the stranger’s eyeyvonne boagrichard gloverthomas lovedayanne zahalka

curated by donna west brett

1 - 24 july 2010

Cover image: Thomas Loveday, detail from the series Evidence of Aliens, 2007–2010. Digital print, 12 x 12 cm.

the stranger’s eyePhotography has changed our consciousness more radically than any other pictorial medium in history, because it has fundamentally altered our perception of and relationship with the visible world.

Klaus Honnef 19921

Since the early days of the invention of photography, the camera’s ability to trap light, create an image and record reality has captured the imagination of artists. The resulting efforts, from the daguerreotype to digital images, have in turn been displayed, analysed and critiqued as being anything from an ‘observer of nature’ to the ‘black arts’.2 For the German cultural theorist, Walter Benjamin, photography presented a new way of looking, a seeing that differs from the naked eye: “For it is another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye: other in the sense that the space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious.”3 Through the technical devices of the camera such as slow motion and the ability to enlarge the image, Benjamin considered that photography reveals the secrets of the unseen and that it is through the photographic eye that the existence of the ‘optical unconscious’ is revealed.

The Stranger’s Eye exhibition presents four artists who utilise the photographic view of the urban environment to explore the liminal spaces of public and private, the visible and the invisible, and notions of place in terms of inhabitation and homelessness, alienation and strangeness. In lived cities and in those that are inhabited temporarily, the stranger’s eye is one that lies between that of the flâneur and that of the spectator or tourist—seeing the ‘out of place’, the strange and the odd. The photographs in this exhibition investigate modes of both the documentary and the constructed image to present the urban landscape from Sydney, Melbourne, Berlin, London or Seoul as dis-placed; alien, odd, sinister and strange. For over 170 years the artistic interest in photography’s capacity to record the world is steeped in the contradiction that photography presents both reality and fiction, a dichotomy that each artist in The Stranger’s Eye explores through their own individual approaches. The urban landscape in turn is loaded with signification and can be read on a multiplicity of levels from community and home to a place of anxiety, alienation, and as claustrophobic, agoraphobic, displaced and fractured.

An ongoing theme in Anne Zahalka’s work is the exploration of the human being in the environment, one that is constructed rather than natural, and shifts between portraits taken in the comfort of one’s own habitat such as the living room, and those taken in the discomfort of ‘somewhere else’. The place of the ‘elsewhere’ is that encountered by the migrant, the tourist or the traveler, of being out of one’s comfort zone and confronted with different levels of intuiting an alien environment. In Hotel Suite4 Zahalka takes the alienating space of the hotel room and gives it a twist. The viewer of the photograph becomes the voyeur and the guest becomes the object of our gaze, seemingly trapped in the non-place of a hotel. Notions of alienation, transgression, desire and adventure are explored through the mediums of photography and film focusing on several individuals in various states of psychological unraveling that the viewer experiences through the processes of surveillance.

Much like Alice in Wonderland, in the video The Stranger’s Eye, we are taken through a peephole into the private world of several guests at the Sofitel Hotel in Melbourne, some of whom are also exploring their own inner voyeur. Time is in a void here, day turns to night and the lights of the city flicker beyond the blinds, the only evidence of life other than one’s own breathing is the occasional noise of guests making their way to or from the hotel lobby. The photographs of individual guests engrossed in their own thoughts, dreams and nightmares are interspersed with photographs of the city at night and at dusk; the city lights punctuating the darkness and the major arterial roads scar the image with their jagged and shimmering haze. The general feeling is one of contrasting claustrophobia and agoraphobia—the barrier of the hotel windows offering little solace to those inside who sense the inevitability of departure—a leaving that offers only the consolation of being able to go home. Running a guesthouse of her own probably gives Zahalka an unfair advantage in being able to observe the traveler’s uncanny discomfort of being in a home that is not ‘at home’.

Cultural and architectural theorist Siegfried Kracauer was keenly aware of the potential of space, particularly urban space, to “act as a powerful emblem of social estrangement”, a focus of his writings being the familiar spaces of hotel lobbies, the pleasure palaces of the cinema, cafés and music halls and the boulevards that he considered to be homes for the homeless.5 The hotel lobby epitomized, for Kracauer, the space of the modern detective novel and the conditions of modern life emphasizing the anonymity of the traveler and the fragmentation of existence.6

On the hotel lobby Kracauer writes:

Rudiments of individuals slide in the nirvana of relaxation, faces are lost behind the newspaper, and the uninterrupted artificial light illumines only manikins. It is a coming and going of unknowns who are changed into empty forms by forgetting their passwords, and who parade, imperceptible like Chinese shadows. If they had an interiority, it would have no windows.7

Yvonne Boag’s photographic series Seoul ROK spans over a decade, documenting the changing city of Seoul as major areas are erased and rebuilt. The ever-changing city poses critical questions for the artist particularly in regard to recording the disappearance of communities and cultural sites, the traces of which are covered by new streets, buildings and societal structures. Boag’s photographs epitomise Kracauer’s concerns about inhabited space, the void or empty space and explore the everyday dichotomy of cities being full of nothing.

Destruction and reconstruction are an inevitable means to change in the large city as are vacant buildings, shops and homes that deteriorate or become subject to vandalism such as in the photograph of a restaurant with smashed windows, upturned chairs and empty display counters. Buildings such as this are marked with a red sign to denote their inevitable demolition and replacement with something new that, as Ernst Bloch observed, leads to lifeless streets and vacant spaces, and “if an old installation is pulled down” he writes “and a fresh one put there, a hole still remains. Nothing is deposited, the space remains open for what is missing.”8

Boag has, over the last decade or so, observed major and minor changes in the urban landscape of Seoul. The disappearance of markets, homes and communities which are replaced by tacky love hotels, shopping areas, excessive street signage and the inevitable appearance of the mobile phone and digital cameras that offer every person the capability of communication and recording. This new regime of urban economic desire has replaced the shoddy pot-plants, the mended plastic baskets and results in piles of rubbish in back lane ways while main thoroughfares contrast with distant mountains and the ongoing military presence. The contrast of the military with the westernization of the urban landscape makes the view strange, alienating the locals from their environment. In contrast with Zahalka’s photographs, Boag’s camera lens is on the street, recording the slums, the ‘love hotels’, the military presence and the constant re-writing of a city in transition.

Richard Glover’s interest in urban photography stems from his work as an architectural photographer and his engagement with the gritty urban streets of cities such as London, Mexico and Sydney working in an objective way to record monuments, housing commission sites, villas and various building sites as landmarks. Glover’s photographic eye shifts from glamorous sites to the gritty, melancholic and dismal spaces we all encounter in cities when we allow the streets to guide us to places unknown. While Benjamin’s experiences of encountering the city were initially through his nanny, his mother and later via the wily ways of prostitutes, Glover’s encounters are via the economic trail of financial wizards who dive rapidly from fortune to misfortune.

In Wall Street - Street Wall Glover explores the dichotomy of a gleaming financial company in Sydney, presented as an amalgamation of views from the high-rise lift—the outsider looking in—and an image of a London advertising billboard from the economically bleak 1990s. As an urban study of the effects of the recession, Glover reveals the economic disarray through abstracted views of public billboards devoid of advertising, their former contents torn and tattered. Glover’s work reveals the transitory nature of our existence and the inevitability of change whether this is in a state of progress or recession. The constructed world of finance and corporate lust and desire is epitomized in a photographic composite of images taken from a moving lift, silently rising and falling through the centre of a high-rise building. Much like a spy in the act of surveillance, Glover honed the lens on anonymous offices whose daily inhabitants operate in the world of confidential transactions. Such operations are made strange by the transparency of the different floors in the multi-storey building as floor to ceiling glass walls turn the secret world of finances into a veritable fishpond. For Le Corbusier, modern office blocks are “gigantic and majestic prisms of purest transparency [that] rear their heads one upon the other in a dazzling spectacle of grandeur…”

In contrast, the black and white photograph taken in 1990s London when the financial markets took a hammering, a blank advertising billboard conveys more in its emptiness than it probably ever did with its former advertising banners. The remaining scraps and scars instead resemble an abstract painting, the word ‘Maiden’ ironically implying innocence, youth or a new voyage, while the white line struck underneath has a sense of finality as well as stating a negative position.

Kracauer’s street is an arena of fleeting impressions and chance encounters that intoxicate the flâneur as they eternally form and then

dissolve. In his analysis of Kracauer’s and Benjamin’s musings on the modern street, Anthony Vidler considers the photographic medium, in intersecting with the street as subject, to foster a self-estrangement that allows for the viewer’s identification with the objects being observed.9 For many of us, the city remains invisible as we move from one location to another distracted by our daily rituals. How many of us notice a new void in the streetscape and cannot recall what stood in it place. The camera, as a function of urban mapping, extols the virtue of memory of place made possible by the solitary wanderer contemplating the urban surrounds and photographing the unseen. The process of getting lost opens the city’s vistas to new perspectives and visions, new in that they have previously gone unseen and are only made visible through the camera eye.

In Evidence of Aliens Thomas Loveday investigates evidence and the meaningless of meaningful things in the urban landscape; street signs and objects that reveal our own alienation in the environment. Resembling travel photography, these images of Sydney, London or Berlin reflect upon the oddities of a place, which is already strange, turning the lens to record objects, sites, spaces and places that are not subject to ‘postcard’ views. Like the flâneur Loveday wanders the streets, observing objects and situations that appear estranged from their surroundings and all it takes to see them is a particular point of view. As Georg Simmel observed “objects remain spellbound in the unmerciful separation of space, no material part can commonly share its space with another, a real unity of diverse elements does not exist in space”.10 The outcome of this struggle between space and objects in Loveday’s work includes a large red truck stuck in a driveway, street signs that reveal their alienation through isolation from the surrounding environment, dismal East Berlin buildings, discarded armchairs, holes in the ground, monuments to dead philosophers or a favourite pickup spot of the serial murderer Ivan Milat. Each image is made strange though its banality and its alienation as a specific object or site only visible through the camera lens.

The strangeness of the street is palpable in the juxtaposition of visual oddities including the Japanese fictional character “Hello Kitty” painted on the side of wall on Invalidenstrasse, Berlin posing with a gun, World War II gas masks for sale on the Berlin Mitte streets, a blow up kewpie-doll in a regional NSW town or a street stencil of ‘KRUDD’, our recently demised prime minister. Each image is but a fragment of the many layers of the urban landscape where space and place are in a constant friction of

transition—between future and past, between memory and history. There is far more alienated meaning in the world than can be seen. It takes a great deal of effort to find the alienated objects, but once found the sheer quantity of strange relations, misdirected signage and odd events makes the conclusion inevitable: we live in a alienated world.

For Kracauer, the street, properly recorded, offered a virtually inexhaustible subject for the comprehension of modernity; its special characteristics fostered not only the chance and the random, but more importantly the necessary distance, if not alienation, of the observer for whom the camera eye was a precise surrogate.11

Donna West Brett, 2010

The curator would like to thank the artists: Yvonne Boag, Richard Glover, Thomas Loveday, Anne Zahalka.

Many thanks to:

Rowan Wilson: installation; Mike Day: lighting advice; Claire Taylor: catalogue design; Lisa Jones & Peloton for their support and assistance.

1. Klaus Honnef, Rolf Sachsse and Karin Thomas (eds), German photography 1870–1970: power of a medium, DuMont Buchverlag, Köln, 1997, 8.

2. See Walter Benjamin ‘A small history of photography’, 1931, in One-way street, Verso, London, 1997, 241–2.

3. Benjamin, 243.

4. Hotel Suite was produced during Zahalka’s Artist in Residence at Sofitel Melbourne on Collins during April 2008.

5. Anthony Vidler, ‘Warped space: art, architecture and anxiety in modern culture’, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001, 72.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid, 73.

8. Ernst Bloch, ‘The void’, in Heritage of our time, (first published 1935), University of California Press, Berkley and Los Angeles, 1991, 209.

9. Vidler, 113.

10. Ibid, 67.

11. Vidler, 113.

images1. Anne Zahalka, Room 4729, from the series Hotel Suite, 2008. Type C print, 75 × 92.5 cm.

2. Yvonne Boag, from the series Seoul ROK, 1993–2008. Giclée colour print on Hahnemühle photo rag, dimensions variable.

12. Richard Glover, detail of Wall Street - Street Wall - Image no: SP10-200. Giclée colour print with Ultrachrome ink on 308gsm Hahnemühle photo rag, 76 x 124 cm.

4. Tom Loveday, Evidence of Aliens, 35 Alienated Transport, 2008. Digital print, 12 x 12 cm.

5. Anne Zahalka, Hotel Suite, 2008. Type C print, 75 × 92.5 cm each.

6. Anne Zahalka, from the series Hotel Suite, 2008. Type C print, 75 × 92.5 cm each.

7. Anne Zahalka, digital stills from The Stranger’s Eye, 2010. DVD, plasma screen, duration 13:34 minutes.

8. Yvonne Boag, from the series Seoul ROK, 1993–2008. Giclée colour print on Hahnemühle photo rag, dimensions variable.

9. Yvonne Boag, from the series Seoul ROK, 1993–2008. Giclée colour print on Hahnemühle photo rag, dimensions variable.

10. Yvonne Boag, from the series Seoul ROK, 1993–2008. Giclée colour print on Hahnemühle photo rag, dimensions variable.

11. Richard Glover, Wall Street - Street Wall - Image no: SP04-057. Giclée monochrome print with Ultrachrome ink on 308gsm Hahnemühle photo rag, 100 x 124 cm.

12. Richard Glover, Wall Street - Street Wall - Image no: SP10-200. Giclée colour print with Ultrachrome ink on 308gsm Hahnemühle photo rag, 76 x 124 cm.

13. Thomas Loveday, from the series Evidence of Aliens, 2007–2010. Digital print, 12 x 12 cm.

14. Thomas Loveday, from the series Evidence of Aliens, 2007–2010. Digital print, 12 x 12 cm.

15. Thomas Loveday, from the series Evidence of Aliens, 2007–2010. Digital print, 12 x 12 cm.

works in exhibitionAnne Zahalka, Room 4729; Room 4117; Room 3905 with view to Fitzroy Gardens*; Room 3905; Room 4212; Room 4927 with view to Melbourne Cricket Ground* from Hotel Suite, 2008. All photographs Type C prints, 75 x 92.5 cm ea. Edition of 5. All images courtesy of the artist. *Not included in this exhibition.

Anne Zahalka, The Stranger’s Eye, 2010. DVD, plasma screen, duration 13:34 minutes. Courtesy of the artist. Lounge chair, ottoman, side table, lamp supplied by Sofitel, Melbourne. Credits: Anne Zahalka, director/producer; Michael Williams, director of photography; Andrew Barnes, film editor; Antoinette Ford, film editor (Room 4212 only); Andrew Plain, sound editor, Huzzah Sound; Rachel Leslie, 1st assistant director.

Anne Zahalka gratefully acknowledges the support and involvement of the following people: Clive Scott, General Manager, and Annie Dawson, Public Relations Manager, Disuke Hebara and Terrence Murphy, Guest Relations, Dora Yanga, Housekeeping from Sofitel, Melbourne. Reuben Krum, Deborah Leiser-Moore, Abbra Kotlarczyk, Naree Vachananda, Jock Given, Tilly Morris, Zen Ledden and Selina Ou. Anne Zahalka is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne.

Yvonne Boag, 29 photographs from the series Seoul ROK, 1993–2008. Giclée colour prints on Hahnemühle photo rag, dimensions variable. Artist’s proofs. Courtesy of the artist.

Yvonne Boag is represented by Australian Galleries, Melbourne and Sydney.

Richard Glover, Wall Street - Street Wall - Image no: SP04-057, YEAR. Giclée monochrome print with Ultrachrome ink on 308gsm Hahnemühle photo rag, 100 x 124 cm. Artist’s proof. Courtesy of the artist.

Richard Glover, Wall Street - Street Wall - Image no: SP10-200, YEAR. Giclée colour print with Ultrachrome ink on 308gsm Hahnemühle photo rag, 76 x 124 cm. Artist’s proof. Courtesy of the artist.

Thomas Loveday, 52 photographs from the series Evidence of Aliens, 2007–2010. Digital prints, 12 x 12 cm each. Courtesy of the artist.

Thomas Loveday is represented by Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney.

Peloton is assisted by the NSW Government through Arts NSW

Gallery hours Thursday to Saturday 1–6pm Tel +61 2 9690 2601info@peloton.net.au

19 + 25 Meagher StreetChippendale NSW 2008 Sydney Australiawww.peloton.net.au

Boag, YvonneGlover, RichardLoveday, ThomasZahalka, Anne

The Stranger’s Eye, exhibition catalogue, Peloton, 1–24 July 2010

Text: Donna West Brett, exhibition curatorLayout: Claire Taylor

© 2010 Peloton Inc.All images © the artists. Catalogue essay © Donna West Brett. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author(s).