Jeff Carter John Gollings Trent Parke
Photographs from Gold Coast Streets 1957 - 2008
Street life is a shared experience of common places, along roads and pathways, beneath signs and shop awnings, at bus stops and car parks. Glances are exchanged, conversations overheard, confrontations made with display and bravado and silent reverie found within the maelstrom. The street is by definition a very public space - but as presented in this exhibition, there are also private and unseen transitory moments captured by the keen eye of a photographer. These are images where everything seems to come together and where the fraction of a second captured on film, gives new insights into the wider experience of the city. Street photography can transform random events and sites into a place of unscripted theatre where personal narratives caught in the frame become part of a larger drama of universal experience. Streets of Gold presents the work of three important Australian photographers Jeff Carter, John Gollings and Trent Parke, who have each come to the Gold Coast with specific - but quite different - intentions to make photographic studies of these streets. Their work spans three generations and reflects distinctive approaches to the genre of street photography. Their images however, offer much more than a straightforward historical record of a time and a place. They are infused with a genuine sense of inquiry that seeks out the less obvious or the cliché. The camera is their common compulsive tool of investigation and many of these works are now seen for the first time. The street life captured in their works is however, as much about city form as it is about people. The buildings, signs and street furniture of the Gold Coast have the same kind of transitory presence as the people within the frame. The distinctive built form of Surfers Paradise that we recognise today, has a brief history of just 60 years – a relative infant compared to other major Australian cities. This urban landscape has a language of impermanence and there is an almost tangible, expectant sense that as needs change and opportunities arise, new structures will emerge. Alternately sites may languish for many years awaiting consolidation or the right market conditions, so these spaces lie untended or vacant, often dappled with faded multiple ‘For Sale’ signs. An arrival to the Gold Coast is an encounter first with a trickle, then a staccato rhythm of low apartments, soaring towers, petrol stations and modest beach houses squeezed between gleaming mansions. The coastal urban highway strip is punctuated by signage for hotels, fast food outlets, shopping arcades and fun attractions. The gold of these streets is the palpable sense of the possibility of reinvention and renewal. The opportunity for escape from the conventions of suburban life - either for a few days as a tourist or for a lifetime as a resident - has lured many thousands to the Gold Coast since the mid 1950s. Some revel in the opportunities for transgression, others slip easily into the early morning rhythms of beach life. These works by Jeff Carter, John Gollings and Trent Parke show that these streets are ours to inhabit and enjoy, to shape and to change. Virgina Rigney
His target for these black and white photographs were the popular magazines such as People, Pix, Australian Walkabout and the Australian Womans Weekly - which in a pre-television age gave people the opportunity to really see what was happening in the world. The American magazine Life which appeared in 1936, was one of the most influential of this style of publication, and in 1951 it published its first picture essay over four double pages - previously a single image had carried a story. This kind of format immediately suited Carter’s approach of seeking to get to know his subject’s wider situation and wanting to tell that whole story with a series of images – it also gave better returns and greater control to him as both a writer and photographer. Rather than wait for an editor to commission him to do a particular feature, Carter would often simply propose a subject and head off. In the summer of 1957 he returned to Surfers Paradise with his wife Mare and baby son to make a more serious study of the holiday town that was starting to capture the national public imagination. He carried two recently purchased identical East German Super Ikonta cameras which used square shaped 120 film with 12 shots per roll.
‘It is any Australian country town plus optimism. It is a utopia of souvenir shops, bamboo bridges spanning murky rock pools, night clubs, fabulous floor shows, bikini bars selling floral wisps of bathers and Hawaiian shirts through windows open to the foot path …. There is a feeling, rare enough in Australia, of adventure and enterprise. You might call it the cream skimmed off the top of the 20th century Australian spirit…a feeling that Australia’s heavy shroud of conservatism is here burst open, providing an outlet for the type of entrepreneur who is stifled by the plodding restrictive ways of the southern cities. Here he is getting something done. He is building and making a rowdy, good natured flamboyant, crime free healthy resort which can attract holiday makers purely on economic grounds.’ Boyd had recently returned from almost two years as a Fulbright scholar and visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in America and perhaps his polemic was born out of the frustration at returning to a still provincial Australia. Carter’s street photographs from the same year capture similar impressions - some quite literally, such as the image of the couple walking over the bamboo bridge at the Cathay Café, and others indirectly, such as the extraordinary captured moment street image - Tableau. Two girls in their fashionable après beachwear, have stopped to look at the improbable sight of a man doing a handstand on the roof of the building opposite. The two older, formally dressed men on the footpath, are oblivious to this display of youthful exuberance and recklessness - and they seem out of place and time.
These precisely engineered cameras were relatively compact yet delivered medium format image quality with a Zeiss lens that folded out and a viewfinder that was held to the eye. Such a camera allowed Carter to operate quickly and discreetly.
The relative innocence of these moments has shifted when Carter returned in the early 1960s’, this time with 35mm Nikon cameras and standard and telephoto lenses. A new generation of teenagers crowds the pavements, glancing in envy at a smart car and a swagger, carefree in manicured highset hairdos or calling out with sexual bravado. The beer garden is their post beach playground, graphically captured in Carter’s composition of bare chests and big smiles.
Crossing the border into Queensland he recognized the novelty of the American style take away food bar – come on eat before we both starve – the individual bar stools and quick roadside service.
Hatless, shirtless in the searing heat at 1:46 pm, Carter has captured them again on the steps of the main beach at Surfers Paradise in a composition not too far removed from the classical renaissance.
In 1957, Surfers Paradise was beginning to bustle. Post-war building restrictions had been lifted in 1952 but it had taken a few more years for economic activity to gain real momentum. Lennons Broadbeach Hotel had opened in 1955 and the Chevron Hotel and Kinkabol – the first high rise apartment building were just beginning construction. Carter noticed and photographed a rather unprepossessing sign for Florida Gardens, the first canal estate that was being dredged a few miles down the road in the midst of a dry paddock. It was however, the immediacy of the lively street activity that Carter had come to photograph.
Their confidence and assurance is evidence of a distinctly Australian refashioning of street culture – the formality of the European best-dressed style promenade has evaporated and what you are not wearing has become more important than what or who you are.
For Surfers Paradise, the street seamlessly merges with the beach, for there is little that delineates these two zones – people wander from their hotel, to the sand and back, eat and browse in the shops without changing their clothes, putting on shoes or relinquishing their newly lost inhibitions. Carter reveals an eye for stylish fashion – something he thinks he took from having watched his mother work as a dress designer. He has noticed the jaunty capri pants on the women at the Spaghetti and Goulash stall, and the combination of casual beach wear in the Bon and Tom’s American Café scene. These photographs also show a cosmopolitan selection of informal eating out options – something of a novelty in an Australia that was yet to feel the impact of post war immigration on national cuisine.
Jeff Carter continues to practice as a photographer and at 80 has recently embarked on a series of journeys to photograph the human face of drought and climate change in irrigation and marginal grazing lands, a project that will take up most of 2008. In 2004 he was honoured by the Australia Council with a prestigious Emeritus Award. He is represented by Bryon/McMahon Gallery in Sydney and in Melbourne by the Christine Abrahams Gallery. His work is held in National collections and these may be viewed via Picture Australia and also at www.jeffcarterphotos.com. 1. 28.12.1957 Melb Age Literary Supplement 2. Other photographs from these trips were featured in “The New Gold Coast” in PEOPLE 8.11.61 (pages 19-25), “Golden Girls” in PEOPLE 16.1.63 (pages 34-35) and another about upcoming GC model of the period Kathy Ford and Paula Stafford in PEOPLE 5.4.67 (pages 26-27)
Jeff Carter Street of a Thousand Pleasures 1957
Born in 1928, Carter had begun travelling with his camera and working in itinerant farming and labouring jobs to pay his way since leaving school just after the war. After five years as editor of a popular Fishing and Outdoor magazine he decided to start a fully independent career as a photographer and writer - carting his bulky typewriter and camera to document previously unheralded working Australian lives. At this time he made extensive studies of the traders at the Queen Victoria Market, Melbourne, Sorlie’s Travelling Vaudeville Show and the new towns of the Snowy Mountains Scheme.
The images have a contemporary parallel in an article on Surfers Paradise written by Robin Boyd, then Australia’s best-known architect, for one of his regular columns in the Melbourne Age on ‘Developing a Fibro Cement paradise’ (1)
All works on the following pages C type film – Contemporary Digital Print Courtesy the artist, Bryon McMahon Gallery Sydney and Christine Abrahams Gallery Melbourne
Jeff Carter had heard there was ‘something different’ happening up in this place called Surfers Paradise and, in 1955, he went there briefly with his friend Eric Warrell to see for himself.
1 Jeff Carter Love in a Hot Climate 1957 2 Jeff Carter Pioneer Boulevardeers 1957 3 Jeff Carter As Good as it Got 1957 4 Jeff Carter Before Sophistication 1957 5 Jeff Carter Why go Overseas 1957 6 Jeff Carter When all else Fails (there is always fish and chips) 1957 7 Far Left - Jeff Carter Tableau 1957
Jeff Carter Passing Time c.1963
Jeff Carter A Touch of Class c.1963
1 Above - Jeff Carter The Age of Ignorance c.1963 2 Jeff Carter Not Parking, just Pausing c.1963 3 Jeff Carter Worlds Apart c.1963 4 Jeff Carter Mutual Appreciation c.1963 5 Jeff Carter Apres Surf c.1963 6 Jeff Carter Best Dressed, Less Dressed c.1963
“Venturi has written a dangerous book …. It inverts the ideas that many have based their professional lives upon” This ‘dangerous book’ was Learning from Las Vegas, first published in 1972, which on one level was a study of the Las Vegas strip as a phenomenon of architectural communication, but whose broader intent was to argue for a recognition of the value and role of the architectural form of the everyday – signage, shopping centres, garages, parking lots - and against what the authors termed purist Modernism, which had become sterile and divorced from the way that people and cities actually wanted to function. They advocated the vitality of architecture of inclusion – against ‘the deadness that results in too great a preoccupation with tastefulness and total design’. Far from being threatened by these ideas, three young architects, living far away in Melbourne, were immediately attracted to the arguments. They decided to test out the ideas and make their own study of the one place in Australia that unashamedly embraced the American style iconography of signs and symbols to create a streetscape of escapism – Surfers Paradise. Tony Styant-Browne, Mal Horner and John Gollings had studied together at Melbourne University in the late 1960s and Styant- Browne went on to write a masters thesis on the Strip city. Gollings had decided to pursue his pre-university interest in photography and was working with commercial advertising as well as beginning to specialise in architectural photography. Their Gold Coast connections where reinforced by their own holiday experiences as teenagers and by Styant-Browns father who had practiced as an architect here for a number of years. The year they came - 1974 - was an exceptionally bad one for Surfers Paradise. Cyclonic rains had bought extensive flooding to Brisbane and the Gold Coast, first on Australia Day and then later again in March. The beaches were stripped of sand leaving bare the unsightly, but essential, rock walls protecting the Esplanade and tourist numbers were significantly down. Political uncertainty at a Federal level and the spectre of inflation kept building activity low and only two small high-rises were built in that year. This background is hinted at in the hundreds of photographs that John Gollings took over those 3 weeks. The streets are clean but relatively quiet and orderly, although this may be attributed to the desire to photograph in early morning light. Gollings recalls that with only three weeks scheduled to make the study before they were due to go on to other commitments, the three had already decided on quite definite photographic strategies before they arrived and he went to work quickly with large format, panorama and 35mm cameras. Essentially he worked in four different styles of street photography: quick single 35mm documentary shots of hotels, shops and signs, carefully composed medium format images that concentrated on formal elements of colour and composition, wide panoramas shot in the middle of a street and finally the most complex and innovative – strip together streetscapes. This multilayered approach to making photographic documentation was partly informed by the extensive use of photographic reproductions in Learning from Las Vegas, and this in turn had been informed by contemporary Pop Art. The authors, Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, make reference on the second page to their debt to the Pop artists and Ed Ruscha in particular and later in the book they feature a black and white photograph that is an “Edward Ruscha” style elevation of the Vegas Strip. (Illus.33 ) Ruscha b. 1937, had studied at art school in Los Angeles in the late 1950s and his paintings were meticulous renderings of isolated commercial signage or deadpan renderings of petrol stations. In 1966 he published a small unassuming artist’s book– Every building on the Sunset Strip – that was literally that – a photographic strip of both sides of the road folded concertina style
which when opened out stretches for over 8 metres. The small size of the images just allows you to read the detail on the shops, hotels and vacant lots - Plushpups sits beside the Hotel Continental, the Body Shop Burlesque and Liquor Lockett. Encased in a glittering silver slip case, it has become a small but influential icon of the Pop Art period. Ruscha commented - “The photographs I use are not ‘arty’ in any sense of the word – I think photography is dead as fine art; its only place is in the commercial world …I want absolutely neutral material” Gollings has taken this idea of making a series of photographs and then combining them to form a long image of the streetscape, but has also inserted his own photographic language to make his work anything but neutral. Shot from the rooftop of a slowly moving car he painstakingly made over 10 street strips of central Surfers Paradise some using over 20 different images. Shooting in colour he is able to capture the graphic intensity of the line of awnings and signs beneath a bright blue sky, and rather than mechanically align each photograph neatly, he has chosen to push and flatten the shapes of the buildings to enhance their graphic quality and to maintain the legibility of the signs. Pedestrians appear occasionally and with their shorts and long white walk socks are definite markers of their time. Some, with their careful composition and capturing of itinerant detail, such as Hotel Surfers City which features a gleaming blue sports car out front, take on all the qualities of street photography of the captured moment. The medium format compositions such as Mini Putt Putt and Modern Units are early indicators of Gollings’ now renowned elegance, but there are also works of humour and irony such as the rear view of the Revolving Aquarium restaurant sign with the photo point station and the looming beer jug beneath a threatening sky. Some works hint at the passing of a golden age for Surfers Paradise – he photographs the fading signage for Siesta Motel , the tired Golden Mile Flats and the pool of the El Dorado ( the first motel in Surfers Paradise and then just over 20 years old) in an warm sunset light, knowing that these would not be part of the streetscape for very much longer. As often happens with such projects, time and the immediacy of the need to pursue careers and family commitments saw that their study of the Surfers Paradise strip was never published. Styant- Browne moved to Los Angeles a year later and when Gollings visited him there he was able to purchase two copies of Ed Ruschas’ book for himself. The images in this exhibition have never been published or exhibited before and using digital scanning, Gollings has combined the multi-images according to his original vision and they are now presented as complete. As artworks they can now be seen as representing an important moment in Australian photography – when the language of American Pop art was translated in a completely contemporary way to make a distinctive local expression. We can only hope that we are now ready to learn from them. Letter to the Beautification committee of Las Vegas who where anxious to plant trees and grass along the strip – “ the best things are the signs and the architecture – the median should be paved in Gold” Learning from Las Vegas p68 John Gollings was born in 1944 is principal of Gollings Pidgeon a Melbourne based company specializing in architectural photography and graphic design. Although best known for his architectural images – including much recent work for the latest Gold Coast highrise developments, Gollings has lectured, published and exhibited widely both nationally and internationally in Art Galleries and Museums and holds a Masters of Architecture from RMIT. His work is held in the collection of the Australian National Gallery. 1. Ed Ruscha quoted In Oxford companion to Contemporary Art p260
All photographs C-Type film Contemporary digital print. Courtesy John Gollings
John Gollings Sign Revolving Aquarium Restaurant, Isle of Capri 1974
1 John Gollings Ampol Service Station Surfers Paradise 1974
5 John Gollings Surfers Paradise Street Panorama 1974
2 John Gollings Modern Units 1974
6 John Gollings Mini Putt Putt 1974
3 John Gollings El Dorado 1974
7 John Gollings Bottle Shop 1974
4 John Gollings Siesta Motel 1974
8 Below - John Gollings Street Panorama Surfers Paradise Blvd 1974
John Gollings Yum Yum 1974
John Gollings Golden Mile Flats 1974
Forward to 2008 and the Gold Coast has leap frogged other regional centres to become Australia’s sixth largest city. On any given day, an average 78,000 people visit, and more than 1000 choose to settle here each month. The Gold Coast uneasily straddles competing reputations as the ultimate party town and the place to gracefully retire - as a natural aquatic playground for the lithe and fit, or the site of the highly fabricated fantasy ‘worlds’ - as entrepreneurial, aspirant and internationally connected but also the home base of support for the inwardly looking One Nation party.
Parke’s photographs may at first seem like they are the lucky result of simply being in the right place at the right time – however the decisions made to be in those places, a clear sense of composition and an intuitive interest in the human condition, make him able to respond quickly when something does happen. Patience and physical stamina combined with intense concentration are hallmarks of his working methods but it is the quality of light and the saturated colour that this brings to his images that is one of the most defining elements in his work.
In the 34 years since John Gollings made his series, the revolving Aquarium restaurant on the Isle of Capri has become an Anglican church and the mini putt putt is overlooked by an 80 storey residential tower.
Before the sun even touches the horizon, Surfers Paradise is awake – in fact with the longest trading hours for nightclubs in the country, it never sleeps. As the light then spreads and the wind is still, the streets become a stage for the meeting of two separate cultures.
Trent Parke had originally planned a trip to the Gold Coast to continue a series of street photography begun in Sydney that particularly captured reflections, shadows and atmospheric effects within the built canyons of the city. He was then perhaps best known for his work Minutes to Midnight – a series shot in black and white over two years as he travelled the harsh, sparse vast distances of Australia, with his partner and fellow photographic artist Narelle Autio, as the county turned over the millennium to the new century. This new city series precipitated a move into intense saturated colour, shot with medium format film stock, so that when printed to a large scale, each fragment of detail within the frame is laid bare.
Shirtless, tired, and still keyed with the exuberance of music and substances, the boys sitting on the steps at the point where Cavill Mall meets the beach have made it through the night. The beauty and infinite stretch of the beach and ocean offer the space to get things together before moving on. They inhabit exactly the same place where Jeff Carter photographed his colour beach scene over 45 years earlier. At this hour however, the beach is not theirs alone, for one by one, cyclists, joggers, skaters and most distinctively, surfers appear, their boards tucked under their arms on their way to catch a hoped-for swell. These groups pass each other without needing to acknowledge the connection of the shared time.
Parke quickly realized that the Gold Coast had a very different kind of urban landscape from conventional cities, with its aging motels and remnant fibro beach shacks surviving between mansions and high rises and the very obvious sense of continual change. The Red Lion Motel is depicted in what must be its third incarnation of a new colour scheme within as many years and it is now dwarfed by the sparkling apartment tower on the other side of the highway.
6 AM Sunday morning Surfers Paradise presents the disjunction between the culture of the night and the third of the Gold Coasts early morning inhabitants - the international tourist. Lying asleep in a position of beautiful repose with the sea lightly drenching him, the boy becomes a little like human detritus, for the gaze of the tourist is firmly on the million dollar view stretching out before him. (1)
Big skies and billowing clouds introduce another important element, but it is the unpredictability and the unusual street life of the metropolis on the beach that has led him to return three times since 2006 to make this ongoing series of work, Coming Soon.
This is amongst the most recent of Parkes pictures, made in February 2008. This visit coincided with what seemed like the only real weekend of intense heat that whole wet summer. The city felt charged and eagerly embraced one last opportunity for play before the season turned.
Street Photography has continually evolved with its own rich formal language and history and Parke has absorbed these legacies – both through his membership of the Magnum photo agency and through his own large collection of books. Rather than look to the up close captured moment style of say Cartier-Bresson, American colour photographers of the 1960s and 1970s, Gary Winogrand and Stephen Shore have been more influential. Shore’s epic road series American Surfaces of 1972 of apparently banal streetscapes, hotel rooms, signs and characters met along the way, seems unremarkable at first but the concentration, matter of factness and constant recording have a tone that appeals to Parke.
Our message Jesus captures the moment where one persons early morning stroll to the beach is another’s disastrous end to the night – a scenario played out beneath the ironic call to personal salvation of the Surfers City Chapel. (2)
Digital photography has now made the camera a ubiquitous presence on the street. Carrying a phone or pocket camera puts the potential for taking an image of a quirky moment within the reach of just about everyone and if that does not get you, in a post 9/11 world, a surveillance camera probably will.
Trent Parke was born in 1971 and raised in Newcastle, New South Wales. Using his mother’s Pentax Spotmatic and the family laundry as a darkroom, he began taking pictures when he was around 12 years old. Today, Parke, the only Australian photographer to become a member of the Magnum Photography Agency, works primarily as a street photographer. He was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography and has won World Press Photo Awards in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2005, and in 2006 was awarded the ABN AMRO emerging artist award.
Parke is one of 18 international photographers featured on the web site www.in-public.com devoted to profiling the whole genre of street photography and which also gives anyone in cyberland the opportunity to have their work reviewed and placed up. As an indicator of the revival of interest in the genre, the site receives many thousands of hits per week. Despite the obvious logistical advantages of digital cameras, Parke continues to work only in film and to sell his work as C Type film prints. This enforces a discipline of being aware of the remaining stock in his pocket and there is no facility for the immediate review of an image to ‘see’ if it has been captured.
But it is also in the ordinary that Parke finds a kind of grace. He finds the confluence that has brought a cyclist attired in red beneath a similarly hued bending crane and the reverse of a sign, two men walking in unison yet on the opposite sides of an otherwise deserted street, and a man feeding a parking meter in a empty car park, framed by the discarded guard rails.
He lives in Adelaide and is represented by Stills Gallery in Sydney. (1) (2)
For the record Parke notes that the tourists did check that the man was breathing before taking their picture and that he woke shortly afterwards. The driver in the car was not hurt. All other works on the following pages are Type C Photographs shown in this exhibition as Digital Prints from the series Coming Soon. Courtesy the artist, Magnum Photos and Stills Gallery Sydney
Trent Parke Vegas in Paradise Gold Coast 2006 Type C Print 114 x 143cm, Collection Gold Coast City Art Gallery Acquired 2007
Trent Parke Hard Rock. Surfers Paradise 2006
Trent Parke Six A.M. Sunday morning Surfers Paradise 2008
1 Trent Parke Burleigh sunset. Burleigh Heads 2006 2 Trent Parke Exotic vegetables. Gold Coast Hwy 2006 3 Trent Parke Instant cash in a flash. Miami. Gold Coast Hwy 2006 4 Trent Parke Combi Van. Surfers paradise 2008 5 Trent Parke Waiter. Surfers paradise 2008 6 Trent Parke Our Message Jesus. Broadbeach Gold Coast Hwy 2008 7 Trent Parke Red Lion Motel. Surfers Paradise 2008 8 Trent Parke Pastor Benny Hinn’s Holy Spirit Miracle Crusade. Surfers Paradise 2008 9 Trent Parke Five A.M. Sunday Morning. Surfers Paradise 2008 10 Trent Parke Morning storm. Surfers Paradise 2008 11 Trent Parke Sunrise in paradise. Surfers Paradise 2008 12 Trent Parke Man Feeding Meter. Surfers Paradise 2008
Trent Parke Crime Stoppers Surfers Paradise 2008
The exhibition is presented with the generous sponsorship of the Sunland Group.
Listed international developer the Sunland Group, is delighted to support this exhibition of important photographs which vividly capture the evolution of the Gold Coast from a holiday coastal town to a vibrant, sophisticated city. Sunland was founded on the Gold Coast 25 years ago and has proudly played an innovative role in the development of the city’s distinctive urban environment and its landmark architectural achievements. We value the opportunity to look through the eyes of these artists to celebrate our region’s past and focus on a future vision for the Gold Coast.
Gold Coast City Art Gallery wishes to thank the Sunland Group for their support and the three artists, Jeff Carter, John Gollings and Trent Parke, for their enthusiasm in working on this project and for making their works available for exhibition. Gold Coast City Art Gallery Gold Coast Arts Centre 135 Bundall Rd Surfers Paradise Ph 61 7 55816567 gallery@gcac.com.au www.gcac.com.au Acknowledgments This catalogue is published by Gold Coast City Art Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition Streets of Gold Jeff Carter John Gollings Trent Parke Photographs from Gold Coast Streets 1957 – 2008 28 March – 11 May 2008 Curator: Virginia Rigney Curator Public Programs GCCAG Design: Peter Sexty Design © Images: Jeff Carter, John Gollings Trent Parke Text: Virginia Rigney ISBN 978 0 9775023 3 3