The Photograph and Australia (2015) by Judy Annear is a strange and puzzling book.

Its strengths are highlighting the conceptual and historical aspects of photography in Australia plus the scholarship that stands on the shoulders of those early curators who first collected, exhibited and wrote about Australian photography. Gail Newton, Alan Davies, Anne-Marie Willis and Helen Ennis are mentioned. Instead of producing another historical overview of a great or master photographic canon, Annear presents an argument on the nature of Australia and its primary concerns based on the “latest thinking on photography and its connection to people, place culture and history”. This is done through the exploration of 5 themes, namely, time, nation, people, place and transmission through the collective photographic archive.

However, this exploration is reduced to ” two major ideas or subjects : people and land (or country). Australian based photographers were and are exemplary as portraitists and landscape photographers and have much to say about people and environment.” What is ignored, pushed into background, or displaced is the subject of photography and the city. Though there are images of the city scattered throughout the text, oddly, the city itself is not a major theme or primary concern.

Odd because most Australians live in the city, as do photographers. The latter have also photographed the city in both the 19th and 20th centuries. Captain Sweet, Mark Strizic, Wolfgang Sievers, Max Dupain, Athol Shmithe, Grant Mudford, Trent Parke, Greg Wayn and Brett Leigh Dicks quickly come to mind. This would suggest that photography in Australia, as in Europe, has been closely associated with the city in industrial modernity. The modern, industrial city even understood itself through its own image.

I am at a loss to understand the absence of the city as a major section or theme in a photographic project highlighting the conceptual and historical aspects of photography in Australia. At a loss because in photographing the city the photographers represented the complex ways that space, place, people and history were reimagined in conjunction with the industrial, topographical, economic and technological changes associated with Australian in the second half of the twentieth century. It is odd because the lecture series associated with the exhibition was entitled ‘How photography made modern Australia’ involving “experts [Julie Ewington, Martin Jolly and Jane Lydon] from a broad range of artistic disciplines to provide context and insight to the history of photography.” Yet there is no mention of how photography in the city made modern Australian in the book, even though any realistic conception of modern Australia would have to include the city.

Secondly, though the lecture series is not online, I would hope that the speakers would have questioned the idea of photography making modern Australia. . Surely the making would have been more the operations of capital, empire and settlers than photography. Nor is it clear that photography alone made the idea of modern Australia. Would not painting and literature created the conception of a pastoral Australia?

The words ‘city’ or ‘urban’ are not even listed in the index of The Photograph and Australia, even though it is published the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney, which is Australia’s current global city. The preoccupation with the nation — the book investigates how photography was harnessed to create the idea of a nation” — suggests that we are standing in the 1930s primarily looking back to Federation and to the colonies on the Australia continent in the nineteenth century to a largely imaginary past in which settler Australia was an agricultural country peopled with miners, small farmers and shearers. The look forward from the 1930s is more of a glance. The backward focus on settler Australia as modern is very strange, given that ‘the urban mode of life’ was one of the primary concerns of photographers in the second half of the twentieth century.

One reference point of The Photograph and Australia is the atlas format which is a platform on which things happen, on which connections are made between images, only to be unmade and considered anew. A notable example is Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, a picture atlas based around photography, which created the potential space for interpretation, experimentation, and even subversion against the hegemonic art historical order.The Photograph and Australia’s emphasis on the nineteenth century and aboriginal people provides a welcome balance to previous accounts a picture atlas highlighted the 1930s with it international modernism, and the 1970s with its national counter-culturalism. Annear makes no claim that the book is a definitive or encompassing text that can account for all of Australia and Australians — she acknowledges that it barely scratches the surface of the various Australian archives containing photographs.

Despite this incompleteness, the text is seriously weakened by its failure to consider the city in terms of time, place, people and history in Australian modernity. This is especially so when the exhibition’s title insists on recognizing the role of photography in representing something of what Australia was and is. It offers us little by way of the immanent deep theme of photography and the city in Australia; or what the concerns of the urban photographers about the city were and are. More specially modern Australia would mean an industrial Australia and the way that modern, industrial Australia was interpreted by photographing the city still needs to be constructed and interpreted from the various archives of Australian photography.

The Photograph and Australia

Photography and time

Post-Covid Adelaide