Skip to main content

Angela Blakeley and David Lloyd

Never Again: Giving Voice to Survivors of the Rwanda Genocide; Blakeley & Lloyd: Social Documentary Photography 1993 – 2010

Anne Kirker
Eyeline 76
The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

Documentary photography occupies an uncertain place in relationship to art museums in Australia. Often it seems as though the straightforward recording of joy or tragedy, or simply the mundane, through the lens of a camera does not qualify to be embraced as part of the art canon. Only if there is an intellectualisation of the image, does it pass muster. Yet if such direct and challenging imagery were cloaked in theoretical justifications then the dislocation and trauma so often implied could well be muted for the viewer.

Mindful of this conundrum, Queenslanders Angela Blakely and David Lloyd articulated the exhibition of work from their fifteen year collaboration in a manner recognisable for surveys in practically any media mounted by art institutions, in this case the Museum of Brisbane. For their series of photographs examining conflict in Africa and other parts of the world (the former USSR, for example) as well as individuals in personal crisis closer to home, an intermixing of aesthetic genres was employed. Linear arrangements of text-with-image black and white photographs, focus walls sporting single large-scale colour images (some backlit), assemblages of different genre photographs in a single work, all pointed to the broadening of what used to be conceived as photo-journalism.

In no particular chronological order, the series selected included troubling topics that have particular relevance for Australia, namely anorexia, male suicide, and marginalised Indigenous youth in Mt Isa. Let me explain how these photographers, either individually or together, presented such news-worn topics in fresh and compelling ways. For her series ‘Jenny’ (1998), Blakely showed the portrait of a troubled nineteen year-old woman through a juxtaposition of three large-scale cibachromes. The first photograph matter-of-factually showed the girl’s