Self-portrait with camera 1960-2006 (2011)
Book essay
'Faces are Maps': Sue Ford and Portraiture
by Helen Ennis ©
Published by Monash Gallery of Art 2011
When Sue Ford became interested in photography as a teenager in the late 1950s the
photography scene was very different to the one we now take for granted. Professional
and commercial photographers were extremely active, 1 but there was no separate
category of art photographer as there has been since the early 1970s. Those interested
in using the medium as a means of self expression were invariably professionally trained
and made their living in the fields of advertising, fashion, architecture and industry, or
in science and medicine. The most ubiquitous area of practice across Australia was
portraiture, carried out in city, suburban and country studios that were often also
involved in wedding photography, another lucrative area of activity.
These simple historical facts are what make Sue Ford’s practice, begun in 1961, the
more remarkable. Though it was largely invisible at the time of its production her
photography from the 1960s occupies a crucial place in Australian photographic history,
coming immediately before the explosion of the art photography movement in Australia.
In the decades that followed she produced a wide-ranging, complex body of work which
contributes to important debates about gender and race, about the politics of history
and representation, about feminism and postcolonialism. And yet, as her extensive
archives reveal, there is one area of practice that remained constant across nearly fifty
years – portraiture.
The beginnings of Ford’s career were relatively conventional. She worked as a delivery
girl for Sutcliffe Photographers in Collins Street, Melbourne in 1960 and was responsible
for delivering photographs to advertising agencies in the city. However, she found
herself seduced by the ‘magic’ of the processes she witnessed in Sutcliffe’s darkroom
during her lunch hour. The following year, aged eighteen, she enrolled in a vocational
photography course at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and completed the
first of a four-year course (art photography courses were not introduced to tertiary
institutions until several years later). At this time she made some well resolved but
standard documentary images that were suffused with the humanist and universalising
spirit encapsulated in The family of man exhibition which toured Australia in 1959.
However, very quickly she struck off on her own path. In 1961–62, in a studio above
Ninky’s Tea and Coffee house in Little Collins Street which she shared with a fellow
student, Annette Stevens, Ford began to make her first important works. These were
portraits of her female school friends. All the hallmarks of her mature practice appear in
these charming images: a collaborative approach, the preference for ‘a set formula’
(Ford likened it to a cake recipe)2 and a pared-down visual vocabulary. As she later
explained, the camera was set on 1/60th of a second at F11 and one of four backdrops
was used, either a white or black sheet, a bamboo stand or a hessian curtain.3 This
systematic approach became her modus operandi, serving her extremely well in the Time
series of photographs and in the films Faces and Faces 1976–1996 (with Ben Ford).
Ford’s portraits from the 1960s did not make their public appearance until the early
1980s when they were exhibited in Photo-book of women (1982) and published in
A sixtieth of a second: portraits of women 1961–1981 (1987). The response to them
was therefore delayed and already historicised. Within the context of Ford’s oeuvre and
subsequent historical events, the photographs can be seen to carry substantial weight
as portents of great social and political change. From the outset Ford’s practice was firmly
anchored in the lives of women and their shared desire for liberation from a patriarchal
society and confining, stereotypical roles. The consensual approach she developed
and the kind of photographic imagery she produced make it clear that in developing
independent, autonomous lives the company and support of other women was crucial.
Not only were the women friends, they were artistic partners and collaborators as well.
Their actions ranged from playing up for the camera – as in Carmel and Trish’s faux
fashion photographs (1962) – to real world initiatives that included the establishment
of the film-making collective Reel Women in 1980. The collective, of which Ford was a
founding member, aimed to expand women’s access to film making.
The sixties portraits do not, however, relate only to history. Their continuing appeal
derives from their freshness and vitality, and the youthful charm of their smooth-skinned
subjects, with their sometimes earnest expressions. Ford later recalled that her sitters
approached being photographed with ‘a ceremonial seriousness’ as they changed their
clothes and hairstyles for their sessions. 4
The degree of formal experimentation in Ford’s early photography is also striking. It is
evident in her choice of unusual vantage points, unexpected framing and – especially in
the portraits – the favouring of extreme close-ups that strip away contextual elements.
This experimentation was allied to her politicised and iconoclastic view of the technical
aspects of photography. As a woman and single mother raising two children, Emma and
Ben, Ford was acutely aware of the political, gendered economy of photography.5 She
drew attention to the economic difficulties involved in accessing good photographic
equipment, well equipped studio and darkroom facilities, as well as the inequities
associated with childcare and securing extended periods of solitude and uninterrupted
time to work. In 1980 she remarked that ‘women generally have to make film-making
fit into their life, not their life fit into a career of film-making, which is generally the case
with men’.6 Ford did not regard technical accomplishment as a measure of success and
produced prints that, in her words, were often ‘rough as guts’,7 purposefully aligning her
work with a conceptualist wing of practice rather than fine art photography traditions.
In the 1970s Ford made two revealing statements about her views on photography.
The first was in 1973, when she was awarded an Ilford Scholarship to study photography
at the Victorian College of the Arts. She outlined what was then a radical conception of
photography as a plastic medium, explaining that she planned to experiment:
with emulsions, colour, photographic silkscreen and photo-sculpture … some artists
are utilising phototechniques and are thinking in a photographic way. I want to use
some of their techniques and materials to extend photography into other dimensions. 8
A year later in New photography Australia: a selective survey, published by the newly
founded Australian Centre for Photography, Ford stated that she was exploring the
camera’s ‘unique capacity to simply RECORD’.9 These dual interests – in photography’s
ability to record and its plastic possibilities – were the touchstones in her practice,
surfacing and resurfacing at different points throughout her career. Series from the 1990s
onwards, such as From Van Diemens Land to Video Land, used hand-colouring, collage
and laser prints. But it was in her portraiture, above all in the Time series and extended
self-portraiture, that Ford used photography’s recording capacity to greatest effect.
Time series, Ford’s best-known work, met with critical acclaim when first exhibited;
Geoffrey De Groen, for example, described the photographs as ‘brilliant’.10 The series
presents two, sometimes three, images of the same subject taken from seven to ten years
apart. Each person stares into the camera, subjecting themselves to intense but detached
scrutiny. There is no pretence, no romantic and atmospheric effects. The film Faces
follows the same formula. Subjects drawn from Ford’s own circle pose in front of a neutral
backdrop, each faces the camera for a sometimes excruciating thirty second period.
The concerns with time and change which underpin Time series and Faces are in Ford’s
self-portraits too and can be seen in the series of 47 photographs that make up Selfportrait
with camera (1960–2006). But her autobiographical project, particularly in the
early years, also had a political dimension – feminism and the desire to create new,
positive images of women that challenged the stereotypes of ‘glossy, brainless beauty,
slim, attractive bodies, flawless complexions and eternally smiling mouths’.11 Choosing
to photograph oneself, one’s life and one’s time exemplified the now well-worn slogan
‘the personal is political’. Ford’s self-examination across the decades is unflinching and
exacting. As Janine Burke wrote in 1980, her ‘psychological history [is] etched in her
face for everyone to see’. Burke concluded that Ford’s self-portraits are ‘as honest as
one can ever be about oneself’.12
For Sue Ford portraits, or ‘faces’, were an enduring interest. After all, as she remarked in
1978, ‘Everybody’s face tells you about the society they live in, and what they’re feeling
inside … faces are maps’.13