Great Experimentations

All photographs are portraits of the past. Shutters click and whoosh, a moment is ripped from the slipstream of what Susan Sontag, in On photography (1971), called ‘time’s relentless melt’. The medium’s elegiac bias is, for Roland Barthes, symptomatic of the ‘terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead’ (Camera lucida, 1980).

These melancholy words haunt me when I look at Carol Jerrems’ photographs, haunted in turn by the spectre of her premature passing, in 1980, at 30 years old. This body of work is not only a memento mori for a precocious talent, but also a requiem for the era Jerrems has come to personify. Today her mythos is inextricable from the countercultural milieu she chronicled with an inspired and uncommon affinity.

By the end of the 1960s, American writer Joan Didion had already declared the sun was setting on the Age of Aquarius: ‘All that seemed clear,’ she wrote in Slouching towards Bethlehem in 1967, ‘was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job.’ Jerrems’ intimate portraiture confirms that time moved slower in the Antipodes, however; her images are populated by an idealistic generation enacting their nascent politics via trials in communal living, free love, creative cross-pollination and radical resistance. The photographer’s cultural moment is closer to that of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977), with its rotating cast of artists and dropouts falling in and out of one another’s beds, sharehouses and scenes. One of the anonymous interviewees in A book about Australian women (1974) – a collaboration between Jerrems and writer Virginia Fraser – summed it up neatly as ‘our period of great experimentation’.

In Jerrems’ photography, social change forms the backdrop to the everyday: say, in her pensive self portrait Carol Jerrems (Self portrait in front of a wall with Australian Centre for Photography exhibition posters) (1974), where she wears a badge with the feminist slogan ‘You’re among equals’ pinned to her lapel; or in Sharpie couple, Melbourne (1976), where two teenagers with matching buzzcuts and stony glares pose in front of a brick wall bearing a torn campaign poster for an aspiring Aboriginal politician, featuring the rallying cry ‘It’s our turn’. But do the couple link arms in a gesture of solidarity or exclusion?

Sharpies, a uniquely Australian subculture, drew upon the iconography of their British counterpart, the skinhead, whose proletariat rebellion was entangled in white supremacy, and here it’s unclear whether the symbolic association is ideological or aesthetic – whether the threat of violence is bona fide or just bravado. Like so many of Jerrems’ photographs, this ambiguous image encapsulates both the era’s heady possibilities and its political contradictions.

Jerrems picked up her camera as second-wave feminism was cresting, and her biography is paved with broken ground.

Part of the first photography cohort to graduate from Prahran Technical College, Jerrems had several works from her student portfolio acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria for its first photography collection in 1971. The following year Two views of erotica, Jerrems’ duo show with Henry Talbot, was the first exhibition curated by Rennie Ellis at Brummels Gallery, the first space in Australia dedicated to photography. Featuring nude photographs of Jerrems by Talbot alongside Jerrems’ own works, this titillating exhibition lays bare the second-wave’s paradoxes, similar to The Female Eunuch (1970) author Germaine Greer modelling as a centrefold in Oz magazine (where she was also a staff writer). While many other feminists questioned Ellis’ obsession with nude portraiture – and his decision to launch Brummels with such a salacious show – Jerrems attempted to reclaim the naked female body but hadn’t yet learned how to extricate herself from the male gaze, reflecting a cultural uprising still underway.

‘It is difficult to exist as an artist ... It is more difficult for a woman,’ writes Jerrems in 1974. ‘And if her tool of creative expression is a camera, there is yet another struggle because photography is not fully recognised as being an art form in Australia.’

Published on the eve of International Women’s Year, A book about Australian women documents a turning point in feminist consciousness-raising. Jerrems’ subjects include writer and historian Dr Anne Summers AO, shot when Summers was completing her epoch-making study Damned whores and God’s police: The colonization of women in Australia (1975). Looking back, Summers sees her own anxiety, despondency and ‘the steeliness that I was beginning to develop, which would ultimately see me get through this period and able to finish the book’.

Like Summers’ study, A book about Australian women strives to look beyond ‘politically conscious, active’ women to survey the wider sisterhood. Jerrems portrays these women in their own worlds – leafy backyards, cluttered living rooms, street marches, studios – playing with children, joyfully embracing, clutching pets or tools or placards, posturing or larking about. Portraits of women such as artist Grace Cossington Smith AO OBE, author and poet Kate Jennings, singer Wendy Saddington, historian Lyndall Ryan AM, and Thainakuith sculptor Dr Thancoupie Gloria Fletcher James AO appear alongside ‘strippers ... women’s liberationists, Aboriginal spokeswomen, activists, revolutionaries, teachers, students, drop-outs, mothers, prostitutes, lesbians and friends’.

This intersectional approach also captures a watershed moment in First Nations rights. Turn the page and there’s Wiradjuri tennis legend Evonne Goolagong Cawley AC MBE, her unwavering gaze framed by wispy ringlets. There’s author and campaigner Roberta ‘Bobbi’ Sykes, snapped with a megaphone and at the podium at the 1972 Black Moratorium. There’s Noonuccal activist, poet, writer and educator Oodgeroo Noonuccal, pen in hand, at her desk on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island); Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta Elder, activist and writer Margaret Tucker MBE at a Christmas party at Melbourne’s Aboriginal House; Gunditjmara woman and arts advocate Joyce Johnson, who co-founded Australia’s first Aboriginal theatre company, Nindethana, in 1971; Murri musician Syvanna Doolan at the newly formed National Black Theatre in Sydney.

In Fraser’s accompanying interviews, common themes emerge across class and race lines: of loveless marriages, domestic burdens, abortions, rape, affairs, gendered violence, internalised sexism. The book opens with a 54-year-old mother of three who, after 30 years of marriage, is questioning the gender roles she inherited as ‘the absolutely natural order’. Reading Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan comes with painful revelations about her own indoctrination, but she also worries for the next generation: ‘I sometimes think the old ways were better ... We were all more romantic, had higher sort of ideals.’

As the book goes on, younger women who are trying to live out their feminist ideals admit they’re still struggling with familial configurations, equitable childrearing and social expectations.

Jerrems was part of a new wave of artists who, by the 1970s, were finally starting to shake off the cultural cringe. Her muses included friends, contemporaries, mentors and lovers – with frequent appearances by filmmakers Paul Cox and Esben Storm; photographer Robert Ashton; actor Richard Moir; and musicians Greg Macainsh and Red Symons of Skyhooks (then one of the biggest rock bands in Australia) – and, in keeping with the spirit of the times, these roles often blurred.

Jerrems captures a heyday of Australian pop music, which flourished with the introduction of FM broadcasting in 1971. This decade gave birth to homegrown independent record labels such as Michael Gudinski’s Mushroom Records in 1972 – whose merchandise is sported by one of Jerrems’ subjects in Mushroom lampshade (1975) – who signed Skyhooks the following year. Jerrems’ photos also take us behind-the-scenes with touring musicians such as Brownie McGhee, Leon Russell and Ambrose Campbell, their stage personas stripped away in private moments of contemplation.

At the time, newly mandated cultural policy and funding bodies were reinvigorating local arts scenes, producing one of the first artistic generations who didn’t feel compelled to seek their fortunes offshore. The Australia Council was announced by Prime Minister Harold Holt in 1967, based on similar national arts councils in Canada, the UK and the USA, and established by his successor John Gorton the following year.

The local film industry was simultaneously revived by the establishment of the Australian Film Development Corporation and the Experimental Film and Television Fund in 1970, as well as the opening of the Australian Film Television and Radio School in 1972. These initiatives supported Jerrems’ mentor Cox’s move into feature filmmaking with Illuminations (1976), as well as her boyfriend Storm with 27A (1974) and In search of Anna (1978) – for which Jerrems was stills photographer – and saw Jerrems herself make an experimental feminist short film, Hanging about, in 1978.

Like her great inspiration, the American photographer Diane Arbus, Jerrems was determined to transcend her middle-class upbringing, and like Arbus, her intimacy with her subjects was often achieved through sex. Self portraits with Storm and Campbell are clearly post-coital, naked bodies still flushed with passion. Jerrems initially gained access to First Nations communities through her student at the notoriously rough Heidelberg Technical College, Ron Johnson, a descendant of the Gunditjmara people, who became her lover. She was also ‘smitten’ with Mark Lean, another student at Heidelberg, who provided entry to the Sharpie subculture. Like Arbus too, the power dynamics here between photographer and subject appear murky from today’s vantage – one can’t help but wonder how these images would be viewed if their genders were reversed.

However, it would be dishonest to deny how this frisson animates Jerrems’ most compelling images. Her portraits of Lean fetishise a working-class masculinity where desire is inextricable from danger. In an unsuccessful grant application for her unfinished 16mm film School’s out, she writes like an anthropologist of Lean’s ‘“skin-head” cult ... [who] like bashing, beer, sheilas, gang-bangs (rape), gang fights, billiards, stealing, and hanging about’.

In Mark Lean: Rape game (1975) Jerrems shoots Lean from above, his raised fist curled around a bunch of straws, whose length would determine who got to sleep with the photographer. In Kathy Drayton’s documentary Girl with a mirror (2005), Lean and his friend Jon Bourke remember that ‘she went along with it because she wanted to be there and take the photos. So whatever we suggested she went along with it’ – a pact that they say all parties willingly submitted to. ‘She thought we were bigger louts than what we actually were,’ recalls Lean. ‘We were playing at being louts.’

Contact sheets for her disquieting masterpiece Vale Street (1975) reveal the photographer’s seduction. In preceding shots we glimpse Lean and Bourke’s shyness around worldlier older women, before uncertainty is eased through smoking joints, kissing, removing clothes. The roll ends soon after Jerrems captures the iconic image of two boys, muscular yet scrawny, advancing from the shadows toward a defiant, bare-breasted woman in the foreground. The trio don’t look at one another, however, but at the unseen puppeteer pulling the strings.

In portraits of others we simultaneously see a portrait of Jerrems herself, as projected through their gaze. For if Jerrems’ images have a punctum, to return to the language of Roland Barthes – his term for the element of a photograph that compels and fascinates – it is the mercurial photographer behind the camera, at whom her subjects look with bravado, trepidation, warmth, desire.

‘Any portrait is something of the subject’s personality and something of the photographer’s,’ explains Jerrems. ‘The moment preserved is an exchange.’

In the exhibition Melbourne out loud: Life through the lens of Rennie Ellis, held at the State Library of Victoria in 2024, a letter from Jerrems to Ellis was displayed in a glass case like a treasure.

Her looping cursive is spry, girlish, confirming just how young she was at the height of her career. ‘You know, pictures remind us of where we’ve been and give other people somewhere to go to!’ she writes. ‘I don’t want to go where I’ve been before.’

Jerrems’ photographs are reminders of revolutionary potential, immortalising the counterculture before the fall. Youth’s impossible promise is frozen in time.

This is an extract from the National Portrait Gallery’s Carol Jerrems: Portraits publication, on sale now in the Portrait Gallery Store. The Carol Jerrems: Portraits exhibition was on show at the Gallery from 30 November 2024 until 2 March 2025.