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Two women by the water's edge.
The first, a nineteenth century English fisherwoman-Elizabeth Johnstone - who was documented by the early photographer David Octavius Hill and subsequently made famous by the German critic Walter Benjamin though his discussion of her image in his essay on photography.
The second, a contemporary Lebanese-Australian artist - Mireille Astore – documenting her self-imposed detention as part of a site-specific sculpture and performance entitled Tampa, located in the unlikely setting of Tamarama Beach, Sydney, as part of the 2003 'Sculpture by the Sea' exhibition.
Together, both women and their texts provoke a series of questions concerning art and politics in general, and photography in particular.
Writing in 1931, Walter Benjamin conjured up an arresting image of an apparently anonymous woman, whose silence spoke to him of the very nature of photography. For him, the image of this woman, her eyes averted from the camera's gaze, contained something which broke the bounds of art as it was usually understood: ' in Hill 's Newhaven fishwife, her eyes cast down in such indolent, seductive modesty, there remains something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer 's art, something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in art' .1 The felt reality of this woman's onetime existence, marked in the quality of her gaze before the camera, distinguishes this image from other acts of portraiture: for Benjamin, the boundaries of art were broken by this encounter with the real, with this woman's insistent reality. Significantly, it is... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline