Postgraduate Summer Program: assessment exhibitions

Warwick Clarke Body & Soul

Body and Soul is an interdisciplinary, comparative study of the essay form, with particular reference to the Weimar period. The essay is a marginal literary genre, which, like much documentary style photography, attempts “the imaginative recreation of a culture, a period or an individual”. August Sander’s photographic opus, "People of the 20th Century" and Robert Musil’s essayistic novel, "The Man Without Qualities" invite comparison as complex and problematic portraits of their respective societies. Sander’s typological portraits are well known and his legacy informs much of contemporary documentary photography. These images investigate documentary’s relation to truth and question the role of fiction in the documentary tradition.

John A. Douglas Screen Test (Americana/Australiana)

The conceptual framework of the Screen Test (Americana/Australiana) is bound by two key imperatives: to re-image and re-interpret cinema that embodies the heightened aesthetic experience of film, and secondly, to investigate these aesthetic experiences in relation to culture and meaning. The process involves selecting a segment from a mid 20th century film from either Hollywood or Australia. The aesthetic experience of the scenes is heightened and re-performed within the context of their cultural identity and personal symbols. The production of each segment undergoes a transformation where the narrative structures, locations, props, editing and characterisations shift from their original forms. The work also explores the aesthetic properties of the film stilled. A production photograph is made to once again hold the heightened aesthetic experience of the scene as a photographic tableau.