Photography and Australia (review)

This is an excellent survey of the major developments, practitioners and icons of Australian photography, providing a wide-ranging, inclusive overview much like the block-buster exhibitions the author has curated for more than twenty years in Canberra’s national cultural institutions. Generously illustrated with eighty images, and written in a clear, accessible style, seven chapters cover themes and periods ranging across the entire span of photographic practice in Australia since 1841, and constituting a valuable introduction to the medium’s main developments in broad historical context. In what follows I focus especially upon Ennis’ claims for “uncovering” a “distinctively Australian visual culture” and the central role of colonialism within her analysis.

Ennis’ introduction argues that several concerns make Australian photography different – its colonial history and relations between Indigenous and settler Australians (8), as well as a central preoccupation with the mythologizing of landscape. Australian exoticism was defined as “Aborigines, flora, fauna and significant geological features” (23), but for Ennis, colonialism is defined primarily as an absence of metropolitan resources, resulting in an “ordinariness and modesty” that we should see “not as failings but as an ongoing source of strength” (16). She makes the interesting suggestion that within Australian photography there is a striking “orientation towards realism,” a preoccupation with “the physical, material aspects of life rather than its metaphysical or spiritual dimensions,” that she speculates stems from a distaste for self-reflection, amounting “to a collective act of repression arising from the circumstances of colonization: the dispossession of Aboriginal people …and Australia’s beginnings as a penal settlement (9).” This is an intriguing idea, but however plausible, it is hard to evaluate such claims when no comparison with developments elsewhere is offered – what of photography in other settler colonies with broadly comparable historical trajectories? A proliferation of research has emerged in the wake of decolonization around the globe that provides insight into colonial curiosity about new worlds, and cultural exchange between indigenous peoples and invaders – and I was left wondering how a distinctively Australian visual culture emerged from these shared circumstances.

Chapter one, “First Photographs,” discusses the medium’s antipodean beginnings in 1841, and traces its conformity to the “lines of power laid down by the flow of capital and consumer goods” that marked European settlement. In this section Ennis notes the similarities of the new technology with developments elsewhere – yet also its limitations, such as the poverty of the Australian holdings. The 1870s saw the medium became “deep-rooted,” expressing the aspirations of colonial society through portraiture and “publicly oriented” photography that laid emphasis upon “materiality, on the physical aspects of existence” (27–29).

Chapter two, “Black to Black,” explicitly addresses the interest in photographing Indigenous people from the earliest days of settlement, through well-known examples such as Henry Frith’s ‘last of’ portraits of the Tasmanians, policeman Paul Foelsche’s Northern Territory series, and J.W.Lindt’s Clarence River studio portraits from northern NSW, all set in brief historical context. She traces how the exploitative purpose of such images changed during the 1970s as Aboriginal people began to assert their rights and took up the camera themselves, and notes the 1990s tendency for Indigenous artists to draw heavily upon historical archives. Ennis defines this genre as “immensely troubling,” disturbing colonialism and continuing to haunt us – but doesn’t really explore why this might be, or discuss our own very changed context for viewing images of Indigenous Australians.

Chapter three, “Land and Landscape” examines the creation of landscape as an expression of settler culture, from early predilection for settled, humanized landscape, the twentieth-century emergence of modernist art photography such as Pictorialism that generated “generalized, timeless landscapes,” up to wilderness photographers such as Peter Dombrovskis and Olegas Truchanas whose work was used during the 1970s and 80s to express competing claims to land. Chapter four, “Being Modern” more closely considers the Modernist practice of figures such as Max Dupain, Olive Cotton, Axel Poignant, and Laurence Le Guay from the 1930s onwards, and the effect of the Second World War.

Chapter five, “Made in Australia” addresses documentary photography which Ennis...