Photography

One of the characters in Stephen Spender’s novel The Temple, written in the early 1930s, is a young German photographer. They met in Hamburg in 1929. Spender, a university student just discovering the autobiographical bent of his own inspiration, observed that his friend’s attitude was very different. Instead of wanting to preserve the sensuality of the moment in monumental form, the German photographer set out to report the opposite – the death of every moment – which, at the time of being lived, is also passing. His photographs, he told Spender, were not intended to live, they were not communicative. Records of moments already gone at the click of a shutter, they annihilated even memory. Or were intended to do so.

Illustrations are almost mandatory for certain types of books, technical manuals, travel books. Illustrated poetry is not unheard of, but neither is it a common phenomenon in Australia, the normal perception being that poetry is a discrete and competent medium. Nevertheless, there are times when pictorial complementation has been thought desirable. Such a book is O’Connor and Coleman’s Poetry in Pictures: The Great Barrier Reef, which collects some of O’Connor’s reef poems and matches them up with some superb photographs of the birds and marine forms described. The result is a handsome book of the sort you might buy at a reef resort for a Thinking Friend back home.

We all have our favourite examples of language in the landscape, and can feel disappointment not to find them in collections. The pleasure they give can only be enhanced by finding more. This Richard Tipping has done, his choice of graffiti, random association, incongruity, and vandalised property documents man-made absurdity in what he terms ‘this visual and verbal traffic jam ... our every day mental habitat’. The resulting ‘photo-poems’ exploit the ambiguity between intent and effect, text and context to provide fields of symbols from which the reader (viewer?) construct his own meaning.

A colleague questioned my choice of these two books for this page, wondering whether they are too localised for a national journal. This reminded me of a Victorian friend who once aired a theory that the poetry of Kenneth Slessor. That man of Sydney, is not highly regarded in Victoria while ‘Furnley Maurice’ (Frank Wilmot) is little appreciated north of the Murray. What rubbish. Admittedly a writer’s presence on his own soil can be important both for his work and, in some ways, for his audience. It was only when Patrick White and Christina Stead returned to Australia after long absences overseas that they gained proper honour here. But universality also cuts across boundaries and there are universal qualities, or at least for ‘new world’ countries, in each of these books.

The photograph is our time’s supreme form of self-expression. Wherever we look, we are surrounded by photographs – in books, on posters, in magazines, newspapers, packaging, and of course in films and television. The photograph is universally understandable and so appears not to need explanation to supplement it. Its power to convey experience increases as superfluous details are eliminated. And it attains its highest potential when the representation becomes purely symbolic.