carol jerrems with larry clark, nan goldin and william yang
The 1970s was a fertile time for US and Australian photography. An increasing sense of political disillusionment arising from the Vietnam War, burgeoning social movements and the emergence of a new counter culture all demanded a fresh approach to art and life. In Australia a younger generation of students graduated from newly established tertiary courses in photography, dissatisfied with modernist attempts to distil complexity into an essence and seeking to address broader experiences that exceeded the camera’s frame. Hitting the streets and looking to their immediate environments, they used their cameras as a tool to share their experiences and promote social change.
The role played by the celebrated Australian photographer, Carol Jerrems, within this climate is the focus of Natalie King’s exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Up Close. Jerrems’s practice is contextualised with the work of the American photographers, Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, and the Australian, William Yang.
As the first survey of Jerrems’s work to be held in twenty years, Up Close provides a valuable opportunity to see many rarely seen photographs. Iconic images including Jerrems’s Vale Street (1975) are represented, along with the hauntingly detached images that Jerrems made during her protracted stay in hospital for treatment of the rare liver disease that ultimately took her life in 1980, a few weeks before her thirty-first birthday. Less well-known work from Jerrems’s student days at Prahran College of Advanced Education offers insight into the development of her introspective and self-aware practice. Archival material from the Jerrems family provides a fuller picture of Jerrems’s life, but throughout the exhibition she remains an enigmatic figure, quiet, watchful and remote.
Although Jerrems, Clark, Goldin and Yang are brought together