Rozalind Drummond (born 1956) is a photographic artist. Australia. [1]
Drummond trained initially at Prahran College 1982-84, an institution which Australian Centre for Photography director Deborah Ely recognised in 1999 as producing "some of the country's most acclaimed practitioners" including Drummond amongst them, beside "Bill Henson, Carol Jerrems, Steve Lojewski, Janina Green and Christopher Koller". [2] From 1985–86 she undertook a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art at the School of Art in the Victorian College of the Arts where Bill Henson, as noted by Max Dupain, [3] was her supervisor.
In 1997 she was awarded a Samstag Scholarship of A$30,000, plus airfares and fees, for a year of overseas study during which she took an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London. [4] Co-recipients were Zhong Chen, Lyndal Jefferies, Steven Holland, and Julie Gough. [5] Later in Australia she completed a Master of Arts (Art in Public Space), RMIT University, Melbourne in 2017. Since then she has exhibited nationally and internationally and her work is in major public collections.
From 1986-88 Drummond was Assistant Director at George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne, [6] and she has held academic positions as Lecturer in Photography, Victorian College of the Arts, School of Art, Melbourne 1987-89, Lecturer in Photography, School of Art and Design, Monash University, Caulfield Campus 1990-91 and Lecturer in Photography, School of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Burwood Campus until 2014.
Drummond first showed solo in 1985 at George Paton Gallery (where she was to become assistant director the following year). [6]
Less than ten years into her career, in 1993, Drummond and painter Geoff Lowe were invited by curator Juliana Engberg to produce an exhibition involving collaboration with Vietnamese artists supported by Asialink's Australian art to Asia project and hosted by the Hanoi School of Art, [7] the nation's first contemporary art contact with Vietnam. [8] Choosing to show typical examples of their Australian contemporary art practice, Drummond took long contact proofs, titled Voyeur and excepted from monochrome Super 8 footage which had been made between 1960–65, which could be unrolled and pinned to the gallery wall either horizontally or vertically, allowing viewers' own interpretation of narrative, and reported that some of the Vietnamese artists were surprised she chose not to frame her photographs.
The exhibition was shown in Australia as Vietnam at the Waverley City Gallery from 25 February to 28 March 1993, [9] in which Zara Stanhope points to "Drummond's creative acts of framing and filming," and "unsettling juxtaposition of unfamiliar, geographically distant images" which "disrupt the convention of the invisible journalistic photographer [and] Western modes of narrative and brings about reconsideration of viewing responsibilities." Drummond also included a series of untitled black-and-white photos extracted from an unfinished video she made in Vietnam in which scenes in motion were rendered blurred and out of focus. A single framed passport photo facing a group of like images at opposite ends of a long narrow space that for Stanhope signify "the individual made poweriess before structures of the mass or of nation. The passport proves the existence of the refugee and reminds us that those who cross frontiers are, like criminals, the objects ol surveillance." [10]
Drummond's Peeping Tom (named from Michael Powell’s film) was shown at Monash University Gallery, November 1995 to February 1996. Beside found photographs it included three video screens; one showing Powell's 1960 movie; another voyeuristically tracking a woman as she weaves through museum displays; and a third with a live feed of the exhibition space in which the viewer can see themselves recorded. The sum of these parts places the audience in the role of victim and aggressor simultaneously. It is a frequently referenced work, [11] [12] early on by artist and writer Perry Fowler;
"Drummond has created an ‘artificial’, cryptically narrated, masculinist subjectivity. Like a psychoanalyst ‘reading’ a patient or a detective investigating a mystery, the viewer deciphers the story through ‘clues’ provided at random.The story reveals an arguably pathological perception of the feminine. Drummond’s women are shallow, monochrome beauties, naively modeling for long-forgotten amateurs. Manipulated and enlarged, they become images of a reconstituted femininity; a postmodern perception of a post-war sexuality." [13]
Reviewers recognised an allusive [14] and elliptical gaze in Drummond's oeuvre from early on in her career, with Max Dupain in 1986 describing as "intensely introverted" her imagery in The Melbourne Stage: Photographs by four post-graduates at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney;
"Rozalind Drummond shows 16 extremely beautiful colour pictures. As a group they are intensely poetic and charged with a very personal sense of mystery and sometimes unrelenting despair. Subdued yet passionate, delicate and sombre, thought-provoking and slightly awesome, they could all be shifting shadows of the same person. I return to these pictures again and again. In ordinary terminology they have depth. It is heartening to know that photography can thus rise so superior to actuality." [3]
Drummond's embrace of postmodernist traits prompted mixed reviews. Beatrice Faust slighted her contributions to the National Gallery of Victoria's 1988 Excursions into the Postmodern: Five Melbourne Photographers; New Acquisitions, writing that she had failed to make "a coherent body of work," and that beside John Gollings' studies "powerful melding of architectural, pornographic and optical images," hers were "sketchy and trivial." [15] Canberra Times critic Helen Musa by contrast understood in 1992 that Drummond "uses photography to exploit the distance between the real and the fictional." [16] Stuart Koop ambiguously qualified such a response in comparing separate 1991 exhibitions by Drummond (Scopic Territories at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art) and Wolfgang Sievers' industrial photographs (at National Gallery of Victoria) to identify her...
"...apparently total abdication of authorial responsibility in [ . . . ] a dependence on everything extrinsic to the photograph which has come to characterise the critical import of postmodern photography as some kind of institutional critique; this in contrast to the intrinsic formalism of modern photography," noting "[Sievers'] (perhaps naive) confrontation of power, capital, social control, or whatever, in the construction of aesthetic forms, [while Drummond], in retreat. hopes rather to spy a random trace of their omnipresence, poking the camera into a city's spaces for a glimpse of puissance. The difference is a capitulation of sorts before the unrelenting advance of "capital" manifest in theories such as Debord's." [17]
Greg Neville in The Age however dismissed Scopic Territories as "a cold and overstated exercise. In that at least it is a good example of the current, Post-Modern Academy style," its catalogue as "impenetrable" and the accompanying video as "interminable," [18] and dismissed a reshowing of the images in Reflex at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, curated by Koop, as "blurry night shots of the city, such as one expects (but does not encourage) in undergraduate students." [19]
Rebecca Lancashire more positive in reviewing Location, at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 1992, notes "Rozalind Drummond's black and white Melbourne scenes, deliberately out of focus: images of flux and uncertainty," [20] and Zara Stanhope addressing Reflex as an exhibition of ironically "bad" photography, in which Drummond's work accompanied that of Susan Fereday, Graeme Hare, Les Walking and David Stephenson, described hers as "dynamic images;"
"Abstracting the real, the works in Reflex restage the classical struggle between the expressive and the descriptive, the subjectivity of the gaze and the indexical qualities of photographic reproduction. The electric neon lighls illuminating the form of Western and Eastern cities appear out of the night in Rozalind Drummond's...They provide the viewer with only a transitory glimpse, insufficient to discern the figure in the darkness, or to culturally position oneself." [21]
Drummond has applied a feminist visual critique to gender. [22] Reacting to her 1996 exhibition Bunny Rug reprising American pinup photographer Bunny Yeager's self-portraits reviewer Bruce James of the Sydney Morning Herald finds himself "unpersuaded but provoked." [23] In a 1997 issue of ArtAsiaPacific, [11] Natalie King described the installation Peeping Tom (1995) by Drummond as, “A group of large format, toned photographs … haphazardly pinned to the gallery walls like an archive,” suggesting not an institution but the “archive” as a collection of related things (whether in subject or form), [24] inviting, as Freda Freiberg remarked, "a surreptitious peep, if not a studied gaze, at the bodies and business of others..." and to "turn our gaze back on the professional peepers, to play their game. We are asked to play the sleuth." [25] However, reviewing more conventional imagery in Perfect for Every Occasion at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2007, critic Robert Nelson dismissed as "feeble happy snaps," her portraits of youths; "Even the scene where one girl touches another, which is given the dramatic title Now Everyone Knows, seems unmomentous." [26]
Penny Webb writing on Durmmond's 2007 collaborative show with Stuart Bailey, Carpetweed, at Victoria Park Gallery, Abbotsford, discerns a more effective "exchange ... established between these two bodies of work - six photographs pinned around the space; six constructions on the floor: a meeting of minds, you might say. Rozalind Drummond has cast a dispassionate eye on piles of materials and objects, discarded or yet to be claimed, in the process of some sort of office move or domestic upheaval." [27]
Drummond's exhibitions include:
The Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), in Fitzroy, Melbourne, Victoria, is a venue for the exhibition of contemporary photo-based arts, providing a context for the enjoyment, education, understanding and appraisal of contemporary practice.
Carol Jerrems was an Australian photographer/filmmaker whose work emerged just as her medium was beginning to regain the acceptance as an art form that it had in the Pictorial era, and in which she newly synthesizes complicity performed, documentary and autobiographical image-making of the human subject, as exemplified in her Vale Street.
Steven Siewert is an Australian photojournalist and art photographer.
Susan Fereday is an Australian artist, writer, curator and educator. She holds a doctorate from Monash University, Melbourne. She was born in Adelaide, South Australia.
Robert Rooney (1937–2017) was an artist and art critic from Melbourne, Australia, and a leading figure in Australian Conceptual art.
John Cyril "Jack" Cato, F.R.P.S. was an Australian portrait photographer in the pictorialist style, operating in the first half of the twentieth century. He was the author of the first history of Australian photography; The Story of the Camera in Australia (1955)
Susanne Helene Ford was an Australian feminist photographer who started her arts practice in the 1960s. She was the first Australian photographer to have a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1974 with Time Series. A book of her portraits of women 'A Sixtieth of a Second' was published in 1987. Her photographs and eclectic practice was displayed in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2014.
Micky Allan is an Australian photographer and artist whose work covers paintings, drawings, engraved glass overlays, installations and photography. Allan has become an influential public speaker and has been invited to be a part of many discussions on feminist politics and present a number of speeches held in galleries across Australia about art photography during the 1970s.
Ruth Maddison is an Australian photographer. She started photography in the 1970s and continues to make contributions to the Australian visual arts community.
John Chester Cato was an Australian photographer and teacher. Cato started his career as a commercial photographer and later moved towards fine-art photography and education. Cato spent most of his life in Melbourne, Australia.
Jennifer "Jennie" Boddington was an Australian film director and producer, who was first curator of photography at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (1972–1994), and researcher.
Ponch Hawkes is an Australian photographer whose work explores intergenerational relationships, queer identity and LGBTQI+ rights, the female body, masculinity, and women at work, capturing key moments in Australia's cultural and social histories.
Robert Owen is an Australian artist and curator. He lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.
Arts Project Australia Inc. is a registered charity and non-profit organisation located in Northcote, an inner northern area of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The organisation provides facilitation/mentoring, studio and exhibition spaces for artists with intellectual disabilities, and as such has been identified as a major centre for the promotion and exhibition of outsider art, or art that has been produced outside of the contemporary and historical mainstream. In 2016 there were approximately 130 artists attending the studio, with the work of exhibiting artists featuring alongside works from the broader contemporary art community in the annual rotating exhibition program.
Kate Just is an American-born Australian feminist artist. Just is best known for her inventive and political use of knitting, both in sculptural and pictorial form. In addition to her solo practice, Just often works socially and collaboratively within communities to create large scale, public art projects that tackle significant social issues including sexual harassment and violence against women.
Stephen Wickham is an Australian photographer, painter and printmaker.
Robert Ashton (1950) is an Australian photographer and photojournalist.
Jacqueline Mitelman is an Australian portrait photographer.
Cherine Fahd is an Australian artist who works in photography and video performance. She is also Associate Professor in Visual Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia and has published in academic journals, photographic and art publications, and in news and media. Her work has been shown in Australia, Israel, Greece and Japan. She has received numerous grants, and has been awarded residencies in India and in Sydney at Carriageworks.
Hoda Afshar is an Iranian documentary photographer who is based in Melbourne. She is known for her 2018 prize-winning portrait of Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani, who suffered a long imprisonment in the Manus Island detention centre run by the Australian government. Her work has been featured in many exhibitions and is held in many permanent collections across Australia.