Junk for Code : Australian photography: Ingeborg Tyssen

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Australian photography: Ingeborg Tyssen « Previous | |Next »

June 28, 2008

Ingeborg Tyssen (1945 - 2002), the Sydney based photographer, is often acknowledged as one of Australia's leading art photographers. Along with Carol Jerrems and others she became part of the canon of Australian art photography. We seemed to lost contact with the canon for some reason. Does digital represent a new start?

Ingeborg Tyssen, Royal Easter Show, 1982

Tyssen’s early photographs were taken in the streets and suburbs of 1970s Australia and America and they depict urban aloneness and isolation mixed with a hint of surrealism. This would now be seen as pretty straight, old school black and white modernist photography.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:57 AM | Permalink

| Comments (4)

Comments

Thank you for the link to Ingeborg Tyssen, I hadn't heard of her, her photos are a wonderful discovery.

Posted by: Barbara Fischer | June 29, 2008 6:32 PM

Barbara,
Dunno if you know. Ingeborg Tyssen was married to John Williams -- another Sydney based photographer, who helped establish art photography in Australia in the 1970s. Dunno if you have heard of him. For some reason his work is classified as personal documentary by Gael Newton. Presumably that classification refers to a rejection of traditional documentary photography that mirrors reality and does so in order to establish modernism in art photography in Australia.

I guess Tyssen helped to establish an Australian photographic vocabulary---I've picked up on her billboard series her garden series and tree series.

Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson | June 29, 2008 7:03 PM

Glad to see ingeborg's work on your site. Dunno why Gael Newton calls my stuff 'personal documentary' either. Ingeborg was killed in Holland in 2002. We're scheduled to share a joint show in 2010 at the Lewers Gallery. For the record it'll be a mainly digital-print show. JW

Posted by: john williams | July 19, 2008 9:09 PM

John,
I knew about Ingeborg being killed in Holland in 2002 by a car accident. Truely tragic loss both personal and national.

Yeah I puzzle about 'personal documentary' too. I'm not sure what it means---the subjective element of the photographer that undercuts documentary photographer as a mirror of reality perhaps?

From a more philosophical/aesthetic perspective I would decode it in terms of photographs that represent an “opposition to history” by affirming the subjective experiences of ordinary people that modernity, science, and industrial capitalism have done so much to crush.

It's a mouthful I know. But it does capture the critical perspective of art photography that I would hate to see lost/forgotten in a digital age that often celebrates the banal.

Good to see the turn to a digital/print---it brings photography out in the public domain more,and so give us a chance to explore, get to know,and share our visual heritage.

By the way I respect your contribution to Australia's modernist photographic history and visual culture. A great body of work that helps develop our urban visual language.

Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson | July 20, 2008 8:38 PM