Robert McFarlane photographer and writer

This is my first weblog - designed to be essentially diarist - but hopefully with comments of value from many sources on the artistic medium that belongs to all of us - photography.

I now live in Adelaide but visit Sydney regularly to write my photography column for the Sydney Morning Herald.

My most recent trip coincided with seeing the last days of an expansive exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP) showcasing three artists. The first exhibition began literally in the passage leading into the ACP www.acp.com.au and was James Brickwood's evocative coverage of an annual Australian social ritual - "Schoolies" at the Gold Coast.

Every year we read about thousands of end of year high school students descending on the Queensland coast but this year a talented young photojournalist actually showed us what they were like - looking, without sentiment, at Australia's youth culture. James Brickwood, of Oculi photo agency www.oculi.com.au and the Sydney Morning Herald, explored the social phenomenon that is Schoolies Week, producing a memorable, non-judgmental photo essay. My main reservation was that he may have got even closer had he chosen one or two individuals, and explored just that avenue, as Bruce Davidson did in his influential 1960 Esquire magazine essay, "Under The Boardwalk".

In the main ACP gallery, Darren Sylvester www.ssfa.com.au introduced us to immaculately conceived, imagined realities - from a still, meditative young woman in close up to two children standing by a lake, immersed in their private experience.

Sylvester has a talent for deflecting the viewer of his pictures from taking things too literally, allowing them to enter his imagination and that of his subjects. In the front gallery, Queensland photo-artist Marian Drew www.mariandrew.com explores still-life imagery punctuated with dead animals ... deceased sea birds and bandicoots sadly forming parts of her beautifully realized colour images.

Using superb large format pigment inkjet printing, Drew's elegant pictures constantly reference painting, but remain intrinsically photographic.

Afterwards, I met briefly with an artist from a recent ACP show, Alexia Sinclair, www.alexiasinclair.com

Her previous series at the ACP displayed twelve historic regal women - from Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette, Elizabeth the First through to Queen Christina of Sweden - to critical acclaim.

We discussed her forthcoming, parallel visual essay on regal men.

We drove to a Surry Hills caf�, the Book Kitchen www.thebookkitchen.com.au and were joined by a friend of Sinclair's - one of Australia's most talented young fashion designers - Hannah McNicol - who uses photography imaginatively on her website www.hannahmcnicol.com and is currently launching her own fashion designs as well as clothes specifically created for pregnant women www.bumpology.com

My next destination was STILLS Gallery, driven this time by Sandy Edwards, a previous Director of STILLS www.stillsgallery.com.au Sadly, I arrived also in the final days of another remarkable still-life exhibition by the doyen of the genre in Australia - Robyn Stacey and one Australia's most talented, minimalist photographers - Christine Cornish.

I was just in time to hear the last part of an artists' talk by both women. Just for a sense of scale, I photographed Robyn in front of her immense, recent colour print entitled, "Mr Macleay's Fruit and Flora, 2008" from her series, "The Great and the Good", printed,
for a change these days, using the type C process rather than pigment inkjet printing.

My last destination was historic Customs House, at Sydney's Circular Quay.

Though Sandy Edwards remains associated with STILLS Gallery, the former Director has started a new consultancy of her own, offering creative support for photographic artists and their galleries, called ARTHERE. www.arthere.com.au Her latest exhibition, curated by Edwards, is Mayu Kanamori's "The Island of the Ancients", an exploration of Sardinia's centenarian citizens.

My review of this exhibition for the Sydney Morning Herald can be found at http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts-reviews/mayu-kanamori-the-island-of-the-ancients

As I checked my notes I was greeted by a friend, ebullient Sydney photographer Paul Green http://web.mac.com/paulgreen_photo_film who was on his way to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) nearby to document a Mike Parr performance for the 2008 Sydney Bienniale. Green has a raw, potent vision and occasionally a wonderfully oblique sense of humour.

As we talked I remembered a picture Green had exhibited a couple of years ago at the Bondi Pavilion Gallery - a landscape made near South Australia's Flinders Ranges that showed a playful visual signature that is all too rare.

While I consumed a much needed Caf� Latte, Green said an interesting thing. "Digital (photography) is making it harder and harder to make a living." he maintained.

"Clients want ever higher megapixels (in cameras) and are not satisfied with (even) the high end digital SLR's. It's cheapened the (photographic) process in some way. Now people want their pictures straight away and ... don't want to pay a lot of money. With digital they think anyone can do it. But with the art documentation I do, things have to be as perfect as possible at the capture stage. You (then) have to give them a fully retouched picture. Otherwise it comes back on you when they're published (if there's a flaw)."

Green then hurried away across the square at the Quay to the MCA to photograph Parr, leaving me thinking of the mixed blessing that digital photography can sometimes be.

EXHIBITIONS IN SEPTEMBER

Cinematographer Gary Steer has a refined, minimalist, colour exhibition in the Mary Meyer Gallery www.meyergallery.com.au at 269 Bourke Street, Darlinghurst, running until September 23rd. Steer is yet another photographer seduced by abstract forms, especially in colour, within the Australian landscape.

Steer has a long career as a celebrated documentary film-maker, especially concerning animal behaviour, for DISCOVERY channel, BBC and the National Geographic. His photographs, however, are meditative and delicate.

Richard Green comes to landscape photography from a background as a physicist. Now retired, Green, with wife Carol, flies his own twin turbine EADS Eurocopter and documents the Australian landscape as he finds it. His landscape images
of Australia are as majestic as Steer's are minimalist and graphic.

"Wild Places" will be the last exhibition at Byron McMahon Gallery www.sandrabyrongallery.com.au in Redfern, owing to the end of the partnership between Sandra Byron and Peter McMahon.

With over thirteen years' experience as Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery of NSW and a further thirteen years as
a pioneering private gallery owner specialising in photography, we await the next incarnation of the Sandra Byron Gallery with interest. "Wild Places" continues until September 27th.

The Josef Lebovic Gallery are having an exhibition of Australian and International photography with the general theme of "Industry".
Some of the connections to this theme are very lateral indeed but there is no mistaking that this show, mounted in Josef Lebovic's traditionally generous 'Salon Hang', is littered with photographic masterpieces - from Andre Kertesz's "Lost Cloud, New York 1968"
to his archetypal high viewpoint "Pont des Arts, Paris 1929"

Australian photographers also fare well with the late David Moore's powerful "Sydney Harbour Looking East, 1963" and Roger Scott's amusing 1986 take on maintaining the Sydney Opera House.

In the spirit of frank disclosure, I should also mention that the Josef Lebovic Gallery www.joseflebovicgallery.com represents my archive. The exhibition continues until October 11th 2008.

The next blog will include the new exhibition at STILLS Gallery featuring Polixeni Papapetrou and Beverley Veasey. There will also be additional coverage in future blogs of anything that makes our life as photographers better - from new cameras and printers - to software. At no point in photography's history has the technology of image-making evolved so quickly and this space will attempt to note important changes as they arise.

Robert McFarlane September 2008