John Williams by Lecturis

JOHN WILLIAMS PHOTOGRAPHER AND HISTORIAN

EDITOR ROLF SACHSSE

THE MAN BY THE TREE Notes on the Reconstruction of John Williams’ Photographic Work

The photograph shows a scene by the sea shore. It is divided exactly into halves by a tree, prorating the image into two separate scenes. On the left, through a typical afternoon haze, one can see the shore and, vaguely defined, a bench, a boat and, in the background, a hill, this last almost indiscernable.The left half is, itself, cut into halves by another tree, with a man pushing a single-handled cart along a platform formed by irregularly shaped concrete elements, with something of the flair of Mediterranean sea shores as they were in the 1950s. The right half of the photograph shows a small wind shelter with the typical round-bow windows of 19th-century industrial edifices, except that it is made of wood and has room for just one average-sized bench. On that bench, one can see a reclining figure with eye shields and a rolled piece of cloth under his head, one leg up on the bench, the other down on the ground. This figure gives the clearest indication of when the photograph was taken: only until the 1970s did people wear shorts with street shoes and long white socks. (It is dated by its photographer, Ed Douglas, to 1976).1 The most important part of the image, though, is placed in the middle between the two trees, exactly on the vertical line of the Golden Rule: a big man, seen from be-

hind, in a worn corduroy jacket, holding a 35mm camera, bent forwards and a little to the side while concentrating on taking a photograph. The horizontal line of the Golden Rule in this image can only be traced by suggesting a relation between the man’s knees, the base of the tree in a little circle of grass, and a somewhat silly water spigot on the right side of this circle. This line, though, would not be perfectly horizontal, and it is this which, in all its quietness, gives the image a somehow delicate balance without basis. So far, this photograph is easy to read. But if one takes a closer look at some of its details, questions arise: what is the man – of course, this is John Frank Williams – taking a photograph of? If it is the reclining man in the shelter, the photographer is too near the tree; the shadows on the ground clearly show that he cannot be further than two or three feet from it. If he has one of the then-modern ultrawide-angle lenses on the camera, the tree would take up more than half the image; if it was a normal lens, the result would be an out-of-focus barrier in looking at the upper half of the reclining man – a photograph that nobody would take at the time. Maybe John Williams is testing equipment; maybe he is trying to establish new methods of fast-focussing

Rome, 1968

Paper Seller, Farmerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Bldg, Sydney, 1965

Beach Shelter, St Kilda, Melbourne, 1974

Prague, c.1991

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Sydney, 1970s

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Haymarket, Sydney, 2003

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Overseas Shipping Terminal, Sydney, 1978

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Fiat, Rozelle, Sydney, 1971

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Sydney, 1980

PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES AS HISTORICAL EXPERIENCES The Work of John F. Williams To Jean, In Gratitude

I. Whether writing or making pictures, once a work is out there it’s no longer yours. Once out there, it has a life of its own. (John F. Williams) Unfortunately, John F. Williams’ work is not very well known or extensively studied, either in Australia or worldwide. Williams, a man with intense ideas and diverse intellectual endeavours, was so absorbed in the creative re-elaboration of his pursuits that he didn’t do much for the promotion of his work or the dissemination of his ideas. In addition, his ideas, especially on history, and more specifically on Australian history, were deemed controversial because they didn’t follow prevalent intellectual fads, apply voguish theories or abide by the specific practices of clearly demarcated disciplines. Williams was, in effect, one of the last Renaissance scholars in that his researches into the collective memory of his society were focused on the articulation of a universal intellectual discourse, within which questions of identity, memory and representation could be addressed through both word and image – through history and photography. His history books are brilliant works of meticulous reconstruction and detailed research. They don’t simply explore a historical episode, action or period: they are articulated in a language of historiographical synthesis. In their pages, we can clearly detect a process towards a ‘master synthesis’ which culminated with his posthumous book on the Gallipoli Campaign, the foundational mythos of Australian identity. This move to continually deeper synthesis entailed an extended complexification of sources, material and methodology. Whoever reads his historical studies is immediately

impressed by the ‘foundational’ aspect of their conceptual framework: Williams’ books on the Australian involvement in World War I, especially his masterpiece The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism 1913-1939 (1995), are magisterial explorations of the structural foundations of modern Australian culture in its ambiguous confrontation with modernity, specifically its retreat from an initial cosmopolitan internationalism after the First World War. His last book, Deutschland über Allah! Germany, Gallipoli and The Great War (2016), is a work of intuitive reconstruction, sensitive insight and historical imagination bringing his historiographical project to its most accomplished fruition. The transition from the depiction of the confrontation between modernity and Australian society to what he called ‘transnational insights’ in his last book shows the constant and persistent re-examination of the past through the perspectives and the aspirations of the present in a creative, multidimensional and critical manner. At the same time, throughout his life Williams was a committed photographer, trying to observe, capture and establish photographic analogies of his historiographic projects in an almost self-effacing manner and enduring plastic form. During his career, only a small number of exhibitions were dedicated to his work. Nevertheless, within the context of post-war Australian realities, Williams’ dedication to photography was not a peripheral or an amateurish indulgence but a passionate and systematic cultural project. Precisely because of his intense commitment to the extinction of his personality, his work, both photographic and historiographic, constructs a semantic field of references between reality and memory expressing an existential and a political re-orientation in the quest for identi-

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ty and selfhood which deserves more exploration and interpretation. The structural complexity of his work remains unique in the intellectual tradition of postwar Australian society while emerging out of its own contradictions and reconsiderations. Helen Ennis observed that, after the 1960s, the tradition of ‘elegant masculinist and nationalist images’ exemplifed in the images of Max Dupain and David Moore was replaced by new notions of identity and memory ‘critiquing popular visual representations of Australia as well as the inequities in the traditional power relations between photographer and subject’. As Dupain, himself, said of Williams’ more complex constructed images, he ‘has shaken off the shackles of conventional illustration’. John Williams’ photographs compel the viewer to discuss the ways we perceive images as historical constructions and trans-personal experiences. The creativity he brings to his central fields of research is truly intricate and intriguing. Williams was a historian and a photographer, and the historical impulse, the need to articulate a narrative about the past, was not simply embodied in his books but can also be seen in his photographs. Australian culture was the starting point of his intellectual adventure: its ideas and practices, rituals and patterns, collapses and ruptures. His work belongs to the cultural conversations that took place in Australia after the war, while employing the medium of universal technological modernity, the photographic image. Generally speaking, Australian cultural studies suffer either from excessive idealisation or from disdainful self-deconstruction. Romanticism and cynicism are the two poles of reference that, to this day, dominate the interpretation of the tradition. Williams avoided such implied master narratives which referred – positively in the romantic pole, negatively in the cyncial – to the idealised perception of an originary Australian ‘innocence’, indicating a society and a nation whose official ideology placed them outside history. The local dimension, indeed the national dimension, is given a uniquely trans-national character of its own in Williams’ works, both written and photographic. His books disassembled the mytho-historical models of

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self-fashioning which presented an Australian sense of time punctuated by events that took place elsewhere (mostly in Europe) but not here, in the land of great Australian nothingness (according to Manning Clark) or in the Great Australian Emptiness (according to Patrick White). In a sense, Williams’ books relocated a modernist sense of time from Gallipoli and the Western Front to specific locations in Australia, populating the familiar landscape with memories of real human adventures or furthermore of very distinct human presences, responding to the existential challenge of what might be called the Great Australian Solitude, that is to the growing and intensified Australian self-awareness and individuality. For this reason, his photographs do not simply record an object or a situation in isolation. In his images, one can easily detect the invisible emotional and intellectual threads which connect their subjects with greater stories or tragedies around them, over a period of time as continuous snapshots of distinct ‘decisive moments’. Like his history books, his photographs are not simply records of the vicissitudes of history. They are critical reconstructions of the constitutive discourses of lived experience in a way which does not resemble either mainstream or postmodern approaches to questions of representation. They are about lived and living experiences (Erlebnis), and not simply about memory and the past (Erkenntnis). Historically, Williams located a divergence from traditional ways of looking at the Australian experience emerging, for the first time, with the generation of the 1890s just before World War I. In his book on Australian culture, Williams not only tried to indicate the role of what he called ‘vital art’, namely the art of the lived experience as self-awareness and self-reflexivity, but he also delineated what killed the potentialities of such art when it became a fossilised and formulaic convention. ‘As Australia’, he concludes the book, ‘began to emerge from the depression of the 1930s, this once-radical art of the 1890s, but now a reactionary art that upheld isolationism, was again becoming redundant. There could be no substitute in a living, vital culture for a living, vital art.’ This very distinct approach remained comprehen-