School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemThe public and the private: John Berger's writing on photography and memory(ANU Canberra School of Art Gallery, 2000)John Berger's writings on photography belong mostly to the 1970s. Like Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Berger is an advocate of realism, although in neither a naive nor a simplistic fashion. I argue that Berger's writing on photography stands out firstly because of its refusal of a blanket response. Instead, the pivot of his analysis is ambiguity: on one level, the ambiguity of photographic meaning, but also the ambiguity of photographic practice due to the social and political contradictions in which the camera is embedded. This refusal to homogenise the entire field is important, because it allowed Berger to remain attentive, at a moment when many were not, to the different registers of photographic usage.
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ItemWalls of light: immaterial architectures(Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2002)Alex Proyas’ film Dark City (1997) begins when a man wakes up to find he is sharing a room with a woman who has been brutally murdered. His memory is hazy, fragmented. He can’t remember what happened. He can’t remember his own name. The film conjures a compendium of noir elements: seedy hotels, shadowy streets, a string of dead women, hard-boiled cops, a hero accused of murder, a torch singer heroine, all set in what seems to be the noir heyday of the 1940s. The plot, as with so many noir tales, revolves around a search for memory and identity. Underneath the surface of everyday life lurks a massive conspiracy. Someone - a group of strangers - is after him. They want to kill him, but no one believes it. His quest for personal identity becomes a journey into the underbelly of the city, an exposure of its double life. Dark City keeps faith with the noir tradition in which urban alienation is cloaked with sexual overtones and redemption from the night-world is the task of an individual man. The most interesting aspect of the film is the way its striking visual design marries the possibilities of digital imaging in cinema to an urban fable in which brute materialism is explored as a narrative conceit. The city is explicitly figured as a pseudo-sociological experiment run by aliens, and a science fiction story is augmented by science fiction modes of perception - photo-realistic images which warp and morph before our eyes in “real time”. Liquid architecture is born.