Photography as Social Encounter: Three Works by Micky Allan, Sophie Calle and Simryn Gill

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Notes

1. Suzanne Davies, ‘Micky Allan: Photographer’, Lip 4 (1978–79): 49. In an interview from 1978, Allan said: ‘I saw photography as a form of social encounter—that what happened at the time between you and who you photographed was extremely important. In that sense, in comparison with painting, it is much more integrated into what is actually going on.’

2. Allan started taking photographs in 1974 after joining a loosely formed collective at Melbourne's Pram Factory in Carlton, then a centre for experimental and feminist theatre. While designing sets and posters, Allan learnt photography from the darkroom of Australian artist Virginia Coventry. Concurrently, Allan's art-school training in painting had led her to the unconventional practice of hand-painting her photographs, which she continued over several years. Her 1975 series of her friend, Laurel, shown in Three Women Photographers at the Ewing and George Paton Galleries in 1975 with fellow Australian artists Sue Ford and Coventry, marked the first of a wave of contemporary hand-coloured photographs exhibited in Australia. Traditionally, hand colouring was women's work, and its use by Allan was fundamentally antagonistic to the prevailing male-dominated aesthetic of modernist black-and-white photography. Following Allan, hand colouring was taken up by many other Australian women artists, including Ruth Maddison and Robyn Stacey. It should be noted that Allan's approach to photography was far from homogeneous. She was interested in places as much as people, taking in documentary projects (for example, a commission to document the CSR sugar refinery in Pyrmont, Sydney, on its centenary) and a sequence about the end of the day at a school for handicapped children (Yooralla at Twenty Past Three, 1978).

3. Memory Holloway, ‘In the Tracks of Isis’ in Micky Allen Perspective: 1975–1987 (Clayton: Monash University Gallery, 1987), 3. Allan's concerns extended more broadly, although she attended a ‘consciousness raising group’ and admits that feminism was important to her aims (email message to the author, 24 October 2012).

4. Drawing on a version of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’, personal histories were identified in the 1970s as a rebuttal of the values of formalist art criticism as codified by Clement Greenberg in New York.

5. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002).

6. Memory Holloway, ‘The Many Faces of Woman’, The Australian, 6 June 1978.

7. Carol Jerrems and Virginia Fraser, A Book About Australian Women (Fitzroy: Outback Press, 1974), n.p.

8. Holloway, ‘In the Tracks of Isis’, 7. It should be noted that a number of high-profile rape cases appeared in the Australian news at the time.

9. Susan Sontag's On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977) originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977.

10. Laurie Anderson, Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Twenty-Year Retrospective (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 146.

11. Joanna Lowry, ‘Negotiating Power’ in Face On: Photography as Social Exchange, ed. Mark Durden and Craig Richardson (London: Black Dog, 2000), 11.

12. Allan later used a similar technique in a commissioned series of portraits of the citizens of a South Australian town called Citizens/People of Elizabeth (1982–83), which also included the text of what was said by the photographed person during the encounter.

13. Virginia Fraser, ‘Time Out: A Different Temporality’, Art Monthly 247, March (2012): 12.

14. As Allan put it in 1978: ‘My Trip … is about what people think about photography—just anyone and everyone; there was a huge range of responses to being offered the chance to take a photograph. Hardly anyone said no—most people loved it. How much they wanted to know technically varied a lot and I just let them define that.’ quoted in Davies, ‘Micky Allan’, 52.

15. Such work was pioneered by figures like North American photographer Wendy Ewald, who, in 1965, taught impoverished Appalachian children to document their lives in photographs. Across the Atlantic in Britain, the Half Moon Photography Workshop (and its magazine, Camerawork) had an explicit goal of democratising the practice of photography in the 1970s, through the provision of darkrooms, workshops and, in some cases, cameras. This was seen as a consciousness-raising activity, informed by Marxist and feminist theory.

16. The work is alternatively known as The Shadow, The Detective, and The Shadow (Detective), which I have adopted here.

17. Sophie Calle, Double Game (London: Violette Editions, 1999), 69.

18. Calle, Double Game, 122–23.

19. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 87.

20. As Stuart Morgan suggests, Calle's work seems to parody ‘the conceptualist approach of ignoring the self’, by ‘presenting the reader with a fictional self about which nothing is learned’. Stuart Morgan, ‘Sophie Calle: Suite Vénitienne’, Frieze 3 (January–March, 1992): 20.

21. Jessica Morgan, ‘No Place Like Home’ in Simryn Gill, exh. cat. (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art and Koln: Walter Konig, 2008), 59.

22. Roadkill (2000), for instance, is an installation of everyday objects and fragments that have been run over by cars, which the artist collected on the roads of several cities over a number of years. Each of these flattened objects is mounted on a set of miniature toy wheels and then released into the gallery, raising questions about the origins and movements of objects within particular cultures.

23. Gill wrote this text for inclusion in curator Hans Ulrich Obrist's Do It, an experiment into how exhibition formats could be rendered more flexible and open-ended. See Obrist, ed., Do It: The Compendium (New York and Frankfurt: e-flux and Revolver, 2004), 110–11.

24. Morgan, ‘No Place Like Home’, 63.

25. Maggie Finch, ‘Simryn Gill: Questions of Coherence, Knowledge and Information’, Discipline 3 (Winter, 2013): 81–94.

26. The domestic interiors of Inland also recall Gill's Distance, 2003–08, in which she attempted to convey the inside of her home in Marrickville to someone residing outside of Australia. Despite producing 130 images, her attempt to create a comprehensive experience of her home ultimately failed, in her view. As she observed in an interview, ‘the final result is almost like an incoherence, it's too close, there is too much information’. ‘Simryn Gill in Conversation with Natasha Bullock and Lily Hibberd’, Photofile 76 (Summer, 2006): 17.

27. Naomi Cass, ‘How We Are in the World: The Photography of Simryn Gill’ in Simryn Gill: Inland (Fitzroy: Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2009), n.p.

28. Simryn Gill: Inland, n.p.

29. Books have frequently been part of Gill's practice, offering a readymade vehicle to explore how we order and describe the world around us. She carved and sliced into old books to create makeshift shrines in Pooja/Loot, 1992; created paper leaves for lush tropical foliage from the pages of classic books dealing with human exploration and botanical evolution in Forest, 1996–98; asked people to nominate a book or text of personal importance from which she uses the pages as material to create bead necklaces in Pearls, 2000–; and erased the captions from photographs in the Life World Library in 32 Volumes, 2006.

30. Leon Goh, ‘Simryn Gill: Inland’, Photofile 89 (April–July, 2010): 71.

31. Marcus Bunyan, ‘Review: “Simryn Gill: Inland” at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy’, Artblart, posted 6 December 2009, www.artblart.com/2009/12/06/review-simryn-gill-inland-at-the-centre-for-contemporary-photography-fitzroy.

32. Bunyan also notes the irony—perhaps unintentionally—of being asked to wear white gloves to handle the prints, as if to remind us of the settler relation to Australian land.

33. Morgan, ‘No Place Like Home’, 65.

34. On cosmopolitanism in contemporary art, see Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (London: Routledge, 2011) and Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

35. On the dialogical in photographic portraiture, see Lowry, ‘Negotiating Power’, 9–25.

36. Wearing's artist statement spells this out: ‘The bizarre request to be “captured” on film by a complete stranger is compounded by a non-specific space; the blank piece of paper, which almost replicates an unexposed film. … [The images] interrupt the logic of photodocumentary and snapshot photography through the subjects’ clear collusion in and engineering of their own representation.’ Wearing, quoted in David Campany, Art and Photography (London: Phaidon, 2003), 128.

37. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1977), 10.

38. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (New York: Zone Books, 2008).