What is real one moment has become
imaginary the next … you believe
what you see now and the next
second you don’t any more.

Robert Frank

Of course, recording the commonplace is not a new phenomena. The history of social documentary photography is a lineage of imaging ordinary subjects. Experiences of daily life have been the fodder of photojournalism and remain the core of news imagery. Documentary photography has been selectively accepted into the fine art cannon but the genre is generally valued for its newsworthiness or social implications. The rise of photo-based weekly journals in the 1930s and the employment of photography during the Depression era, played a roles in increasing the political importance of documentary images. Concerned documentary photography, such as that made by the Mass Observation Unit in the United Kingdom after World War II, indicated a belief in the power of the insignificant and banal.

Apart from the consciousness raising purpose of the documentary genre, unexceptional subjects hold aesthetic promise in photograph’s ability to look at them anew. Surprising juxtapositions raised the average to the extraordinary in Surrealist photography. Modernist aesthetics gave new force to changing social and personal landscapes, suited to the speed and portability of the camera, endowing subjects with an ideologically detached look.

The impromptu performance of life and the photographic instant came together by the 1950s in the snapshot aesthetic of photographers such as Cartier-Bresson and Winogrand. In the conformity and relative economic security of the 1950s, and with television seeming to take on the role of presenting the world, photographers turned to more intimate interpretations.

Until the 1970s, it was still possible to believe that social and personal truths could be evident in the ordinary things of life. In Australia, photographers like Carol Jerrems documented seemingly unposed and uncontrived picturesque images of daily life. But at the same time, photography’s veracity as a mechanism for social documentation was being called into question. Recognition of its constructed nature was central to its enlarged political and critical role in the art sphere.

Why would an interest in the minutiae of the domestic or the personal be the real thing of the mid 1990s? While the everyday persists photographically in the catalogue or archive it is also evident in artistic styles which range from traditional compositions to informal and spontaneous snapshots. With the introduction of digital imaging, and the need to rethink the mechanics of representation, concepts of the everyday have also been grafted onto an interest in low tech equipment and unremarkable content. A return to personal or thematic interests in the last decade has seen a simultaneous reduction in the role and analysis of photography as a theory-driven site for ideological relations. The types of work considered here are not consciousness raising exercises and don’t have much hope of presenting the familiar as new in an already media saturated environment. As the substance of the present, the vernacular lends itself to photographic projects that emphasise the visual in artistic practice and express the contingency of time and place.

Lyndal Waker's colour photographs and Brett Vallance's polaroids depict domestic interiors. Walker’s images of shared houses in the series House Style are titled according to the objects or zone depicted, the location of street and suburb and the month photographed. In these unpeopled spaces, such as Entrance table, Tennyson St, Richmond, August 1997, Photo wall, Gore St, Fitzroy, May 1997 and Sideboard, Gore St, Fitzroy, May 1997, the rich accumulation of objects are indicators of unseen inhabitants and lifestyle. Furniture, objects and ephemera are the stuff of experience, interests, relationships, survival and life’s episodes. They represent an accumulated past and potential future. The visual details lie dormant, awaiting the viewer’s contact with and enlivening of, deathly, abundant particulars.

Vallance’s Mens’ Rooms also present shared spaces laden with detail. Both Vallance and Walker use the framing of the lens to restrict our perspective and scale determining the intimacy implied in the viewing relationship. While objects in Walker’s prints are about two-thirds life size, the inherent narrow frame, small dimensions, transience and washed out colour polaroids of Mens’ Rooms provide the structure for an intimate scopic relationship. You could almost be lead to think the choice of medium reflects an intrusion into privacy that was permitted only momentarily; a quick shot when the opportunity presented itself.

Peering into private, intimate spaces, particularly the sacred realm of the bedroom, raises the spectre of voyeurism. The photograph draws together the public and private, familiar and foreign, in the process of enabling and challenging the act of looking. But the exposé is distanced by being depicted second hand and the anonymity of both subject and viewer removes any need for awkwardness.

In Vallance’s and Walkers’ work, the viewer is pulled from one image to the next, obsessively seeking differences in detail. As visual documents, they do not encourage knowledge or sensitivity but wait quietly like picture puzzles, directly challenging the conventional shock tactics of the photograph with the rudimentary enjoyment of looking. And it is the details which control the process of looking, details where "the very banality of this retrieved material is the source of its power to arrest us and to trap us in the object field of its gaze."¹ Material evidence of the lived world is extracted, defined and reconstituted to make it visible. Its the same kind of effect sought after by artists like Robert Rooney and Ed Ruscha, although the serial photographic work of these artists are programmatic and even more emotionally detached.

As an optical trace the photograph always misrepresents the weight of subjectivity that resides behind the lens. The evacuation of authorship and denial of style (which ironically creates its own style) intended by the documents of New Objectivity or conceptual photography in the 1970s is not an option for photographers in the 1990s. Qualities important for conceptual photographic projects two decades ago, such as anonymity and mechanic reproducibility are invalidated by awareness of the medium’s subjective parameters - selection, framing, resolution, colour and image modifications - that seemingly contribute empirical credibility to reports of life as it happens in the likes of real TV docudramas and infomercials. An unsophisticated, artless and sometimes tawdry contemporary look is not the sign of a slacker attitude but savvy, strategic choices of camera, form and content. The appearance is passive, confessional and culturally loaded. The visual tension of these works is drawn out between the real life subject matter, the actuality of the camera and the subjectivity of the viewer.

Gavin Hipkins’ intense photographic observation connects physical things to the web of cultural, social and personal spheres in which they circulate. His photographs in the Romance; Incomplete series have an off handedness that suggest the sort of familiarity which leads to the exceptional passing as unremarkable. Hipkins' works also references place; towns where incidents, experiences and memories infuse with the thing photographed. Here, the overlooked object became part of the pattern and texture of an intimate or public reality.

Hipkins uses photography’s inherent mediation and lack of transparency as part of his ongoing investigation of the visual operation of the medium. By separating and disassociating the photographed souvenir, Hipkins alludes to the field of intangible relationships and memories within which it must be embedded. His project is about more than photographing things as Winogrand would say, "to see what they would look like after being photographed". Photographer and viewer collude in the process of imaging the ordinary as mysterious and in the desire to make evident the contingent.

As a photographer succumbing to the open ended project of an archive that "must never be finished", Hipkins runs the risk, in Allan Sekula’s terms, of becoming a "detail worker, providing fragmentary images for an apparatus beyond his or her control."² As part of a larger body of work, Hipkins' photographs refer to the contemporaneity of a journal or diary. His images lack the frontality and regularity that give photographic archives an apparent lack of artifice or the commemorative qualities employed, for example, in Bernd and Hilla Becher's typographies. But they do share anthropological characteristics with Jim Speers’ photographs of hotel interiors.

Jim Speer's West Plaza and Glenbervie Suite photographs are of function rooms, designed for instructive or entertaining inhabitation. Bland and commodified, these rooms are flexible and seamless sites that function without intruding on the users’ consciousness, each interchangeable with the other. Empty and unprepared, they appear dormant and dysfunctional; a synthetic proscenium awaiting the cycles of business and hospitality. Behind the silence of these secluded spaces, operates the mechanisms of invisible service industries.

As the real is both familiar and strange, seen and unseen, it is distanced and displaced from the viewer by the photo’s surface. Abstraction can be a tool to both withhold and make proximate photographic realism. Robin Neate’s images refer to the "graph" in photography; that sense of drawing over time. These images are selected from a larger series, itself a narrative that is deliberately incompletely pictured, as if frames have been cut at intervals from a spool of film. Each image is part of an event that is neither reality or illusion and threatens to both coaless, or fade out, of focus. In these scenes, the viewer is again a voyeur but this time there is no focal point as the details remain uncertain. Neate’s work is filmic and transient, seeming to arrest by chance moments of flux. His images resist resolution and definition, encouraging the possibility of visual knowledge that has the potential to resolve but never can.

Art that attempts to get outside language and knowledge (via metaphor) accords to Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s perception that the photographic image is a site of instability between language or discourse and the real or visual. Where Walker Speer's and Vallance images suggest the certainty of empirical visual evidence, Hipkins and Neate seek the ambiguity of meaning or sensations in the visual, or in Gilbert-Rolfe’s terms, surprise rather than recognition: "This would be the visual as that which language does not know, that which defies description by remaining visible."³

Zara Stanhope
October 1997

Endnotes
1 Joanna Lowry, "Photography, video and the Everyday", Creative Camera, Aug/Sep, no.347, London, p.20.
2. Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive", The Contest of Meaning, ed. Richard Bolton, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1989, pp.374-5.
3 Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe, "Vision’s Resistance to Language", Beyond Piety: critical essays on the Visual Arts 1986-1993, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995, p.43.

© The artists and
Courtesy of the artists

Brett Vallance, Mens rooms,
polaroid photograph, 1997

Lyndal Walker, Sideboard,
Gore Street, Fitzroy, colour
photograph on art
mount, 39.5 x.59.5 cm, 1997,
courtesy of Karen
Lovegrove Gallery

Jim Speers, West Plaza no:3,
colour print (no negative),
1996

Gavin Hipkins, Romance:
Wellington, 1996

Robin Neate, Scene #5,
c-type print 1997