Patrick Pound, photography, Melbourne, Art and Heritage Collection, found objects
Summary
Artist Statement
Melbourne-based artist Patrick Pound began this series of works with a set of ‘unattributed portraits’ from the City of Melbourne’s collection of Talma Studio photographs. Talma Studios once stood opposite the Town Hall, in Swanston Street, and counted Lord Mayor Henry Weedon (in office 1905–08) as one of its managing partners. Pound has juxtaposed the formally staged Talma portraits of everyday anonymous Melburnians with a series of Parisian photo booth images from his own collection.
The photo booth is a less formal version of the studio in miniature. However, the photo booth images Pound places alongside the Talma portraits deliberately show people who are not quite ready for their image to be taken. These are melancholy unstaged moments. They are permanent records of the in-between moments of life. These sitters haven’t quite composed themselves. They are caught blinking or moving in or out of frame. Portraits are inevitably staged versions of our selves, and these pairings of anonymous folk are marinated with the human condition.
These pairings of the staged Melbourne studio images and Parisian photo booth images ask us to think about how we habitually adopt standard poses for the camera’s insatiable eye, and they draw our attention to the ways in which photographs are casually yet deliberately constructed. Pound juxtaposes pairings of people, studio portraiture types, historical time frames and famously paired cities: Paris and Melbourne. We are all familiar with 'the Paris end of Collins Street'; amusingly, Pound makes us wonder about the possibilities of a Melbourne end of the Champs Élysées.
Pound is an avid collector of photographs, and his personal archives contain thousands of images categorised according to a carefully considered (if somewhat idiosyncratic) taxonomy. He has found photographs with the photographer’s shadows in them. He has collections of snaps featuring the thumb of the photographer. He has hundreds of photos of people caught in the wind, and of people holding cameras, and of people holding photographs. He even has a vast collection of photographs of people who look dead but who (probably) aren’t.
Patrick Pound, 2013
