(Installation View, pp. 221–228)
In 1977, William Yang (then known as Willy Young, prior to, in his words, ‘coming out’ as a Chinese-Australian) used the walls of the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP) for a diaristic exhibition, Sydneyphiles. This was Yang’s first exhibition, in which his small-scale photographs of Sydney’s gay, art, fashion and socialite scenes were printed together and hung closely alongside and above each other to cover the walls like a giant personal scrapbook (larger images in ACP’s standardised frames also appeared on other walls). The ACP’s press release described Yang as a ‘pictorialist columnist … recording a diary of portraits … events, happenings and people’ and pointed out that ‘most of the exhibition is in colour, representing the surreal, social and satirical eye that Willy, as reporter-photographer, has developed’. (The fact that the images were colour was still notable, since most of the art photography shown at ACP was black and white, and indeed Yang increasingly worked in black and white himself for his personal work).
As Yang reflected in 1998:
I had my first exhibition, Sydneyphiles, at the centre in 1977. I showed social photos, a genre that hadn’t been shown much before. It also depicted scenes from the gay community which had never been shown before in a public institution. It attracted big crowds and was considered controversial, mainly because of the gay content. The sex.1
In his performance work My Generation, 2008 – also produced as a documentary film in 2013 – Yang goes a step further, saying: ‘Sydneyphiles was a sensation and it launched me as a photographer’.
Yang’s documentation of the show is as colourful and social as the work itself. Images of his friends, the fashion designers Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson, show them head-to-toe in colourful knitted designs. Photographs of Yang giving a talk about the work show a long-haired and handsome young man holding court with a cigarette, while people sit listening on the floor of the gallery. The audience has become part of the work. A community artwork at the dawn of identity politics in Australian art, the press release notes that Yang ‘has invited many of the subjects of his photography’ to his exhibition, which ‘promises to be a particularly spectacular event’. Reflecting on the exhibition in My Generation, Yang says that he ‘discovered what people liked most was looking at pictures of themselves’. Sydneyphiles is additionally significant because it is likely the first solo exhibition by an Asian-Australian photographer, even if nothing was made of this fact at the time.
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William Yang, Diaries: A Retrospective Exhibition, 25 Years of Social, Personal and Landscape Photography, State Library of NSW, Sydney, 1998. ↩