Remembering Tomorrow

History of Photography, 2021

This article explores innovations in photographic production and experimentation in Australia, especially Sydney, from 1935 to 1940. While many photographers and photographic societies were still promoting the aesthetics of Pictorialism, others were responding to new demands and opportunities provided by publishing, advertising, international expositions, local exhibitions and architecture. After introducing some of the forces for change, where there was often an easy exchange between photography and design, the article examines four case studies from 1937 to 1940. Three of these were generated by international expositions; all involved different types of photomurals and collaborations across the arts. These collaborations were instrumental in helping to shape Australian modernism and a postwar recovery within the arts.

Media International Australia, 1995

An examination of a series of recent newspaper articles, each of which is about the 're-discovery' of some previously anonymous person who had featured in a classic Australian photograph. I use Benjamin, as well as recent debates within historiography around the filiation of memory from history, to discuss this phenomenon. I discuss the photograph's peculiar relationship to both memory and history. I locate the new role for the historic photograph as somewhere between the artefactual aura of the classic painting and the discursive mutability of the computer file. I claim a new role for the press which now commands and curates a large archive of images from our past and hence, like public monuments and ceremonies, has a stake in recuperating memory to serve history.

This paper focuses on building a conceptual framework for looking at contemporary photographic methods through the lens of historical process within the medium; its relationship to the fields of science and technology, how society’s relationship with photography has changed, and why process is not as valued today but continues to have relevance. It is also a defense for reimagining how we can approach the medium in a more holistic way, while still generating relevant and contemporary dialogue about a medium that is rapidly being replaced by it’s digital successor. My concern is that the issue of what is lost, as we barrel into the future, further and further away from the tactile and hand-made image, is that our critical thought of the past, present and future is not considering the contexts of those times respectively, lacking the universal perspective to analyzing over-arching modes of image making. What I attempt to do in the following pages is take a step back from the standard, polarized view of the differences between “then” and “now”, and elucidate the modes of common thought that continue to inform visual culture. To look holistically at the photographic, outside of time, at the objective agenda of why we make what me make.

IMAGE. Zeitschrift für Interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft, 2021

The following takes a historical look at the shifting conceptions of photography from the 1950s on, identifying foundational premises which have determined the discourse of photography into the 21st century while also creating contradictions between theory and practice. Using the controversial reception history of Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man exhibition as an example, core aspects of photography’s performativity are elucidated, which conventional theory has failed to accommodate. Further, historical as well as emerging resources are identified which facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of photography’s social significance.

This research paper investigates the formation of the international photographic collection at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. This is a story that has never been told. It is the story of how the NGV set up one of the very first photography departments in a museum in the world in 1967, and employed one of the first dedicated curators of photography, only then to fail to purchase classical black and white masterpieces by international artists that were being exhibited in Melbourne and sold at incredibly low prices during the 1970s and early 1980s, before prices started going through the roof.

J. Godole, I. Idrizi (eds.). Between Apathy and Nostalgia. Private and Public Recollections of Communism in Contemporary Albania. Tirana, IDMC, 103-119, 2019