Reveries: photography and mortality

27 April to 5 August 2007

Photography has long been an integral part of life’s ordinary and extraordinary rituals. It is present from the moment of birth onwards, but what role does it play in the final stages of people’s lives? This groundbreaking exhibition is concerned with photographs made in the presence of or consciousness of death. It features work by Australian and New Zealand photographers from the late 1970s up to the present day. The exhibition aims to extend notions about portraiture: in the face of mortality representations of self also encompass the possibility of the dissolution of self.The exploration of ideas associated with mortality has been enormously varied and highly individualized. However, some common elements are apparent – in the strategies photographers have adopted and in the images they have created. There is, for example, a recurring interest in the interplay between dark and light, inside and outside, self and other. The use of metaphor has also proven crucial as a means of creating an open-ended visual language. The natural world appears is an insistent presence, whether in the form of the moon, sky, clouds, flowers or birds.

Reveries: photography and mortality is organised into groups of works that are concerned either with death of self or death of other.

Olive Cotton, Max Dupain, David Moore, Alex Poignant and Michael Riley are among those represented with a selection of their ‘last’ photographs – reflections on their own mortality. These are not portraits in a conventional sense because the subject’s physical presence, and the inter-related matters of likeness and one’s position in society, is regarded as irrelevant. Instead, self is represented as immaterial, not separate from the external physical world but woven invisibly into it. The flowers Max Dupain photographed hover in an indeterminate space, they are neither one thing nor another. In Michael Riley’s poetic Cloud series different objects float across the viewer’s field of vision – a boomerang, a bible, a wing of an angel and a feather, each improbably but perfectly suspended in the sky.

The second group of works in the exhibition deals more specifically with dying as a process. Carol Jerrems photographed the deterioration of her own body in a compelling series of photographs taken in hospital a few months before her death. Rod McNicol, Jack Picone and William Yang are among those who have worked collaboratively with the terminally ill, in some instances over an extended period of time. Yang personalizes his documentary approach by writing onto his photographic prints, combining text and image to provide a highly personal narrative about the illness of his friend Allan who died from AIDS/HIV. The AIDS-related work also has an activist dimension, bringing into the public domain the effects of the epidemic on the gay community.

The exhibition also includes postmortem portraits – for example, as part of New Zealand photographer Anne Noble’s series on the death of her father. Noble considers the ways in which the dead remain present to those who are living.

The photographs in Reveries operate at the limits of what can be given visual form and yet they admirably fulfill a number of concrete functions. They convey more information about the incredible complexity and diversity of individual human experience, and underscore the possibilities of the photographic medium for creative and imaginative expression. Their significance, however, extends further than this for they also represent the shared desire of photographers and subjects to communicate their personal views on life and death. These photographs – made not for the subject but for those left behind – have come to assume a life of their own.

Helen Ennis, Guest Curator of Reveries: photography and mortality is a Senior Lecturer in Art Theory and the Associate Head at the Australian National University, School of Art.

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