The Devil’s In The DetailAngela Blakely + David Lloyd

This is the second ‘portmanteau’ exhibition that Blakely/Lloyd have held at White Canvas Gallery, Brisbane in which they have mixed bodies of work done collaboratively with other sets of images produced as sole practitioners.

It is also the second time that I have been invited to contribute a text essay commentary to the exercise so my first question was of course “why me again?” (don’t worry, we will eventually get back to a discussion about the exhibiting practitioners and their respective bodies of work). I think the reason they invited me to write a sequel essay is that the experimentation with new directions and approaches to documentary storytelling that we saw in their last portmanteau show continues here in yet another fresh set of directions. This means that the rationale I supplied last time (about the ways in which the multiple narratives and various visual languages fitted together) is now incomplete unless it can be extended to include the latest experimental tangents within a consistent conceptual thread that operates throughout the gestalt of all the plural strands.

Last time, after celebrating the diversity of topic content and visual language seen in the various sets of images exhibited, I concluded the essay with the assertion that, despite the diversity, the common link in their recent work was a central concern with

Four ExhibitionsThe Devil’s In The Detail

injustice (in various forms and at various scales) and the corrosive damage it creates within human individuals, families and societies.

If you’ve still with me this far into the second essay, I hope you will accept the following statement as a given: Blakely and Lloyd are two (sometimes collaborating) visual practitioners with long established histories of engagement with issues of moral philosophy who, at this stage in their careers, are experimenting with a diverse range of elements within the storytelling form of Documentary Photography as they explore in concept of ‘injustice’ from plural perspectives.

If we’ve sorted that out, we can return to the task of considering the latest results of their visual experimentation.

The first thing that strikes me about this new round of discovery is the playful use of satirical humour as a critical strategy that is evident in some of the work. This is perhaps a surprising development from two documentists who have, in previous projects, often confronted us with some of the darkest imagery in contemporary Australian Photomedia.

One of the collaborative pieces within the portmanteau of sub-exhibitions on show is entitled

In the Eye of the Beholder and is a series of images of pedigree pigeons that did not win their respective show categories. This has conceptual links to Blakely’s substantial, previous solo projects on body-image disorders and the horrifically damaging effects that this social pathologies has on individuals, families and communities. Yet somehow, this new work is funny! Yes, it highlights another despicable aspect of human nature where the same kinds of damaging norms of ‘beauty’ are now applied judgmentally to individuals from another species whose only ‘crime’ was the misfortune of getting caught up in the monstrous, eugenic breeding program of pigeon fanciers. But there is a touch of Monty Python (or is it Benny Hill?) sensibility in their choice to couple the show judges’ text on the condemning ‘failings’ of a particular bird with a portrait of that bird in such a way that we viewers can’t help breaking the cardinal rule against anthropomorphising animals in ‘serious’ Documentary Photography.

I look at the pairing of text & image and cannot stop myself imagining that the pigeon is looking back at me with all the self-loathing and shame that consumerist norms engendered in the young women that Blakely earlier documented in the Anorexia wards of hospitals. In the Eye of the Beholder makes me laugh but it also makes me want to weep for the pigeons as I mentally ‘hear’

them apologise for failing to live up to absurd standards of beauty that they had no agency in creating.

Blakely’s solo work The Twins links directly back to a piece that formed one section of the last Blakely & Lloyd portmanteau presentation in Missing 2014. That previous piece was a single, tragic image (entitled Grief Lasts Forever) that grew out of an intensely personal investigation into grief and loss as it impacted on the relationship that Blakely shares with her identical twin. This new work looks at the (often bizarre) ways in which body image issues can impact on two human individuals whose physical appearance is so very similar that sometimes they can’t even tell each other apart in photographs.

In the image-set The Comparison is Crippling, Blakely has selected family snapshots and digitally ‘smeared’ her twin’s face onto her own. The results form intriguing visual puzzles that are oddly comical but also quite violent. This is an intentional outcome that Blakely is using to cathartically release simmering resentments that have built up over many decades of observing the close attention that any photo of the twins seemed to garner from friends and family as they invested large amounts of energy into the task of differentiating which twin is which and inevitably based their judgments on

value-weighted criteria as they debated which twin was “fatter”, “taller at that age” or “less sullen looking in photos”.

The first of Lloyd’s solo exhibitions within this latest collection is No Access and it is also showing dangerous signs of satirical intent. In this series of images, we see the deliberately authoritarian imposition of threatening gate-signage nailed down onto landscapes by mining companies who are anxious to assert their newly gained control. The rural areas documented have long been tamed by white settlement but the roads we see within them have traditionally been shared byways that formed key connective tissue to country communities. The gated roads were iconic features of a culture in which frequent travel across a neighbour’s property boundaries (in the ubiquitous ‘Ute’) was a freely welcomed, daily occurrence. Although you were expected to always remember to “shut the bloody gate”, you did not have to negotiate with the Sydney office of a trans-national corporation before you were allowed to open that gate.

Lloyd makes these visual signifiers of a new corporate spirit of fear and suspicion in rural Australia look like the heavy-handed over-reaction that they are. He makes them look ridiculous and worthy of scornful derision rather than the fearful compliance they are intended to engender. This is

a dangerously subversive act because history has repeatedly taught us that dictators may clash with their military rivals but they reserve a special level of fury for any visual storyteller who dissolves their thin facade of unearned authority by exposing them as laughably silly.

His second exhibition Callous Disregard displays no overt evidence of humour in its documentation of agricultural shows and instead reads as a visual statement of cold, silent rage.

The annual agricultural shows that are such an important part of rural Australian culture sometimes struggle to carry off the sleight of hand that is needed to present the spectacle of their climactic, prize-awarding ceremonies as glamorous events. The bigger, better resourced shows, such as the Brisbane ‘Ekka’ can afford the full technological array of light-shows, music and fireworks but ultimately, none of this ever quite manages to cover up the raw smell of shit that hangs over the whole enterprise as an unwelcome reminder that animals have actual, corporeal existences outside of the exploitative purposes and performances that we impose upon them in the tidy human world.

In this body of work, David Lloyd has turned his back on the lights, the music and the shampooed, blow-waved specimens on the parade ground and

instead takes us on a tour of the atmosphere of fear and quiet despair that pervades the glamour-free zone of the backstage holding pens where these sentient beings are kept in stasis until they again become worthy of commercial, human consumption.

This latest text essay be me has no conclusion because that now seems premature. Blakely and Lloyd are clearly still in the middle of a period of inventive experimentation that involves the possibility that tiny, intensively personal stories can sit alongside explorations of huge global issues and documentation of horrific violence can sometimes exist, uncomfortably but meaningfully, amongst visual commentary that relies on scornful derision rather than angry outrage.

I’ve got no idea which direction/s Blakely and Lloyd are heading next but I expect that the results will once again be compelling, challenging and surprising.

Dr Peter MilnePeter Milne has more than 25 years experience as a

photo-media practitioner whose work has incorporated both classical ‘Social Documentary’ and ‘Fine-Art’.

Peter lecturers in Visual Arts, has published numerous books and exhibited nationally and internationally.

In The Eye Of The Beholder

Barry breeds pigeons and he has done so since he was child. Now in his seventies, there is little about pigeons that Barry doesn’t know. He is a show judge, a mentor for new breeders and a multiple award winner. Barry is happy to advise.

To us, pigeon breeding was foreign, even foolish. We listened to his stories: the competitions, the politics, and the difficulties of breeding programs. He told us that the bred pigeons could not survive in the ‘wild’, that they were so disabled it would be impossible for them to exist outside their cages. Puffed chest, golf ball heads, splayed feathers, much sought after by the breeders, rendered the birds as disabled. Yet they were prized and played into the vanity of their owners.

At a number of pigeon showings we photographed the pigeons who were not awarded a prize. Head too big, legs too straight, comments that seemed to be complimentary until you understood the parameters against which they were being measured. Yet, to our uninformed eyes, each displayed a personality that was not dampened by the rigors of the competition nor the criticism of the judges.

Of course it was difficult to not to draw parallels to the human condition. Media constructed notions of beauty result in starvation, unnecessary medical and pharmaceutical intervention and a type of synthetic breeding program that is not too different from that endured by pigeons. Maybe through obsessive narcissism or folly, we have become pigeons.

Blakely / Lloyd

The TwinsAngela Blakely

When I speak, I speak as ‘we’. Standing alone, others wonder who it is I’m including.

We are measured against our sameness, apart from “the prettier one”, “the smarter one”, “the taller one”, “the fatter one”. Images of my (twin) sister and me, taken from family snapshots are overlaid and merged. The opportunity to compare in minute detail is denied.

The Comparison is Crippling

We try to be different - to make much of the small differences and claim our own identities. But we are cast as ‘identical twins’.We don’t always recognise which one is which and both think the final image looks like the other. Perhaps we are more familiar with each other’s appearance than our own.

No AccessDavid Lloyd

The long meandering country road, dusty and holed with use, no longer crisscrosses the rural divide. Silently, land has been co-opted and barriers erected. This land is no longer our land. No Access does not stand in opposition to mining. Not yet anyway. For whether it be the computers we use to stay connected, the solar panels we purchase that make us feel socially responsible or the cameras I use to tell stories, mining is embedded into the fabric of the 21st Century. The debate is not whether to mine, but rather how and when to mine. Greed, gluttony and apathy have resulted in large sections of our nation becoming little more than wastelands. And for those of us who would look, access is denied.

What became obvious in North Western Queensland was that, combined, the mining companies controlled the political and social agendas. Through ostensibly generous salaries, subsidized housing, and the rare community donation, mining companies have become the pushers and the population the addicts. Mine workers are afraid to speak to strangers for fear they are the media. Criticism is only whispered when in the company of friends. And the right to have an opinion that may differ from the company has been sold cheaply. To express that opinion puts job and home at risk.

No Access argues that Australia should retain exclusive rights to its resource management. It argues for controlled mining. But most of all it presents a snapshot of the liberties we have sold in order to satisfy those who seek to maximize profits and minimize social responsibility.

Callous DisregardDavid Lloyd

There’s a youtube clip of a rescued calf that becomes a domestic pet on the farm. It knows no bounds. It walks into the house, grazes on whatever food is about and is pampered unreasonably so. Along with the family dogs it is taken for daily walks. When called, like the pups, excitement abounds and the calf jumps and plays joyfully with its new pack. I didn’t know cows played. Secure and safe from the cruelty of animal farming, this calf has achieved what almost no other commercial animal ever achieves - the right to the pursuit of happiness.

The numbers are incomprehensible. Over 60,000,000,000 (yes sixty billion) animals are tortured and slaughtered for profit each year. But we see none of it. The billions of tons of steak, chicken, lamb and pork are farmed cheaply, harvested callously and kept at the ready so that we can buy burgers, drum sticks and ribs on demand. As the level of cruelty increases, so too do the astronomical profits of the livestock industries–profits that belie their bleating rhetoric of better farming practices needed to feed a hungry world.

In a film clip of a medical experiment, a live Pig is strapped to a gurney and burned with blowtorches. When finished, the Pig, now little more than crackling, pants. A man in a white coat leans forward and gives the Pig a drink. As it drank, unaware that its savior was its killer, I understood the Holocaust, the Killing Fields,

the Rwanda Genocide, the millenniums of bloodshed and our schizophrenic ability to love a dog and be complicit in the terror and torture of farmed animals. I understood what JM Coetzee meant when he argued that while humans are capable of great empathy their ability to turn that empathy off at will blackens their soul.

On the days of the Brisbane Ekka (Royal Qld Agriculture Show) people came to a set of dilapidated sheds in the upper show grounds to ‘see the animals’. Children fussed and anthropomorphism abounded. Parents took photographs of their progeny with cows and birds and all listened to the ring masters reduce each animal to number of meals, kilos of steak and dollars to be made. There was a level of excitement, even awe. But in amongst all their excitement, no one noticed that the cows didn’t play.

David Lloyd and Angela Blakely lecture in Photojournalism and Documentary Practice at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Australia

Contact:davidlloyddocumentary@gmail.com

angelablakely1@gmail.com