In a 1985 interview with Dean Bruton, South Australian filmmaker Ian Davidson suggests that he himself was the first person to have a photograph accepted for exhibition by South Australia’s Contemporary Art Society (CAS) some time in the 1950s, a year after the CAS committee rejected a photograph by John Walpole. Davidson speaks of a filmmaking collaboration with Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski featuring seven Adelaide artists and how that project forged bonds between film and painting and would strengthen ties and facilitate the adoption of trends from Europe and the US.

I recall David Bailey in an interview saying, “What’s an art photographer anyway? You don’t say you’re an art sculptor, you’re just a sculptor.” Adam Duktiewicz helps us out in his preface with the idea that art photography “gravitates around self-directed aesthetic and conceptual dimensions that speak to the artist’s taste, intellectual pursuits and awareness of traditions and ideas in art and photography and popular culture.” Perhaps we could augment this by saying that the photographers represented in this book have furthermore engaged with an arts and academic community by exhibiting, teaching and association.

The introduction to the book is written by Ed Douglas, who established and headed the first department of photography at the South Australian School of Art in 1977. He speaks of bringing an awareness of overseas acceptance and developments in photography to South Australia, where now for the first time photography could form a part of a visual arts degree on the same footing as painting, sculpture and printmaking. It is easy to liken the department in those early days to Gatsby’s swimming pool, as it seems many of the artists represented in this book passed through it in a time which from our 2020 viewpoint seems vibrant, exotic and distant. The span of this book’s survey 1970 to 2000 is well chosen, as this was a time of progress and change in the arts. Ed Douglas also writes in his introduction that Australia and particularly South Australia had been lagging behind the US and Europe in its recognition of photography.

What follows is a survey of twenty Adelaide art photographers, each of whom is represented by six pages of work. As well as this, each photographer presents us with a single page containing biographical information and a statement about their work. It is a very well produced book with with a nice clean design. The quality of the paper, the reproductions and printing are all excellent. 

The book also contains a philosophically informed essay by Gary Sauer-Thompson which places what was happening in Australian art and art theory in the context of US and European activity and philosophical discourse, and then considers South Australia as a subset of what was happening elsewhere in Australia. The essay provides a survey, and a record, of the various art-philosophical discussions that took place in South Australia at the time and which led to the formation of the Experimental Art Foundation and Progressive Art Movement.

This essay is not for the faint of heart; it’s written in a very dense academic style and is probably impenetrable to the general reader. Certainly I tried many times and failed to digest it, but grappling with it allowed me to see the book – and perhaps its purpose – more clearly.

The essay mirrored for me many of my own questions that formed from reading this book. What is included and excluded? Are omissions conscious exclusions or are they simply gaps? Of course these questions apply to any survey. As Sauer-Thompson posed them in relation to information previously available on art photography in South Australia, I was forced to apply the same logic in my consideration of this book.

In summing up I’d like to reintroduce my comparison with the earlier book, Art and Artists of South Australia. Both are books that record a moment in time; they are written while the artists referred to are alive and can speak for themselves. Both mark periods of transition, as we are entering now a time when books such as this are less likely to be written; where ephemeral collaborative online projects are more likely than fixed physical surveys. In placing one freshly minted work alongside another from 50 years ago I wonder what another 50 years will bring, and how Adelaide Art Photographers c. 1970-2000 will appear then. 

To close, I cannot do better than borrow the assessment of Ivor Francis in his foreword to the earlier book; here we have “an assemblage of data that will grow in value with the passage of time.”

References

¹ Art and Artists of South Australia by Nancy Benko. Published under the patronage of the Lidums family 1969

² State Library of South Australia, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection OH 15/8