There is photography almost 200 years and Photography: Real and Imagined at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) could be interpreted as an try to understand its history.
An enormous and dazzling exhibition featuring 311 photographs. The basic thesis of this exhibition is that some photographs document reality, others are merely a product of the photographer’s imagination, and many are a mixture of each.
The parameters of the exhibition are determined partly by the NGV’s collections and partly by the perspective adopted by the curator, the erudite and long-time senior curator of photography at the NGV, Susan Van Wyk.
Fortunately, the curator didn’t choose a linear chronological approach from daguerreotypes to digitization, although each are included in the exhibition, but created 21 different thematic categories, including: light, environment, death, conflict, work, play and consumption.
Australian artists, international context
Categories have porous boundaries. Even with the help of a 420-page book catalog, it’s difficult to find out why Michael Riley’s deeply moving photograph of a dead gala shown against a background of cracked earth belongs to the theme of the environment moderately than death; why Rosemary Laing’s painting of a detention camp, Welcome to Australia, belongs to a movement moderately than a community, conflict or narrative.
I felt that there was a need to prepare the material, and the broad thematic structure allowed the viewer to create a form of mega-narrative of the performance.
There can also be a clear desire to create a global context during which the work of Australian photographers will likely be presented.
It is indeed a very wealthy cross-section of Australian photographers gathered at this exhibition. It is just not an Anglo-American construct of photographic history; Australian photographers are featured alongside New Zealanders and their Asian peers.
Although the NGV can boast of getting its first curator photography department there are significant gaps in the collections in every gallery in Australia in the department’s 55-12 months history.
For example, Russian constructivist photographers, including Aleksandr Rodchenko, who, so far as I do know, is represented in the NGV collection single little book, nevertheless it plays a vital role in any account of the history of photography presented by British, European and American museums. Eastern European photographers are also generally underrepresented.
Key moments and surprises
The exhibition combines what’s iconic with what’s latest and unexpected.
The expected key moments in photography history are generally present with a list of names, including Dora Maar, Man Ray, André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Eadweard Muybridge, Bill Brandt, Lee Miller and László Moholy-Nagy.
They are all on display and represented through their iconic works.
Juvisy (1938) by Henri Cartier Bresson, colloquially often known as Sunday on the Marne, is a deliberately subversive image by this left-wing radical photographer.
This photo, taken at the height of the Great Depression, shows the victory of France’s popular left-wing government, which in 1936 passed a law entitling French staff to 2 weeks of paid vacation. Here the working class enjoys a picnic in Juvisy, south of Paris.
Around the same time, Dorothea Lange, in Towards Los Angeles, California (1936), juxtaposes the agony of unemployed people wandering around searching for work with a billboard promoting the convenience of train travel. An aphorism attributed to her summarizes much of her work:
As bad as that is, the world is potentially filled with good photos. But for photos to be good, they need to be filled with the world.
Man Ray’s Kiki with an African Mask (1926) is certainly one of the most famous photographs in the world, also often known as Noire et blanche (Black and White). The surrealist artist juxtaposes the elongated face of his muse and lover Kiki (Alice Prin), with closed eyes, with the face of a black African ceremonial mask.
There was a photo controversial when it was first published and stays controversial to at the present time.
The exhibition also includes a number of latest classics, including Pat Brassington’s Rosa (2014), Polly Borlan’s Untitled (2018) from the MORPH 2018 series, and Robyn Stacey’s Nothing to See Here (2019), which could be seen as entering the land of the uncanny. Behind the facade of the familiar, we’re invited to enter an unexpected world.
Reinterpreting our world
Photography’s status for creating a reliable copy of reality was tarnished even before digital software was created. There is an old saying: “pictures sometimes deceive, but photographs always lie” – precisely because there was a belief that they might not lie.
One of the most interesting works in the exhibition is by New Zealand-born photographer Patrick Pound, titled Images of People Who Look Dead but (Probably) Are Not (2011–14). It is an intensive installation composed mainly of found photographs, during which viewers are asked to create a narrative of life and death.
Photography: Real and Imagined re-examines our thinking about the art of photography and explores photography’s ability to recreate and reinterpret our world.
