Best, S.

(2011) “Performative Photography: Review of Anne Marsh’s LOOK:

Contemporary Australian Photography since 1980,” Eyeline, 74 80-81.

It’s been a long time since a major history of Australian photography has been

produced. Before Anne Marsh’s book was published late last year, the most

recent scholarly book would probably be Catriona Moore’s 1995 text on feminist

photography, Indecent Exposures: Twenty Years of Australian Feminist

Photography. Before that, the bicentennial year of 1988 produced two

comprehensive histories: Anne Marie Willis’ book Picturing Australia: A History

of Photography and Gael Newton’s exhibition and catalogue, Shades of Light:

Photography and Australia 1839-1988, which included essays by Helen Ennis and

Chris Long. Of course there have been other publications on Australian

photography over the last two decades—thematic studies of photography,

introductory texts, exhibition catalogues and more focused books on genres of

photography, individual artists and so forth—but no one has attempted to create

a coherent and comprehensive narrative of photographic developments of the

last forty years. For this achievement alone Anne Marsh is to be heartily

congratulated.

This book is a very welcome addition to the literature, as well as being a terrific

resource. It should be in every university library and on the bookshelf of every

photo-media student in the country. The text is very generously illustrated,

making this the kind of cross-over book that should appeal to collectors as well

as a more general audience for contemporary art. That said, the quality of the

reproductions is not consistent. The colour reproductions in particular are often

very poor representations of the original images.

The book has an unusual structure for a scholarly history, instead of a

continuous text with embedded images, it is comprised of three very loosely

connected parts. At the launch of the book at Stills Gallery in Sydney in March

2011, Anne Marsh said her model for the book was the Phaidon series, “Themes

and Movements,” and in particular the volume titled, The Artist’s Body. One can

see the influence of the Phaidon series in the size and overall structure of the

book and most particularly in the first (and largest) section, which is comprised

of a collection of images organised thematically. The themes are: identity, life,

experiment, space, and environment. There are sub-themes to further refine the

classification of the photographs.

Each photograph in this section is accompanied by a short description, which

reads like a wall-text for a museum exhibition. The Phaidon volumes, on the

whole, have excellent short descriptions of the illustrated works. The

descriptions for Look: Contemporary Australian Photography are more uneven,

perhaps because they were compiled and written by one of the research

assistants for the project. Some of these descriptions are very useful and

instructive, however, some are composed of the kind of vague, low-grade

artspeak that I consistently try to dissuade students from emulating. To give just

two examples of the latter, we are told that David Rosetzky’s Without Jeremy

(2004) “reflects the tension between our desire for control and a world that is

increasingly fractured” (108). The photograph that has attracted this description

is a composite image that appears to splice together an image of a man and

woman. The woman’s face is uppermost with small sections of a man’s face,
indicated by the coarser textured chin and prominent adam’s apple, peeping

through the lace-like structure of the upper image. This strange amalgam of two

different bodies is not mentioned in the caption, which merely concludes with

one of those stock postmodern phrases that could describe a multitude of

images: “subjectivity is reframed as a profoundly fragile and fragmented thing.”

Similarly, Anne Ferran’s two photographs, Scenes on the Death of Nature I and II

(1986), are described as free of “narrative” and supposedly this “ensures that the

photographs remain open to a range of possible meanings and interpretations”

(53). Leaving aside the strange implication that narrative generates a singular

meaning, a shock no doubt to unsuspecting literary critics, I’m trying to imagine

when a photograph is closed to a range of meanings and interpretations. Surely

this is a very rare phenomenon, while it barely rates mentioning the openness of

art to interpretation. At least these captions are all very short—generally two

sentences long--unlike the prolix (and similarly vague) wall-texts much loved of

contemporary art museums.

The second part of the book is a substantive history of approximately forty years

of Australian photography starting in the 1970s and organised roughly

chronologically into five chapters. I say “roughly chronologically” as the chapters

focus on particular time frames, organised consecutively, but they also indicate

the recurrence and perseverance of various genres and styles of photography.

This is a very accessible text, which deftly weaves together local and

international developments in photography. As well as providing a historical

framework to make sense of the last forty years, it also discusses individual

photographs in a lively and informative way.

The first chapter, “Maverick Photography,” considers three currents prevalent in

the 1970s: conceptual, activist and documentary photography. Marsh draws

together existing Australian scholarship on photography as an “alternative

practice” (Helen Ennis) and “oppositional photography” (Martyn Jolly), which is

perhaps the most familiar characterisation of Australian photography of the

1970s, while also connecting this local history to the dominant international

trend of the 1970s: conceptual photography. Marsh notes, for example, Robert

Rooney’s familiarity with the serial propositions of Ed Rusha such as Twentysix

Gasoline Stations (1962).

Serious considerations of the contribution of photography to conceptual art have

only arisen in the last ten years or so, with exhibitions such as The Last Picture

Show: Artists using Photography 1960-1982 (Walker Art Center, 2003) and

Postmedia: Conceptual Photography in the Guggenheim Museum Collection

(Guggenheim, New York, 2000). Mark Godfrey has noted how photography

prised open the self-referential, solipsistic character of serial art, as it were,

bringing the world in.i This interpretation of conceptual art could be further

developed to consider the specific Australian situation where the blurring of

genres, such as documentary, activist and conceptual photography, is common,

as Marsh indicates in the work of artists such as Wesley Stacey, Ian North and

Virginia Coventry. In this chapter, Marsh provides both a framework and a

stimulus for further research into the complex mixture of activist and conceptual

strategies.

The second chapter examines more familiar territory: appropriation and

postmodernism. The photographic domination of the 1980s is examined

alongside key ideas investigated in that period such as the gaze and masquerade.

The chapter moves easily between explaining these contemporary ideas and

showing their pertinence for photographic practice.

In the third chapter, Marsh draws attention to the theatrical past of photography

clearly building on her earlier work on performance and photography. ii More

specifically, this chapter examines the upsurge of directorial photography in the

1990s and links this to the idea of “performative photography.” Directorial

photography is a term coined by American photo critic, A. D. Coleman in 1976 to

describe the fictional orientation of photography, that is, the construction of

deliberately staged events specifically for the camera. In her explanation of this

genre, Marsh draws an analogy with film, describing these types of

photographers as directing “photo shoots much like directors of art house

movies” (355). Australian artists, such as Rosemary Lang, Bill Henson, and

Tracey Moffatt, are then aligned with international practitioners of this genre,

which, according to Marsh, includes Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, and artists

more usually associated with the Dusseldorf school of photography, Andreas

Gursky and Thomas Struth.

The link between American feminist Judith Butler’s idea of performativity and

the directorial mode is an interesting argument that Marsh proposes here. While

I am not a fan of the idea of gender as performance, preferring instead the

approach to sexual difference proposed by Australian feminist Elizabeth Grosz

which focuses on the body rather than gender, Marsh nonetheless gives an

excellent account of an important approach to sexual politics and its application

to a range of contemporary practices.

The fourth and fifth chapters outline more familiar art historical preoccupations

and periodisations. Identity politics, which dominated the art of the 1990s, is the

subject of chapter four. The final chapter addresses the idea of a reinvigoration

of the medium provoked by Rosalind Krauss’ recent criticism of the post-medium

condition.

The third and final section of the book has a timeline, which gathers together

details of major exhibitions, galleries, publications and events. It also includes

brief comments from educators, curators and critics of Australian photography.

This resource will be invaluable to researchers. In sum, this is a book that should

very quickly become the standard reference book for contemporary Australian

photography. Let’s just hope Macmillan will consider publishing more of these

types of important reference books.

i
Douglas Fogle, The Last Picture Show: Artists using Photography 1960-1982, exh. cat.
(Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003); Mark Godfrey, ‘From Box to Street and Back Again:
An Inadequate Descriptive System from the Seventies’, Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970,
ed. Donna De Salvo, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2005) 33.

ii
See Anne Marsh, Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia 1969-1992 (Melbourne: Oxford
UP, 1993) and The Dark Room: Photography and the Theatre of Desire (Melbourne: Macmillan,
2003).