her work is either that of genuine intrigue or marketing hype. Not much is known about her as a person or as an artist. There are conflicting stories about her life and background, she didn’t exhibit work during her life-time (1926 – 2009) and it wasn’t until a trunk of her negatives and prints was ‘discovered’ at an auction that she became ‘known’.

Of course it being America, there are conspiracy theories.

But one thing for sure is that she was an extremely good photographer. Two books of her work have been published in recent times, Vivian Maier – Street Photographer (2011) and this book, Vivian Maier – Self-Portraits (2013).

In the current time of the grinning idiot selfie it is wonderful to see a book of subtle and clever self-portraits.

Maier used both 35 mm and medium format cameras, working in colour and black & white. Her work from the 1950’s when she began to use the square format Rolleifiex camera are for me the strongest in the book. She was extremely good at using the square format to its fullest potential; her compositions are very good indeed. Her colour work is strong too, but has a harder feel to it.

There is a mysterious feel to the book from seeing so many photographs of Maier and not knowing why she took so many photographs of her self. Occasionally another person in the photograph, whether this person was know to Maier not, we’ll never know. No diaries or notes about the photographs have been found.

In her introductory essay Elizabeth Avedon says, “I am not sure if we can read the ‘self’ in Vivian Maier’s self-portraiture or even chart the progression of her life through her images. We look at her self-portraits for revelations, but she does not really give us much.”

The cloth bound book of 120 pages (26 x 28 cm) is beautifully printed, the essay by Elizabeth Avedon is concise and informative.

It’s a great book; don’t focus too much attention to the conflicting stories about her life and the conspiracy theories about her. Her photographers are strong, intriguing and mysterious and beautifully presented in this book.

David Tatnall

Official website of Vivian Maier

Due out July 2014
USD 40.00

Controversial, misunderstood, and sometimes overlooked, Minor White (1908–1976) is one of the great photographers of the twentieth century, whose ideas exerted a powerful influence on a generation of photographers and still resonate today. His photographic career began in 1938 in Portland, Oregon, with assignments for the WPA (Works Progress Administration). After serving in World War II and studying art history at Columbia University, White’s focus shifted toward the metaphorical. He began creating images charged with symbolism and a critical aspect called equivalency, referring to the invisible spiritual energy present in a photograph made visible to the viewer.

This book brings together White’s key biographical information—his evolution as a photographer, teacher of photography, and editor of Aperture, as well as particularly insightful quotations from his journals, which he kept for more than forty years. The result is an engaging narrative that weaves through the main threads of White’s life, his growth as an artist, as well as his spiritual search and ongoing struggle with his own sexuality and self-doubt. He sought comfort in a variety of religious practices that influenced his continually metamorphosing artistic philosophy.

Complemented with a rich selection of more than 160 images including some never published before, the book accompanies the first major exhibition of White’s work since 1989, on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from July 8 to October 19, 2014.

Purchase from Amazon

The Sievers Project
Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy.
until 24 August 2014

Considered one of the world’s great industrial and architectural photographers, Wolfgang Sievers (1913-2007), a student of Bauhaus, fled Nazi Germany for Australia at the outbreak of WWII. In 1939 he opened his photographic studio in Melbourne and became one of Australia’s most renowned photographers with many of his images icons of the industrial age in this country.

Since his death in 2007, Naomi Cass the director of Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) has pondered how to combine contemporary practice with Sievers own work,the outcome of which is “The Sievers Project” in which six “early career” photo-media artists have responded to Sievers’ photographs in both direct and more esoteric styles.

The Sievers Project artists – Jane Brown, Cameron Clarke, Zoe Croggon, Therese Keogh, Phuong Ngo, and Meredith Turnbull – were given an open brief says Kyla McFarlane, Assistant Curator at CCP, who was also heavily involved in the Project. “The only remit was to respond to his work or his life or his philosophy…All responded quite respectfully, and have taken quite an interesting lateral and sometimes more direct responsive approaches”.

McFarlane says Clarke and Brown focused on some of Sievers more commercial images. Both visited various sites that Sievers had photographed including the Ford Factory and AMCOR’s Australian Paper Mills in Melbourne. Brown also visited “an old mining site in Broken Hill, which is a graveyard for machinery. There’s a certain poetic melancholy to these images. Jane prints her own work and uses interesting tones including gold. The prints are arranged in grids so you can see this mass of machinery and the abandoned nature of the place. We’ve hung Jane’s work opposite Sievers’ images and there is a real conversation between the pair”.

At a textiles plant in the Victorian country town of Wangaratta Clarke took a different approach with his response. With his idea being to capture the “theatrical drama of Sievers work, Cameron has taken portraits of the machines and the individuals,” offers McFarlane. “The workers in these photographs look so human and almost sweaty against these machines that are still in operation”.

Photo-media artist Zoe Croggon has taken Sievers’ photographs and used them underneath her collage works that are printed on aluminium. Suspended from the ceiling on wires, these two images overlap and juxtapose the athleticism of the human form against cold steel.

Phuong Ngo drew on his migrant heritage to tell a personal story about his mother and other Vietnamese women who worked as seamstresses in backyard workshops. Using the sewing machine as the lynchpin, his portraits explore the relationship between the machines and the women. McFarlane says this work is a personal homage to Ngo’s childhood. “Phuong said that when he was growing up the sewing machine’s sound was like a Vietnamese lullaby…so here he’s taken a nub of Sievers’ work and placed it within his own history”.

n addition to the more traditional photographic representations are works that feature fabric, sculpture, collage and photolithographs. Using photography and original sculpture, artist Therese Keogh chose a photograph Sievers took in Rome of The Forum on which to frame her response. McFarlane says Keogh’s approach is centred on what she’s defined as “anomalies in Sievers’ practice”. Another installation artist and designer Meredith Turnbull, has used Sievers’ portrait of designer Gerard Hearbst as inspiration. Hearbst was an immigrant like Sievers. In this portrait Hearbst is pictured waving a bolt of fabric like a flag. It is this image that Turnbull has collaged and printed onto fabric as her response to a master’s work.

More at Photojournalism Now

Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill. Victoria
until 31 August 2014

The ‘road’ has long been the subject of artistic expression, a symbol of the physical and allegorical paths we follow. In this group exhibition featuring eight artists – Micky Allan, Virginia Coventry, Gerrit Fokkema, John Gollings, Tim Handfield, Ian North, Robert Rooney, Wes Stacey – the archives of the Monash Gallery of Art have been mined to uncover works taken in the 1970s and 1980s. These photographs examine the meaning of the road in modern Australian life through the exploration of the relationship of photography and the experience of road travel.

MGA Curator Stephen Zagala says, “The road has often provided Australian photographers with a means to an end, whether a landscape or a picturesque community in some distant part of the country. But as this important exhibition shows, during the 1970s, the road took on a whole new meaning for Australian photographers. It provided a space for innovation and experimentation, and also a photographic reconsideration of Australian life.”

The exhibition features Wes Stacey’s visual travelogue of the trips he made in the early seventies around Australia in a Kombi. “The Road” also includes John Gollings’s monumental, ten-metre long streetscapes of Surfers Paradise Boulevard from 1973, and Robert Rooney’s iconic Holden park, featuring Rooney’s Holden parked in 20 different locations across Melbourne. “The Road” also features work by “two of Australia’s most important feminist photographers, Micky Allan and Virginia Coventry, who both challenged many of the gendered assumptions about the road, automotive travel and Australian life during the ‘70s and ‘80s”.

More at Photojournalism Now

Background

I’ve been using large format cameras since the mid 1970’s. I tray develop negatives using ID11, ABC Pyro or Rodinal (now Adonal). I mainly use FP4+, TRI-X 320 and HP5+.

I have made the test negatives for this review over a period of time in different lighting conditions.

Chris Reid from Blanco Negro suggested using the film at ISO 320 as a starting point, and after making my first set of negatives I found rating the film at ISO 250 worked better for my style of making photographs.

Testing Fomapan 400

The first photographs I made were tests to determine the speed I should rate the film when using my normal developer ID11 1:1 at 20° and tray developing with a pre developer water bath. I found the combination ISO 250 and development time of 11 minutes produced good negatives, this became Normal Development time.

Photographs for this test have be made on a folding 4 x 5 camera with 150 mm lens (Salmon Rocks) 90 mm (Snowy River) and 210 mm (Portrait of Joanna). Exposures where calculated using a 1° spot meter and grey card using the Zone System.

The photographs reproduced here have been scanned from the contact photographs and are un-manipulated.

Test photograph one: Salmon Rocks

This photograph was made late in the afternoon. I was drawn to the reflection of the clouds in the foreground water. Relatively low contrast, so not that difficult to get the highest sky Zone VII and the shadow of the large rock Zone III to retain detail. This negative was given normal development time. The reference contact photograph made on grade 1½ paper.

Test photograph two: Snowy River

The Snowy River at Frenches Narrows photographed at sunset. Reflections are always tricky. The issue of the brightness of the sky and the darker reflection require careful exposure reading. Here the bank of vegetation in the middle was Zone IV and the bottom left corner was Zone III, the sky ranged from Zone VI to VII½. This negative was given minus normal development. I was very happy that this printed well as a contact photograph on grade 1½ paper.

Test photograph three: Portrait of Joanna

Photographed in very high contrast light. The skin tones varied from Zone IV in the shadows to Zone VII½ in the highlights. This negative was given minus normal development. Reference contact print made on grade 1½ paper.

Conclusions

I found the film worked really well in varying light conditions and responded well to changes in development time to produce negatives that could easily be printed.

I didn’t find the film to be overly contrasty. I found contrast could be controlled well by changing development time. It does have a distinct grain though, as you would expect from a ISO 400 speed film, but no more so than other ISO 400 films.

Fomapan 400 has like all films a distinct ‘look’; the grain, tonality and overall appearance is different to that of HP5+ and TRI-X 320, as they are to each other.

I did however fine the emulsion a little softer than other films when wet, so care should be taken when processing it for the first time.

Fomapan 400 is a good film, it is well worth trying, and at $68 for fifty sheets it is one of the most economical films available. As a starting point I would recommend an ISO of 320 or 250 and a slight reduction of the recommended development time.

David Tatnall

Blanco Negro is the sole Australian agent for Foma products.

Data sheet for Fomapan 400.

The Zone System.

Photographs by David Tatnall.

Centre for Comtemporary Photography. Fitzroy
until 31 August 2014

Younger artists could be forgiven for not knowing of Wolfgang Sievers, the German photographer who fled his homeland in 1938 after the Nazis tried to engage him as an aerial photographer for the military.

It was a long time ago, after all, but his legacy has been enduring.
Sievers ended up in Australia at the start of WWII and joined the armed services here; and rather than devoting his talents to the Luftwaffe, he was eventually able to get out his cameras, set up a studio at the top end of Collins Street and start documenting Australia, heroically and with enormous style.

The National Library of Australia meticulously scanned Sievers’ extraordinarily large output – so when Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography last year commissioned six artists to respond to Sievers’ work for a new exhibition, there was a lot for them to explore.

Some of the artists, says centre director Naomi Cass, followed diligently in the master’s footsteps; others among these emerging artists of various ages chose to riff off a single photograph.

“Their brief was to immerse themselves in Wolfgang Sievers but we were never going to direct them,” Cass says. “We didn’t mind if they responded to his narcissism, his political beliefs, his photography, his interest in architecture, his Bauhaus background, his engagement with German intellectuals: it was open.”

Most of the six artists were very familiar with Sievers’ photographs and artist Jane Brown already knew how mesmerising his images of Australian industry and manufacturing sites could be. She went to Broken Hill, where Sievers had documented the Broken Hill Associated Smelters site in 1959, and to the old Australian Paper Mills (APM) in Melbourne, now owned by Amcor.

“In Broken Hill, I got transfixed by some of the machinery that had been left behind, that had probably been there since the ‘50s when Sievers was there,” she says. “Some of it almost formed a memorial to the miners, as well.”

Her work documents machinery, slag-heaps, architecture and, she says, it picks up on Sievers’ aesthetics and ideas.

“He was working for commercial clients, so his work is very beautiful and carefully constructed,” she says of the images produced there and at APM. “At the same time there was something of Sievers’ aesthetic I wanted to connect with as well.”

Brown says Sievers was very much a part of the optimism of Melbourne being a manufacturing hub, and she has been struck by the loss of this optimism and the changes that have happened since his time.

“It is quite saddening. You wonder what has happened to all these people that worked there? That sense of employment, that loss. It seemed so purposeful – they built these things to last, it wasn’t as transient as work is today. You could identify with it more, there was great pride in the work.”

Via the Sydney Morning Herald