Sue Ford: Not Blinded by the Site
All artists, regardless of medium, are involved in the act of looking, of trying to pin down in some concrete form (even if just momentarily) an impression, a place. They share certain attributes with private detectives and forensics experts, archeologists and scientists – investigators who take the slimmest threads to compile a final, dense tapestry of information.
This most certainly applies to Sue Ford who, in a 46-year career, has never tired of the most rigorous investigations. Talking with Ford, one walks away having been barraged by a morass of broiling ideas, a sense of an analytical intellectualism meeting a poetic lyricism.
But Ford is neither a purebred conceptualist or a fuzzy romantic. Indeed, if anything she has found an almost ideal balance between the intellect and the felt which has been articulated most recently in her unique balancing act between the digital and the ‘painterly’.
That she is on a mission is beyond dispute. The various bodies of work that constitute her career have each required grueling research and she is not adverse to taking risks, both in the adventures she undertakes to garner her information and in her presentation – which more than once has raised eyebrows and, upon occasion, political ire.
With Ford’s work we have to go beyond, or perhaps beneath, the obvious. In her recent series Last Light she subverts the role of photographer by taking photographs of photographers. There is both a sly humour at play here and a considered analysis of contemporary human interaction with ‘nature.’
Ford raises some intriguing issues in these works. By photographing the photographer, rather than the sunset itself, she is adding a narrative about the human condition, the notions of awe and the sublime which her tourist photographers seem to think can be captured with a digital click. But she is doing something further here. Almost inadvertently she has simultaneously taken her own stunning sunset pictures and images of twilight moments with the figures superimposed, almost heroically, taking on a similar role to that of the figures captured in the works of the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, the master of the symbolic landscape.
Last Light is essentially a continuation of the work entitled Videoland that was shown at the NGV in 1994. “This work is looking at photography, landscape and illusion referencing the digital world where everybody is now a photographer,” Ford says. “I have chosen to work with this subject in a digital mode, intentionally using the particular qualities of digital imaging to produce this body of work.”
The result, almost despite the media, is distinctly painterly and impressionistic – a far cry from most digital photography shown today. But it also highlights the media-saturated condition of contemporary life – everyone today, it seems, is a director, creating their own sense of reality.
But there is also an extraordinarily powerful sense of ‘place’ in these works, an element even more strongly explored in her other recent series, Site Unseen. Here the mysteries deepen and Ford as both detective and archeologist comes to the fore. Unlike the traditional romantic notion of Australia’s white beaches, Ford digs beneath the surface, discovering artifacts and histories. The “veil of texts” as she dubs them, which lay over the works could, with variations, be applied anywhere on this vast continent with its hidden histories – hidden both through time and through a more contemporary governmental policy of denial.
In these works Ford’s veil of text suggests are far deeper history to the site she has chosen to document. Her unknowing collaborators, the archeologists who have investigated the region, had discovered stone flints cut in accordance with Aboriginal tools. Suddenly these beach-side bush scenes take on far deeper cultural and historical significance; she has combined the potentially mundane with the overtly studious to create an alchemical boiling point of meaning and significance.
“Being on site knowing even a small amount of the history, changes the experiences of being in that particular site,” she says. Her interest in Indigenous history alongside that of white history in this country has created a rare blend. “This juxtaposing of the text and images is intended to work like a kind of a ‘Time Mirror’, she says. “The viewer will really only see in it what they are able. I like to leave it open to different readings and not make any political statement.”
In 1974 Sue Ford was the first Australian photographer to be given a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria with her now famous Time Series. Her work has always touched a nerve, perhaps in large part due to what she describes as her “interest in Australian history and the relationship between past and present and the nature of impermanence.”
Ford studied photography at RMIT in Melbourne and since 1971 she has had numerous photographic exhibitions. She has also made films which have achieved critical success, such as Faces which was featured at the opening of the new Australian Centre for the Moving Image, at Federation Square. She has featured in numerous major exhibitions and, over the years, Sue Ford has helped establish photography as the cutting edge of contemporary art.
Ashley Crawford |
