The Ghost in the Machine
Art Gallery of NSW
******
By Ginny Gordon
Sometime around 1956. I'm not sure exactly when, but sometime around 1956, the total number of photographs of people overtook the world's actual population. From that moment on, being real means you belong to a minority, and it's images that inherit the earth.
There are currently 95 found photographs from this bursting ghost-world currently on display in the Art Gallery of NSW. All of them were taken by unknown photographers between 1868 and 1971, and they feature pedestrians, soldiers, children and lovers, all nameless and anonymous, and mostly, by now, no doubt dead. But this exhibition is more than a momento mori; there is humour and warmth here.
The absence of a photographer forces attention to the content of the pictures themselves. They depict a lost world, that age of iron loosely called modernity. Who could have known that New York was so achingly beautiful at the turn of the 19th century? That a zeppelin, viewed from a ship's prow, could appear so menacing and vulnerable at the same time? That Tower Bridge, crowded with horses, could appear to be such an astonishing piece of engineering? A child, dressed in a cardboard box with blind eyes and a gormless smile, stares out of the 1920s, frozen forever in a moment of play. One can't help but wish he stayed in there, encased against the horrible decades to come. These are small artefacts, designed to fit in the palm of the hand or to be pasted into albums, made of silver gelatins as delicate as a baby's skin.
They aren't the dramatic, large-scale images that we are now inured against - they're traces of vanished lives, and for that reason, all the more heart rending.
Just next to the exhibition is the entrance to Bill Viola's astonishing video installation, The Fall into Paradise (2005). Go see that too. If you can't enjoy it, you don't have a pulse.