Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia 1848–2020

Abstract

Over the past few decades, a new genre of photography book has established itself, a genre dedicated to the history of photographic exhibitions. These books have included volumes about great exhibitions – The Family of Man continues to generate its own halo of publications – and the curatorial record of certain museums who like to think of themselves as great, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Installation View offers a different perspective: a historical survey of photography exhibitions of all kinds within the boundaries of a particular, rather modest, nation-state – Australia. Compiled by two eminent local scholars, the book began as a research project dedicated to constructing a comprehensive timeline of Australian photography exhibitions, now available in online form (see www.photocurating.net). This timeline remains the backbone of their book, although its chronological imperative has been mediated by the imposition of thirty-six chapters, each with a short essay dedicated to a particular theme or type of exhibition, and sometimes ranging backwards and forwards in time. By this means, the book seeks to trace ‘the constantly mutating forms and conventions through which photographers and curators have selected and presented photographs to the public’. This chapter structure has a number of benefits. It allows the book to extend from the earliest exhibitions of photographs in Australia, held in the 1840s, through to the nearpresent, but also to pause and consider some key moments, such as the arrival of a touring version of The Family of Man in 1959 or the establishment of the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 1974. A familiar global story, in which displays of work in commercial studios are given a more formal setting by professional photographic associations, until galleries and museums begin to provide an art historical mode of presentation in the twentieth century, is thereby inflected with regional specificity, and even with significant differences. Most striking is the way that Installation View locates its exhibition history within a colonial context. The display of daguerreotypes of exotic natives in Adelaide and Sydney in 1846 and 1848 is, for example, given a counterpoint in a chapter devoted to exhibitions of work produced by indigenous photographers in the 1980s. Another distinctive element is a series of chapters dedicated to ‘intercolonial’ exhibitions, the first situated in Melbourne in 1866, offering their audiences ‘a triumphalist representation of the colonial project’. As one writer congratulated his readers in the Australian Monthly Magazine in January 1867, ‘they [the photographs he saw] mark the growth of art in this our antipodean world, and exhibit the high standards of taste to which we, as inhabitants of new colonies, have arrived’. A later chapter titled ‘Exhibiting the Modern World (1937–54)’ examines another version of this national self-promotion in its discussion of the modernist photographic modules mounted in the Australian Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. As the exhibition’s designer Douglas Annand claimed, it was a ‘display in which national character, the nature of the country, its life and industry, are dramatised into an exciting and informative spectacle’. Already, then, this book takes a liberal view of what constitutes the ‘in Australia’ promised by its subtitle. As an outpost of the British Empire, the penal settlement that became Australia was always a permeable entity, with both photographers and photographs regularly moving back and forth across its borders. Martyn Jolly, along with co-author Elisa DeCourcy, has already revealed, in a 2020 book titled Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle, the extraordinary transnational story of English-born daguerreotypist J. W. Newland, who opened his first studio in New Orleans in the USA and subsequently photographed in Central and South America, the South Seas, Australia and India, before being killed in Calcutta in 1857. Installation View posits an 1848 display in Sydney of 200 daguerreotypes by Newland as ‘the first solely photographic exhibition in Australia’. The claim underlines the difficulty of defining a ‘first’ and even an ‘exhibition’, let alone the ‘photographic’ – Newland also presented projected magic-lantern shows. Not mentioned in Installation View, for example, is an earlier presentation of photographs by Adelaide-based painter and illustrator, Samuel Thomas Gill, who had imported daguerreotype equipment from Richard Beard in London, along with specimens of the Beard studio’s work. Gill then