Allan

William Yang
Australia
1943

Allan
from the monologue Sadness
1990
19 gelatin-silver photographs
Place made
Sydney
Medium
19 gelatin-silver photographs
Dimensions
50.7 x 40.4 cm (each sheet)
Credit line
Gift of the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 2019
Accession number
20192Ph1(1-19)
Media category
Photograph
Collection area
Australian photographs
Copyright
© William Yang

  • While he initially aspired to be a playwright, Yang, who was born into a Chinese–Australian family, has pursued a career as a photographer since the mid-1970s. Many of his photographs explore his sense of identity, aspects of his family’s history, or document his social milieu in Sydney’s artistic and gay communities. Reflecting on his choice to work with photography, he wrote:

    I don’t think I have a great technical aptitude but I am interested in people. I have a feeling for the theatre, for irony and for stories, the tragic comedy of our lives … Often I have felt in a privileged position where people have let me photograph them, have let me get close to them with a camera.1

    The series Allan is a tribute to his young friend Allan, who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988 and who died just under two years later, in July 1990. Yang combines nineteen photographs of his ailing friend with his own diaristic observations, providing glimpses into Allan’s present and past, his hopes and fears. This work not only offers an intimate portrait of his friend, but a universal statement about mortality.

    These images and texts also formed the basis of Yang’s slide monologue Sadness (1992), which Yang performed live throughout Australia and internationally.

    Julie Robinson, Senior Curator, Prints, Drawings & Photographs

    1. William Yang, William Yang: diaries: a retrospective exhibition, 25 years of social, personal and landscape photography, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 1998, unpaged.

  • Public Image, Private Lives: Family, Friends and Self in Photography

    Art Gallery of South Australia, 5 February 2016 – 18 September 2016
  • William Yang 1943

    Allan

    1990
    19 gelatin-silver photographs
    Accession no: 20192Ph1(1-19)