(Installation View, pp. 403–422)
Photographs have long appeared in public space in the form of advertising. Taking advantage of the photographic image’s capacity for reproduction and enlargement – not to mention their seductive power – photographic billboards and billposters have littered our urban landscapes since the early twentieth century. In recent decades, technological enhancements such as backlighting and moving LCD screens have also been introduced. Beyond advertising, however, it has been rarer to find other forms of photography exhibited in public space. Nevertheless, a number of ‘exhibitions’ of Australian photography have been held outside of art galleries and museums, which although easily neglected in histories of photography are nevertheless important to account for, in terms of how photographs are made public and circulate. For instance, Micky Allan was commissioned to produce a site-specific installation in the Rotunda in Elder Park, as part of the 1982 Adelaide Festival of Arts. The ominously titled Pavilion of Death, Dreams and Desire: The Family Room took the unprecedented form of fourteen full-length handpainted photographic portraits of the artist’s family.
Popular photography exhibitions and prizes are often held in public spaces to maximise audiences. But when artists choose to show photography direct to the public it is often to make a political point. For instance, at the height of the Vietnam War in 1967, Wolfgang Sievers made an installation in his own showcase at the prominent Collins Street entrance of Australia Arcade in Melbourne. Instead of his usual promotional array of commercial photographs made for industrial clients, he displayed a photograph (taken from Life magazine) picturing an American soldier holding the mangled head and torso of a Vietnamese man like a trophy with the following declaration:
I, Wolfgang Sievers: victim of Nazi persecution – prisoner of the Gestapo – volunteer AIF and RAAF 1939 – volunteer Australian Army 1942 to 1946 – protest – against this undeclared war – against conscription by lottery – against imprisonment of conscientious objectors whose just stand has been laid down at the Nuremberg trials to be the duty of all men.
Draping the smaller side showcases in black, Sievers claimed he lost up to sixty per cent of his industrial clients as a result of this protest.
Many years later, in 1992, a photograph from the Vietnam War was presented in public in a very different context. A colour transparency taken by the Australian Army photographer Sergeant Mike Coleridge of American helicopters landing for Australian troops was cropped, enlarged to cinematic size, and etched into granite for the new Vietnam War Memorial (designed by the firm Tonkin Zulaikha Harford in association with sculptor Ken Unsworth). In this commemorative context, an evanescent instant captured by an army public relations photographer has been literally turned to eternal stone – to become the locus for the same contemplative temporal dilation as a roll call of the dead. The monumental photographic image, now in contrasty black and white, towers over viewers, physically interpellating them in their nationalist ideological subjectivity. As in similar memorials internationally, visitors now use this giant granite photograph as an impromptu commemorative site by poking the stems of paper poppies into its cracks or leaving personal offerings beneath it.
An even more dramatic appearance of an archival photograph in public space is the prominent use of an image of Aboriginal prisoners in neck chains (taken by German anthropologist Hermann Klaatsch in 1906) in a well-known public mural in Melbourne commissioned by the Aborigines Advancement League. Designer Megan Evans – a white art school teacher – drew much of the imagery for the Northcote Koori Mural, 1984–85, after discovering the 1983 catalogue for the After the Tent Embassy exhibition, with its forceful texts by the Indigenous activist and academic Marcia Langton.1 Originally located opposite the Northcote Town Hall (now digitally reproduced in neighbouring Thornbury), the 50-metre wide mural depicts various aspects of Victorian Aboriginal history, including white invasion, dispossession and oppression of Aboriginal people, and the history of the Land Rights movement.2 The large scale of the mural heightens the semiotic force of the central image of the men in chains – used in various political campaigns and described by historian Jane Lydon as a ‘a pan-Aboriginal symbol of injustice’.3 The photograph’s transformation into public art is a public intervention in the historical consciousness of a nation.
In 1988, Ian de Gruchy worked with the Polish American artist Krzysztof Wodiczko to create a large-scale temporary projection of an Indigenous ‘humpy’ structure on to the modernist architecture of the Adelaide Festival Centre. Temporarily installed during the Adelaide Festival in the politically charged context of Australia’s bicentennial year, Humpy was designed to make visible an invisible history of the site and to question white Australia’s relationship to place. De Gruchy was inspired to make the work after seeing photographs of makeshift humpy structures – shelters or dwellings made from bark used by Aboriginal Australians – from the Central Australian communities of Yuendumu and Papunya taken by friend and fellow artist Dave Kerr. De Gruchy’s description of the project states that the Festival Centre was built over an Indigenous settlement and that the work was created to highlight this.4 As projections, the photographic images become an immersive media experience that, as one writer observes, ‘re-positions the viewer in time and space, thereby allowing an invisible repressed history to become visible’.5 Thirty years later, Indigenous artist Tony Albert projected a vast computer-generated photo/graphic animated montage I am Visible, 2019, onto the National Gallery of Australia’s exterior.
In 2002, Anne Zahalka’s series of lightboxes Welcome to Sydney at Sydney Airport could also be described as an intervention into public debate. Following her previous introduction of multicultural figures in her 1989 series, Bondi: Playground of the Pacific, Zahalka had become increasingly engaged with celebrating multicultural Australia. By 2002, several years into John Howard’s leadership of the country, and following the Tampa affair in 2001, when a Norwegian freighter carrying 433 rescued asylum seekers was denied entry to Australian waters, the debate about migration had become toxic. In response, Zahalka worked with the Sydney Airports Corporation to produce a series of seventeen large-scale panoramic photographs to affirm the vibrancy of Sydney’s multicultural identity. Presented in lightboxes next to the arrivals area of the international terminal, Welcome to Sydney featured staged portraits of individuals from ethnic groups with a long association with migration to Australia, such as the Chinese and Italians, as well as more recent migrant communities, like the Vietnamese and South African. Each person holds a cultural or symbolic object they have brought from their homeland, and the image is accompanied by the words ‘welcome to Australia’ in their respective languages. Zahalka imitated a contemporary postcard format, and indeed the series was also published and sold as a set of postcards. Following its showing at Sydney Airport, the work was later exhibited at bus shelters and at the Museum of Sydney.
In the postmodern heyday of the late 1980s, a number of artists sought to use the city as a temporary canvas through the use of slide projections or billboards. In 1987 and 1988, Jeff Gibson plastered Sydney with cheap black-and-white posters of himself posing as various corrupt corporate ‘types’. As part of Brisbane’s Expo 88, Jeanelle Hurst curated a project called InterFace 88: City as a Work of Art, which included both formal light-plays and figurative photographic work by artists like Peter Callas and Jay Younger. In a similar vein, Stuart Koop from Centre for Contemporary Photography organised City Screens in 1993, a series of slide projections on Melbourne buildings, inspired and aided by the technical virtuosity of Ian de Gruchy (who in 1992 had converted the side of the State Library of Victoria into a bookshelf by scaling up a photograph taken in its reading room). City Screens included artists Domenico de Clario, Susan Fereday, Peter Hennessy and Patricia Piccinini, Maria Kozic, and Marie Sierra-Hughes. Fereday projected a giant screw onto the QBE Insurance building with the words ‘Culture is Business’ and de Clario projected a bedside lamp. The event was a forerunner to more playful projection festivals in Melbourne such as Gertrude Street Projection Festival (2007–) and the circuit of popular public projection mapping light festivals around Australia, including Sydney’s Vivid Festival (2009–), Canberra’s Enlighten Festival (2011–), and Melbourne’s White Night Festival (2013–19).
Since 1979 members of the culture-jamming group Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (BUGA-UP) had been using their spray cans to disrupt the semiotic messages of tobacco and junk food advertisers and draw attention to the insidious power of billboard photographs. Billboards also became a sought-after site for postmodern artists to engage directly with media culture. For instance, the Australian Centre for Photography presented Add Magic: A Billboard Project in 1990, in which six artists were invited to produce images that would be presented on fifty billboards in Sydney and beyond, over a six-month period. Curated by Denise Robinson in collaboration with the Biennale of Sydney, and deliberately occupying space normally used for advertising in places like railway platforms, the most iconic work was Maria Kozic’s image of the bikini-clad artist holding a drill with the words ‘Maria Kozic is Bitch’ (with the word ‘bitch’ in large red capital letters). Appearing like an advertisement for a trashy film, Bitch, 1989, became a key work in her career and in Australian feminist art. The other artists were all well-known postmodernists who, aside from Pat Brassington’s homoerotic black-and-white montage, produced more or less obscure, theory-inspired image-text interventions, many in the style of American artist Barbara Kruger: Juan Davila’s graffiti-like treatment of the word ‘wog’, Jeff Gibson’s seascape overlaid with text, Robyn Stacey’s digitised images from television and Peter Tyndall’s images of a woman’s hand scrunching up money.
Postmodernism aside, subsequent public billboard projects have tended to be more accessible. Rosemary Laing’s greenwork, 1995, for example, was exhibited at Sydney Airport – a generic non-place – but was connected to the site through its notions of speed and perception. Likewise, a series of public billboards in Melbourne organised by the Visible Art Foundation (established by architect Nonda Katsalidis) privileged photographic work that operates at the level of visual surprise. Several made explicit connections to fashion advertising. For instance, in 1999 Patricia Piccinini was invited to present a gigantic portrait from her series Protein Lattice – an image of a model with a giant genetically engineered mouse on her shoulder – on a busy city corner outside Katsalidis’ Republic Tower apartments in Melbourne. Likewise, Julie Rrap’s Overstepping, 2001 – a giant digital photograph of a woman’s feet morphed into stiletto heels – inaugurated a dedicated art billboard fronting Katsalidis’s Hero apartments on Russell Street, Melbourne, in 2002 (adjacent to the building where The Family of Man was held in 1959).6 Similarly, as part of Zara Stanhope’s 2007 survey exhibition of conceptually oriented work, Perfect for Every Occasion: Photography Today, Geoff Kleem’s large-scale image of an Australian beach punctuated by two white rectangular ‘windows’ was situated incongruously in the bush gardens at Heide Museum of Modern Art. Mounted on the kind of trestle Kleem is known for in his gallery-based installations, the abstract work seemed to purposefully deny its sense of place.
By contrast, inexpensive large-scale printing has recently enabled a wide variety of community-engaged, often site-specific photography in public space, with hoardings and paste-ups giving voice to the experiences of people in marginalised local communities. Even a Melbourne Tram became a travelling panoramic vehicle for Hayley Millar-Baker’s fantastical black-and-white photographic montage of Aboriginal life and country as part of the 2018 Melbourne International Arts Festival. Similarly, the political potency of Hoda Afshar’s ghostly black-and-white portraits of asylum seekers incarcerated on Manus Island was magnified when they were presented as six 2.4-metre high billboards along the train line that skirts The Substation in the western Melbourne suburb of Newport in 2019.
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Marcia Langton, with photographic research by Wesley Stacey, Narelle Perroux, After the Tent Embassy: Images of Aboriginal History in Black and White Photographs, Valadon Publishing, Sydney, 1983. The book was based on an exhibition of photographs of the same name held in Paddington Town Hall in 1982, then a bohemian inner-city suburb of Sydney. ↩
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The work was painted over the summer of 1984–85 by Evans with league members and trainee artists Les Griggs, Ray Thomas, Millie Yarran, Ian Johnson and Elaine Trott (funded via a Commonwealth Employment Scheme) – and many other volunteers, ‘including a group of African musicians who helped paint the two men with the chains’. Evans then made chalk line grids on the masonite, and describes it as a paint-by-numbers process. The image of the men in chains is actually in reverse – simply because it looked better in the design. ↩
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See: Jane Lydon, Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights, New South Books, Sydney, 2012, p. 13. ↩
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Ian de Gruchy, ‘Humpy – Adelaide Festival 1988, Adelaide Festival Centre’, artist’s website, Online at: http://www.artprojection.com.au/html/urban.htm. Accessed 27 October 2019. ↩
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Alexandra Gillespie, ‘Humpy: An Early Australian Architectural Projection’, in Kathy Cleland et al (eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA2013, University of Technology Sydney, p. 5. ↩
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Rrap also presented Pearl John from her series Fleshtones outside Republic Tower in 2003 – a digital lump of flesh on a sandy beach that seems to update Max Dupain’s Sunbaker. 1937. While such surrealist-influenced representations of the human body might have once shocked the public, they are now more playful than controversial. ↩