Riley from Time Series II 1962-74

Summary

Photographer, filmmaker and photo-media artist Sue Ford (1943–2009) is considered one of Australia’s most important woman photographers of the second half of the 20th century. Studying and practising her art from the early 1960s, she cemented her reputation through her clear engagement with second-wave feminism in the early 1970s, with often simple, personal depictions of her subjects.

Establishing her practice at a time of energised consciousness raising in the West and urgent political activism, Ford used her camera to document the restless, crackling, dissenting mood of the times. At the heart of her work are the critical issues of gender, feminism, identity and Indigenous rights. Embodying the catchcry ‘the personal is political’, her photographs weave these critical threads into nuanced narratives of everyday life and social and political exchange in the public realm.

The Art and Heritage Collection holds a selection of Ford’s black-and-white photographs, spanning the 1960s to 80s, and ranging over her ethical and intellectual concerns. Her ‘Time Series’ , taken between 1962 and 82, is a compelling meditation on identity, personal history and the ineffability of time, realised through multiple portraits of her many subjects. The collection holds two double and two triple photographic portraits from the series, featuring Fabian, Jim, Riley and the artist herself. These gelatin silver portraits reveal the passage of time and hint at the multiple identities that comprise the complex and evolving human self.

The ground-breaking ‘Time Series’ made Ford the first Australian photographer to hold a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, using portraits from the series taken up to 1974. Works from ‘Time Series’ were also shown in ‘The Thousand Mile Stare’ touring exhibition, which opened at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 1988 and for which the City of Melbourne was a sponsor. The city’s four works from this series were purchased in the wake of this exhibition.