(Installation View, pp. 329–336)
During the 1980s, William Yang began to develop what he calls his ‘monologues with slide projection’:
I was there with my slide projector in people’s living rooms and often I’d be talking with the slides and so I just developed a performative mode where I’d either talk with the slides or just play them with music, and both were very effective.1
Yang had a background in theatre and all of his theatre pieces begin with photographs: ‘First I take the slide images which I push around on my light box, then the words come’.2 His breakthrough work Sadness, first performed at Belvoir Street Theatre in 1992, interwove the story of Yang’s discovery of his own family history as a Chinese Australian with the impact of AIDS on Sydney’s gay community. This intimate, but nuanced, unfolding and overlapping of personal stories and cultural histories continued in subsequent shows as Yang developed his gentle, static, almost blank performance persona. Sometimes, within the dramaturgy of the image sequence, the photograph on the screen is tightly tied to its live narration by Yang, and at other times Yang leaves the audience a space to be carried along by the images themselves and the music – though still, crucially, in his presence.
Although the shared space of theatre is crucial to Yang’s performances, in 1999 the film director Tony Ayres adapted Sadness into a documentary film that screened at film festivals and on national television. Yang’s later performances My Generation (a retelling of the photographs in his 1984 book Sydney Diary), Bloodlinks and Friends of Dorothy have also been turned into video documentaries. As Yang has said: ‘When I started to do performance pieces I metaphorically stepped in front of the camera. I showed myself and told a story. I’ve probably become more well-known as a photographer through my performances’.3 Indeed, many of his performance pieces have toured overseas. In many respects, Yang’s process is one of breathing life into his archive, as he notes of his highly personal monologues, ‘Because I’ve got the stock of photographs, I can always go back to my library of pictures and pull out different stories’.4
Yang’s ‘monologues with slide projection’ are sometimes described as being a ‘new’ form for presenting photographs. However, one precedent is the long tradition of family slideshows, which were often undertaken after returning from holidays, with such performances playing out in domestic living rooms around Australia – exactly where Yang’s performance practice also began. But in the early twentieth century, photographic slides were also part of powerful theatrical experiences, although in an entirely different emotional register to Yang’s. In the summer of 1919–20, the famous Antarctic photographer Frank Hurley toured Australia with what he called a ‘synchronised lecture entertainment’ called In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice. Just four years after Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition – when their ship, the Endurance, was crushed by ice and a party was forced to sale 1300 kilometres in a lifeboat for help – Hurley appeared as himself, the returned explorer and ‘intrepid photographer of the Antarctic’. The audience was there to see him, to hear him tell the story, and to see his glass lantern slides, which he alternated with short cinematic film sequences and augmented with sound effects and music.5 At the Lyceum Theatre in Sydney, for instance, he gave nightly performances that a full-page advertisement in The Sun newspaper promised to be:
UNPARALLELED PICTURES OF REAL-LIFE THRILLS! Everything in these pictures is real – photographed at risk of life a score of times among the grinding ice-packs of Antarctica. And everything is new – nothing that you have seen before.
HEAR FRANK HURLEY’S THRILLING STORY! Captain Frank Hurley talks to you as the pictures are showing. He tells you the plain unvarnished truth of the perils and privations of the men who were lost in the ice. He was one of the gallant party – he went through it all, carrying his camera and fighting to save these films.6
The contemporary conflict photographer Stephen Dupont has recently revived the early twentieth century tradition of photographers like Hurley. In his slide show talks, he performs as himself, a photographer/witness returned from some of the world’s most dangerous places. In 2017, he produced an hour-long live theatre performance Don’t Look Away for the MOFO Festival at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart. As in Hurley’s ‘synchronised lecture entertainments’, Dupont combined live scripted moments with film clips, still images and music to take the audience on what he describes as ‘a rollercoaster ride through a world of humanity, inhumanity and a little insanity’.7 In a very different register, photographic projections have long been incorporated into live music, theatre and experimental environments. For instance, as part of the 1976 Adelaide Focus Festival (later named the Adelaide Fringe Festival) the South Australian Photographic Federation organised an exhibition of ‘International Slides and Prints’ titled Interphot 76 at the Freemasons Hall, North Terrace. Every evening during the festival, the South Australian media artist Józef Stanisław (Stan) Ostoja-Kotkowski, sponsored by Akai and Kodak, performed Echoes, where 400 colour slides of electronic effects superimposed over a nude model were projected through six Kodak carousel projectors in synchronisation with a Pink Floyd album.8
In 2003, Ross Gibson and Kate Richards projected their police archive work Life After Wartime on the stage backdrop during a performance by experimental jazz trio The Necks, and in 2005 the artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, violinist Richard Tognett, collaborated with Bill Henson on the slide/music performance Luminous, drawing on the popularity of Henson’s moody images, which have themselves often been compared to classical music.
Although staged in different historical eras and in different dramatic registers, all these performances of the photograph in Australia – from the humble living room slide show and the popular PechaKucha presentation format of twenty slides at twenty seconds each, to the large scale theatre production – remind us of a persistent photographic power of human-to-human sharing, where images are offered to audiences in a space of mutual presence.
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Helena Grehan and Edward Scheer, William Yang: Stories of Love and Death, New South Publishing, Sydney, 2006, p. 29. As Yang has said: ‘Since 1982, I had worked with slide projection. I was taught techniques by Ian de Gruchy who specialises in outdoor slide projection on buildings and now works from Melbourne. The first pieces that I did were a combination of music and slides – audio visual’. William Yang, Diaries: A Retrospective Exhibition, 25 Years of Social, Personal and Landscape Photography, State Library of NSW, Sydney, 1998, n.p. ↩
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William Yang, Sadness, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1996. ↩
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Russell Storer, ‘A Conversation with William Yang’, The China Project, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2009, p. 260. ↩
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ibid., p. 267. ↩
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Robert Dixon, Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments, Anthem Press, London, 2011. ↩
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The Sun, 23 November 1919, p. 20. ↩
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‘Varanasi & Holi reportage: Photography workshop March 7–11 2020’, Stephen Dupont Blog. Online at: https://www.stephendupont.com/blog. Accessed 1 July 2019. ↩
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Australian Photography, September 1976, pp. 48–53. ↩