Can we talk about an Australian photography, as we once used to talk about an Australian art or Australian culture? Does it make any sense to talk about an Australian photography in the globalised world of the 21st century? Should we do so?
Gayle and I, bare and exposed
Between the 1940s and 1960s Bernard Smith published three books that established paradigms for the interpretation of Australian art, albeit in European art historical terms. These shaped the emerging discipline of Australian art history onto a trajectory that would not be shaken for another two decades, a direction that continued in the 1980s' and then 1990s' emphasis on the postmodernist strategy of appropriation.
In the first, Place, Taste, Tradition Smith argued that vision had a history in that the English colonists saw the Australian landscape with English eyes and they endowed that landscape with the formal qualities of landscapes to which they were aesthetically accustomed in England. The flora, fauna, landscape and indigenous people were all It was the other. constructed as exotic, repugnant and grotesque. It was the other, but also an imaginary fantasia full of wonders and monsters. Smith's claim was that art and identity result from the negotiations of traditions and locations, and not of the soil.
Gayle and I, bare and exposed Between the 1940s and 1960s Bernard Smith published three books that established paradigms for the interpretation of Australian art, albeit in European art historical terms. These shaped the emerging discipline of Australian art history onto a trajectory that would not be shaken for another two decades, a direction that continued in the 1980s' and then 1990s' emphasis on the postmodernist strategy of appropriation.
In the first, Place, Taste, Tradition Smith argued that vision had a history in that the English colonists saw the Australian landscape with English eyes and they endowed that landscape with the formal qualities of landscapes to which they were aesthetically accustomed in England. The flora, fauna, landscape and indigenous people were all It was the other. constructed as exotic, repugnant and grotesque. It was the other, but also an imaginary fantasia full of wonders and monsters. Smith's claim was that art and identity result from the negotiations of traditions and locations, and not of the soil.
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