Escalator Site, Parliament Station 1977

Summary

Wolfgang Sievers (1913–2007) arrived in Australia in 1938, settling in Melbourne the following year. Of Jewish descent, he had escaped Germany after being called up to serve in the Luftwaffe as an aerial photographer, having previously attended Berlin’s Contempora School for Applied Arts. Sievers’ studies had exposed him to the ideas of the Bauhaus, including the benefits of combining applied arts and fine arts, and the power of manufacturing and mass production in modernity. These concerns were foundational to the career he subsequently forged as one of Australia’s most notable industrial photographers. This Type C colour photograph shows a vast escalator shaft during the construction of Parliament Station on Melbourne’s city loop in 1977. The unworldly scene is a brilliant meeting of opposites: a colossal shaft on which two tiny, hard-hatted figures stand; the feat of mechanical engineering contrasting with embodied humanity; saturated hot colour against the coolness of black and white; a perspective that has one simultaneously looking both up and down in this subterranean scene. The print was purchased at the exhibition titled ‘One Thousand Miles’, initiated by the Victorian Centre for Photography and held at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 1988, before touring regionally.