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SMH 05.11.07 |
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Reviews
Beyond fashion to fine portraitureJuno Gemes’s collection bears witness to Aboriginal life and icons, writes Robert McFarlane April has proved to be an expansive month for photography in Sydney. Juno Gemes’s Proof exhibition has successfully transferred from Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery to the elegant on-campus exhibition space at Macquarie University. Gemes’s Proof show represents 30 years of documenting the emergence of the Aboriginal movement in Australia. It is frequently elegiac in its assembly of images with departed cast members of the drama of 20th-century Aboriginality present – in image, if not in life – from elegantly dressed iconoclast Burnham Burnham to poet Oodgerooo Noonuccal and inevitably, Charles (Kumatjay) Perkins. Burnham Burnham, once known as Harry Penrith, is photographed in 1984 standing next to fellow NSW South Coast identity Guboo Ted Thomas. This picture carries the trademark easy rapport of Gemes’s other images. Even when her subjects are looking close to camera, Gemes’s presence is barely noticed, so easily is her role as a photographer accepted. One picture which particularly arrested me was of dancer Lois Cook, photographed deep in rocky bushland near Sydney. As part of a fashion shoot organised by Gemes using Aboriginal models wearing garments with indigenous motifs, Cook reveals a presence infinitely more powerful than the vacuous chic usually associated with fashion. Cook’s prideful gaze easily ferried this image from fashion into fine portraiture. Gemes’s artlessly diarist approach to covering political change for black Australia suggests that photographic artistry was never her first concern. Indeed, there is a certain unevenness to Gemes’s printing style, but this photographer’s successful witnessing of political change in recent Australian history outweighed any minor technical reservations I might have had. Ultimately I was more impressed by Gemes’s ability to be present at important intersections in political history – such as the handback of Uluru to the traditional owners in 1985. Occasionally, however, images tilted from reportage into rough surrealism as with the eerie Two Members of the Stolen Generation, Alice Springs 2000 where the women were photographed on stage watched over by a ghostly, much larger video projection of themselves.
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The
Sydney Morning Herald Metropolitan 20 April 2004