Reviewed by Zoe Turner
Photographic portraiture is a delicate art form. To make an image that captures the spirit of the subject requires openness and trust between the photographer and the sitter. If these things are in place, then a connection can be made, if only for a fleeting moment. It is challenging not only for the photographer but the subject as well. To be relaxed, comfortable and unselfconscious while a camera is a metre away from your face is an art in its own right.
Sonia Payes embarked on a huge undertaking with her project Untitled: Portraits of Australian Artists. Comprising an exhibition and a beautifully produced book, Untitled is, like the country Payes traversed in order to collect these images, vast in its scale. The photographer spent two years travelling around Australia in between other commercial photography jobs – no doubt demanding and challenging in their own right – to make portraits of sixty contemporary artists.
Payes has gone to the artists to observe them in their most significant places: the sites of creation, inspiration, and exhibition. These are intimate places and magical, too. We rarely glimpse the private and internal processes that spawn artworks, or view pieces that aren’t laid out with careful consideration in an exhibition. Untitled takes us to a privileged viewpoint where we can see the timeless intrigue of differently dishevelled studios; painter Jennifer Goodman in her surprisingly meticulous workspace that is clinical save for the multi-hued, tightly geometric paintings; Rosella Namok sits on a paint-striped floor intently signing her finished canvas; sculptor Kim Westcott wields power tools as she works on a piece against a dry bush backdrop; and the statuesque Bruce Armstrong crams in amongst his wood-carving sculptures in his warehouse. We see the inspirational pictures they tape to their walls, the carpet or flooring they have, and whether they are messy or neat. And in some cases we see them breaking free of their studio – walking the dog, riding a bike, pausing for a moment outside their studio caught in a shaft of golden sunset light.
The exhibition, which ran from 31st July – 25 August 2007 at the Charles Nodrum gallery in Richmond, showed thirteen large format prints and fourteen smaller works. To make prints at such scale (127cm x 127cm) is costly and requires intense attention to detail from a number of people – the printers, the photographer, the assistant. To check and re-check any print for subtle adjustments of colour and tone could easily cause one to spiral into a deranged, obsessive state. At that size, it becomes difficult to control the quality of each print. In this respect, Payes excels. The prints are technically exquisite and their sharpness and solidity give them a strong presence by virtue of quality and scale.
Looking around the exhibition, I wondered what had informed Payes’s decision to display those particular images at the largest scale. They were all good photos, but there were a few images that did not seem to me to be the strongest works in her series.
While the exhibition presented a stripped back selection of 27 images, the book showed the portraits in the context of other looser, more incidental images that revealed a much more insightful portrait of the artist. Going even deeper, the book also featured a text piece about each artist, written by a different author. So where some of the isolated exhibition images fell a little flat, when re-viewed in the context of the book, the companion imagery and text built up an expanded portrait that was far more compelling and well worth the time spent exploring and considering the artist and their work. In this sense, Sonia Payes’s project reveals how deeply context and meaning are intertwined, which is a particularly interesting proposition in the realm of portraiture.
As Professor Ted Snell says in his introduction to the book:
We demand a lot from a portrait. It must not only record the physiognomy; we want to go beyond mere appearance to understanding, we require disclosure and we need a leitmotiv, a quintessential image that will everlastingly default as the sitter in our mental archive – both the artist and their studio forged into a complex entity.
With Untitled Sonia Payes did not set out to create an encyclopedia of Australian artists. But the result of her two years of tireless researching, contacting, setting up and then finally photographing these artists is a hefty tome that has detail and richness that make this beautiful art book far more enjoyable and informative – albeit in a lateral way - than any encyclopedia could ever be.
Untitled: Portraits of Australian Artists
(2007)
by Sonia Payes
Palgrave Macmillan Publishing
ISBN: 9781876832282
400pp AUD$150.00