While there is no question that the highlight of the second Queensland Festival of Photography (QFP) was AES+F’s Last Riot, a three-screen video installation by four Russian artists, Annie Hogan’s Type-C prints more particularly served the ‘local’ impetus of the QFP and its camera-based emphasis.1 The Last Riot (at The University of Queensland Art Museum) rightly attracted the ‘Wow’ factor, as it did at the Venice Biennale in 2007, but it is Hogan’s exhibition that has a specific resonance for Brisbane audiences.
Before she took up the Samstag Scholarship in 2002 to study for her Masters at Chicago’s famous Art Institute, Annie Hogan’s Queensland interiors had been shown in a low-key way in Brisbane. It was here that she grew up and gained her first degrees (at the Queensland College of Art). On this occasion however, the Museum of Brisbane mounted a survey exhibition covering ten years of her activity (1997-2007). Curated by Frank McBride, with an insightful catalogue essay by Rosemary Hawker, the opening served to launch the Festival proper.
So what is it that made Hogan’s photographs, as presented here, both compelling and yet deeply disturbing? For this writer, they are foremost expressions of the poetics and politics of space. Un-peopled, these uniform-sized images in their pristine white frames concentrate on old-time houses or vacated rental flats. These are flats (not apartments)—the cheap kind from the 1950s with green painted walls, lino floors and floral carpets, with lace curtains or plastic Venetian blinds. They are the sort of places that smell of body odour, beer, and human despair.
Yet there is always a redemptive quality to the corners photographed and the walls punctuated by windows. It