The Museum of Photographic Arts: Defining Place/Space

Kangaroo (2017) by Michael Cook

Admittedly, photography is not my favorite medium, but I wanted to give the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego a fair chance. I do not hate photography, I just appreciate other mediums (like painting) more. With the ease of a smartphone camera and the abundance of images on social media, photography seems commonplace to me. While I may be indifferent about photography, I have always wanted to go to Australia; luckily for me, the exhibit is called “Defining Place/Space: Contemporary Photography from Australia.” The exhibit was divided by individual artists who gave a brief summary of what they hoped to achieve in their series of chosen photos. Through this exhibit, I was able to identify what I believe to be the unique strengths of photography.

A Moment in Time and Patrick Pound

Patrick Pound is a Melbourne-based artist whose presented work is a series of photos that he found making a complication called Air Moving Right. All the images in this series depict a disruption in the air by anything from wind to breath. The subjects are all different people, places, and even time periods, united only through a sense of instantaneous movement. Some of my favorites include a woman blowing up a balloon, a baseball player sliding into home plate, and a man blowing a bubble with his gum. There is an ephemeral nature to these images implying that they would have been completely different if taken on a few seconds later. Pound’s focus on air evokes the ability of a photograph to capture a moment that is both quick and fragile. If a person’s laugh were bring recorded, photography would be able to capture the moment the subject’s head is thrust back, while a painting would capture the resulting smile. Photography may be less permanent than other mediums, but it can be more intimate in its portrayal. 

Air Moving Right (2018) by Patrick Pound

The Quotidienne and Trent Parke

Trent Parke is a street photography whose work is pedestrian in multiple senses of the word; he captured many anonymous individuals walking across an Adelaide city street in a series called “The Camera is God.” It is everyday people, going about their everyday lives that make up Parke’s subjects. The camera is said to be God as it sees everything, even the commonplace, without discrimination. Additionally, Parke notes that the images are akin to surveillance footage which is becoming all too common in modern life as seemingly every little aspect of a person’s life gets recorded. 

Since photographs can be taken and developed quickly, they do not need to focus on what is special and can capture the nuances of everyday life. Most other mediums seem to focus on more grandiose concepts due to the longer amount of time that is put into the production. Photography is an art form that champions ‘the little guy.’ The average person can be part of something larger, whether that be positive—Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York man-on-the-street approach—or negative—Parke’s presentation of pedestrians as pawns of surveillance. 

No. 731 Candid portrait of a woman on a street corner, Adelaide, Australia (2013) Trent Parke (top left)

No. 309 Candid portrait of a man on a street corner, Adelaide, Australia (2013) Trent Parke (top right)

No. 066 Candid portrait of a man on a street corner, Adelaide, Australia (2013) Trent Parke (bottom left)

No. 893 Candid portrait of a man on a street corner, Adelaide, Australia (2013) Trent Parke (bottom right)

Getting to the Truth

Untitled #1 (2015) by Hoda Afshar

The medium of photography seems to be grounded in more reality than some other mediums because it is capturing rather than representing, evidence rather than suggestion. While we all know nowadays that a photo can be distorted by Photoshop tools or Instagram filters, one can usually find some truth within the image’s frame. There is a long history of photography’s ability to reveal the Truth (with a capital ’T’). One example is Dorothea Lange’s 1936 Migrant Mother which drew attention to the plights of farmers brought on by the Great Depression. 

Mother & Baby (2017) by Tracey Moffatt

There were many examples in “Defining Place/Space” which bring in a range of social justice issues. Artist Tracey Moffatt’s series “Passage” uses the dramatic lighting of a 1940’s film noir in pieces like Mother & Baby to give danger and urgency to the modern issue of asylum seekers. Likewise, Hoda Afshar gives representation to the LGBTQ+ community by being allowed to photograph a bathhouse where a group of gay men were secretly allowed to be themselves. The featured men remain anonymous, as in Untitled #1, but being captured on camera cathartically gives the sitters legitimacy in a once very private space. The series is called “Behold” which commands the viewer to acknowledge the whole context of each shot. 

These mentioned photos get to the truth by presenting reality no matter how harsh it may be. On the other hand, artist Michael Cook demonstrates that an injustice can be represented by anything but reality in his “Invasion” series. I was highly amused to have my first impression of the exhibit feature scenes of London being attacked by surrealism—laser-eyed kangaroos and UFOs! (My favorite in the series, Kangaroo, is featured above). The absurd attacks on London flip around the narrative of colonization by having the British experience the shock, fear, and confusion they inflicted on Australians when they first started inflicting their influence on their shores. 

I came for the humorous content and I stayed for the history lessons.