Newsletter and IYOP Initiatives Australian Coalition '99

Age and Consent - A Photographic Exhibition by Ella Dreyfus

A commentary by Martin Thomas

Photographs can have their own fecundity. The gallery not only houses images but facilitates their generation as memories and sensations come floating through. These photos of naked, older women are large, their format square (suggesting an evenness in proportion). With the power of magnification, the changes time has wrought upon the body, the fineness of wrinkled flesh, the tissue texture I know so well from holding my grandmother's arms, are simply stated.

A veil has been dropped, and shielded from the returning gaze it is kind of safe to play voyeur. Depiction of the nude is typically inextricable from issues of sexuality and desire. Hence the revelation of seeing nudes where these factors are not at the forefront; which state with a certain brutality the warts and all reality of a time in our lives. No part of the body is hidden from the all-seeing lens. Scars, stretch marks, pubic hair coarse or absent, the patches discretely worn for hormone replacement purposes, are there in all their nakedness.

These images are not really about making beautiful what is usually maligned as some commentators have suggested. That is only part of the story. Beauty is hardly omniscient among the young, and among the aged it tends to leap out only here and there. Certainly I find beauty in the torso stretched and stretched again by its erstwhile inhabitants who have left a vessel, perfectly tempered, that has done everything it was designed to do.

But there is much about old age that is cruel, painful and debilitating, that rots the body or - maybe worse - decays the mind. One part of the exhibition shows women in geriatric care. Some suffer dementia. There is a frightening portrait of an old, old woman. Her hands block her eyes to speak all too plainly in their silence of unresolved grief. As rich in narrative as the bodies themselves, are the signatures of the models - they all gave written consent - which the artist has reproduced, enlarged and displayed alongside the photo of its maker. Some commence with a certain assurance then drift off into doodleland. Others have that tight studied control that expresses poignantly the concentration involved.

Ultimately, I felt a deep sense of gratitude from this experience: not just to the artist but to the many women photographed who were brave enough to show their bodies as they are. Amidst the mixed bag of feelings it generated - fear, admiration, mirth, the oddity of being a man and encountering these secrets of womanhood - were moments of such richness and resonance.

For more details contact
STILLS GALLERY

Phone :	02 9331 7775
Fax :	02 9331 1648
Email :	photoart@stillsgallery.com.au
Website :	www.stillsgallery.com.au

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