PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE RETURN OF THE DEAD

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE RETURN OF THE DEAD
3.00pm Saturday 14 August 2010 FREE EVENT
Bookings preferred mga@monash.vic.gov.au or call 03 8544 0500

Join prominent photographic artists ANNE FERRAN and ROD McNICOL and well-known curator and writer HELEN ENNIS as they discuss photography's ability to keep the past alive.

Contemporary culture is obsessed with keeping the dead alive. While vampires and zombies were once the mainstay of horror films and literature, the success of Buffy and more recently the Twilight saga suggest our collective fascination with the undead has reached phenomenal proportions.

Photography is also preoccupied with the undead: it keeps the past alive, in the form of a magical, silvery image. As part of its latest exhibition Living deadly: haunted surfaces and contemporary art, MGA is hosting a panel discussion on photography’s ability to keep the past alive.

image: Rod McNICOL Untitled 1–20 from the series Memento mori 2002–3
20 pigment ink-jet prints on cotton paper 2010
courtesy of the artist and Place Gallery, Melbourne

Barbara Oehring wins Most Dramatic Image

MGA Friend Barbara Oehring took out the LEXAR MOST DRAMATIC IMAGE prize at CCP 2010 Kodak Salon for her photograph Sleep in Fright. Barbara wins a Sony DCR SX40Silver Handycam & Lexar Card Pack $1427. Check out the show until 25 September 2010

Nan Goldin at Heide

Heide's current exhibition Up close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang argues that photography offers a means to engage with and give a picture to "subculture". In this way, the exhibition signposts the political and ethnographic preoccupations of certain photographers of the 1960s-80s.

Aside from the excellent survey of Jerrem's work, the exhibition provides a great opportunity to see Goldin's keystone work The ballad of sexual dependency. Goldin first began showing this slide show with soundtrack to friends - invariably the subject of the photographs - at venues around New York City in the late 1970s. At Heide, it is seen in extended and somewhat updated form. The slide show runs for over an hour and has to be viewed in full. Even if not you're enamoured with Goldin's refusal of technical virtuosity, it's impossible not to be affected by the work's melancholia and intimacy.

Jerrems at MGA and Heide

There are two great opportunities in Melbourne at the moment to consider the significant legacy of one of the city's most important photographers Carol Jerrems (1949-80). A large survey of Jerrems' photographs opened yesterday at Heide Museum of Modern Art. Up close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang draws on a range of public and private collections to build a convincing picture of Jerrems as a great photographer whose work engaged keenly with the politics and style of Melbourne's avant-garde during the 1970s. MGA is showing a series of pictures made recently by Lyndal Walker and Concettina Inserra that draw on the legacy of Jerrems, Taking pictures some time later.

The series presents portraits of Walker and Inserra's milieu, each holding a print of their earlier photograph "Pole Street" (2000), which restages Jerrems' most famous picture "Vale Street" (1975). Also included is a 1976 photograph of Jerrems' friend Juliet holding a print of "Vale Street", itself the point of origin for Walker and Inserra's recent series. We get a clear sense of the influence of Jerrems for later generations of artists. Lyndal and Tina's photographs also suggest that the gender and sexual politics indicated in Jerrems' work, with the hopes it placed in cultural practice as a driver for social reform, remains a work in progress.

Shaune

Bill Henson lectures

Today's Sunday Age has a report on eminent artist Bill Henson's lecture to be delivered tomorrow (Monday 2 August) at BMW Edge, Federation Square. The article suggests this is Bill's first public talk since the controversy over his work two years ago. That's not quite true: Bill spoke at MGA on 29 September last year, when he answered questions from the crowd, some of which touched on the controversy. Bill will again speak to MGA visitors on 12 August.

Shaune