Tracey Moffatt

Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. Born in 1960 in Brisbane, Moffatt began her career in the late 1980s – her first solo exhibition was at the Australian Centre of Photography in 1989 – and has since established herself as a pioneering voice in contemporary art, nationally and internationally, over the past four decades.

Throughout her career, Moffatt has consistently emphasised her artistic role as an image-maker and storyteller rather than a specialist in any one medium. As a result, she takes a deeply narrative approach to her practice, using the mediums of film and photography as tools to construct theatrical scenes and open-ended stories. Moffatt’s mercurial status as an image-maker is witnessed in her experimental approach towards such mediums, with bodies of work ranging from nineteenth century photogravures to photoshopped found images, as well as long-form narrative cinema to short-form digital video. Moffatt’s films can be described as moving photography and her stills like cinematic tableau, both allowing for the real and the imaginary to co-exist, and for Moffatt to explore themes of desire, longing, structures of power and collective memory. Moffatt’s storytelling draws on her autobiography as an Aboriginal woman, particularly where she has used herself as a model, but is equally influenced by Western art history, popular culture, advertising and television to reflect broadly on issues of identity, race and gender.

Frequently using herself as a model in highly staged photographs, Moffatt presents tableaux that explore the tensions underpinning unequal power dynamics. Moffatt’s first major photographic series, Something More, 1989, comprised eight large photographs that drew on the aesthetics of 1950s melodrama to tell the story of a young woman’s attempt to leave her small town life for the promise of the city. The series concludes with a violent death.

In Up in the Sky, 1997, Moffatt takes her visual cues from the neo-realist cinema of 1960s Italy. In the twenty-five-part series, Moffatt adapts cinematic conventions such as blurred motion, close-ups and low camera angles to aid her storytelling. She even followed the neo-realist method of shooting on location – doing so near Broken Hill, New South Wales – with non-professional actors. By employing this ‘realist’ approach, Moffatt evokes the authoritative mode of reportage. The wide range of characters captured in different scenarios suggests a narrative of epic proportions. But there is no beginning, middle and end to lead the viewer through this story. Moffatt’s photographs function like film stills, highlighting poignant scenes in a larger drama, but one that is never fully disclosed.

First Jobs, 2008, explores Moffatt’s own experiences of paid employment during her teenage years and early twenties. The autobiographical nature of the series is signalled by the titles of the twelve works, each of which identifies the job and year she was employed. Photoshopping herself into different workplaces, such as a fruit market and hair salon, she creates a nostalgic mood. This is reinforced by the bright colour palette of the inkjet prints, which draw on the conventions of art direction in the advertising and tourism campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s.

Moffatt said the following about the series in the year it was made,

"But I remember the good things about the factory floor. Walking into work everyday and saying hi to people you knew, there was a camaraderie. The work was mindless but it didn’t mean that your mind couldn’t go places. Then there was knock-off time. The bell would ring and you would be out the door with a wad of cash in your hand and not a care in the world.

In being a full-time artist there never is any knock-off time. There’s always a nagging, miserable voice of ideas in your head and you MUST get up off the sofa and produce work. The bell never rings and you never know where your next buck is coming from. Your mind is constantly wound up. You’re never really physically tired not like when you had a real honest job. But would I go back to working in a factory just to get good a night’s sleep? Ha, um, no."

Recommended for senior secondary

Heaven (1997) is a twenty-eight minute documentary-style film where Moffatt, and six of her women friends, filmed short sequences of male surfers in various stages of undress. Shot on 8mm video, a pre-digital technology, the surfers were captured changing in and out of their wetsuits in car parks surrounding Sydney’s Bondi and Avalon beaches. The montaged scenes play to a surveillance style hand-held aesthetic. They offer a voyeuristic glimpse, through car windows and from across the street, into the naturalised yet highly gendered ritual of exhibitionism typically seen at the beach, a public act of nudity that is almost exclusively performed by men. As a charged location in the national psyche, Heaven captures the machismo of the beach and surf culture in Australia at the time.

Unlike today, where people purposefully document themselves and others in public for a social media audience, Moffatt’s subjects were not always willing or aware of being recorded. While some men slyly complied, playing to the camera, others were confronted by Moffatt’s scopophilic gaze – a term used to describe the pleasurable act of looking.[1] “Heaven is made by women for women. It is for all the women of the world who like to ‘look’.”[2] While Heaven inverts the deeply gendered history of the nude, which has predominantly focused on women’s bodies, for those men who did display a degree of control over how they were seen by Moffatt, the film also pries open the power dynamics between a photographer and their subject. Heaven taps into the representational power of photography and film. As the men perform their nudity for Moffatt, and us as an unknown audience, she captures the tension of the subject as both victim to and maker of their own image.

[1] Catherine Summerhayes, The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt, Milan: Charta Art Books, 2007, 219. [2] Tracey Moffatt quoted by Catherine Summerhayes, 220.