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Helen
Ennis
Intersections: Photography, History and
the National Library of Australia
National Library of Australia, $59.95pb,
286pp, 0 642 10792 0
PHOTOGRAPHY
WAS INTRODUCED to Australia in the 1840s,
with the first photograph being taken
in May 1841, in Sydney. Since then, photographic
images, in all their permutations (including
the more recent digital images), have
become ubiquitous and indispensable parts
of our daily lives. Family snapshots,
holiday mementoes, news and sporting images,
advertisements, book illustrations and
passport photographs contribute to the
phenomenal quantity of photographs in
existence.
It
is from this huge pool of photographic
images that the nation’s public collecting
institutions — museums, libraries,
archives, art galleries — assemble
collections of photographs in accordance
with their acquisition policies. For the
National Library of Australia, this means
collecting ‘to provide visual records
of the major themes, events, and social
and environmental changes in Australian
history’. Such broad parameters have
led to a collection spanning from the
1850s to the present day, and numbering
some 600,000 items, a collection so vast
as to be largely ‘unknowable’
in its entirety.
The
difficulties of approaching a collection
of this nature are outlined by Helen Ennis
in the introductory chapter of her new
book, Intersections, which is the first
representative survey of the National
Library’s photographic collection.
Ennis, an experienced curator and art
historian, had the daunting but fascinating
task of sifting through endless boxes
of photographs — by known and unknown
photographers, professional and amateurs
— and then determining a way in which
adequately to survey this collection.
Intersections does not adopt an art-historical
approach, as can be found in Gael Newton’s
history of Australian photography, Shades
of Light (1988), nor the socio-historical
approach of Anne-Marie Willis’s Picturing
Australia (1988). Instead, Ennis, taking
her cue from the library’s collection,
adopts a more fluid and creative approach,
exploring connections between various
photographs, as well as with Australian
history, culture, everyday life and the
viewer.
In
her opening remarks, Ennis describes this
project as both disorientating and delightful
— the former not only in terms of
trying to comprehend such a large and
diverse collection and to navigate its
various systems of classification and
organisation, but also because: ‘I
have often been baffled by what I have
come across, by what I have found myself
looking at. The conventions of art historiography
and photographic connoisseurship seem
woefully inadequate …’ For Ennis,
these unexpected images, which challenged
her preconceptions, were among the rewards
of working on this project.
The
concepts of disorientation and delight
are significant because they are carried
through into the format, content and style
of Intersections, mimicking Ennis’s
own experiences. For instance, we begin
reading a chapter and are never sure where
it will lead, with Ennis’s enquiring
nature exploring links, following tangents
and downplaying the obvious. A loose chronology
underlies the seven chapters, yet each
deals with a broad theme usually related
to a major event or issue in Australia’s
history: colonisation; the landscape;
events of national importance; war; modern
life; the 1960s; and documentary photography
(recording reality). Weaving through these
narratives are discussions of more elusive
factors, such as ‘ordinariness, stillness,
imperfection and doubt’, as well
as the impact of changing photographic
techniques and processes on the production
of images.
Sixteen
key photographers in the Library’s
collection, among them Max Dupain, Harold
Cazneaux, Olive Cotton and David Moore,
are represented by ‘portfolios’
of images, which are interspersed between
relevant chapters. Perhaps intended as
visual ‘breath-ing spaces’,
they allow the reader to slow down and
to contemplate the images. These are sometimes
refreshingly unfamiliar, such as Max Dupain’s
engaging portraits of Australians prominent
in the arts.
The
meandering path followed by this publication
is peppered with images and ideas that
surprise and stimulate, such as Dupain’s
portraits or the extraordinary image by
an unknown photographer of the German
Club, Adelaide in 1939, elaborately decorated
for Hitler’s fiftieth birthday celebrations.
(The image appears on the ABR front cover
this month.) From the photographs that
Ennis has unearthed for Chapter Four,
‘Silent Contemplation’, it is
evident that the National Library’s
collection is rich in ‘unofficial’
images related to World War I. These include
photographs from soldiers’ private
albums, images souvenired from enemy combatants
and on the home front, images dealing
with conscription, Australia’s internment
camps, and studio portraits of soldiers.
In this context, Harold Cazneaux’s
landscape and tree studies from the 1920s
and 1930s may seem an unusual inclusion,
but Ennis convincingly identifies images
such as his famous Spirit of Endurance
(1937) as part of an ongoing preoccupation
with the effects of war.
Intersections
grew largely from Helen Ennis’s research
for a two-part exhibition drawn from the
National Library’s collection. In
a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s–1930s
was exhibited in late 2003, and the second
part, spanning the 1930s to 2000, opened
last December and closes on 28 March 2005.
As with Intersections, these exhibitions
responded to the Library’s collection
and provided a fresh vision of photography
in Australia. Ennis’s keen eye brought
fascinating images to light, many of which
also appear in the publication: for instance,
the Australian Information Services’
informal portrait of Prime Minister Harold
Holt standing in the sea alongside his
three bikini-clad daughters-in-law, the
year before he drowned; or Bruce Howard’s
newspaper image of a Melbourne woman towing
her mother and dog on trailers behind
her bicycle; or the anonymous portraits
of Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira
at various functions. With each part of
the exhibition comprising some 300 images,
viewers could make their own discoveries
and construct their own multi-layered
narratives.
Similarly,
Ennis’s inspired selection of images
throughout the book enhances the opportunities
for viewers to make comparisons and links
between images. Matthew Sleeth’s
portfolio portraying Australian troops
in East Timor, including the shot of Kylie
Minogue posing with a rifle, adds a contemporary
dimension to representations of war. Similarly,
numerous images of indigenous Australians
appear throughout the publication. The
chapter ‘Slow Time’, which deals
with colonisation, features nineteenth-century
images. At one extreme is Henry Frith’s
grand and mournful Aborigines, the Last
of the Race, Tasmania (1864); at the other
is the surprisingly informal image of
a naked Aboriginal man and woman by an
unknown photographer, which is titled
A Loving Couple (c. 1868–1872). Later,
in the chapter dealing with documentary
photographs, it becomes evident that the
artifice of these and many other nineteenth-century
images stands in strong contrast to the
remarkable naturalism in photographs of
Aboriginal people by Axel Poignant in
the 1950s.
Intersections,
a handsome publication grounded in stimulating
scholarship, presents a fresh approach
to Australian photography. Equally suited
to ‘dipping into’ or to reading
from cover to cover, it successfully conveys
the richness and complexities of the National
Library’s immense collection, while
enticing us to discover more.
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