Catalogue Essay:

Conor O'Brien, Photographs 2003-2011 at Australian Centre for Photography
By Dan Rule

To even frame this collection of works by Conor O’Brien as a retrospective seems somewhat misplaced. Granted, there are all the familiar symptoms. On paper, Conor O’Brien: Photographs  2003/2011 proposes a consideration of eight years of profuse image-gathering – a reflection upon a body of work that has made an unmistakable contribution to Australian contemporary photography’s recent incarnation and fabric, a body of work that has both eschewed photographic formalism and forged an alluring syntax of its own. On paper, yes, we are looking back.

But there is something amiss in this line of thought when considering O’Brien’s oeuvre. The staid connotations of the descriptors ‘survey’ or ‘retrospective’ tend to betray the photographer’s continued prolificacy; the implied passivity of the retrospective doesn’t sit comfortably alongside his comparative youth. But there is something else at play here, something very much inherent – as we, and O’Brien, are beginning to learn – to his artistic practice.

Indeed, rather than fulfilling the well-worn trope of the reflexive survey – or in simple (or perhaps cynical) terms, the dusting off of old work – this exhibition offers a far more activated illustration of O’Brien’s current process, of what he has come to describe as his “ongoing edit”.

Unlike many artists, O’Brien is unafraid to engage with his past. In fact, he actively and enthusiastically does so. Where his photographs speak of an almost unconscious and oblique candidness and automation, he archives, sorts and curates his bodies of work with the rigorousness of a historian. New photographs become new access points, new activators, to older works; familiarities are recognised and articulated; repeated motifs or gestures become previously unrecognised linkages, traces or glyphs. He studies the new in order to learn about the old, teasing out the work’s lineage, its bloodline. It becomes cyclical – an interchange of reinterpretations.

O’Brien’s recent images also inspire this kind of engagement in their audience, and perhaps this is the subtle mastery of his work. We learn about his old via his new, more so than the other way around. To suggest that the evocative snippets of atmosphere-laden landscapes, snow-covered mountain peaks and wind-blown human subjects that marked his recent The Last White Cloud series enlivened several of his past works would border on understatement.

The Perth-raised photographer’s impulsive, off-the-cuff means of shooting has always attracted its share of champions – among them Melbourne artist Thomas Jeppe’s Serps Press imprint and Sydney’s Rainoff Books, each of whom published sought after editions on O’Brien – but those same seemingly offhand rejections of formalism have also garnered some detractors. 

But with reflection and with time, O’Brien’s work reveals itself for what it really is, and this is the precise power of Conor O’Brien: Photographs 2003/2011. His wonderfully effortless – at times even a little wonky – images are web of moments and instances otherwise lost. They are markers and memory capsules amid the throes of an evolving personal history. 

O’Brien himself put it best when he described working on this exhibition. “It is a current show,  featuring some old works.” That it is.