LISA BLAS Metonymy and memory in the work of Australian photographer, Anne Ferran “....Needless to say, we are not in search of sources or origins, but of structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture.” Douglas Crimp, Pictures, 1979
This past July, I was introduced to Anne Ferran through Mary Roberts, an art historian from the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Sydney. A prolific writer and professor of British Art whose research focuses on gender, Orientalism and the history and culture of travel, Mary is currently writing a book on the artistic exchanges between Ottoman and Orientalist artists in nineteenth-century Istanbul. She had described Anne’s work to me in late 2009, after I gave an informal artist talk at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where Mary was a scholar-in-residence. Mary thought our work had an affinity, and she hoped we would someday meet. Three years later, I indeed met Anne and participated with her in an artist panel, “Toxic Blooms”, at the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand’s annual conference, Together < > Apart, organized in conjunction with the 2012 Biennale of Sydney. Upon arriving at Mary’s apartment in Sydney after a seventeen-hour flight, she immediately gave me a catalog of Anne’s work to peruse. The first series I encountered was ‘Lost to Worlds’, photographs taken over a ten year period in Tasmania, of which a gelatin silver print is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. These landscapes reveal the sites of penal colonies for women in Hobart and Ross, built in the late nineteenth century, and subsequently torn down in the late twentieth century. Silent, pristine and embodying human presence, now erased, these images conjure up other images from the history of photography: fragments of Roger Fenton, Timothy O’Sullivan and Felice Beato come to mind. Instead of a panorama or full view of the site, Anne places her focus on the ground, immersing the viewer in a space both alien and futuristic, yet hauntingly familiar. As the familial legacy of this region descends from many penal colonies constructed by England in the late 1700s, one could literally step into her photograph and wonder, was my family ever here? There is a hovering mist in the upper left hand area of these photographs that appear as light illuminating the ground. In Anne’s words, these “blooms of light” on the surface were the result of a light leak while shooting medium format film, and as many artists are aware, those small glitches can yield unexpected and welcome results to a work of art. The printing of the photographs on aluminum highlights the flecks of light through these fields, subtly changing from one side of the image to the other. Her process is one of careful study, whether working on location, in collections of Australian antiquity or with government records. Her approach exerts conceptual and aesthetic restraint, harmoniously aligning the final photograph and its intention via the process of its making. Another series, entitled “1-38”, begins with a study of departmental health records and photographs from a women’s mental asylum in mid-twentieth century Sydney. Rather than re-photographing the images in their entirety, Anne decided to crop in, focusing on the gesture of the hands,