From the loft

Exposure: Ruth Williams, Media Relations Manager for the Historic Houses Trust, interviews curators of the Archive Gallery, Holly Schulte and Caleb Williams.

Ruth: So guys, what led to the development of this new space, The Archive Gallery at the museum?

Holly: There are so many inspiring images that we find everyday …this is a way of getting them out there, literally ‘exposing them’.

Ruth: Hence the title of the first exhibition you have put on – “exposure”.

Caleb: That’s right, but it is a ‘play on words’ … both in terms of an exposure as a way of making an image on film, and exposing a hidden reality … the daily work assignments police photographers undertook between 1920-60.

Ruth: Its a large collection, this first exhibition consists of 42 images. Was it hard to make the choice?

Holly: We were looking at images that have only recently been discovered … the exhibition is our response to images that excited, or intrigued us. The process of selection was hard … ultimately those images that resonated the most were included. We broke them down into loosely themed groupings that explored different spaces and scenes … domestic, industrial, rural, mug-shot, murder, accident … scenarios that confronted the photographers on a daily basis.

Ruth: Fascinating, it is interesting to understand what goes on in a curator’s mind and why these decisions are made.

Caleb: What came through for us very strongly in this show, was the material shot in the late 1940s into the 1950s … more police, lighter cameras, deeper encompassment of Sydney geography. Photos revealing shadowy streets, sunlit summer evenings, working class neighborhoods, without a car or tree that had not seen a lick of paint for 50 years … there is a real sense of Sydney as a place … its gritty soul bared to the lens, without make up.

Ruth: I understand these images have not been seen in previous books or exhibitions within the museum?

Holly: Yes, it is true the images are completely fresh … not seen before. These images were taken for a short term practical purpose of crime investigation … they were never intended to be seen by the public … that we can see them now is remarkable … and that so many of them are such strong, well considered examples of photography in their own right is even more remarkable. At the moment much work is going to reconstruct the history and stories behind these images.

Ruth: Interestingly enough many photos contain unexpected portraits of investigators on the scene. The show seems to blend the sinister, the poetic, and the practical.

Caleb: In all previous accounts of the collection the words ‘anonymous’ and ‘photographer’ have been linked. We wanted to re-connect the photographers with the scenes they took … so photographers caught in mirrors, reflective surfaces, revealed by their shadows, or hands and feet in the photographic frame seemed important to include. The recording of the crime scene for police purposes involves the capture of a form of dark, hidden history, and those that created it need to be brought back into the light with the photos they took.