The existential portrait
Roderick McNicol
The existential portrait
Roderick McNicol
The existential portrait I came to photography as a young man in the 1970s, at a time when photography was rapidly becoming more widely accepted as an art form in its own right. The Australian Centre for Photography opened in Sydney in 1973 and the National Gallery of Victoria established a photographic department with a curator in 1974 – the first of its kind in Australia. Rennie Ellis established Brummels Gallery in South Yarra and in 1975 the Photographers Gallery was opened, again in South Yarra. Prahran College’s Department of Photography was in full swing at this time and I attended classes there through 1974. And there I became close friends with Athol Shmith, who was to be an ongoing mentor. The predominant photography of that time was social documentary. However, right from the very beginning I was irrevocably drawn to photographic portraiture, and quite specifically to portraiture that engaged a direct look back to the camera. I was always fascinated by the gauche stare back that was very evident in most mid-nineteenthcentury photography. This nineteenth-century stare was dictated by the necessity for slow exposure times back then; nevertheless, I was still inevitably drawn – like a moth to a flame – to this formal, self-conscious gaze. It seemed to me to harbour within it the very spectre of mortality itself. And furthermore, by its very nature this gauche, self-conscious, fatalist stare seemed quite antithetical to accepted notions of portraiture and that appealed to me. Although my early portrait work situated subjects within an environment, very soon I was placing my sitters against a plain, neutral background, paring back information the better to concentrate on this haunting, direct gaze. Consequently, in 1978 (soon after my first
Stewart 1978
exhibition, held at Brummels Gallery), I moved into an old warehouse in Fitzroy and set up my own daylight studio, where I have lived and worked ever since. August Sander and his monumental work People of the twentieth century had strongly influenced my initial approach to portraiture. But as I started to develop my first major portrait series in my studio in the early 1980s, I was to use an even, diffused daylight and a simplified background situation that had more in common with the portrait work of both Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. I had no intention of seeking out ‘celebrity’ or ‘interesting’ subjects. (To my mind most such portraiture was a form of collusion between the sitter and the photographer – a
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exactly the same way. My portraits were becoming more and more like mug-shots.
By sheer coincidence, around this time I came across work that was to have a profound influence on me. And this influence was not to come from portrait photography, but from a far more forensic source. In 1981, the touring exhibition The suspect image turned up at The University of Melbourne. This strange exhibition consisted of photographs and artefacts from the Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminology in Turin, Italy. Lombroso was the nineteenth-century criminologist behind the concept of phrenology, and one of the first to systematically photograph criminal types, not merely as a record but as a means to justify his theory that human traits could be deduced from the shape of the human face. These theories were held to be most valid in the nineteenth century (they were even applauded), but in time these ideas, like the related theories of eugenics, were very much discredited. Kent 1978
sort of ‘piss in each other’s pocket’ situation that created images that perpetuated the myth that ‘all was well’.) Yet neither did I want to seek out a prurient freak show in the manner of Diane Arbus. No, I was content to draw my subjects from life around me – friends, aquaintances and others who were, like me, functioning more or less on the margins of society. So began my series A portrait – using a straight-backed kitchen chair that allowed only one sitting posture, set against a brick wall that had a dark, blackboard-like surface, and with an even light source from skylights and clerestories above that highlighted every detail. Not only was I using this restricted studio situation to pare back information, I was also compelled to frame each sitter in
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These early Lombroso mug-shots were like haunting precursors to the portraits I was making. It was as if I was deconstructing the mug-shot, yet if I was heading into a similar space it was for decidedly different reasons. As Lombroso had done, I was severely restricting my sitters’ ability to present themselves, but I was allowing them to be themselves. I knew I was being ruthless, but I wanted to do it in a gentle way. So why was I paring back portraiture to these bare essentials, producing images that were in no way trying to convey notions of ‘inner character’ or expressions of individual ‘personality traits’ – all the usual tropes for portrait photography? By removing all these ‘constructs’ (the better to engage with the gaze of my sitters), I was seeking to evoke anew something that had become obscured over time, diluted by familiarity: namely, that haunting, existential trace of time and mortality, the fatal sentiment that lies inherent within photography itself.
A portrait
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A portrait was first exhibited in Melbourne in 1985. It was then shown in Krackow, Poland in 1986, and an expanded version of the series was exhibited in Paris in 1987.
Two years later, in December 1989, I was invited to participate in a very unusual project. For a six-month period I became artist-in-residence in the cancer ward of Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital. Initiated by Dr John Salzberg, Senior Oncologist at the hospital, and funded by the Australia Council, this residency was quite a groundbreaking attempt to have art and medicine interact in a very real way.
Given access to all aspects of the cancer ward, my sole brief was to express this experience through my work. It became a very harrowing yet rewarding experience. Having lost both my parents a year or two before the residency, I was no stranger to grief. Choosing to work closely with the palliative care team meant that the patients I was having contact with would soon die. John Salzberg kindly warned me of the emotional territory I was heading into by gently saying, ‘Be careful Rod, every egg you put into your basket is probably going to break’. The work was fraught with issues. How was I going to make portraits in these dire circumstances? It was one thing to confront my peers with an image of themselves that reflected their mortality back to them in an abstract way, but these cancer patients were having to face their own mortality in very real, concrete terms. And in many cases they were also coping with drastic body image changes that were a consequence of their medical treatment. There were many instances when I became close to patients, but understood that it would be totally inappropriate to photograph them. All the same, there were some patients who were prepared to collaborate with me. And I sought to give something back to them in the process by including in their portraits an echo of their own childhood. 14
Portraits from the cancer ward
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Pam 1989 Pam died six weeks after this photograph was taken. She is holding a photograph of herself aged six taken by her father. 17
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The residency gave me an emotional backlog of grief; it was a very profound experience. The period that followed found me needing to take a break from my work.
As it so happened back then, photography was also going through changes. Post-modernist theories were coming to the fore and art photography was being absorbed into the broader context of contemporary conceptual art. All well and good: in art as in life, change is inevitable. Yet I did have certain reservations, especially when the gatekeepers of these new theories here in Australia were strongly insinuating an exclusivity that had the effect of banishing all other attitudes towards photography to the margins, while a broader attitude seemed to have prevailed elsewhere. So, still carrying the emotional consequences of my work in the cancer ward and reeling from some of the local ideological restraints being placed on the medium I loved, I found myself starting what would become a long, selfimposed exile from the world of art photography. But in the back of my mind was always the intention to return to my ‘portrait pilgrimage’ at some stage in the future. And return I did, almost a decade later, when I completed a new series of portraits drawing subjects from the younger generation around me, and this time moving enthusiastically into the world of colour.
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Portraits from last century
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Even while making the original series A portrait back in the 1980s, I was aware of the possibilities that the work held for a future project, a photographic essay about time. No doubt influenced by Sue Ford’s fascinating Time series that I had seen at Brummels Gallery in 1974, I felt that the very direct, formal, self-conscious nature of my portrait work would provide the foundation for a very contemplative essay, should I return to photograph the same subjects at some stage in the future.
The thing I needed was time. Looking back now, I realise that the passage of time is one thing that flows with an unrelenting inevitability; the longer one lives to witness it, the more rapidly it flows. Originally I had in mind to make this work after a ten-year period, but life was to intervene and that was not the case. In the interim, two of my original sitters had died. Reflecting on this, I thought it important that their passing should become an integral part of the series when finally I came to make it. One of the things that most struck me during my time in the cancer ward was how the different individuals I witnessed facing their own impending death – along with their close families – were doing so in isolation from the society around them. They were like islands of grief in an ocean of indifference. The all-consuming, youth worshipping, ‘self-absorbed’ society we exist in today has little time for contemplating death. The French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), at the beginning of a work titled That to study philosophy is to learn to die, quoted the Roman writer and orator Cicero: ‘to study philosophy is to prepare oneself for death’.
Earlier in this essay I spoke of attempting to evoke anew that existential trace of time and mortality, the fatal sentiment that lies inherent within photography itself. In making the series A portrait revisited twenty years or more 30
after the original work, I wanted to reflect on, and to bear witness to, this philosophical essence that lingers like an archaic trace at the very core of photography. —Rod McNICOL, May 2014
A portrait revisited 1986–2006
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Portraiture and nothingness Rod McNicol has been making photographic portraits for over thirty years. He has become one of Australia’s most celebrated portrait photographers, recognised for his decades-long, singular dedication to photographing his fellow travellers. However, to simply describe him as a ‘portrait photographer’ is to overlook the very specific way in which he engages with this genre. Initially inspired by nineteenth-century photographs of criminals and the insane, McNicol has adopted a very particular approach to portraiture, one that resists any superficial celebration of personality. His aim is to photograph everyday people is a systematic way, creating a footprint of their passage through life at a specific point in time. He has now photographed hundreds of people with the same, relentless uniformity: they all look at the camera with a similar expression against the soft hue of McNicol’s studio backdrop; bathed in the uniform light of clerestories and skylights, each body occupies precisely the same part of the photographic frame. Together, these portraits reiterate a sombre message that says as much about photography as it does about the fate of each sitter: memento mori; don’t forget your own mortality.
The medium of photography is particularly effective at laying bare the realities of time and aging. McNicol makes explicit use of this in his pivotal series A portrait revisited: 1986–2006. For this group of pictures McNicol re-photographed earlier subjects, creating diptychs that juxtapose older and young selves against the same background. Like Sue Ford’s iconic Time series, the juxtaposition of portraits makes clear the effects of time and its passage on the sitter. In some instances the subjects have passed away, but McNicol has taken a photograph of the backdrop anyway, allowing its blank brutality to
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First published in 2014 by Monash Gallery of Art 860 Ferntree Gully Rd, Wheelers Hill, Victoria 3150 www.mga.org,au
This publication is copyright and all rights are reserved. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced or communicated to the public by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be directed to the publisher. © Monash Gallery of Art © Rod McNicol
Published to coincide with Rod McNicol: memento mori Monash Gallery of Art 13 June–31 August 2014
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data: McNicol, Rod The existential portrait/Rod McNicol/Stephen Zagala 1st ed ISBN: 978-1-876764-45-6 Editing: Shaune Lakin Design: Mark Hislop Printing: Adams Print
The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Monash Gallery of Art or the City of Monash. BACK COVER Rod McNICOL Self portrait 1978