A matter of perspective
The exhibition of press photographs by Mervyn Bishop show his mastery of the medium.
From antiquity to the Renaissance, and even to the conceptual tendencies in modern art, Western art theory has had a certain bias towards the intellectual aspect of art-making, and has often tended to depreciate the manual and technical aspects of the process. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, wrote of painting as essentially a discorso mentale, as opposed to sculpture, the art of his archrival Michelangelo, which was more “mechanical”.
And yet Leonardo was at the same time a technical prodigy and the greatest practitioner of his generation — at least in drawing and oil painting, even if his mural experiments were less successful — and all theoretical writers of the past took it for granted that artists were masters of the material practices through which they had to express their ideas.
For every art form has a craft behind it, which is not only a manual practice but a set of processes in which hand and mind work together to manipulate matter in the production of meaning. In fact, one of the ironies of art today is that painting has been crippled by the loss of confidence in technical articulacy while in art forms based on new technologies, high levels of technical skill are regarded as indispensable.
Photography is an interesting case, for the age of the digital camera has finished off any claim the photographic image once had to the veracity of direct witness, and, by obviating the need for technical skill, made the taking of superficially satisfactory pictures too easy. Serious contemporary photographers have had to find other ways to use their medium, but by far the greater part of the corpus of great photography remains pre-digital and in black and white.
One can’t help being struck by such thoughts on entering Mervyn Bishop’s exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW. Immediately the images have a crispness, a clarity and decisiveness that all come from the artist’s mastery of his medium: each picture required decisions about filters, aperture and shutter speed, as well as composition and timing — and these were decisions that often had to be made quickly and efficiently, in the heat of the moment.
All of these skills were honed by years of experience as a newspaper photographer: Bishop, born in 1945, was hired as a cadet by The Sydney Morning Herald in 1962, the first Aboriginal photographer to work at the paper. But it is clear too that technical skill is not just a matter of dominating the medium: it is also a matter of coming to understand what it is capable of, becoming attuned to it.
Thus, even from a distance one is struck by Bishop’s sense of composition, which is what makes the difference between a snap and memorable photography. And the sense of composition is itself based on two things. The first is an intuitive understanding of the inherent geometry of the picture area — its divisions into halves, quarters, thirds; its diagonals; even the location of the golden section in width or in height. These are the factors that make the placement of a head or figure significant rather than random.
The other aspect of photographic composition immediately visible in these works is the use of perspective, again something inherent in the very nature of the medium, for photography is heir to the Renaissance theory of perspective. It is in fact a mechanical realisation of the theoretical model of monocular vision directed at a single focal point, a model so unlike the way our two eyes, constantly glancing in different directions, actually see the world, yet so good at producing fixed and memorable images.
The subjects of these photographs are almost all drawn from the life of Aboriginal Australia, mostly from the 1960s and 70s, although a couple of shots included in the exhibition are from as late as 1988. Bishop’s images are engaging in their sincerity, directness and lack of either sentimentality or rhetoric. An early example is the shot of his two younger cousins rowing a boat on the river, and another from the same year shows both white and black children biting at apples on a string.
The juxtaposition of the two groups of children here is an interesting one: both are taking part in a common game at a town picnic, and yet the contrast is subtly emphasised by the two figures not engaged in the game, the black boy in the foreground and the white boy next to him in the composition and yet further away in the diagonal space of the picture. Nothing is overstated: there is just the black boy in his own world, and the white one looking at him, perhaps merely in curiosity.
A number of works, almost of necessity, reflect on the way Aboriginal lives take place within the new framework of white culture and the modern world. Thus, Far West Children’s health clinic, Manly (1968) shows a young nurse in the foreground measuring out medicine into a small cup, while two young boys in the middle ground watch her, one absently and the other intently and even with suspicion.
Very occasionally, we glimpse vestiges of a bygone way of life, as in Children playing in river, Mumeka (1975), a striking tonal composition of strong blacks and whites, presumably using a red filter and perhaps a kind of homage to Axel Poignant’s beautiful photograph of a similar subject, The Swimmers, Milingimbi, Arnhem Land (1952), which Bishop could have seen as a student of photography at Sydney Technical College.
Far from this world are the three toddlers in Save the children preschool, Nambucca Heads (1974), or the mostly black children in School bus, Yarrabah (1974). Even adults are brought within the structures of modern health and education systems, including the two tribal women learning to iron clothes at a home management course in Yuendemu (1974) and the four women sitting outside a health centre in Womenfolk, Bowraville (1974).
Some pictures are intended expressly to document indigenous disadvantage, including The Bus stop, Yalambie Reserve, Mt Isa (1974), although Bishop makes it clear poverty does not, as in today’s remote communities, equate to dereliction: there is a sense of unemployment and even idleness, but one of the young men in the foreground holds a guitar and all seem alert.
Similarly, Woman standing near electric power cord in water (1988) is an image of inadequate housing — a kind of hut and a caravan — and the title draws our attention to the potentially dangerous power cord submerged in a puddle. The owner of the home, however, standing in the centre of the composition, is a dignified woman and Bishop recalls that everything inside was neatly kept and respectable, much as we see in early paintings of settlers’ simple huts.
A number of images evoke another aspect of Aboriginal life at the time: successful integration into the new world of the 20th century. Sometimes the theme is more self-conscious, as in the portrait of Alan Judd, ABC trainee radio announcer, Sydney (1968), at other times it is quite natural: the portrait of Fisherman Charlie Ardler, Wreck Bay (1975) seems to express a completely relaxed union of Aboriginal and Western identities.
More complex is the portrait of Roslyn Watson (1973), a young ballerina who had just joined what would become the Sydney Dance Company. Ballet is a highly artificial discipline, tremendously demanding, and one that could seem particularly alien to the natural way of moving of the Aboriginal body; yet Watson became a successful dancer who enjoyed an international career, so it would clearly be wrong to suggest she is somehow being oppressed by an imposed cultural model.
Any number of these pictures could be forced into a tendentious ideological reading, and the most spectacular case is Life and death dash (1971), for which Bishop won the Nikon-Walkley Australian Press Photographer of the Year award. The photographer has captured a nun rushing down the street with an alarmed expression, holding an Aboriginal child in her arms.
This picture has been interpreted by some — and indeed even on Bishop’s Wikipedia page — as related to the role of the church in the Stolen Generations. In fact it has nothing to do with this subject, and in reality the moral significance of the image is quite the opposite. The child had swallowed its mother’s medication and the nun was rushing to get it help, as the title of the picture suggests.
It is an interesting example of the way the force of ideology can distort our perception of images and even of facts. I alluded earlier to the way some more ambiguous pictures can be read in different ways: thus we can feel the pathos of Aboriginal children in a Western kindergarten. The dislocation of culture is always painful, but we cannot pretend such dislocation has not happened or can be avoided.
The tragedy of social and moral collapse in the remote communities, with their endemic alcoholism, violence and abuse, should have been predictable. To imagine such communities could continue to be centres of a traditional way of life was always a fantasy, and betrays a profound misunderstanding of the way culture operates.
Culture is rooted in work, in this case the relentless work of the hunter and gatherer. Everything else, from social structure to moral codes and belief systems, stems from that fundamental reality. If you take away the element that forms our principal connection to the world, the whole structure becomes arbitrary and meaningless. In the absence of work and of belief in their traditional values, all human beings become self-destructive.
And this is even without considering the demoralising effect of superior technology. It is a commonplace of anthropology that you can disrupt the culture of a Stone Age tribe simply by giving them a couple of iron axes. The deeper meaning of the picture of the two children and the nurse is that they are encountering medicine far more effective than anything their parents had known.
The ideology that produced the disastrous quasi-apartheid of the remote communities could not be more different from Bishop’s vision in these pictures. He reveals the dislocation and the disadvantage, and is sensitive to the difficulties of venturing into another environment and being more or less accepted there. But he also holds out hope of a future of integration, not separation, between the peoples of Australia.
Ideology encourages the self-pity, resentment and, as we say today, victim mentality that are too often still found in contemporary Aboriginal art, and are encouraged by ideologically minded or just opportunistic curators. Bishop’s images offer a realistic but also optimistic alternative, joyful in his remarkable picture of Lionel Rose and solemn in the celebrated photograph of Gough Whitlam pouring soil into the hand of Vincent Lingiari.
Mervyn Bishop. Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, to October 8.
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