Carol Jerrems died in early 1980, aged just 30. And yet her career of only 11 years (1968-1979), was a celebrated one, with her photographs collected straight out of art school by the National Gallery of Victoria. And then, two years after graduating, she was featured in the inaugural exhibition at Brummels Gallery, the first art space in Australia dedicated to photography.
Needless to say, Jerrems’ images captured a moment in time, and were recognised from the outset for chronicling the women’s movement, First Nations activism, youth subcultures and the music and arts scenes of the era.
While I won’t describe this as a new exhibition, the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Canberra has mounted an exhibition of Jerrems’ portraits in a rethink of her oeuvre. The exhibition offers “a slight recalibration of the way that Jerrems’ legacy has been historicised,” explains curator Isobel Parker Philip.
It must be remembered that at the time Jerrems was making, photography was not embraced fully as ‘art’. The exhibition publication recalls Jerrems’ words from 1978, “Photography is an art form, but most Australians still cannot realise this.” It would seem that since then, institutions have worked double-time to recontextualise her work in a broader light.
Jerrems’ notable 1975 photograph Vale Street, remains one of the most iconic Australian photographs ever produced, selling for a record price for an Australian photograph at a Sydney auction in 2023, fetching over 204% above the estimate. Together with that benchmark sale, and using an anniversary – the publication of Jerrems’ ground-breaking, A Book about Australian Women – as its cue, this exhibition looks at her extraordinary portraits 50 years on.
The NPG has further marked the occasion by publishing the first monograph on Jerrems’ work, with new essays offering fresh perspectives on her practice.
And while the exhibition and publication in tandem do shift the lens onto the charged relationship between photographer and photographed – and proximity – rather than merely documenting a social landscape and historical lineages of the medium, it is a very subtle shift.
Parker Philips says of her rationale: “To turn back to Jerrems’ photographs, 45 years after her death, is to consider what lingers. Jerrems amplified the narrative potential of the quiet moment and saw tenderness and intimacy as deserving of attention. Her work is about lust and tension and joy and relationships caught in the slip of the everyday. It is, in other words, intently about touch. To turn back to Jerrems’ photographs is to consider what bruises.”
It is almost a cliché that the intimate black and white photographs are displayed upon a painted band of colour, which is a soft, fleshy pink. While it unifies Jerrems’ multiple series, it also feels suffocatingly tight, pulling the viewer along in a formalism that is at odds with her images.
A highlight of the exhibition, however, is the display of several contact sheets with Jerrems’ markings-up of images for print, which are then displayed alongside those works. This is where the real understanding of her oeuvre from a portraiture tradition sinks in.
The final chapter of the exhibition is a series of works photographed in hospital, as Jerrems battled a rare liver disease. These images were first shown in 2007, in an exhibition curated by Helen Ennis, Reveries: Photography & Morality, for the NPG. While chronologically they make sense as the end point of this current show, in some ways I would have liked the exhibition to start with them, picking up on that idea curator Parker Philips uses: ‘to bruise’.
Read: Exhibition review: Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory, MCA
In many ways the images in this exhibition – even those of celebration – bruise in a soft way, as the sitter stares directly into the camera in confrontation. Jerrems’ images are incredibly self-assured and everyday, even in their intimate moments. They emphatically state a moment of existence that is much more than mere record or casual framing, so I get the desire to hone the point that these pictures continue to talk volumes.
I do, however, question the value of this as a ticketed exhibition, given that history of this collection’s free presentation (the National Gallery of Australia next door has surveyed Jerrems’ work twice – in 1990 and 2012), and indeed the majority of works on display are drawn from its collection (with just a handful from the NPG and the National Library of Australia). Nevertheless, it is an easy exhibition to get enjoyably lost with, across the eddies of time.
Carol Jerrems: Portraits
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
30 November – 2 March 2025
Ticketed.
