Robert Rooney 'The Box Brownie years 1956-58'

Robert Rooney The Box Brownie years 1956 – 58

Robert Rooney The Box Brownie years 1956 – 58

Just looking: instead of an essay Patrick Pound Photographs Whenever we look at old photos time’s relentless melt seems to be as much the subject as what’s actually caught on film. Rooney’s early photos, which have only recently been printed out and now shown at the CCP, call to our attention that kids don’t behave quite like they used to. Nor do cameras, or photographers for that matter.

I’m figuring that Rooney also sees them a little differently now than he would have as the very young man he was when he took these marvellous, fleeting, photos. Taken while he was an art student at the Swinburne Technical College, these images are indeed peculiar things.1 We might ask what it means to revisit these previously un-exhibited images, indeed unprinted until now: more than 50 years after he first took them. Looking back seems a prime condition of photography. The camera records a slice of time, and immediately after, from then on, it’s a record of the past. It’s always a retrospective medium. Photography concertinas time. Adding to this situation, the Box Brownie was itself already an old and inexpensive amateur camera when Rooney used it for these pictures. We might wonder: was it a considered choice of machine or just a matter of convenience? I suspect, from the outset Rooney took care to avoid the ‘higher end’ of photography. His instinctive preference was for the matter-of-fact quality that is, and was, inherent to the medium. These images of schoolboys mucking about in quarries or in the quadrangle of the lower Swinburne Technical school (which Rooney had himself earlier attended), and in Collingwood streets, are casually recorded. They have the deliberately ordinary framing of the snapshot aesthetic. They appear as if they are a set of chance encounters ― stopped in their tracks. Seen now; these images of boys killing time with stones at the ready, and schoolboys with their Gladstone bags, of Billycarts on the street and bad haircuts, dredge up an Australia that is already a light year away.

The way these photographs are printed, as inkjet prints, is also very different than how they could or would have been printed had Rooney done so at the time. So the technology is reworked as well. These prints seem less technical somehow ― more like Seurat’s smudgy conté crayon drawings than conventional photographic prints. This re-enforces the early photographic quality whereby photographs give off the aura of being not so much technological representations of the world as indexical rubbings of light.

Footnotes Rooney undertook a 4 year diploma there before going on to art school.

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Footnotes 2 James Thrall Soby, Ben Shahn, The Penguin Modern Painters, Penguin Books, Middlesex: 1947, pages 4 and 12. Rooney owned this now collectible little classic at the time which he tells me was everyone’s introduction to Shahn.

(I also remember a copy being in my New Zealand childhood home).

3 The Resettlement Administration (RA), later to be the Farm Security Administration (FSA), was a vast government scheme to record the American situation in photographs and paintings, employing numerous struggling artists. A storehouse of photographic images documenting the American situation recorded the dire state of the nation and the positive effects of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies.

In this they had a propaganda function.

The archive was placed in the service of a nationalist programme with a social-reform agenda.

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Rooney was of course to become famous for a completely different type of photography ― the serial works such as Holden Park 1 & 2 (1970), and his Garments: 3 December – 19 March 1973 (1973). These conceptual sets were taken with an adjustable instamatic camera and printed via the chemist as typical amateur snaps. The much earlier images in this exhibition are more conventionally beautiful things. Still they don’t make him look like a “photographer” ― god forbid ― rather they leave him standing as an artist with a camera. They also call into play an early allegiance with the social realist movement. It is no surprise to think of Rooney’s early work in light of Ben Shahn, whose paintings of this period clearly are a model for the young Melbourne artist. Rooney’s paintings and photographs of this period echo Shahn’s interests, as James Thrall Soby put it: “in what people do when in theory they do nothing at all.” Like Shahn’s painting, Vacant Lot (1939), Rooney’s work in this exhibition is “penetrating in its evocation of childhood isolation and absorption in play.” 2 However, Rooney’s paintings don’t seem to share in the social reform agenda of Shahn or of the other RA (later the FSA) photographers and painters.3 Rooney’s attractions seem to be confined to the vernacular, as observed from the outside. Rooney has remained a lifelong flâneur. He is after all, Hawthorn East’s Baudelaire, with Raymond Roussel and André Gide, alongside Joseph Cornell and Ed Ruscha, and with musicians from John Cage to Cecil Taylor, and (more recently), a bit of Blur added to the mix.

The photographs of the children at play, (or doing little or nothing), in the streets of Collingwood and at the tip and quarry in Hawthorn East also raise a theme of class, and of the genre of social documentary photography with something of a social reform agenda of that period. One wonders if Rooney as a young man was already aware of that material from Humphrey Spender in Bolton to Helen Levitt in New York to the chair of the Housing Commission, F. Oswald Barnett’s Depression era photos of suburban slums ― including Collingwood, here in Melbourne, and was Rooney sharing in that at all, or is that a supplementary thing that we bring to these photographs in retrospect? He certainly hadn’t seen the near exactly contemporaneous photographs Roger Mayne took of uninhibited youths playing in a bleak Southam Street in, what is now posh Notting Hill ― made from 1956 to 1961.

Rooney was simply, as always, prescient.

There’s a serious and difficult distinction that all this brings into play.

The sort of photographers that Rooney prefers, from Atget to Walker Evans; and from Lee Friedlander to Stephen Shore, all work outside the Ansel Adams end of photography. Like Rooney, they all use the camera first and foremost as a collecting machine. Their pictures, like Rooney’s, don’t muck with the peculiar qualities of the medium – its relatively detached evidentiary and indexical qualities and all of its peculiar image making defaults ― all those things we take for granted with photographs as though they were natural entities.

Photographers such as Rooney, like the camera for the evidentiary quality of the medium and, paradoxically, for all those very unreal photographic characteristics. In doing that: again paradoxically, his photographs become about photography as well. They are meta-photographic if you will. Those familiar with Rooney’s work will see the humour underpinning his conceptual armatures. Funnily enough though, the smoky details taken from the Box Brownie photos of the kids in the quadrangle are actually rather like Pictorialist photogravures, with their pussywillow focus and murky mood ― especially as the subject matter is also now so far removed in time. It’s like a conceptual serialist’s re-edit of memory lane. It won’t surprise Rooney watchers to hear the Melbourne conceptual artist has a sneaking interest in those artful photographers as well. It takes two hands to play the piano.

Looking at these early photographs, there is already some sense of the serial about them. The documentary series and the photo essay were well established methods in the field. One wonders whether he was consciously entering into that genre of photography, or was this serial approach more intuitive. (A roll of film is already a series waiting to happen of course ― even a good old Pictorialist like Alvin Langdon Coburn’s rolls of consecutive holiday snaps could be said to have something of a serial quality to them). Looking back at Rooney’s early images they hover between the detachment of the insurance assessor and the expressive engagement of the artist as voyeur. There’s something of the immanent and the crime scene and the suburban photo-journalist at work about them as well.

While it’s tempting in retrospect to focus on any sense of the serial in Rooney’s early work in light of the approach he went on to take, in photography and painting, we are left wondering if Rooney was aware of this as an idea in any meaningful way, or did that occur to him as an interesting method, or path, only later, when he became aware of the work of the conceptual artists, especially the photo-books of Ruscha and Ruppersberg, and of those Roger Cutforth works that were mailed out to Pinacotheca Gallery in Richmond, and shown in 1969 ― and so on? Were these early photos of Rooney’s in any sense first steps towards a more systematic conceptual approach whereby photographers, or artists with cameras, sought to aestheticise administration in the way that museums might be said to administer aesthetics? Do they in some way predict that sensibility, if not that conceptual strategy?

While we need to be careful not to over-reach, the fact is that Rooney has brought these images to light. Several years ago he began scanning these early images (and others from quite different series). He then ‘edited’ several sets of these as ‘movies’ on his computer, and set them to his own systematic and enticingly idiosyncratic musical scores. So Rooney himself gives them a new spin. Reworking them, he turns them into new works. They are then (now), new Rooneys. They are, after all, conceptual sets, replaced in the series.

The large series of photographs taken from above the boys in the Junior School quadrangle are a formal set of observations. (In retrospect, Rooney speaks of the subcategories of this set: chasing, wrestling, marbles, and Gladstone bags).

The kids mucking around in the streets of Collingwood are a sort of casual social realist set. The photographs of the teens throwing stones and hanging about at the tip and quarry have more of a threatening, or at least tense, air about them. They hold the possibility that the kids might have turned their aim towards the young photographer. However, they are aware of the photographer. They let him do his thing. Bored as they are, they perhaps play a little to him.

They bring to mind the paintings of an early mentor of Rooney, Charles Blackman. Famously, Blackman had recently painted a memorable series of images of schoolgirls whom he too observed like a detective but painted in a dreamily expressive manner. Barbara Blackman was a life model at Swinburne Technical College, and Rooney asked her about Charles’s enamel emulsion technique. Barbara invited him over, and Rooney became a regular visitor to the Blackmans’ home.

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Paintings The three paintings in this exhibition find the early teens of the photographs merged into the teens of cinema. The paintings in this show all depict teenage boys. They are put together in what appear to me to be some sort of allegorical arrangement. There’s also something restless about them. They seem to play out that feeling so peculiar to being between a child and an adult ― you know, the bored and the restless. These youths are somehow peripheral figures as if they loiter about on the cusp of personal and social change. The impression of an implied allegory, again reminds us of Blackman’s modus operandi. In a fourth painting in this series, but not in this show, a blue figure floats behind in a topsy-turvy dream state redolent of Rooney’s mentor. However, the social realist overtones, as well as the peculiarly graphic painting (and drawing) techniques ― more closely reflect Ben Shahn’s influence. The three paintings in this exhibition reflect the impact Shahn had on the young Rooney. Rooney’s very early paintings are at once lyrical and edgy.

Whereas the photos are actual ― if selective ― records of observed scenes, the paintings are of course far more constructed images. They are put together by hand whereas the photographs are found images as it were. That’s not to say, of course, that they aren’t also mediated or culturally coded. It’s also interesting, that looking at these earlier photos and paintings we tend to place them in the context of other like works of the period, more than we tend to do with images that have just been made. With older images we are wont to place them rather than experience them with the sense of relevant immediacy that we get from what we habitually call the contemporary. We look at older works that we are seeing for the first time so differently than we do contemporary pieces. Then we reframe them to see how they might work again now.

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When we first saw the paintings in Rooney’s home, he commented that one of the figures was based on James Dean. Knowing this gives the painting a different purchase. I assumed it was based on Dean or his character Jim Stark, or a bit of both. Nicholas Ray’s 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause is a key moment in cinema, and social history. That film moved the convention of delinquent urban youth from the grimy slums to the American middle class suburb. However, Rooney actually had another film in mind, (probably East of Eden), when he snared James Dean for his own. When he made these paintings Dean must have just recently crashed to his death. (Rebel stars Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo also died tragically, but later).

Again, time seems to add unexpected yellowing layers of interest and meaning. Time adds varnish.

Shahn, like the regional social realists and many documentary and press photographers of that time ― despite their differences― shared in a general social reform agenda. Shahn was a fine photographer too. In fact, many of Shahn’s paintings stem from his photography. It seems to me that while Rooney was clearly looking closely at Shahn’s painting and graphic style, and to some extent his subject matter, his artistic interests and his temperament lay elsewhere. Rooney’s early work might appear to partake in social commentary, but is from the outset more detached. Perhaps it is also a matter of the period looking seriously in need of reform? From the outset Rooney is drawn to the banal. Rooney is more the sort of artist who treats the world as a puzzle, and rather than setting out to offer a didactic response, instead he substitutes the problem of life with the problem of art.

Rooney is a bit more like that serial Vitruvius of the vernacular, Walker Evans, who got Shahn his (short lived) FSA job. Like Evans, Rooney is cooler, more conceptual, yet he isn’t actually after the clinical rendering of the everyday, he is after a serial record, with a jaunty and mathematical rhythm and beat. Rooney is perhaps more in step with Friedlander and Ruscha.

Above: Rooney’s copy of Rodman’s biography of Shahn. Purchased through a “book finder” (John Friend), found through an advert in Art News.

Rooney’s copy came without a dustjacket. He made his own, employing Shahn’s distinctive graphic lettering style. At the time, Rooney didn’t like his own hand. Rooney and Friend kept in touch: Friend would later send his postage stamp-sized autobiography to Rooney.

(Photo: P. Pound)

Movies In 2009 when Rooney placed these Box Brownie photographs from the 1950s into a film sequence, and added music, they were made to function quite differently. The film, Quadrangle (1956) is, again, made in retrospect. What might have kicked off as a preservation project, with the artist updating his image storage systems, segued into a new and exciting project.

The filmic sequence and Rooney’s accompanying music beautifully highlights the lyrical and the rhythmic quality that was already in the rolls of film. The new way that the photographs get to work is quite marvellous. It seems so fresh and yet it springs to mind the little seen films of Joseph Cornell as well as the jazzy jangle of Zazie dans le Métro, and the mad-cap early cinema efforts like the 20s Australian silent film Kid Stakes which Martyn Jolly spoke about so well at an Atget symposium recently ― that was new to me but which Rooney of course had in his collection.4 Its subject matter of the knock about kids of Woolloomooloo mixing it with a tiny toff from Potts Point ― even its grainy look is a neat counterpart to Rooney’s Box Brownie work.

For Rooney’s entire career, his music and his art-making have been separate yet related projects. For now, in retrospect, Rooney has put it all together.

Footnotes Martyn Jolly, The disinfected city in Australia, a paper delivered at the symposium: ‘Cities in Transition: Photography in Paris and Australia at the Turn of the Century,’ held in conjunction with the exhibition Eugène Atget: Old Paris, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Aug. 25, 2012.

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Robert Rooney The Box Brownie years 1956 – 58

Freeze frame Maggie Finch

This exhibition is of photographs, paintings and a film by Robert Rooney that combines materials and images that are over fifty years old, but which are also contemporary and of the present – in a new incarnation and a new context. The photographs, while taken initially between 1956–58, are displayed here as new (and slightly larger) prints scanned from older negatives and prints. The film is a reworking of the older photographs and is set to music composed and performed by the artist in 2009. The paintings, each dating from 1958, have been exhibited before but never alongside their contemporaneous photographs. The exhibition has come about through a series a chats and conversations and letters between Robert Rooney, Patrick Pound and myself – each of us keen to bring these works to light and to consider the different elements (painting, photography, film and music) side-by-side.

Robert Rooney began taking these Box Brownie photographs in 1956, when he was in his third year of art school at Swinburne Technical College – having previously attended Swinburne Junior School. Taken on walks around inner-city sites in Melbourne, their roughness and immediacy, showing children playing, fighting and scheming, is startling but in a typically quiet and dispassionate way. This is not the Melbourne commonly seen in photographic representation of the time.

In 1956 the city around Rooney was aspiring to a new globalism. It had recently seen its first visit of a reigning monarch, and was the host of the Summer Olympics. It saw the first broadcast of live television. Waves of immigrants, largely from Europe and the United Kingdom, brought new cultural influences into the city – it was in the midst of the period of post-war expansion. Photography and photographers at that time largely shared these worldly aspirations: studio photographers working at the ‘Paris end’ of the city looked to European styles of glamour and modernism to create dynamic portraits with clean lines and sharp silhouettes – the ‘new look’ as characterised by the work of Athol Shmith, Helmut Newton, Henry Talbot, Wolfgang Sievers and Bruno Benini. Photography was replacing hand-drawn illustrations in magazines as a vital tool of advertising work, largely derivative of European and American trends. Photographers such as Mark Strizic depicted the architecture and the city workers and consumers in high-tone images, characterising Melbourne as a dynamic, progressive city.

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Photojournalism and humanist social documentary photography remained popular, through imported publications such as LIFE Magazine, and on the back of Edward Steichen’s 1955 exhibition at MoMA, New York: The Family of Man. Eventually touring to 38 countries (including Australia in 1959) and visited by over nine million people, Steichen set the tone for photography in the mid-1950s. As he stated, the ‘art of photography is a dynamic process of giving form to ideas and of explaining man to man. It was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life – as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.’1 Set against these grand themes of the apparent universality of humankind and its experiences, and the urban revitalism occurring in Melbourne, Robert Rooney typically worked to his own beat. Armed with the vision of artists such as Charles Blackman and Ben Shahn at the forefront of his mind, Rooney took his camera and turned it inward: with a quiet and objective view, his local became his global. The photographs were considered as ‘exercises’. While some became direct influences for paintings (images of children playing among junk and rubble from the series Hawthorn East (1958) lead to the composition of Sunday (1958); the conspiratorial poses of kids in Children, Collingwood (1957) inspired Implication (1958)) it is interesting to consider these photographs in their own right. On one hand they existed as a sketchpad, the camera collecting images to be used at a later date. On the other, the anti-technical, snapshot effect made possible by the humble Box Brownie is revealing of Rooney’s interest in the everyday – of otherwise overlooked sites, scenes of decay and abandonment. His vivid photographs of children at play, on the street, and fighting are far removed from their usual representation at that time in staged, stilted, studio scenes that adorned family mantelpieces.

Revisiting his archive of images years later has allowed Robert Rooney to look again at these photographs and reconsider their place in his overall practice.

It also allows us, the viewer, to look afresh. Formal qualities and aspects of the compositions call to mind a raft of other photographs, photographers, images and film stills. Children, Hawthorn East 6 (1958), for example, is a visual puzzle: a small black-and-white print of a patterned scene of shapes and forms that fills the frame with information. It is difficult to see anything. Only on closer looking does the subject emerge – a jumble of junk and detritus of a tip, and eventually the figures of boys playing among the rubbish. The archaeological sites in Egypt as photographed by French writer and photographer Maxime Du Camp are recalled.

When commissioned to document the ruins in the late 1840s, Du Camp composed the scenes devoid of people with the exception of one figure – a sailor, Hadji Ismael – whom the photographer would make stand in his pictures to create a uniform sense of scale. Ismael appears frequently: among rubble, against a carving, atop a building. Like the boys rummaging in the tip, his lone figure is not always evident on first look. In Rooney’s photograph the boys turn away: they are not directed but are absorbed in their actions, flecks among the piles of waste and debris and potential treasure. They are invisible, unless you look for them.

Another photograph from this sequence (Hawthorn East 2 (1958)) shows the quarry but from a greater distance and framed by barbed wire. This time an association forms with more recent images – the beautifully stark photographs of American artist Lewis Baltz. In his Candlestick Point series of 1989 Baltz documented sites of ‘damage’ with a brutally stark composition that revealed the effects of both human and natural devastation on public parkland at the site in southern San Francisco. Both artists turned their cameras to overlooked, ugly sites, systematically documenting scenes that are indelibly marked by human presence – everyday scenes that by their very mundane nature become quite extraordinary.

1 Edward Steichen, ‘Introduction by Edward Steichen’, in The Family of Man, Museum of Modern Art: New York, 1955, p. 3.

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2 Charles Blackman quoted in, Thomas Shapcott, Charles Blackman, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1967, pp. 16, 18.

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Rooney’s sequence of boys picking up rocks and the aftermath of throwing them into the pit capture something of the tension, potential danger, and visual drama that is experienced when standing before Canadian photographer Jeff Wall’s Boy falls from tree (2010). That truly ‘photographic’ scene, which makes use of the mechanics of the camera to maintain the drama of a moment of action in a way that is cinematic but (it could be argued) trumps the intensity of cinema through its intentional stillness, is recalled on a much smaller scale in Rooney’s images.

That sense of ‘freezing’ action that is the characteristic of a photograph is often referenced within cinema as a ‘photographic moment’ by the freezing of a frame for an extended period. Rooney’s photographs of shenanigans in the tip capture this ‘stillness of motion’ – mini-narratives occur and a sense of drama is created. Another artist is called to mind – Joseph Cornell and his experimental films from the 1930s, particularly The Children’s Trilogy (later compiled together in 1968 by Lawrence Jordan). In these films images are edited together forming chaotic sequences interspersed with the occasional freeze frame, causing the flow of time to randomly stop and transforming the image, momentarily, into an object. It is interesting that Rooney went on to animate these photographs into short films – once static images, depicting frozen scenes of movement, are put into motion once more.

Rooney’s photographs are clearly neither professing to be ancient Egypt looked at through a nineteenth century lens, nor a post-industrial American park ruined by human intervention, nor a cinematic construction of a falling boy or spliced filmic sequences of children’s birthday parties gone awry. This is Melbourne in the mid-1950s, looked at again in the 2010s. The empty backstreets of Collingwood appear a million miles away from their current gentrification; and the kids playing in a quadrangle adjoining the art school dart around with an almost unrecognisable air of abandon. But it is not nostalgia that drove Rooney to revive these images. Rather, they are interesting for the way they are ‘photographically framed’ and make use of the mechanical properties of the camera (preceding the conceptualist photo-works of the 1970s for which Rooney is renowned); and for the way they are informed by a fascination with childhood (its language, imagery, rhythm, autobiographical associations).

In the mid-1950s one of the biggest inspirations for Robert Rooney was Charles Blackman. While most of Rooney’s classmates were drawn to the work of Sidney Nolan, it was Blackman’s dreamlike and evocative images of children that mesmerised Rooney. Blackman had turned to the subject of schoolgirls in the early 1950s and it preoccupied his art at that time. Acknowledging that they were a ‘rather crazy thing to paint’, it was the sense of vulnerability that he became fascinated with, stating that ‘the schoolgirl pictures were so emotionally highly charged and so strident in their colour construction almost to the state where they were quite unpleasant objects; they were quite unbeautiful objects; you couldn’t even say “that was a nice painting, I quite like it”, it was just an ugly picture – putting forth a very strong piece of emotional life.’ 2 Rooney came to know both Charles and his wife Barbara Blackman at that time, and has described how Blackman advised him to draw on his direct experiences – advice that contributed to his long held fascination in the suburban experience. Rooney himself described his relationship to Blackman in a curator statement written for an exhibition which he organised for the then Heide Park and Art Gallery in 1987, called Innocence and Danger: An Artist’s View of Childhood, and it is worth repeating here. As Rooney explained:

“If I hadn’t wagged it from school sports to visit some art shows on that Wednesday in 1953, this exhibition [Innocence and Danger] might not have happened. Luckily the sports master at Swinburne Junior Tech. was also an art teacher, which meant that instead of being punished, I was excused from sport and could visit art galleries for the rest of the year. Of course, 1953 was the year Charles Blackman held his exhibition of ‘Schoolgirl’ paintings at the Peter Bray Gallery in Melbourne. I immediately identified with these paintings. It was like entering a complete world that was strange, haunting, and yet somehow familiar.

The following year I went to the Swinburne Art School fulltime, joined the recently re-formed Melbourne branch of the Contemporary Art Society and met Charles Blackman through Barbara, who happened to be our life model. Between 1954 and 1957 I often visited their coach-house studio in Hawthorn, where I witnessed the ‘Schoolgirls’ gradually turn into ‘Alice’. It was during this period that I began to notice the number of works featuring children in the CAS exhibitions.

Having become an unofficial Charles Blackman disciple, I also made drawings and prints of the children in the streets and paintings of myself as a child in the Gippsland setting of distant school holidays. In 1956 I compiled, illustrated and published a book Australian Skipping Rhymes and began work on a dictionary of children’s language.” 3 It is noticeable that among Rooney’s diverse list of media used to produce works associated with childhood he did not mention the contemporaneous photographs. The fact that he has revisited them in the last few years is interesting.

Rooney’s choice of title for the show, The Box Brownie Years 1956-58, indicates that the camera was certainly an important ‘frame’ for this period of his artistic production – however this has perhaps become more apparent with the distance of time. These photographs are snaps of the urban and suburban realities at that time; they are a collection of images that create a serial view rather than presenting one heroic, stand alone, narrative-driven image; they are a dispassionate, but fascinated, view of fabricated, post-war, Melbourne spaces.

3 Robert Rooney, ‘Curator’s Statement’, in Robert Rooney, Innocence and Danger: An Artist’s View of Childhood, Heide Park and Art Gallery: Melbourne, 1987, p.4.

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Images Cover: The Quadrangle 22 (1956), 14 x 20.43 cm Pg 6: Sunday (1958), 68.5 x 91.5 cm oil on composition board Pg 8 (top): Hawthorn East 2 (1958), 14 x 21.17 cm (bottom): Children, Hawthorn East 1 (1958), 14 x 21.14 cm Pg 9 (top): Children, Hawthorn East 3 (1958), 14 x 21.30 cm (bottom): Children, Hawthorn East 7 (1958), 14 x 20.98 cm Pg.s 10 and 11: Children, Hawthorn East 6 (1958), 14 x 20.21 cm Pg 16: The Quadrangle 3 (1956), 18.5 x 14 cm Pg 17: The Quadrangle 2 (1956), 14.58 x 14 cm Pg 18 (top): Children, Collingwood 5 (1957), 14 x 21.03 cm (bottom) Collingwood 2 (1957), 14 x 20.86 cm All photographs: inkjet prints courtesy of the artist, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

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28 march – 19 May 2013 CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY 404 GEORGE STREET FITZROY VIC 3065 T +613 9417 1549 E INFO@CCP.ORG.AU WWW.CCP.ORG.AU All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical (including photocopying, recording or any information retrieval system) without permission from the publisher. © Centre for Contemporary Photography 2013 and the artist.

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Centre for Contemporary Photography is supported by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria and is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts funding and advisory body. Centre for Contemporary Photography is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, state and territory governments. CCP is a member of CAOs Contemporary Arts Organisations of Australia.