Joy

WALL LABEL: Public Image, Private Lives: Family, Friends and Self in Photography, 2016

The Time series was conceived by Sue Ford in 1973–74, but was originally intended to be titled Ten Faces. The idea for including photographs taken many years apart struck Ford after she’d observed a friend:

I’d been to see this girlfriend of mine. Looking at her face, I thought: ’God she’s changed. It’s really amazing’. Driving down Punt Road I suddenly remembered I still had an old photograph of her, a passport shot I’d done when she was eighteen … so I started finding all my old portraits and old negatives.

For the Time series Ford photographed friends in her immediate circle. She wanted the works to be unsentimental and use the camera as objectively as possible. For her, the camera was a ’time machine’. Ford remarked ’The camera showed me with absolute clarity, something I could only just perceive with my naked eye’.

Julie Robinson, Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs