ONE THOUSAND WORDS [about photography]

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issue number five November 2015

qcritical essays & reviews on photography

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08 A Year Of A Pic A Day

Annie Waters .............................................................................................

18 Where the Wild Things Were

Samara Mitchell .............................................................................................

26 Received Moments:

An Interview With Robert McFarlane Gary Cockburn

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42 Why I Don’t Take Photographs

Jocasta Virtue .............................................................................................

CONTENTS

For me the drive to Ballarat for the Foto Biennale takes about six hours, and it's a worthwhile trip. This year my travelling companions had work in the fringe program and spots in the critique session. Our first evening was a group editing exercise as they put the final elements of their portfolios together.

We started our look through the exhibitions the next day. My friend Sam and I were excited to see Thomas Kellner's contact sheet montages; we'd taught his work in a few of our classes but had never seen live prints. This was how the next couple of days went: looking at prints, meeting artists, talking about photo work. We got to have an extended chat with Kellner the night before we left. On my way out of Ballarat I grabbed a copy of Sam Harris’s book The Middle of Somewhere. Sam bought a print by Jane Long. We all took a fragment of the festival back with us.

The concentrated experience of photography in Ballarat was rich and expansive and stimulating. But when we left Ballarat the photography continued. As it does in this magazine, and BETA, the sister publication from the Ballarat International Foto Biennale. This issue we continue Gary Cockburn's interview with Robert McFarlane, where McFarlane talks about theatre and writing. It's the culmination of thorough effort by Gary Cockburn to spend some time talking and listening to McFarlane. Samara Mitchell was travelling when she had a vivid encounter with the work of Tamas Deszo in a London gallery. I'd seen the pictures on the web, but her reading of them brought them to me fresh. Jocasta Virtue is a keen and clever observer of visual culture; here, she turns her attention memoir-like to a part of her own story. And when Annie Waters spent a year with the discipline of making regular pictures she came away with a ritual, a habit, a space for taking in the world.

INTRODUCTION

So the experience of photography goes on. Forget about the despair you might hear about the surplus of images around us. Watch how these writers pay attention to photographs. They show us ways of experiencing pictures and apprehending the world.

Mike Lim Editor 1000words@ballaratfoto.org

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I want to be an editor. Perhaps that says a lot about me: always effacing, always willing to hide behind someone else’s work. I’m the one who’s obsessived about where to put that comma or semi-colon; being the centre of attention (especially as my true, retiring self, not cloaked in an exuberant disguise) is not exactly my forte. When I mentally peel back my layers of bravado, I see my inner core as a quivering, half-formed thing. This isn’t so much to do with not being comfortable with myself; I’m quite the opposite. I just find it difficult to describe in words ‘who I am’, especially if those descriptors cannot contradict each other.

In 2014 I sought to challenge this hidden side of myself by taking part in a creative endeavour of my own. Every day I took one photograph, a digital record of my year. Even as I decided upon this creative venture, I think that perhaps I am still hiding behind the lens, only allowing the outside world to see a curated, sectioned-off square of each day. Perhaps this is no better than my usual, closeted self. It’s better than nothing, I guess.

2014 was comparatively aimless, with barely any responsibilities or commitments to tie me to any place or project, as a contrast to 2013, when I spent six weeks travelling, completed two degrees and started another, organised a wedding and got married, launched and edited eight issues of

an online magazine and held down two jobs. The stability of a daily routine appealed amidst this state of flux, as I attempted to anchor myself in some small way and provide myself with a sense of continuity.

I first heard about the 1picaday project through a friend of mine, professional photographer Ben Liew, who saw it as a way to encourage people to find a passion for photography in mobile phone photography that is so readily available to them. He wanted “them to realise that they don’t need this [expensive camera] to document their lives”.

Flipping through my own images brought me back to specific moments that I would not have otherwise remembered, and surely this was the main point of the project. Each month had a different theme. So each month I had to make an effort to connect with a different aspect of the world around me, as I searched for my daily image.

A YEAR OF A PIC A DAY Annie Waters

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I can see the smoke rolling across the hills and the acrid, brown fug settling over the city, so I know that there’s another bushfire even before I get the call. It’s bad, and it’s heading straight towards Pete and Fran’s house with a mean northeasterly behind it. They can see the flames across the next valley, just a few kilometres away. They’ve decided to stay and fight, and of course Ned wants to go up and support his parents. I won’t let him go without me. I’d rather be able to help (even if it’s just by making tea, inexperienced city girl that I am) than sit at home, constantly updating the CFS website, imagining the worst.

As we’re driving, against all advice, towards the fire, I see the moon through the haze, high in its arc even in the middle of the blazing afternoon, as if it too had been thrust from its natural habitat by the flames. Almost full, it fits the theme for January, things that are ‘round’, so I snap a quick pic out the window, as much in an effort to distract myself from the fraught evening ahead as a need to fulfil my daily commitment.

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There are a couple of arguments against participating in this kind of photographic venture. The first is that, as a social media based project, the photos clog the newsfeeds of friends who don’t necessarily care about getting a snapshot into your everyday life. Over-sharing is certainly a problem that is endemic to sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as people vent their thoughts, feelings and food-porn to all and sundry. Similar projects, such as 100happydays and 365grateful have inspired vehement rants on the subject, directed at everything from their showy nature to their simplistic approach to ‘curing’ unhappiness or depression.

In light of this negativity, I tried to limit the exposure that I gave this project, not sharing on Facebook and only making my more selective group of Instagram friends suffer through the daily update. I’ve also let them know that they’re welcome to un-follow me at any time, but I seem to have retained a healthy cohort despite my incessant posting. I hope that this is because 1picaday, unlike the other photo a day projects, has a focus on artistry: the image is judged on its photographic merit, rather than its emotional or personal significance.

As I look through the photos I’ve accumulated of this year, I can see that the things that most often catch my photographic eye are smiling friends and

animals; striking colours and textures; buildings with interestingly run-down facades (and yes, the occasional shameless food picture). For me, happiness is found in a moment of peaceful silence with a friend or lover as you read together on an inherited, paisley couch; gasping at the fantastic light as you stand on the edge of a cliff, hair whipping your face and waves pummelling the shore below; or laughing uproariously, watching a video of a hedgehog getting a bath.

Immediacy is vital to capture these moments, and having a smart phone is definitely the easiest way to take an image every single day. But this seems to create the greatest amount of tension around this project. I somehow feel that, were I carrying around a chunky Leica, I would be less vilified than I am now for using my iPhone as a camera. “It’s not art! Stop pretending that it is,” cries Carla (my lovingly critical best friend). I don’t really have any reply to this; as much as I try to avoid pretention or have the best intentions, I’m just another Gen-X kid who’s obsessed with recording the world around them.

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It’s so dark at 5:30. Not dark like I’d expected, hints of pink running through the sky as the sun begins to peek over the horizon, but as dark and cold as the depths of a night that has not yet relinquished its hold on little old Adelaide. Regardless, I swaddle myself in a giant scarf and head out the door, oddly eager to walk the 25 minutes into the city centre.

The cool night air guides me along, under the black shadows of gums, smelling rather than seeing my landscape. Dead leaves crackle underfoot; it’s been a hot summer, only now pulling to a close. I think of the bushfires a week earlier, coming so close to Pete and Fran’s that you could see the next ridge glowing, kilometres of scrub ablaze and dry lightning coming in from the sea. Two days later it was pouring rain and blowing gale force winds. I’m appreciative of this morning’s calm, with the low growl of possums and an incongruous urban rooster audible in the still air.

Closer to the city, the street lights begin to flick off as the sun does, finally, begin to rise, almost imperceptibly tinging the sky a deep plum. Under a dimming orange lamp, I meet my dad and we walk the last stretch together, approaching the circle of people in amicable silence. They are gathered in this newly renovated space that goes by two names, Tarntanyangga and Victoria Square, recognising and demarcating the social divide. It is

the first time I’ve seen the square without its recent metal scaffolding and yellow bandages, protecting the fresh scars from sight. I must admit, it still looks a bit raw.

This place, at the heart of Adelaide, sits on Kaurna land and is the site of the same social, political and cultural tensions that afflict the rest of our country. Though it doesn’t look it, the wide, open expanse of smooth grey slate hides a seamy underbelly. The redevelopment – which aims to “give the space back to the people of South Australia” – has moved on the itinerant group of daytime drinkers that used to gather here, many of them Aboriginal. The council cites ‘vibrancy’ as well as ‘safety’ as some of the motivations behind their big spending; I wonder if larger social measures have been implemented to tackle the real issues, rather than just the visible symptoms. This new, polished Tarntanyangga, with gums set sparsely among large pale stones, could be an analogy for the relationship of non-indigenous peoples with the indigenous community; not knowing how to solve the problem, we merely edge around it.

Thankfully, today, we are here not to dwell on the wounds of the past or the predicaments of the present. This gathering is one that looks towards the future, hopeful for a time of reconciliation and shared culture. We are here for a smoking

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ceremony to inaugurate the land upon which this year’s Fringe will take place. I feel very lucky to bear witness to such a special event; this is the first year that the ceremony has been made public. Senior Custodian of Ceremony, Karl ‘Winda’ Telfer, and his three young roos have carried the flaming coolamon from Mullawirraburka (Rymill Park) and it now sits in our midst, the fire throbbing to the low hum of a didjeridu.

Still in the cover of night, faces illuminated only by the yellow tower of flames, the three young men begin to sing, low and deep and slow. Their voices seem to carry with the sparks to welcome the gradual arrival of the sun. Light slowly begins to bathe their dancing bodies in the soft yellow-pink glow of the morning. Moving as a unit around the circle, their clapsticks provide a frog croak rhythm to the deep, mellow didj. And, as the sun is almost fully above the tall buildings of the inner city, as one, they stop.

Karl says a few words, tall and confident in his kangaroo pelt and ochred chest. He calls on his roos to pick up the mantle and speak for the next generation, and suddenly the men who were so confident during the ceremony become bashful adolescents, stammering in front of such a big group. The youngest of the three, wiry and narrow and probably all of seventeen, is the one to stand up.

“Gday,” he starts. He thanks everyone for coming, awkwardly fumbles for words. But when he finally finds what he wants to say, his message is clear.

“All of you coming here today, you bring your own culture to this place, and we bring ours. And that’s the important thing, that we all gather together and talk about what defines us, share our culture with each other.”

The sun has fully risen by the time we have all drunk a coffee, eaten an egg-and-bacon sandwich, everyone mingling and yawning and heading off to work. Even though the theme for February is shadows, my snapshot of this day is not of the peaceful walk in, or the solemn beauty of the smoking ceremony, but the first light reflecting off the tall buildings opposite. What this morning has meant to me could not be captured in darkness. I feel the need to represent the breaking of a new dawn over Tarntanyangga.

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The feeling of community that runs through the project is one that was unexpected to me. I’ve found at least ten new people to follow on Tumblr and Instagram, and I feel like I became familiar with them in spite of never having met them. Getting a snapshot into other people’s lives is rewarding and eye-opening: a child lying asleep, wrapped lovingly around a cat, in sepia tones. In black and white, two men that I don’t know in suits and bow-ties, looking sharp for a wedding. A cyclist’s shadow in stark relief as they round the bend of a country lane – I’m still wondering how the photographer managed to capture this shot.

Posting on social media allows for this sense of sharing as well as encouragement to keep up with the project. Flickr, Moldiv, Tumblr, Snapseed: this project has opened my eyes to a world of mobile photographic applications of which I could never have conceived otherwise. The digital revolution has set some photographers free, according to Ben, because “you’re limited to your subject matter and your composition”, meaning that you have to reassess how you look at the world around you.

Chatting with Ben, we stumble on to the topic of ‘living behind the lens’, or the idea that the current generations are so obsessed with recording their lives that they can’t step away from technology and just experience the moment. “People who post like

five selfies a day … you see patterns, hoping to get some attention or likes or a cry out. I actually shoot a lot less, because of that, not wanting to miss out on being in the moment. These days, happiness is a Facebook algorithm. It is kind of sad, people do need to put their phones down and just get out there. Living life behind the lens, I think people need to check themselves before they wreck themselves.”

As much as we giggle at this, I wonder whether this sense of distance is unique to the current generations, or whether it’s just that we have the technology that allows us to be hoarders of special moments in such an immediate way. Would the prolific journal-writers of old have become the prolific Instagrammers of this day and age?

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We puff and pant up the dusty red track, which seems to be getting even steeper the higher we climb. Ahead of us bounds a gleeful Dachshund, built like a German Panzer, broad and low and strong as hell. Ruby’s powerful chest is yanking hard at my arm, linked as we are by a lead that I fear may snap at any moment, so purposeful are her stumpy legs. I’m half frustrated, half grateful for her efforts at pulling me up this steep slope; also for her eager panting which removes the need for conversation.

“Ruby!” Steph cautions, as the tiny dog takes a sharp left after a bird in the undergrowth. “Get back here, you sausage!” Chastised, the dog lets up for a minute or two, before resuming her merciless ascent. “She’s like the Energiser bunny, isn’t she?” I gasp, relinquishing the lead to Steph and taking the water bottle in return. “Let’s stop here a minute, I need to get some feeling back in my forearm.”

We stand, under a wizened grey gum, looking out over the dusty expanse of scrub and city below. Steph’s just come back from a break up and an overseas trip, and we’re both letting off some steam as we march up this gully. I’m thinking about quitting my job and she’s already planning the next trip away, desperate to avoid the persistent hounding of her ex. “He calls me and just tells

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flat out lies, you know? Like, he’s lost 30 kilos. That’s not even possible in six weeks!” I nod, and commiserate, and internally cheer that they are no longer together.

We take a selfie at the top of the hill (I’m never without my phone) to celebrate our successful hike, ‘incidental exercise’ as we like to call it. Both of us have fallen out of the habit and this is our attempt to kill two birds with one stone – to catch up and keep fit together. It seems like our schedules are less and less compatible, not just for Steph and me but for all of our friends. It’s a happy coincidence that we both have this weekday afternoon off and can enjoy the sunshine. We both make mental notes to see more people, simultaneously knowing that only a fraction of this planned social interaction will actually go ahead.

On the way back down (trying not to break an ankle or get pulled over a cliff by the ever-eager Ruby), we pass a burnt out stump with a brand new baseball cap incongruously perched on top. The hat reads ‘Trukfit’ and we burst into peals of laughter at its odd placement and relevance to our afternoon. Another photo: this month’s theme is text. I’m glad that this moment of effort and friendship can become part of the project, which reminds me more and more what is truly important to me in my life.

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I began to notice and appreciate other rituals, daily or not. Arriving at work in the still-dark morning, switching off the alarm and on the kettle in the tiny, cluttered back office. Tossing the dregs into the compost – so thick and earthy – and rinsing the modern steel and glass plunger. Setting the coffee to brew as I begin my morning bookseller tasks – flicking on the registers, counting cash into drawers, tidying displays – the bitter aroma tugs at the back of my mind through it all. But patience is part of the routine.

Eventually, I allow the smell to waft me back into the office. Inhale deeply: fill the lungs with the thick, dark scent. Exhale: gently, so gently, depress the lever. Feel the liquid resist but go slowly, slowly. It is in this unhurried compression that the magic lies.

Only through beginning to notice such repetitive daily actions have I become aware that this ritual is one I have inherited from my father. I recall the quiet pleasure he took in slowly pushing the grille through the steaming grounds, his device a plastic, brown 70s model. As a child, my table-height eyes would grow ever-wider as I watched his hairy forearms imperceptibly depress the handle. He must be so strong, I thought, to squash down that steaming, sludgy mixture!

Though there is seemingly no reason to spend so much time on this one, simple action, I always feel a pang of regret when I inevitably hit the bottom, as one does when turning the last page of a really good book. A moment of ceremony has been observed, and now my day can begin. I throw open the doors to allow people to enter my world.

Annie Waters edits, designs and occasionally writes from her delightfully naff couch in Adelaide. She enjoys brightly coloured fabrics, ugly dogs and the sweet satisfaction of eliminating double spaces.

Find all the images from this project by searching #1picadayfor2014 on Instagram, Facebook or Tumblr. You can see Annie’s year in photographs on Flickr and find Ben Liew’s work on his website, benjaminliew.com.au.

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In the warm basement of The Photographer’s Gallery in London, I’m staring at a boy, who has been swallowed by a bear, who in turn has been swallowed by a barn. The barn air looks cold, the boy’s stare empty. The bear’s head is thrown back in a grimace. Not due, I don’t think, to any physical pain, (though it does have a child poking from its ruptured throat), but of mental anguish: an existential howl for its old, wild self.

Tamas Dezso’s Notes for an Epilogue is the culmination of works dating back to 2011, which documents the decaying remnants of a Soviet-era Romania, and the artist’s native country of Hungary. Weaving a slow dance between sentimental portraiture, theatrical composition, and photojournalistic impartiality, Dezso contrasts the fairy-tale landscapes of rural Hungary and Romania with the ecological, architectural, and spiritual ruins of a communist dictatorship.

The exhibition’s over-arching theme of decay is presented most overtly documenting the physical effects of the Soviet empire’s decline, with its disembowelled factory precincts and the derelict social housing projects that have fallen beyond repair, along with the ageing bodies of their squatting tenants. It is in the documentation of such ruins that Tamas Dezso shows that he is a master of his craft not only as a photographic journalist, but as a landscape artist as well.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS WERE Samara Mitchell Tamas Deszo’s Notes for an Epilogue The Photographer’s Gallery, London 17 April – 13 June 2015

Ciprian, the Bear Dancer (Salatruc, East Romania), 2013 Photograph by Tamas Dezso

Courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery

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With The Flooded Village of Geamana (Geamana, Central Romania), 2012 Dezso opens a window upon the environmental devastation wreaked upon Romania’s picture-postcard landscapes. The true environmental impact of this work is not immediately obvious, due in part to the time of year it was taken. Upon first impression Geamana has all the hallmarks of an early Romantic landscape painting: a lonely belltower of a once charming village church, swallowed by flash floods (or perhaps the failure of a dam wall), pitted against the harsh beauty of a Carpathian mountain range. It is only upon further reading into the history of Geamana village1 does it become apparent how menacing the subject matter of the image truly is, and how restrained Deszo’s approach to it has been. In 1978, under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s command, the village of Geamana was evacuated to become a catchment area for the hazardous by-product of the nearby Rosia Poieni copper mine; one of the largest copper reserves in Romania. The lake we can see is highly acidic, containing large amounts of cyanide used in the copper-extraction process. Geamana is one of many sites popular to disaster-tourists, and has been documented many times by the likes of National Geographic and various ruinology blogs. What makes Dezso’s piece different from many of these other images is that by choosing to photograph the lake in winter, rather than the cadmium orange sludge of its summer guise, he has opted for the more hostile elements of this landscape to affect us like slow-release poison. Whilst pondering the ruins of a Romanian winter wonderland, our eyes have all the while been skating across toxic ice.

1 Mihai Andrei, “Geamana – The Romanian Village Flooded by a Toxic Lake”, ZME Science [online science-news]; available from http://www.zmescience.com/oth-er/feature-post/geamana-village-romania-toxic; Internet; accessed 14 June 2015

The Flooded Village of Geamana (Geamana, Central Romania), 2011 Photograph by Tamas Dezso

Courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery

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Night Watchman (Budapest), 2009 Photograph by Tamas Dezso Courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery

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Dump (near Aiud, West Romania), 2012 Photograph by Tamas Dezso

Courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery

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The flooding of Geamana was one of many such projects that saw the destruction of historical buildings and agricultural villages, many of which were replaced by prefab multi-story residential complexes, food-barns, and factories. These wide-scale urban-planning projects were rolled out across rural Hungary and Romania, purportedly to create new thriving urban centres and improve the general living conditions of subsistence farmers. Given that Ceaușescu was hell-bent on appeasing international creditors, it is likely that such projects were as much concerned with hoisting Romania’s national identity out from the mire of peasantry and into the modern age as they were with the welfare of subsistence farmers. Built in the new modernist style, these spectacularly sparse and totalitarian structures were imposed upon the landscape in what appeared to be a systematic attempt to cleanse the nation of its historical pluralities and traditions, in order to move forward in state-controlled unison. Of course as many of Dezso’s more apocalyptic images clearly demonstrate, such megalomaniacal energy is neither politically, environmentally, or even structurally sustainable. Absolutist political ideologies, like brutalist buildings, are most susceptible to decay from within. Reinforced concrete and steel guiders may be able to withstand a punch in the struts with a wrecking ball, but rising damp will bring the most robust of monoliths to its knees.

It would be true to say that Deszo’s use of ruination taps into that same dark vein that turns our heads at the scene of an accident, or is transfixed by drone images of the abandoned theme parks, hospitals, and classrooms of Chernobyl. However Dezso is no pornographer; these images do not fetishize crashes and ruins. Rather he does what so many of the Romantic painters have done which is to employ the dark magnetism of decay as a memento mori (from the Latin phrase meaning 'remember you must die') to enhance the beauty and light of life-forces, of wilderness, and the infinite dimensions of the human spirit.

From birds of prey flocking over garbage tips, our eyes flit to rolling hillsides clocking long shadows in the late afternoon sun and birch forests filled

with roosting fowl. Beech and oak rise and swallow old stone tyrants whilst poplars reclaim deserted military bases. These reclamations offer hope that nature can grab back the handlebars and steady our speed-wobbles. If only we could learn to ride tandem…if only nature didn’t over-correct.

Shrouded in rapturous, winter mists, Tamas Dezso’s portraits of mushroom farmers, woodsman, widows, folk-dancers, and sheep-farmers, show great empathy for people whose spiritual traditions and means of existence have been eviscerated by socialist and capitalist regimes alike. His photographic portraits are at times quite painterly, not unlike the works of Bruegel the Elder, whose stark winter palette provided a backdrop for his cherished farmers and hunters, earning him the name of ‘Peasant Bruegel’. Yet as documentary photographs, these portraits are reminiscent of the efforts of the divisive Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, whose collection and study of Hungarian, Slovakian, and Romanian folk music not only preserved countless works that would have been lost, but made important contributions to the reconstruction of contemporary classical music in the period leading up to the Second World War.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep.

― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I’m staring at the back of a bear, which in turn is staring off into the woods. I’m not sure if the bear is yearning for the woods, or for the boy that once lived in his throat. I have great hope that the transfixed stare of the boy was not that of a spirit in decay, but of one simply in hibernation.

Samara Mitchell is a writer and illustrator, living in Aldinga Beach, South Australia.

Anastasia [ DETAIL ], 2012 Photograph by Tamas Dezso Courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery

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Having worked in the medium for more than fifty years, and written about it for nearly as long, Robert McFarlane occupies a unique position in Australian photography. In the second part of an extensive interview McFarlane talks more about his work in the performing arts, how he became a writer, and his ongoing interest in social issues. The first part of the interview is in issue number 4 of One Thousand Words [about photography].

The sorcery that McFarlane mentioned seeing when working with Steven Berkoff was part, but not all, of what drove his McFarlane’s interest in theatre photography.

“That’s the thing that drew me in. I started to photograph theatre because no one really knew what a photojournalist was in the sixties. David Moore did, because he’d worked overseas, and had overseas clients, but few others did. I had the ability to take sharp pictures under a wide variety of lighting conditions, and observe human behaviour, and those skills were really valuable for performance. The more I photographed it, the more I realised that performance was a stylised version of everyday life. So it had its own attraction. I was still more drawn to documentary, but I could see performance as another arena that was very closely related and incredibly valuable.”

Serendipity played a part, too.

“The first photographer whose darkroom I ever used was Robert Walker, and he shot a lot of theatre. I looked at his pictures, and I loved what he did, but he wasn’t a documentary photographer in the way that I was. And I felt I would do it in my own way. Looking back, because of when I was doing it, I was photographing a large part of the renaissance of Australian theatre and film, when these amazing people really came to the fore. John Bell, Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, David Field and all those guys. And what talent! You knew it when they stepped onto the stage.”

“Billy Hunter – what a rascal! You know that when he was married to Rhoda Roberts [the actor and television presenter] he loved to go out on the tiles. And Rhoda didn’t know what to do about this at first, but he had some problem with his feet and needed a particular pair of shoes to go off carousing. And so she’d hide them.”

Not for the only time, McFarlane slips into an appropriately gruff imitation of the great actor: “Where’s my fucking shoes?”

There’s a related story (not about Hunter) that has me laughing so hard my stomach aches, but – with McFarlane being a seasoned journo – it’s one that he makes sure to register as being off-the-record before he tells it.

RECEIVED MOMENTS An Interview With Robert McFarlane Gary Cockburn

Wilsons Promontory Victoria 1969 by Robert McFarlane

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“I was always interested in words, but I didn’t start writing as a journalist until I was in Sydney. It was out of necessity when I did a story on Bob Dunlop, the boxer. Empire light heavyweight champion, he was, probably in 1966, something like that. George, the editor, said to me ‘We’d really like to get some words with this – can you write something?’ And I said ‘Sure!’ while thinking ‘God!’

“But I wrote the essay, and it ran, and I got paid extra for that. So I was aware that writing was an important source of income.”

By 1967, McFarlane was editor of Camera World magazine, though soon after he left Sydney and travelled overland to Europe.

“When I was in London I didn’t do much writing until 72, when I went to Leningrad to do the story on two Soviet dancers who wanted to emigrate to Israel. The editor said ‘we’ll need some words’, and so I wrote 3500 of them. In those days the Sunday Times Colour Magazine did long, long pieces. When I got back there was a stuff-up with the film processing – they were supposed to push it one and a half stops and forgot – but they managed to sort it out and save the colour, intensifying it in some way, so I went ahead and wrote the text. When I delivered my copy the editor, Magnus Linklater, went through it, in my presence, and eventually got to the last paragraph.”

Valery Panov with wife Galina Leningrad 1973 by Robert McFarlane

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Forty years after writing it, McFarlane recites the passage from memory: “Valery Panov danced for me, alone, at three o’clock in the morning in a square in Leningrad. There was just the sound of his feet, raising the dust, and a taxi rounding in the vacant square. Finally he knelt and said to me ‘This is my stage’ with an indescribably sad smile.”

And then Linklater chimed in: “Just a minute, Robert. The ‘indescribably’ goes. If you can’t describe it, don’t say it!”

Understandably, McFarlane took the session with Linklater as high praise. “They took one word out, and I thought that was a great sign, because the people writing for the Sunday Times were fantastic. And that was where the writing came in. I haven’t stopped since.”

Initially the writing was alongside McFarlane’s photography, but soon enough it came to be about photography.

“I forget the exact transition, but I was asked to review something for The Australian. I wrote for them for a number of years, though they paid very badly. Finally they paid me a really rotten fee for something, and used it almost half-page. That really pissed me off, so I contacted the Sydney Morning Herald. That started fifteen or twenty years writing for the Herald.

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“I loved writing about photography, because it’s important, and I still love writing about it, because there’s not that much that’s good. And I think it’s an underrated medium. I’ve always tried to write unsentimentally, and to be genre-free. I have to look at every kind of photography that’s on show, whether it be conceptual, or photojournalism, or fashion, or whatever.”

The discussion of genre brings us to the question of how McFarlane sees his work, and – with it – how things have changed as technology has developed.

“I would say that I’m a documentary photographer, and essentially I shoot photojournalistically. I use small cameras – digital now – and short, fast lenses. These days I’m working with the flexibility of bridge cameras – they give you a greater variety of viewpoints. The Lumix I’ve got has the equivalent of a 24-600mm, and it’s ƒ2.8 all the way. Which is craziness. I can make A4 prints, equivalent to 10x8, that are the equal of or better than what I used to make from film. And it’s not nearly the performance of digital SLR, which is higher again. The cameras we have now are astonishing. The challenge is to use them for discrete, informed, poetic photojournalism or documentary photography. We have the tools. There are cameras shooting 4K video. That has to be something to use – these are wonderful days.”

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There are very few of McFarlane’s images that could properly be described as news photos, but many that are of historical importance. Does that relate to his interest in history at school?

“I’ve always loved history, and when things have happened within Australian society that were historic, I’ve been fortunate enough to document some of them. The emergence of indigenous protest and Charlie Perkins appearing on the national stage, for example. He’d done things before I met him, but as he said, he was really just starting to throw a brick through the window. He felt that something needed to be done, quite spectacularly, and he did it. So I did things like photograph him at Redfern polling booth, in 1963 or 64, when – as an indigenous man – he couldn’t vote. Which was barbarous.

“The subjects I chose tended to be oblique to history, but informed by it. The day after Whitlam was sacked, most of my friends – we were all talking on the phone about it – were going to get pissed or stoned because they were so angry about what happened. My first reaction was to hit the street, with the thought that I’ve got to photograph this. It had to be seen in some way. So I went to Martin Place and that’s where I photographed the newspaper seller. I don’t know whether I asked him

to hold up the front page or whether he just did it. And then I went round to the stock exchange, and a couple of protest meetings that had started in the street.

“Documentary photographers should catch the wave, and if we don’t, then look for oblique moments that are informed by history.”

In 1985, McFarlane was among 21 photographers – indigenous and non-indigenous – who were chosen to be part of the most ambitious documentary project undertaken in Australia. Completed over the three years leading up to the Bicentenary celebrations, the project concentrated on remote Aboriginal communities and eventually distilled more than 50,000 negatives down to 500 images, which appeared in catalog form as After 200 Years: Photographic Essays Of Aboriginal And Islander Australia Today. The exhibition was shown again at Parliament House in Canberra last year.

“I’ve had a long, if intermittent involvement with indigenous Australia, and that’s still the dominant issue that Australia needs to address. In my own way, I think I’ve been able to photograph it from a relatively involved but apolitical and unsentimental point of view. I don’t like tub-thumping or flag-waving, but I do like to get involved in the communities I’m photographing.”

Charles Perkins on His Way Home from Uni 1963 by Robert McFarlane

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It’s something that McFarlane hopes to come back to.

“There’s something I want to do with indigenous football. I’ve found a community that’s quite small, and quite isolated, and this little team has a mixed record – they have some good results and some not so good ones – but the real result is that they produce champions that go on to play in higher leagues. And I think that’s worth looking at.”

McFarlane’s work as both writer and photographer, and his interest in both politics and the performing arts, provide some interesting contrasts and comparisons.

“The most successful politicians are usually showmen or show women, if you like. I spent quite a bit of time with Hawke at different points, and he was very conscious of his performance, and very interesting. And Whitlam! What a theatrical character he was – so playful with language. He had a wonderful gift for that, more than Hawke.”

As well as a sense of playfulness, good communication requires discipline and economy.

“I have such respect for the English language, because at its best you can say so much with so little. The words themselves, if you’ll pardon the pun, are so prosaic, but when you put them together…. It doesn’t have to be flowery language. And that’s

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what Churchill showed with his speeches. I only found out about this recently, but there are no Latin words in his speeches, because he wanted to use old English. That sort of economy and directness is its own discipline, and it’s like dedicating yourself to not cropping your photos – it’s the same sort of thing.”

If the development of documentary photography in the forties and fifties was driven by events in France and the USA, particularly Paris and New York, did Australia’s distance from those two centres affect the way photography developed here?

“I think photography here just puttered along really, with newspaper photographers doing the majority of documentation. But it wasn’t really documentary photography as we know it. When it was good, it was unconsciously good – most of the time they were conforming to fairly conservative visual traditions.

“When I decided to photograph Charlie Perkins, I’d read a bit about him through newspaper coverage of protests about this, or that. We had a meeting, and he asked what I wanted him to do – he was used to photographers telling him what to do; that was basically what photography for publication meant. Still does, in a lot of ways. And I said ‘Ignore me’, and he got good at that. In the photo of him on the bus, he really isn’t aware of me. I mean, he

Backstage Christmas Eve Paradise Striptease Kings Cross by Robert McFarlane

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knows I’m there, but he’s in that moment. We have this odd silent dialog with our subjects.”

McFarlane adds that he never knows what he’s going to get, which demands the question of whether he knows what he’s looking for.

“Something that reflects who I think the person may be. I never prejudge that – I’ve learnt over the years that people will always surprise you. You’ll see tough people show a tender side…”

Is it about recognising a moment of reality?

“It’s about recognising a moment that may hint at a reality. It’s that thing that Eugene Smith said to me, when I asked him about truth in photography: ‘A photograph is a paper-thin evidence of a possible truth.’ And he wouldn’t make a more extravagant claim for photography’s veracity.

“If you look at it numerically, a hundredth of a second out of someone’s life is a trillionth of their life. It’s amazing that it’s as significant as it is.”

To illustrate the point, McFarlane refers to his famous nude of Bea, taken when she was 17 and depicting her curled up in a chair, hands clasped to her face, almost as if in prayer. “She’d been dancing in a topless nightclub, and even then she was full of grace. I didn’t know that picture existed, but I recognised it when I saw it, and said ‘Just a minute!’

“One of the things I love about the image is the rhythm of it. But what the photo can’t show – because she was just starting out – is that she went on to raise three children, and to work with people who were victims of torture.”

Eugene Smith, who McFarlane interviewed in New York in the early seventies, was known for taking the photo essay to a new level, particularly for his work with Life magazine, with works such as Country Doctor and Spanish Village.

“But he was also capable of taking the iconic single image as well, like Tomoko. And that was something to do with the calligraphy of vision, which is as much about the movement of limbs, arms and bodies within the frame as it is about what resonates with the psyche of the photographer. I talked to Smith about where he came from, and he told me about his father.”

Though the details vary somewhat according to the source, the essence of the story is that Smith’s father had a grain business in Wichita in the American mid-West. Smith was already selling his work to local newspapers by the time he was fourteen, in 1932, and soon after that he began to photograph the environmental damage in the Dust Bowl. In Smith’s words, when he spoke at a conference at Wellesley College in 1975, “I was really photographing the destruction of my own

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family as well as the destruction of an entire area.” Indeed, when the drought laid waste to the grain trade, Smith’s father shot himself, dying while Eugene was giving him a direct blood transfusion.

McFarlane sees the influence of this tragedy in much of Smith’s greatest work: “He was very aware of that sense of loss. When you go through enough of his photographs, there’s a common element in many of the most powerful. It’s in Tomoko In Her Bath, it’s in the midwife story, it’s in an image from Saipan – which I have a print of, somewhere – that shows a marine holding a dying baby, distorted by injury of some kind. It’s one human being cradling another. And I think that it’s a key to his work. I think he yearned for that, so he responded to it when he saw it. It’s a universal thing, but I think with Smith it was personal, too.”

Though it didn’t feature in Received Moments, an image of Smith is just one of many portraits that McFarlane has made of the photographers he’s met. Others include Don McCullin (as seen in the last issue of One Thousand Words), John Loengard, Max Dupain, David Moore, Olive Cotton, Jeff Carter, Trent Parke and Stephen Dupont. There are, of course, many more of writers, actors and both theatre and film directors. On occasion, McFarlane has even turned his eye to wedding photography, though not in the most conventional way.

Legend has it that when Gael Newton wanted to engage a photojournalist whose work she admired to shoot her wedding, rather than an experienced wedding photographer, she found that those she approached first were inexplicably booked. “I’m terribly sorry, but I’m busy that weekend,” was a typical response, to which Newton might have replied, if the line wasn’t already dead: “But I haven’t told you when it is!” Newton was already a prominent figure in Australian photography – she went on to become the Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery – and made her initial approaches to photographers whose work she had already bought for the Art Gallery of NSW.

It has the feel of an apocryphal tale, of course, but for the denouement, which fits both with the photos of Newton that I’ve seen from roughly that time, and with what I know of McFarlane. In common with many photographers, he isn’t the sort of person to think that beauty is shallow or insignificant, but someone who understands that beauty is an essential part of life. When he was eventually approached, McFarlane, unlike his colleagues, was fearless enough to agree to the assignment without a second thought. Yet his eye for feminine beauty, in particular, created something of a problem: Newton had to remind

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him, more than once, that she also expected him to take photos of the groom, and the guests, and not just of her.

That minor detour into wedding photography aside – and in stark contrast to his writing, which must have covered just about every genre and style there is – McFarlane’s work behind the lens has concentrated almost entirely on documentary approaches to the medium.

“The essence of actuality is so worthwhile to pursue. It’s a dance, you know. Sometimes it comes the way it should, and sometimes it’s elusive. Ultimately, any artist, whether they be a writer or a painter or a photographer, is dealing with capturing actuality, what it means to be alive. I like looking back at photographs which convey that, whoever the subject may be, whatever the environment. I like to be able to look at the images and say: ‘That was the way the person was at that time in their life. And it’s only a trace of who they were, but it can be a really important trace.’”

The conversation comes back to the actor and theatre director John Bell, but via a different art form.

“Really, portraiture is all about sculpture. Ultimately it comes down to the mass of the face, and all the things that life has brought to the face. It would

obviously be different to photograph John now, which is something like 25 years later. He’s my age – slightly older, perhaps – and his face is more weathered, though it was starting to become weathered even in those days.”

One of the things that has long intrigued me about McFarlane’s work is that many of his very best images are street photos, but they’re a relatively small part of the whole. Is that for a particular reason?

“Well it is now!” McFarlane makes a joke of his mobility. “I’ve always thought of the street as an incredibly important arena of human behaviour. I think the street tells us everything – or a great deal – about the society we live in, in terms of the way we behave on the street. It’s a form of theatre, in a way, especially somewhere like New York.”

McFarlane is clearly used to discussing the difficulties of street photography.

“When I taught, students would always ask: ‘How do you photograph on the street? People are so sensitive, it’s so hard…’

“And the only answer I could give was to say that you have to know why you’re there. If you’re there just to try and take a great photo, you may get the occasional one that’s memorable, but the real

Railway Duo Town Hall by Robert McFarlane

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reason to be there is to chronicle what the nature of the street is. In other words, to respect the equations – the physical equations that you see in the way people respond to things. If you’re there to plunder, people know, and quite often you get into trouble. But if you’re actually there to respond in as deep a way as you can manifest, to the nature of what it means to be on the street… then people know that, too, and they don’t feel that you’re a predator, as such. There are always exceptions, but that was my experience with it, and I found that if you take it like that, you can sometimes work incredibly closely without people even knowing.”

Which is all very well, and fits fairly closely with my experience, but doesn’t answer the question of why McFarlane didn’t spend more time on the streets. He laughs when I point this out, and then thinks for a moment.

“Probably because I’ve always enjoyed the more intimate dialog with the subject. I’ve always enjoyed the interchanges that occur within people’s own environments, and the street is always an adopted environment. We go down the street to do something, to go shopping, or to go from point A to point B, so the street is a means to an end. And I tend to be drawn to photographing people in their own environments.”

Indian Boy Kolkatta 1969 by Robert McFarlane

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What does McFarlane think of photographers like Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson, who are using the language of documentary and street photography but in conceptual images?

“Crewdson is vastly entertaining. It’s the theatre of photography and it’s a perfectly valid form of expression. Jeff Wall I can’t really comment on because I don’t know as much about him as I should, but Crewdson is very interesting. It’s the grammar – large format documentary photography. Every image is capable of seduction.”

Yet soon enough the conversation comes back to a more conventionally documentary style of photography, and particularly portraiture.

“Photography is so new, really, when you think about it. Just looking back, Julia Margaret Cameron! Have you looked at her portraits lately? I just thought of them then, and I thought of the picture of John Herschel. She was one of the people working when photography was anything but spontaneous, and she was taking these amazing pictures.

“The thing that you find in the really great photographers – and I’ve met a few of them – is that there’s a vision beneath the apparent composition. They make you see beyond whatever you might have thought your limitations were.”

Yet McFarlane also appreciates that sometimes, photographic vision comes to us through photographers who aren’t necessarily capable of creating a great body of work, but still manage to capture something astonishing in a particular image.

Speaking about his experiences working on After 200 Years, he describes a photo that he saw in a house in Cherbourg. (Founded in 1899 by the Salvation Army and taken over in 1905 by the Queensland government, the town eventually became home to Aboriginal people from more than 100 different areas of Queensland and NSW. The population was required to speak English in preference to indigenous languages, and as a result Cherbourg has been described as a place in which there was an almost total loss of cultural heritage. Many of the suppressed languages now exist only in archives held by the University of Queensland.)

“There was a photo of an indigenous woman, probably in her late forties or early fifties, who looked very drawn and stressed, and not well. She was standing at the point at which two rivers met, and to me it was one of the most beautiful, but sad, documentary photographs that I’ve ever seen. Someone had seen it, and embraced every symbol that was in it, including how ravaged the

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subject was – she died of cancer soon after – and they’d kept the craft together just enough to take this intuitively great photograph. That’s what photography can be.”

McFarlane also invokes the book and exhibition Other Pictures, which was compiled by Thomas Walther from his collections of prints – purchased, for the most part, from flea markets and second hand shops.

“He had a show at the MCA a few years ago, and they’re all anonymous pictures. They’re fantastic, absolutely fantastic. They’re taken with varying degrees of skill, but they’re about the playfulness of photography, and the power of photography, in the hands of unconscious, intuitive artists. So photography has that capacity, too.

After talking to him at such length, it’s entirely clear that McFarlane’s passion for photography still burns brightly; if his faith in a medium he’s worked in and written about for fifty years ever dimmed, it certainly wasn’t for long.

“Photography is a common medium, but it’s an elite medium. It retains the ability to fascinate me, and a lot of other people too. It keeps challenging us. It gets back to something we discussed earlier: in the age of 4K, HD, 3D – why isn’t photography obsolete?”

Though his answer to the question he posed is a simple one, it’s no less direct or powerful for that: “There’s something about the still image that still captivates.” No matter where the future takes us, or how technology changes, McFarlane doesn’t expect that underlying reality to change anytime soon.

Gary Cockburn is an Adelaide-based photographer and writer. His series 24 From 48, a two-day microcosm from the much larger project 5000 Streets, is scheduled to appear in issue eighteen of One Thousand Words' sister magazine, BETA.

garycockburnphotography.com

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In my thirties, I fell in love with a photographer. He had a great eye, an interest in nudes, and all the kit. So I took mine off, became a model and, dear reader, married him. Copying the Callahans I was a skinnier Eleanor to his Harry. We didn’t have much money, but we had a lot of time, so we mucked around with light and shade, lines and length, trying to turn ourselves and our experiences into Works of Art. As well as lolling about looking beautiful and projecting emotions, I suggested titles and contributed to artist’s statements (I can mash-up pretentiously postmodern art-catalogue wank prose with the best of them). There’s something seductive about being a muse: you get to be part of the (he)art, with little responsibility for the outcome. That’s probably why the marriage ended. Our wedding photos, however, were lovely, which is why they’re not in an album, but in a very special shoebox, at the back of my wardrobe, below the gown I wore on my Special Day.

I’d actually stopped taking photos in my twenties, because of Australia’s Living Treasure, the cartoonist Leunig, or, as I like to think of him, St Michael of Melbourne. I came across his depiction of a parent and child watching a sunrise on tv — while the same event was occurring outside their window — and it burned into my frontal lobe. Taking photos removes you from life, I concluded. Wanting to drink it all in and be here now, in reality, time and place, I decided to put away my camera.

It wasn’t a hard decision; I’d never been particularly adept at capturing what my eyes could see in a way that evoked it for others. Anyway, there were plenty of photos being taken, and it was easy enough for me to scrounge copies from friends who’d watched the tv instead of enjoyed the party. (And please don’t bother trying to tell me that taking photos was their way of enjoying the party. We both know that it was a way to hide behind the tech; just like a dj, they were present but absent, with us but not of us, watchers documenting life from the cast-iron balcony, while it unfolded below — without them.)

I was still tempted to take photos, of course. And when I got an iPhone, I succumbed to the little camera’s siren call. I cheerfully snapped pix of my pets, garden and other details of domestic detritus. I wanted to preserve the sweet moments of ordinary life for my happy pantry, leaving the sour ones unharvested. They could rot, and return to the earth, who accepts all things. “Why don’t you ever take photos of me?” my new partner used to complain, and I’d mumble something about Michael Leunig and not wanting to miss out on experiencing life directly. But really, I just didn’t want to take the risk of being left with another shoebox full of images of a beloved whose presence remained only in my photos. The cats, on the other hand, were there for the long haul, and fair game — especially when they left mouse guts on the front doorstep and birds’ feathers strewn across the back lawn.

WHY I DON’T TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS Jocasta Virtue

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So I have a lot of photos that I haven’t taken, and some that I have. And I like to look out for them. I see potential photos all the time, walking along the street, apprehending tiny moments that are, ironically, at risk of being lost in an image-saturated era. Sometimes the iPhone and I have a go. More often, I pause, look carefully, and place the delicious detail at St Michael’s shrine, adding it to a pile of mementos I’ve offered him. I also rescue photos thrown out by other people. Spied peeping from barely-intact envelopes, frayed plastic bags and broken cardboard boxes put out for hard rubbish collections, this softy has taken home the lot. From poignant prints of fat Fifties babies, so wanted after the horrors of the Second World War; to contact sheets by Sixties teenagers, inspired by Blow Up to try and make their Kodak moments kool; through fading polaroids of Seventies family holidays, the floral orangey-reds, lime greens and deep browns still luridly alluring; and triumphant images of neon bright achievement in the Eighties, the last decade when humans could kid ourselves that we were masters of the universe. I have quite the extended family, photographically speaking. And, like all conscientious consumer-citizens of the art world, I take photographs in another way: by buying them.

There’s no method to my purchase of photography. I don’t have a plan. I’m not trying to create a collection of Great Works. It’s heroic only in its haphazardness. The pictures on my walls include awkward student pieces that innocently think they’re the first to depict human foibles in black and white (bless!). There’s a canvas-printed Banksy of a little girl blowing lovehearts from a dandelion clock…a shoddily-developed, badly-cut and poorly-matted print of who knows what…there’s even, just occasionally, a piece of Very Fine Art photography (I do love an opening my darlings, the noise, the people, the novelty!). But what all of these images have in common is that they reached out to me from their original location, and wrapped their sticky fingers around my heart so that I just had to take the clinging baby orang-utan home, to keep its all-seeing eyes safe from the barbarians who only wanted to log it for the frame.

So maybe the title of this essay is misleading? Because I do, after all, take photographs. As I’ve just confessed…I take them home, and I take them of home. But I won’t take them of you, my dear; not while there’s a sunrise for us to watch — together.

Jocasta Virtue is an Adelaide-based writer who is interested in design and cultural history. You can find her on twitter: @JocastaVirtue