Landscape after land rights, after conceptual art

Photography and place

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In the 1970s, the traditional genre of landscape photography was assailed from two very different directions. On the one hand, on the international art scene the advent of conceptual art saw the questioning of the techniques of fine art photography and its traditional approaches to representation. In the wake of conceptual art, many artists ‘used’ photography rather than identifying themselves as photographers. The other challenge is more local and particular to Australia: the emergence of Aboriginal Land Rights movements, which demanded a more sensitive approach to thinking about co-existence, the contested nature of land and its meanings. Under the influence of these twin challenges, the idea of a straightforward depiction of the land lost force and interest. Picturing the land became a much more complicated ethical and conceptual problem.

This complicated terrain was recently explored by the exhibition ‘Photography and Place: Australian landscape photography 1970s until now’, curated by Judy Annear at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

The exhibition included a selection of works by eighteen artists from a range of generations and representing a variety of perspectives: indigenous and non-indigenous, native born, long-term visitors, expatriates, and more recent arrivals. In alphabetical order, the artists represented were: Simone Douglas, Peter Elliston, Anne Ferran, Simryn Gill, Bill Henson, Douglas Holleley, Rosemary Laing, Marion Marrison, Ricky Maynard, Ian North, Paul Ogier, Debra Phillips, Jon Rhodes, Michael Riley, Lynn Silverman, Wesley Stacey, David Stephenson, and Ingeborg Tyssen.

If there is one shared feature of the photographs in the exhibition, it is that none of them enable or suggest easy entry into the depicted landscape. In other words, the idea of imaginatively stepping into the picture is not encouraged. The activation... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Ingeborg Tyssen, Bush Relevance 1, 1986. Type C photograph, 25.4 x 25.4cm. Hallmark Cards Australian Photography Collection Fund 1989. Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales. © Ingeborg Tyssen, 1986. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney.

Anne Ferran, Untitled, 2008. From the series 'Lost to Worlds'. Digital print on aluminium, 120 x 120cm. Collection: Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, Hobart. Image courtesy Stills Gallery, Sydney and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. © Anne Ferran.