FotoFreo 2008 Conference
The FotoFreo 2008 Conference is proudly supported by Edith Cowan University
The conference will open with a key note address by Dr Anne Marsh reviewing the present state of Australian photography, particularly in regard to documentary and art based photography.
Other topics to be considered include our understanding of the meaning of beauty and the implications of the notion of beauty in some areas of photography, in particular, landscape and fashion photography (beauty as a device, etc.)
Another topic to be examined will be the intersection of art forms, in this case, photography, the graphic arts and the written word.
The conference will take place in the afternoon over two days and with 4 speakers presenting on each day.
Venue: The theatrette at the WAMM on Victoria Quay
Dates: Saturday the 5th of April and Sunday the 6th of April
Time: 1pm – 5pm with a half hour afternoon tea & coffee break.
Cost: $99 for two half days; $55 for each half day
To make a reservation for this important event please email info@fotofreo.com
We will advise when we can process bookings.
Confirmed speakers include
DAY 1
Chairperson, Dr Daniel Palmer
Dr Anne Marsh, Dr Helen Ennis, Marian Drew and Michael Desmond
DAY 2
Chairperson, Dr Jonathan Marshall
Daniel Palmer, Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg and more to be confirmed.
Anne Marsh by Poli Papapetrou
Anne Marsh
Keynote Address: A Critical Axis: Documentary Photography and Art.Anne Marsh says that, "In this paper I will look at how documentary photography and art photography have existed historically on a cosmetic axis, often driven by curatorial agendas and the art history of photography.
"It is now apparent that after a decade or so of spectacular performative tableaux photography, a new generation is looking again at the real and its representations. After we were seduced by Jean Baudrillard and spun out by the hysteria of the already written, the death of the author and the dizziness of the simulacra, we are now returning to the world and its affairs. In 2005, I was taken by Daniel Palmer’s observation that in the 2000s there has been what he calls a “tension between the desire to reproduce the world and the need to intervene and change it” (Photogenic, p. 5).
In this scene the axis which has documentary and photojournalism at one point and art photography at the other starts to become dynamic. What we witness is a movement along the axis where art photographers start to look closely at the other end of the spectrum as a way of bringing their work closer to the real. We also see documentary photographers moving from magazines and books and onto the World Wide Web and into the art galleries.
"The other issue that compels me is the critical position that argues that conceptual art gave photography status as art because it worked with the bare essentials of the medium. This position is caught up in contemporary critical debate concerned with the post-medium condition. However, one could argue with some force that photography, in all its manifestations, has always been a virus within visual culture. Conceptual art may not have been able to exist without photography.
"The ubiquitous nature of the photographic image has created a new language. As Moholy-Nagy noted in 1936: it is the lingua franca of our time. Every other visual media has been influenced by the perspective of the camera and the mechanical reproduction of images.
In this paper I want to explore some of these issues. To suggest that photography may not be a medium at all. If it is, it is a radically different medium and one that has successfully destabilized all other visual media. I want to analyse the return to the real, the desire to intervene and change the world through photography."
Dr Anne Marsh is Associate Professor in Theory of Art & Design in the Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University. Her research areas include: photography, performance art, feminism, postmodernism and psychoanalysis. She is author of Body and Self: Performance Art in Australian, 1969-1992 (Oxford University Press, 1993), The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire (Macmillan, 2003) and numerous articles and exhibition catalogue essays on contemporary Australian art and photography. Her essays have been translated into French, German and Spanish. Anne is currently writing a book on Contemporary Australian Photography.
Helen Ennis
Photography, beauty and difficulty
Photography, more than any other medium, intersects with the most personal aspects of our lives, from birth to death and everything in-between. It is part of our individual and collective rituals, serving a huge range of functions. How do photographers deal with issues that are difficult and highly charged – mortality, for example? And how might viewers respond to photographs that are difficult, because they are highly personal, intimate and perhaps even painful? What role might the aesthetic qualities of the images play in this discussion? With reference to her research for Reveries: Photography & Mortality (National Portrait Gallery, 2007) Helen Ennis will argue for the beneficial effects of difficulty. She will focus on ‘limit cases’, photographs that test the boundaries of what we might expect not only from photography but from ourselves.
Since 2000 Helen Ennis has curated many major exhibitions including: Reveries: Photography & Mortality, (National Portrait Gallery, 2007); a retrospective exhibition of the work of European émigré photographer Margaret Michaelis (National Gallery of Australia, 2005); Mirror with a memory: Photographic portraiture in Australia (National Portrait Gallery, 2000); the two-part exhibition In a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s-2000 (National Library of Australia 2003 and 2004); and a retrospective exhibition of Olive Cotton’s photographs (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000). Helen Ennis is also extensively published. Her most recent publication is the fully illustrated catalogue Reveries: Photography & Mortality. Some of her other publications include: Man with a camera: Frank Hurley overseas (National Library 2002), Intersections: Photography, history and the National Library of Australia (National Library, 2004) and the biography Margaret Michaelis: love, loss and photography (National Gallery of Australia, 2005).
Helen Ennis is an Associate Head, Undergraduate, and Senior Lecturer in the Art Theory Workshop at the Australian National University School of Art. She was Curator of International and Australian Photography at the National Gallery of Australia from 1985-92.
Marian Drew
Beauty and photography
"In this paper I hope to introduce briefly some of the dilemmas as well as advances, photographs have made to our concept and experience of the beautiful. By examining a number of artist’s works including my own, I will propose a definition of beauty as representing the object of longing and, as extension to this, will discuss the Japanese concept ‘wabi-sabi’, which presents the experience of beauty through ideas of humility, authenticity and imperfection. Wabi-sabi identifies beauty in the ordinary, causing the ordinary to be no longer ordinary (1). I propose that in general, photography has extended our vision and appreciation of the ‘beautiful’, not only through the appreciation of beauty within the photographic object but by transferring that experience back into the world." Marian Drew
(1) Sartwell Crispin, 2004 Six Names of Beauty, Routledge, NY
After completing her Degree in 1984, Marian Drew was awarded a German Government Scholarship to study experimental photography in Germany. Since that time her work has been recognized thorough grants, awards and residencies in Australia, Europe and the US. She is Convener of Photography at the Queensland College of Art, Brisbane and is represented by commercial galleries in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and New York. In Australia her work is represented in State and National Gallery collections. Her first major monograph was published in 2006 by the Queensland Center for Photography and held her first solo show in New York titled Every Living Thing in late 2007.
Michael Desmond
Uncanny Valley: The disturbing question of beauty
It is still assumed that a photograph records a precise moment of physical likeness in contrast to a painting or drawing. These older media are generally considered to record a more generalised impression and are thought to be able to capture something more than surface appearance. Changes in the technology of photography have led to changes in the nature of photography. Editing of the image (in the studio rather than in the camera) is increasingly important and the ability to change, modify, apply a painterly approach to a source image or even combine disparate images, is now possible.
The ability to manipulate the image allows the photographer to alter reality and create more aesthetically satisfying image than actually exists. This has implications for the
emotional response to the face – our ideas of beauty and symmetry and for notions of the ideal. But is beauty an absolute? And is absolute beauty what we want? When beauty approaches perfection it can become disturbing, unnatural, uncanny.
The presentation will refer to the work of contemporary photographers.
The term Uncanny Valley was coined in Masahiro Mori's hypothesis of 1970 that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathetic until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion.
Michael Desmond is the curator at the National Portrait Gallery. He has extensive experience in the culture industry. He worked as the inaugural Manager of the Drill Hall Gallery in Canberra and at the National Gallery of Australia as Curator of International Paintings and Sculpture. Until recently he was the Manager of Collection Development and Research at the Powerhouse Museum. Over the last two decades he was responsible for making a number of significant acquisitions and developing many exhibitions.
Michael is the author of numerous books including Imagining Space: Jacky Redgate 1980–2003 (2005); Leonardo da Vinci : The Codex Leicester (2001); Love Hotel (1997); Islands: Contemporary installation from Europe, America, Asia and Australia (1996, an exhibition catalogue with Kate Davidson); 1968' (1995, an exhibition catalogue with Christine Dixon) and European and American Paintings and Sculpture 1870-1970 in the Australian National Gallery (1992, with Michael Lloyd).
Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin
Adam Bromberg and Oliver Chanarin make the observation that, “For us an image is the result of a thousand decisions and much discussion - words are as much a part of image making as light is. Words are often presented alongside our photographs and indeed much of the work itself has been about exploring the relationship between these two vocabularies. We will present a range of work from our book projects to date including Ghetto, Mr. Mkhize's Portrait, Chicago, The Red House and Fig exploring how they have each used images and words.
Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin are a photographic team based in London. They have produced four photographic books; Trust (2000) which accompanied their solo-show at The Hasselblad Center, Ghetto (2003) a collection of their work as editors and principal photographers of Colors magazine and Mr Mkhize’s Portrait (2004) which documented South Africa ten years after apartheid and Chicago (2006). Broomberg and Chanarin tutor on the MA photojournalism course at London College of Communication. They regularly teach workshops in photography and continue to work editorially for magazines including The Guardian Weekend, The Observer Magazine and Life.
Daniel Palmer
Beauty in Photography
In a line of reasoning that descends from Walter Benjamin’s famous critique of New Objectivity in the early 1930s, the danger of photography is that it merely reproduces the world as it is, and says it is beautiful. Passivity is thus inscribed in the very notion of the beautiful, presented as a distraction that fails to turn viewers into thinkers. We are left as mere consumers, unable to productively understand the relationships underlying the image. Today this basic assumption underlies the common prejudice against practices as diverse as Sebastião Salgado’s black and white images (which are considered too beautiful), and fashion photography (whose beauty is considered irredeemably frivolous). Such debates are, of course, tied up with questions about authenticity and commercialism. In contemporary art photography, meanwhile, beauty is everywhere and yet its discussion is muted. At a time in which the distinction between art, documentary and fashion photography is blurred in the ubiquity of the carefully staged image, we might perhaps return to the question of beauty in photography. Where does beauty sit in relation to other aesthetic categories like the ‘sublime’ in relation to contemporary photography? Can beauty be critical? What are the terms of this criticality?
Dr Daniel Palmer is currently Lecturer, Department of Theory of Art & Design at Monash University. He publishes extensively, contributing regularly to a wide range of Australian and international art journals including Photofile, Real Time, Broadsheet and Frieze. He was previously the Project Coordinator at the Centre of Contemporary Photography and taught at the University of Melbourne. Originally from Perth, Palmer was actively involved in the Photography Gallery of WA in its formative years, and also held two exhibitions of photography at PICA before concentrating on writing and curating. As a curator, he is a strong advocate of emerging artists, illustrated by the photography exhibitions Between Place and Non-Place (2001) and Work (2004).
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