GIRL IN A MIRROR – 70s faces: gritty, poetic and elusive

Photography: a form of art in the pictorial era

She, born in Melbourne in 1949, had studied photography at Prahran College with the absolute determination to capture the life of suburban gangs full of violent tomboys. Carol Jerrems https://www.portrait.gov.au/people/carol-jerrems-1949 spent the last months of her life in a hospital, where she died just before she turned 31, on a winter day in 1980. The year before, when she was still teaching the art of photography and taking self-portraits in the mirror, she had been diagnosed with blood cancer.

She continued to photograph herself until the end, documenting with her images of her also the agony and pain of a mangled body. She was the first contemporary Australian photographer to have her own works in Australian museums. Speaking of that not excessively tall girl, who in 1972 had been included in an exhibition reserved for emerging photographers, a photography teacher of hers long remembered not only the desire for sexual freedom of that red-haired female. He remembered also the fact that only she, Carol Jerrems, https://www.artmuseum.qut.edu.au/whats-on/2014/exhibitions/carol-jerrems-photographic-artist had her own inner world, and a place invisible to the eye where she chose to perceive things inside, first photograph them.

Living side by side with those young criminals from Heidelberg – a suburb of Melbourne – she thus had the opportunity to feed with raw images everything she saw, but also that she felt inside. Hers was a short and intense life, lived in Melbourne, in the 70s. One of her “Vale Street” prints sold for $ 122,000 at a Sotheby’s Australia auction. Her camera picked up not only women seeking freedom, but also street youth and dazed indigenous prisoners of the urban suburbs.She did not seek advertising work, but the almost diaristic approach relating to herself and the urban youth environments that surrounded her. “Vale Street,” one of her most implicit photographs, depicted a model with two menacing boys in the dim light just behind her. Also in that image, Carol Jerrems https://nga.gov.au/jerrems/ chose the front focus, just to emphasize what the observer could have perceived in the attitude and looks of the three protagonists.

Her creative curiosity has focused not only with informative compositions, but he has deliberately chosen that his desire to realize something, in unusual ways, should also be personal. Everything that she has captured with photographs has managed to define a piece of recent Australian history. The photographs taken by Carol Jerrems, just like her own inner world, drag the viewer into an intimately dangerous situation with the subjects she decides to involve in the stage representation. By carefully observing who she decides to portray, you too will have the impression of perceiving what is inside them https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2020/feb/27/the-photography-of-carol-jerrems-boasts-australias-highest-priced-photo-in-pictures.

If you want to know photographic stories already published, you can type http://meetingbenches.com/category/photo/. The intellectual properties of the images that appear on this blog correspond to their authors. The only purpose of this site is to spread the knowledge of these creative people, allowing others to appreciate the works.

Instagram

Check Also

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC PERSONIFICATION – Niccolo Cosme and the brotherhood of men

Promote social awareness with photography He began a career in photography in 2001. For those …