Strange beauty in sordid photography

By T.J. McNAMARA

Nothing suggests the passage of time more than photography. When we look at a Victorian photograph, we know that all the people in it are now dead, devoured by time.

Despite this power of suggestion, photography was not accepted as the equal of painting and sculpture until quite recently.

Now photographs, film and video have become part of the museum scene and have moved out of specialist galleries into major public and dealer galleries.

It remains true that photography does some things that painting does not, notably convey a detailed immediacy and a sense of the working of time.

Time, eroticism, fashion, the stuff of dreams, modern technology - all play their part in the outstanding exhibition called Promise, by Fiona Pardington, at the Jensen Gallery in Upper Queen St.

The material of the exhibition comes from a cache of contact prints found in a rubbish skip in London. These were so-called glamour photographs, taken in black and white for cheap men's magazines in the 1950s or 60s.

Pardington has re-photographed them and enlarged them as computer prints. On the new scale they are larger than life, an important factor in their impact.

Each one is an individual figure, topless, but generally, as the conventions of the time demanded, with panties on.

The images are immensely sad but made powerful by a strange beauty. Enlarged on this scale, the sordidness of the circumstances of their making is abundantly clear.

The dreary snaps posed by desperate young women anxious to earn a few pounds now take on a human interest far beyond the erotic frisson they were intended to convey.The details are touching as well as fixing the images exactly in time. The eye-shadow that becomes a mask and the off-centre bra-straps of Gina, the knitted pullover and the conventional face of Jenny.

The face and the jumper in this image are exactly like the ultra-orthodox, tidily English photographs on the front of knitting patterns of the past, but the jumper is pulled up to show bare breasts.

Transparent black pants with an edging of white lace become pathetic when they are on Gigi, crawling on obviously artificial grass and wearing nothing else but backless, high-heeled shoes.

Amid all this pathos - and ironies such as the fine figure posed against curtains with a Mondrian pattern - there is a special kind of splendour to these women that emerges despite the dirty feet, the stains on the sheets, the fake wallpaper, the hideous bedside tables and the strained poses aimed entirely at the masculine viewer.

It comes from the power of sex. These photographs would probably have been torn out of magazines and put up on walls as the temporary subjects of a kind of secular adoration.

Early in her career, Pardington made elaborate constructions that enshrined a little image in the way a reliquary encloses the bones of a saint.

These images are not so elaborately presented but, as the title implies, they contain promises not of salvation but of payment, of sex, and of a sort of worship, all at the mercy of time. The eye that saw these promises in the prints in the rubbish is a splendidly artistic eye.

At the Sue Crockford Gallery, Richard Maloy is presenting endeavours in photography, videos and sculpture, exploring the possibilities of these media in ways that befit a young artist.

The show is called Blue Dog and has as its centre a little dog, somewhat like a messy Scotch terrier, modelled in plaster and painted bright, artificial blue.

Maloy, like Yves Klein, loves blue. A while ago he made and photographed some blue roses. This time he photographed the blue dog.

He also took his blue dog to the Gold Coast where, we are told, the dog loved the sunny weather. This trip gave rise to a series of photographs of the Gold Coast which are also in the exhibition.

One set of these is images of little trimmed bushes. In the middle of the gallery is an enlarged version of one of the bushes, badly made of cardboard boxes. No doubt it is for the dog to pee on.

The blue continues in the videos where we see the artist putting cardboard armour on one arm and one leg and painting it blue. No doubt to protect from a bite from the little dog.

All of this is witty or unbearably twee, according to taste. The only photographs that really have an effect are close-ups of the dog enlarged in the Michael Parekowhai manner, where the face of the dog with its smooth, blue eyes is strange and suggests some peculiar mutant. This is a clever exhibition by a talent of some promise.