Greg Neville,  John Gollings exhibition, 2017

Monash Gallery of Art, “the Australian home of photography,” has a retrospective exhibition of the work of John Gollings, our premier architectural photographer. 

“The History of the Built World is the first major survey of Golling’s photographic practice, and offers a much anticipated opportunity to appreciate the full breadth of his unique photographic vision.”

It may seem a stretch to call it the history of the built world, but his subjects go back to aboriginal interventions in the environment of 28000 years ago      – see photo above – and include ancient Indian structures and other antiquities along the way to contemporary architecture by Frank Gehry and others.

Golling’s approach has been consistent throughout his half-century career, to interpret a building’s structure and explain it in its own place and context. As a trained architect he understands design and form. The exhibition presents his photography as an illustrative craft, always in service to the client and the subject.

Gollings is also a spectacular entertainer. His vital images radiate energy and he employs every trick to achieve it: ultra-wide lenses to stretch space, natural and artificial light for colour gloss, and shameless vignetting to focus the eye on the glowing subject at the centre. In a sense, he combines the instincts of a Pictorialist – to make the picture and its subject an aesthetic object, and a modernist – to  express the building’s deep structure. He is one of our indispensible photographic artists.

John Gollings:  The history of the built world runs until March 4, 2018 at Monash Gallery of Art.

The great 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge is the subject of a new movie, a biopic called Eadweard. It covers his famous professional life and controversial private life and is due for release this year.The movie was directed by Kyle Rideout and stars the Canadian actor Michael Eklund.

Muybridge has had a career comeback in recent years with new a new biography, a comprehensive new website, and recently a major exhibition at London’s Tate Gallery. There is even a chamber opera by Philip Glass called The Photographer.

Muybridge deserves this public attention for the breadth and drama of his life, as well as his great influence on photography and cinema. He was a highly successful landscape photographer before millionaire Leland Stanford hired him to capture the galloping horse. He soon became an international celebrity on the basis of his Animal Locomotion photographs. He presented these in book form and in public lectures where his projector, the zoopraxiscope, displayed them in living movement.

These lectures were an immediate predecessor to cinema which he helped give birth to following discussions with Thomas Edison in 1888. The Kinetoscope craze soon followed, then the Nickelodeon phase and modern cinema around 1904.

Muybridge’s private life was equally compelling. Discovering that he was not the father of his seventh month old baby, he sought out his wife’s lover and, after introducing himself with the words “Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here’s the answer to the letter you sent my wife” shot him dead.

He was later acquitted due to “justifiable homicide” despite the plea of insanity due to a serious head injury after a stagecoach accident. With dramas like these, you might wonder why it took so long to have a movie about him.

See the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/133479780

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A personalised invitation card to my group exhibition, Momentary. It opens this Wednesday, December 3 at 6.30pm.

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