Museum #1: Museum für Fotografie

Museum für Fotografie

Jebensstrasse 2, 10623 Berlin

S- & U-Bahn Zoologischer Garten

He caused scandal in Berlin in 1963 for photographing a model dressed as a spy being arrested at the Berlin Wall. His shot for a hosiery billboard, of a model naked bar stockings, was banned in New York in the ‘80s for being too explicit.

German-Australian photographer Helmut Newton was a self-described ‘gun for hire’, who claimed his photographic work was not art, but whose provocative images stylistically and thematically pushed boundaries. In the context of this museum, however, his creative presentations cannot help but be viewed as art, collated as they are under the one roof.

Read my full review of the Helmet Newton Foundation exhibition at the Museum für Fotografie in Civilian: www.civilianglobal.com. 

to the island

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Insta-city

This month involved a brief sojourn in Sydney, where time was spent supping coffees in schmick Surry Hills cafes, eating copious dumplings and exploring the 18th Biennale of Sydney (http://bos18.com/). I walked the city one cold afternoon, taking Instragram photos for Lonely Planet (@lonelyplanet, @littlecollisions). When you're a regular visitor to a city, it's easy to veer towards a jaded and flat encounter, but with camera (or, rather, iphone) firmly in hand, I felt a revived enthusiasm, and set off to discover the city as if for the first time. Emerging from Central Station, the most prosaic of Sydney transit points, I had that famous Proust quote in mind: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. A wet and wintry city is a ripe setting for architecture, interiors and light. No change to preoccupation, then, in this new voyage.

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Cockatoos and Convicts

Did you know there is an incredible industrial and historic relic of an island sitting plump in Sydney Harbour? Maybe you do if you frequent the Balmain ferry route or have headed there to watch the New Year’s Eve fireworks. Information about the island’s Aboriginal history is scant, but it was known by local indigenous people as Wa-rea-mah, and later Biloela, meaning ‘cockatoo’. The island is an eerie place, scattered with remnants of its various personas as convict penal colony, school for wayward boys and orphans, and government ship yards. You can easily imagine the ghosts of men in chains from almost 200 years ago, toiling to blast the cliff and excavate the dock area. It’s a brutal history that offsets the maritime success achieved through the ships constructed in the island's workshops and launched into the bay.

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Modern artscape

One of the island’s modern incarnations is as a location for the Biennale of Sydney. The juxtaposition of an industrial and historical site housing contemporary art creates a fascinating yet unsettling context for the installations, housed in warehouses, old grain silos and set along pitch-black tunnels through the cliff. Cranes and industrial machinery along the wharf and around the island take on a creative appearance, tall and poetic as sculptures. Looming on long legs, they appear almost humanesque. Functional objects that transform into artistic spectacle and comment. The interplay between historical and modern occupation was acknowledged, intentionally or otherwise, in several exhibitions at the Biennale. It was these works that referenced the layering of historical transformation and the container of the art itself – chiselled tunnels, industrial-sized cogs and winches, giant steel frames and parts I couldn’t name a purpose for – that I found most engaging. Here, too, the journey became one about having new eyes. About reinvention.

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The pieces

Chasm, by Fujiko Nakay, involved an artificial mist periodically ejected in great bursts from the cliffside near the entrance to Building 150, itself once a turbine shop and brass foundry. The mist's eruption against the afternoon sky when viewed from the darkness inside the warehouse created a magical scene of silhouettes as people interacted with the piece. Morphing forms would appear and then disappear without a trace. 

Inside Building 150, against a constant electronic soundscape tumbling and crashing, the beauty and symmetry found in the industrial machinery was poignantly referenced by Cal Lane. Lace designs in red sand, an odd contrast against the concrete flooring, led to a white lattice-work shipping container, resembling a large, elaborate bird cage. 

Jonathan Jones' untitled light installation through Tunnel 1 cut a jagged path through the cliff, created a metaphoric connection to the convict chiselling once done to create this corridor. 

Outside, the weather was suitably tempestuous and unnerving – gloomy clouds threatened, dissipated to blue, reformed, then erupted into showers and downpour before clearing, only to repeat throughout the day. My day at the Biennale involved constant transformations and new perspectives on a fantastic hybrid island beneath shifting skies.

a theatre of light

IT’s a night like any other. A bar. Some drinks. Many conversations with friends. This bar, however, is not like any other. It has a cinema out the back. We take our drinks and sit there, two of us, in the empty space, with the midnight conversations dulled behind us. The space is functional, utilitarian, but there is a lamp lit in one corner that transforms quotidian objects into luminous, burnished lines that I covet for my camera lens.

I wonder, what moves us to take photographs? Do we hope to seize the past, compose narratives, transform memory into something tangible? Are we trying to make evidence of events, capture the real, hold something up as ‘truth’? In many instances, taking a photograph is all of these things. Tourists in particular are good at this. Evidence. Narrative. Memories.

Beyond holiday snapshots, though, the eye is important. You have to see something first. You sense possibility, respond to, perhaps, the potential in the light, the colour, the composition. The photographer imagines how reality could be, not just how it is.

Some of my favourite things to photograph are everyday objects that have been set apart from the mundane, often by a trick of light. I can crave an image, like a predator who sets sights on its prey, tracks it and then cages it. Yet it’s not a sinister act. Although it is one of ownership. Control. Desire.

Chairs. I photographed the chairs. I found them beautiful. But to my friend they were no doubt quite ordinary. ‘I never would have photographed that’, he said, mystified. But when he saw how they were lit up in the photograph, he too loved what he saw.

In this way, photography is far from being a simple representation of reality. When we select a subject, choose the exposure, angle the camera, zoom in, it is an interpretation of what is real. We are a filter. When we delete an image, reposition the lens and take another shot – one we prefer, for whatever reason – we are imposing ourselves upon the image.

What to me seems certain is that the image takes on a life of its own, beyond the first view with the naked eye, beyond the prosaic reality of being stacked and empty chairs in a theatre. The composition may be identical, but we are left with an image of an image of an image…

the translation of photography

LAST YEAR I was lucky enough to attend a Jewish wedding of two close friends in Alice Springs. We danced on the red dirt while it was raining and until we ran out of breath. The bride hitched up her dress, knotting it at the hem, and swapped her Vivienne Westwood heels for cowboy boots. We were terrorised by oversized moths dive-bombing us in the marquee beneath the lights, while the groom’s family were making speeches. Nature was an active player at the wedding. We were visitors, acclimatising.

Before the wedding, a group of us drove countless kilometres to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. After we’d set ourselves up at our Yulara campsite, I went for a walk. There were surprisingly few people around on the path I took, which lead to the top of a lookout. It was peaceful and vast at its peak, as I stood disarmed, looking out across the red undulations and sparsely populated land. I took a photograph.

The desert I saw was nothing like I thought it would be. The desert around me wasn’t at all empty, as the term ‘deserted’ has come to mean; it was full – not just with animals and plant life – it was thick with a resonance and intensity that conjured a wonder unlike anything else. I had forgotten this picture until I looked through my images recently, and was struck by the likeness the scene had to a Fred Williams painting. I have always admired Fred Williams’ work. His dabbed impressions move me inexplicably.

A few months later these same friends moved north to Darwin, and I paid a visit. One weekend we took in the sunset at Mindil Beach. A popular spot for market shopping and sunset viewing, the beach becomes crowded as day ends, and people settle in along the sand. Corks are popped on champagne and beer bottles get kitted out with stubby holders. I wondered what could be special about sunset here. What I witnessed was a glowing orb dipping gradually, almost ceremonial in the way it captured the audience’s attention, and falling to the water beneath it.

When I look at this picture, what is striking to me is how much it resembles the Aboriginal flag. The colours of red and black are reversed, of course – and the black is water and red is sky – but the sun itself is what holds the image together, resounding, powerful and assertive, burning at the centre of the elements.

Sitting on the beach, it didn’t strike me this way at all. Looking out across the earth from Yulara, I didn’t immediately think of Fred Williams. Something particular happened when the image was translated by photography. It took these images for me to be able to see the environment in this particular way. Fred Williams and Harold Thomas saw this first, unaided by the camera, and gave these images to us, populating the Australian imagination.