It is the middle of a London winter, late afternoon, and in the room in which I sit the brightest light comes from the screen of my laptop. It is cold in hue. I start to open image files—a clutch relating to a project in Australia. The screen bursts with warm, saturated colour.
The pictures show a multitude of banners simply fashioned from a few metres’ square of cloth stretched between two lengths of timber. The banners have been carefully ‘planted’, each with a space around it, in a large grassed-area beside a Melbourne beach—common land? From afar (the distance of the ‘installation shot’), the image is of mixed blooms—a happy riot of strong hues and bold shapes. And yet, the emphasis on ‘pure’ opticality is not innocent.
Feeling my distance, I realise that the theme of ‘being at one remove’ is key to what I am looking at. That I have encountered the banners via the mediation of the documentary photograph is a neat co-incidence. In the first place, there is the literal absence of the banners’ subjects, or the standard-bearers. Paradoxically, the anthropomorphic form of the structures (each has a torso and two legs) underlines this, even as it also acts as a stand-in for the absentees.
Reading the verbal and pictographic slogans that the close-up shots reveal, I start to wonder if there is an explanation for the missing marchers in the tenor of the messages. Some are predictably didactic. In the necessary shorthand of the genre, one commands: ‘HEAL YOURSELF’ (the ‘R’ is back to front). Some make sweeping observations: ‘LUCKY COUNTRY NO MORE’ (the second ‘N’ reversed) in yellow cut-out fabric letters on a green