Vantage point: David Stephenson’s camera captures a unique view of cities in Light Cities/Asia. Susan Long, Start, Sutton Projects 230 Young St, until May 31
Jessie Scott, The Coburg Plan, blindside.org.au/play
A bit like a landscape painter in search of the picturesque, David Stephenson climbs to the highest eminence to make his images of foreign cities by night. Called Light cities / Asia, the photographs at John Buckley are taken from tall buildings, looking across at other skyscrapers and the web of roads and topography that surround them.
Shanghai, Hong Kong and Bangkok become translucent, radiant in their humid smog, as if the leaden air is set alight by an excess of energy. From its unusual vantage-point, the camera seems to register an aerial radioactivity, a sinister incendiary that is perhaps nothing more than the output of so many power generators that supply ubiquitous appliances.
Now that I’ve seen these pictures, I notice the aura of consumption everywhere. Even the page that I’m writing on glows like Shanghai. It’s the electrical campfire of the information age, which is in fact relatively efficient for the billions of people it connects.
From Turner to pictorialist photography, artists have enjoyed the ominous visual condiment of pollution; but in implicating the electrical luminaries in the haze, Stephenson takes us to the larger cycle of choice and production that underlies the emissions.
The pictures are monumental, documenting the urban sublime, which is both seductive and terrifying. They’re made with chemical photography, which is obsolete, given that the prints are in any case produced digitally.
Just as the cities of the advanced economies are now towers of information rather than a sprawl of manufacture, so the photograph is on its way to becoming a matrix of data. Stephenson still holds out against the digital; but he too will succumb, in the same way that cities tend toward a raster upon a river.
The survival of film is more than a matter of sentiment for Susan Long in her Start at Sutton Projects. All the big cities of the world have libraries with holdings of information in microform. The film compresses text and image in a denser form than paper.
Long prints out the beginnings and ends of the reels that she’s encountered. They're the odds and sods in all their analogue messiness, which is coincidentally moody, having the appearance of night, where random scratches on the film resemble the trace of light in photography with long exposures.
At other times, they look uncannily like an abstract artwork, with a suggestion of concrete poetry in the printed words designating the start and end of film. Film may be outdated; but before its end, digitised replacements had begun.
Digitisation ultimately transcends the gallery itself, as more organisations, like C3, have excellent screen initiatives online. An example is Jessie Scott’s video The Coburg Plan at Blindside, which you can view at home but not in the gallery.
The four-minute video is made from archival 35mm slides, which appear with the sound of an old automatic projector. But Scott has exaggerated the delay between one slide going down and the next appearing, giving long periods of black that make the experience tense and portentous.
The slides document the northern working-class suburb of Coburg, now perhaps the next up-and-coming part of Melbourne but which struggles to create a sense of urbanism against its bleak horizons of boundless bungalows on bald allotments.
David Stephenson would die in Coburg. Anyone from our town who visits Hong Kong may well return through automotive Coburg and wonder just how much longer the horizontal aesthetic can hold out against a more efficient footprint.
Spookily, Scott takes her transparencies from the recent past, where the cars are sometimes only 10 years old. The vignetted image and dowdy subject matter look ancient, but in fact they’re close to the present. With long, melancholy periods of black and relatively short glimpses of suburb, Scott makes the present seem dead on arrival.
Each image seems morbid, with its own funeral in the dark movement of the slide projector. In that black interval, you wonder if maybe on the other side lies a brilliant metropolis of a kind that Stephenson would want to photograph.
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