Jeff Carter John Gollings Trent Parke

Jeff Carter John Gollings Trent Parke Photographs from Gold Coast Streets 1957 - 2008 Street life is a shared experience of common places, along roads and pathways, beneath signs and shop awnings, at bus stops and car parks. Glances are exchanged, conversations overheard, confrontations made with display and bravado and silent reverie found within the maelstrom. The street is by definition a very public space - but as presented in this exhibition, there are also private and unseen transitory moments captured by the keen eye of a photographer. These are images where everything seems to come together and where the fraction of a second captured on film, gives new insights into the wider experience of the city. Street photography can transform random events and sites into a place of unscripted theatre where personal narratives caught in the frame become part of a larger drama of universal experience. Streets of Gold presents the work of three important Australian photographers - Jeff Carter, John Gollings and Trent Parke, who have each come to the Gold Coast with specific - but quite different - intentions to make photographic studies of these streets. Their work spans three generations and reflects distinctive approaches to the genre of street photography. Their images however, offer much more than a straightforward historical record of a time and a place. They are infused with a genuine sense of inquiry that seeks out the less obvious or the cliché. The camera is their common compulsive tool of investigation and many of these works are now seen for the first time. The street life captured in their works is however, as much about city form as it is about people. The buildings, signs and street furniture of the Gold Coast have the same kind of transitory presence as the people within the frame. The distinctive built form of Surfers Paradise that we recognise today, has a brief history of just 60 years – a relative infant compared to other major Australian cities. This urban landscape has a language of impermanence and there is an almost tangible, expectant sense that as needs change and opportunities arise, new structures will emerge. Alternately sites may languish for many years awaiting consolidation or the right market conditions, so these spaces lie untended or vacant, often dappled with faded multiple ‘For Sale’ signs. An arrival to the Gold Coast is an encounter first with a trickle, then a staccato rhythm of low apartments, soaring towers, petrol stations and modest beach houses squeezed between gleaming mansions. The coastal urban highway strip is punctuated by signage for hotels, fast food outlets, shopping arcades and fun attractions. The gold of these streets is the palpable sense of the possibility of reinvention and renewal. The opportunity for escape from the conventions of suburban life - either for a few days as a tourist or for a lifetime as a resident - has lured many thousands to the Gold Coast since the mid 1950s. Some revel in the opportunities for transgression, others slip easily into the early morning rhythms of beach life. These works by Jeff Carter, John Gollings and Trent Parke show that these streets are ours to inhabit and enjoy, to shape and to change. Virgina Rigney Jeff Carter had heard there was ‘something different’ happening up in this place called Surfers The images have a contemporary parallel in an article on Surfers Paradise written by Robin Paradise and, in 1955, he went there briefly with his friend Eric Warrell to see for himself. Boyd, then Australia’s best-known architect, for one of his regular columns in the Melbourne Age on ‘Developing a Fibro Cement paradise’ (1) Born in 1928, Carter had begun travelling with his camera and working in itinerant farming and labouring jobs to pay his way since leaving school just after the war. After five years as ‘It is any Australian country town plus optimism. It is a utopia of souvenir shops, bamboo editor of a popular Fishing and Outdoor magazine he decided to start a fully independent career bridges spanning murky rock pools, night clubs, fabulous floor shows, bikini bars selling as a photographer and writer - carting his bulky typewriter and camera to document previously floral wisps of bathers and Hawaiian shirts through windows open to the foot path …. There unheralded working Australian lives. At this time he made extensive studies of the traders at is a feeling, rare enough in Australia, of adventure and enterprise. You might call it the cream the Queen Victoria Market, Melbourne, Sorlie’s Travelling Vaudeville Show and the new towns skimmed off the top of the 20th century Australian spirit…a feeling that Australia’s heavy of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. shroud of conservatism is here burst open, providing an outlet for the type of entrepreneur who is stifled by the plodding restrictive ways of the southern cities. Here he is getting His target for these black and white photographs were the popular magazines such as People, something done. He is building and making a rowdy, good natured flamboyant, crime free Pix, Australian Walkabout and the Australian Womans Weekly - which in a pre-television healthy resort which can attract holiday makers purely on economic grounds.’ age gave people the opportunity to really see what was happening in the world. The American magazine Life which appeared in 1936, was one of the most influential of this style of Boyd had recently returned from almost two years as a Fulbright scholar and visiting professor publication, and in 1951 it published its first picture essay over four double pages - previously at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in America and perhaps his polemic was born out of a single image had carried a story. This kind of format immediately suited Carter’s approach of the frustration at returning to a still provincial Australia. seeking to get to know his subject’s wider situation and wanting to tell that whole story with a series of images – it also gave better returns and greater control to him as both a writer and Carter’s street photographs from the same year capture similar impressions - some quite photographer. literally, such as the image of the couple walking over the bamboo bridge at the Cathay Café, and others indirectly, such as the extraordinary captured moment street image - Tableau. Two Rather than wait for an editor to commission him to do a particular feature, Carter would girls in their fashionable après beachwear, have stopped to look at the improbable sight of a man often simply propose a subject and head off. In the summer of 1957 he returned to Surfers doing a handstand on the roof of the building opposite. The two older, formally dressed men on Paradise with his wife Mare and baby son to make a more serious study of the holiday town the footpath, are oblivious to this display of youthful exuberance and recklessness - and they that was starting to capture the national public imagination. He carried two recently seem out of place and time. purchased identical East German Super Ikonta cameras which used square shaped 120 film with 12 shots per roll. The relative innocence of these moments has shifted when Carter returned in the early 1960s’, this time with 35mm Nikon cameras and standard and telephoto lenses. A new generation of These precisely engineered cameras were relatively compact yet delivered medium format teenagers crowds the pavements, glancing in envy at a smart car and a swagger, carefree in image quality with a Zeiss lens that folded out and a viewfinder that was held to the eye. manicured highset hairdos or calling out with sexual bravado. The beer garden is their post Such a camera allowed Carter to operate quickly and discreetly. beach playground, graphically captured in Carter’s composition of bare chests and big smiles. Crossing the border into Queensland he recognized the novelty of the American style take Hatless, shirtless in the searing heat at 1:46 pm, Carter has captured them again on the steps away food bar – come on eat before we both starve – the individual bar stools and quick of the main beach at Surfers Paradise in a composition not too far removed from the classical roadside service. renaissance. In 1957, Surfers Paradise was beginning to bustle. Post-war building restrictions had been lifted Their confidence and assurance is evidence of a distinctly Australian refashioning of street in 1952 but it had taken a few more years for economic activity to gain real momentum. Lennons culture – the formality of the European best-dressed style promenade has evaporated and what Broadbeach Hotel had opened in 1955 and the Chevron Hotel and Kinkabol – the first high rise you are not wearing has become more important than what or who you are. apartment building were just beginning construction. Carter noticed and photographed a rather unprepossessing sign for Florida Gardens, the first canal estate that was being dredged a few Jeff Carter continues to practice as a photographer and at 80 has recently embarked on a series miles down the road in the midst of a dry paddock. It was however, the immediacy of the of journeys to photograph the human face of drought and climate change in irrigation and lively street activity that Carter had come to photograph. marginal grazing lands, a project that will take up most of 2008. In 2004 he was honoured by the Australia Council with a prestigious Emeritus Award. He is represented by Bryon/McMahon For Surfers Paradise, the street seamlessly merges with the beach, for there is little that Gallery in Sydney and in Melbourne by the Christine Abrahams Gallery. His work is held in delineates these two zones – people wander from their hotel, to the sand and back, eat and National collections and these may be viewed via Picture Australia and also at browse in the shops without changing their clothes, putting on shoes or relinquishing their www.jeffcarterphotos.com.

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