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October 19, 2010
In her Generations: Australian Photography Since the 1970s essay for the 2002 Photographica Australis exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography Gael Newton describes the recent trends in Australian photo-based art.
The main point she makes is that though photo-based art now plays an important role in contemporary Australian art it was once otherwise:
As recent as the 1970s photographic practice was dominated by men, and 'photographer' meant either a professional in commercial practice or an amateur exhibitor in specialist photographic venues. The term did not include the concept of the photographer as being in the vanguard of contemporary art. Throughout the seventies there was a rapid growth in public awareness of photography. Government funding via the newly formed Australia Council for the Arts allowed for the establishment of the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 1973 and later the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne. Meanwhile, museums began to collect and display photography as an art. Surveys of the period show a preference among selectors for personal documentary and especially street photography in the American mode. Works were usually small-scale black and white and mostly by men, although Carol Jerrems (1949-1980) was regarded as the exemplary figure of her generation. In the 1980s postmodernism powerfully attracted students, in particular women, many of whom sought out art school photography courses as a conscious choice of expressive mode and vocational direction.
In the seventies and eighties photographers were shown in dedicated photography galleries but rarely included alongside painters and sculptors in the stable of major dealer galleries, or even in the publicly funded contemporary art spaces
She adds:
It was only in 1982 at the first Australian Perspecta exhibition in Sydney that curator, Bernice Murphy, recognised photographers as contemporary artists. Murphy included an installation by Bill Henson as a major work and also groups of works by Fiona Hall and Douglas Holleley. Hall and Holleley both showed small-scale works, but subsequently in contemporary art shows throughout the eighties and nineties photographic works increased in number and indeed in scale and impact. The 1982 Perspecta exhibition was also the first major occasion in which recent Aboriginal works were included as 'contemporary' art. Photography was in the slipstream in these years but came to have an ever more prominent role in defining contemporary art in Australia.
That is just over 20 years ago.
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