“One picture is worth ten thousand words,” said Fred R. Barnard, a Mad Men-like advertising exec working in 1920s New York. Much like Don Draper, he was pretty slippery with the truth, attempting to pass off variations of this tagline as either ancient Japanese or Chinese proverbs, thereby predating the mass misattribution of mangled-but-peppy quotes posted on Instagram by almost a century.
But the truism at the heart of his wibbly wobbly manipulation stands: Photography can transfix while communicating complicated ideas and sophisticated storytelling in an instant. This brings us neatly to NGV’s fascinating new exhibition Photography: Real and Imagined. A breathtaking survey of the cultural institution’s vast photography collection, it highlights north of 270 works centuries by Australian and international artists across two centuries. But rather than settle for a straight-up showcase, NGV Senior Curator of Photography Susan van Wyk and her team have devised an intriguing concept for the show.
The photographs presented either document our world the way it really is, or play fast and loose with the truth to imagine how it could be with illusion-boosted visual magic. So you have Murri man and Mervyn Bishop’s history-capturing 1975 snap of then-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pouring sand from his palm into Gurindji Elder and activist Vincent Lingiari’s as a symbolic gesture recognising First Nations land rights. This shot is all the more important when you consider that Bishop, behind the camera, was the first Aboriginal photographer to work for a major newspaper in this country, beginning his cadetship with the Sydney Morning Herald in 1963.
Awesome Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj fuses Western pop culture iconography with traditional wear to mess with fantasies of the North African country and South African visual activist Zanele Muholi offers statuesque depictions of queer Black women reclaiming their narrative.
If advertising’s impact on the art form and the crossover into fashion magazine shoots fascinates, you’ll want to check out arresting images by the likes of the late Paris-based photographer Man Ray, who worked for French Vogue during the Roaring Twenties and spin out to German Avante-garde artist Ilse Bing’s surrealist shoot for Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1934 ‘Salut’ perfume launch.
Famed American photographer Nan Goldin’s documentation of drag culture in New York and beyond is represented with a stunning shot of a rain-dappled star Misty, during a pride march in the ‘90s. As Goldin – the subject of Laura Poitras’ outstanding doco All the Beauty and the Bloodshed – puts it in her 1993 photobook The Other Side, “Part of my worship of [drag queens] involved photographing them. I wanted to pay homage, to show them how beautiful they were. I never saw them as men dressing up as women, but as something entirely different – a third gender that made more sense than either of the other two.”
Also check out the late Australian photographer Rennie Ellis’ snaps of Sydney drag artists in his 1971 Kings Cross series, and the arresting imagery of American artist Cindy Sherman. The latter loves playfully smashing gender binaries and exaggerated ideas of celebrity in her hyper-stylised self-portraits, telling outré filmmaker John Waters in an interview for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, “I wish I could treat every day as Halloween, and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character.” We dig that imaginative power.
With so much to see spread out across no fewer than 21 themed sections at Fed Square’s Ian Potter Centre, NGV’s Real and Imagined is a colossal endeavour in which you can fully lose yourself. Or if you want someone to hold your hand through this historical and imagined epic that’s been four years in the making, you can join free guided tours at 10.30am every Thursday and Sunday morning until the exhibition closes in February 2024. These photographs really are worth the early start.
