photographic histories

In her Other histories: photography and Australia essay Helen Ennis says that up to the late 1960s a strict hierarchy operated  in art history in Australia. In this  hierarchy the traditional art forms of painting, and to a lesser degree sculpture, were regarded as most important, followed by drawing and printmaking. Art photography was mostly confined to a medium specific realm, rarely penetrating the larger art world. It occupied a peripheral position in relation to mainstream art practice in the art institution. 

Moreover, as Geoffrey Batchen, points in his essay  ‘Australian made’,  in  his Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, Australia's photographic history is:

positioned, when it is thought of it all, as no more than a supplement to The History of Photography as we have come to know it through Helmut Gersheim and Beaumont Newhall  and all their more recent followers. This establishment history, already circumscribed by its monotonous quest for orginality, priority, and the heights of artistic sensibilty, has by and large confined its attention to developments in France and Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth.  As a consequence, no photographs from Australia are featured in its hallowed lineup of masterworks.   

Since the scholarly  history of Australian photographic tradition was only constructed in the 1980s Australian art photographers (photography as 'self-expression')  took their bearings from American art photography in the 1960 and 1970s. 

The regional or Australian history of art photographic that emerged late in the 1980s was premised on the modernist, essentialist approach championed by Szarkowski and others with its conventions and categories  of artistic genius, an oeuvre, innovation, technical excellence, period style and rarity. Modernist formalism ruled.  

 Gael Newton in her  Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988 was  an attempt to establish some sort of local artistic tradition for the medium.  The above  categories were simplified into ‘pictorial power’ and ‘artistic merit’  and the  text was premised on the  search for exceptional images produced by a few clebrated photographers. It was organized into photographic art history's  stylistic categories of pictorialism, modernism, documentary and  postmodernism.  

Given this history of our visual culture both the representation of the landscape in Australian  visual culture and the  visual language  of that tradition have been established by painting  and the  books on painting by art historians. In order to see how the Fleurieu Peninsula has been visually represented in the past we need to turn to the modernist painters of the 1940s-1960s, such as  Dorrit Black, James CantKathleen Sauerbier and Dora Chapman.

The painter that is the most significant for me is James Cant's representations of the local  bush and scrub around Aldinga and Willunga. Less important is  Lee Friedlander's  interesting photographs of  trees and shrubs in the US are not as crucial, as these do not refer to this particular place. Nor did I know about  the colonial photography produced in  the nineteenth century as the first South Australian survey history of photography, A Century in Focus: South Australian Photography 1840s-1940s by  Julie Robertson and Maria Zaagla,  was not produced until  2007. 

Introduction: a sense of place

Our connection to Victor Harbor as a place, as opposed to a tourist location, came with the decision by Suzanne's parents-- Bruce and Marjorie Heath---to retire to this region of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula  from Melbourne.  

Suzanne's  parents built  their  retirement house near Rosetta Head, and though Bruce, died in 1980 just after the house was built, Marjorie lived in the house until her death in 1997. Both Bruce and Marjorie loved the local landscape of the Fleurieu Peninsula.  This place--it was bounded by Aldinga, Kangaroo Island,  and lakes Alexandrina and Albert  near the mouth of the River Murray---became their home. 

Gary meet Suzanne in 1993  and we used to visit Marjorie on weekends and  public holidays. Whilst staying at Solway Cresent  Gary started taking photographs of the local landscape.These were  in the pre-digital days  of film cameras when all the work--processing and printing --- was done by the professional photography labs. 

Suzanne and her sister Barbara inherited the house when Marjorie died,  and Suzanne bought Barbara out, primarly because Suzanne lived in Adelaide whilst Barbara lived in Brisbane. Suzanne and Gary continued to visit on weekends and holidays.

Solway Cresent became a weekender. Over the next decade Victor Harbor became a place,   a  home away from the inner city apartment  in Adelaide's CBD and the world of work. The region became a place in that we developed a sense of human attachment and belonging.

The photography became an expression of our  sense of place, a way of giving meaning to this geographic space. We started to realize that the landscape of the Fleurieu Peninsula had its own identity. The local painters exhibiting in the local art galleries were pre-modernist in that their paintings were of gum tree a la Hans Heysen or Horace Hurtle Trenerry,  rural cottages, or picturesque seascapes with their  blue sky and sea.  

Modernism was not solely an urban phenopmenon as there  the modernist painters of the Fleurieu Peninsula   such as Dorrit Black, Dora Chapman and James Cant in the 1940's -1970s. The local visual art scene was either  unaware of, or had fogotten,  this body of work,  or the regional culture  was indifferent to abstraction and  the abstract expressionist representations of the locality. What was missing was Black's emphasis on the form of the landscape;  Cant's closely observed  paintings of the undergrowth and minutia of the Australian bush or scrub; Chapman's  abstractions of eucalepts; or the surrealism of Ivor Francis.