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The prosaic title of Dena Lester’s exhibition of photographic works belied the complexity of her engagement with both the landscape genre and the photographic medium. Her images traversed both the familiarity of local vistas and the anonymity of more distant landscapes, whilst exploring the formal and conceptual possibilities of photographic representation.
The local landscape loomed large in the sixteen panels of Lost (After McCubbin) 2003, a photographic update of Frederick McCubbin’s iconic nineteenth century painting of a child lost in the Australian bush. Lester’s expansive black and white composition—almost ten metres long and two and a half metres high—allowed the viewer to take a walk alongside the trees to encounter a man who had taken the place of the frightened girl in McCubbin’s original. Dwarfed, but not overwhelmed, by his surroundings, Lester’s naked subject suggested a changing narrative concerning our relationship to the land. He seemed ready to walk into the distance of his lush surroundings, replacing the sense of human vulnerability of McCubbin’s earlier painting with one of expectancy. In Lester’s installation, the bush had become an environment full of fascination and quietude rather than one to be feared.
Lester would have travelled further from the city than McCubbin in order to find her unblemished landscape, as the suburban sprawl has swallowed his once rural sites. This sense of time passing, and of a continued conversation with earlier modes of representation, pervaded the exhibition as a whole. Some works suggested the geographically distant history of photography itself. Lester’s monochromatic depictions of unidentified ancient ruins, castles, chasms, trees and lighthouses recalled photographic landscapes taken by early experimenters with the medium in Europe. In contrast to the direct connections of place