Different Take On Imagery

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday July 23, 2008

Reviewed by Robert McFarlane

PHOTOGRAPHY

VIVID National Photography Festival

Canberra, to October 12.

THEY are doing things differently at Canberra's expansive, inaugural VIVID photography festival. With more than 100 exhibitions, works will be on display everywhere from elegant suburban home galleries to the concrete caverns of the National Gallery of Australia.

Gael Newton's monumental Picture Paradise at the NGA assesses a century of photography in the Asia-Pacific region to 1940. She aligns photography's birth with emerging Asian-Pacific nations.

Francis Chit's 1886 image of Crown Prince Vajirunhis's Bangkok investiture portrays Asian regal power as comparable to European splendour - but with an Asian accent.

That sense of difference pervades Picture Paradise, with Newton's curatorial eye extracting sharp contradictions from familiar subjects. Samuel Bourne's 1865 photograph of the Taj Mahal shows the familiar avenue leading to the architectural masterpiece lined by forests so dense they partially obscure the entrance.

Newton also uncovers a surprising fragment from Julia Margaret Cameron's final years in Sri Lanka. Cameron was known for powerful Victorian portraits of British luminaries; her 1876 portrait of two of her Tamil servants renders the young girls' grace - and fear.

But the real delight among Picture Paradise's hundreds of works are the daguerreotypes, the tiny metal plates on which images were made during photography's infancy.

A few kilometres away, at ArtWranglers, a villa in Dickson, Willameena Gentle hosted an exhibition of Axel Poignant photographs. Poignant photographed indigenous Australia with affection and little sentimentality. However, his 1948 picture of young Croker Island women now seems ironic, considering that island's role in dispersing the stolen generation. Axel Poignant: Some Significant Portraits 1938-1952 can be viewed by appointment at ArtWranglers, 18 Morphett Street, Dickson (02625709490) until August 3.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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