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Tracey Moffatt's two series, Up in the Sky and Heaven, marked her New York grand entrance: the work was commissioned by prestigious DIA Foundation and will be on display there for close to a year. Up in the Sky is a series of twenty-five offset photographs, some black and white, some sepia-toned, and is reminiscent of Moffatt's earlier Something More, which depicted eerie impressions of life on Australia's red-neck margins. Heaven, by contrast, is a frivolous 'documentary' video project which stitches together rough-takes of surfer-types dressing and undressing in various Sydney beach-side parking lots. The contrast between the serious, almost moral tone of the photographs and the voyeuristic giggling incited by the video, makes for an intriguing tension.
Many of these photographs are shot off-centre and have the fast and loose feel of action photography. Indeed, Moffatt's shots of 'outback life' in part invoke the humanist imperatives of documentary photography, with a strong feel of the likes of Dorothea Lange. Lange's moving portrayal of the American rural poor during the Great Depression, her images of stoicism and resilience amongst the devastation of dispossession, hunger and despair, haunt Moffatt's works. Here too we are confronted with godforsaken landscapes peopled by desperadoes unhinged from the ties of convention and social expectation. However, Moffatt's photographs are also clearly staged: the figures are characters who pose and act out; the tableaux are orchestrated and artificial.
While they are imbued with nostalgia for a humanist perspective, Moffatt's photographs betray the self-consciousness of a constructed (although fractured) narrative. The protagonists in this narrative would appear to be a teenage dishwater blonde and her black newborn; the other figures, such as a group of