Catalogue essay for This is Suburbia exhibition
View the catalogue here.

It’s something special to have your city reflected back at you through the lens of a camera. People in big, old cities take it for granted. Paris through the eyes of Atget, New York, Levitt, London, Brandt. When it’s our own environment what the camera is capable of doing is somehow more apparent – isolating, stilling and focusing, it shows us what our usual distracted, glancing, preoccupied way of seeing does not – the details, the things that go unnoticed. The most powerful photography engages fully with specificity.

And Canberra is a relatively young city, planned, its blandness and sterility a well-worn cliché. It can be hard to see, a leap to think that it is interesting or worth recording. There have always been the FIFO people. Max Dupain, David Moore, John Gollings; Canberra as the national capital has had its fair share. A number of prominent photographers have photographed here but not surprisingly, assignment-driven, the architectural work that they made gave us primarily a record of the big public buildings. But there are the many photographers who lived here also. Hedda Morrison, Gerrit Fokkema, Ian North who ended up in Canberra for part of their lives. They had the time and the inclination to venture out of the Parliament Triangle into the places that they lived. Into the suburbs.

The suburbs have loomed large in the post war imagination, when they became the place most people ended up making their lives; made most famous perhaps in the images created by American documentary photographers in the 1960s and 1970s, whose aim was to suppress the dramatic and the picturesque. Seen in contrast to the vitality of the city or the beauty of the natural landscape it was a place often depicted as a place of at best loneliness and boredom, something that could quickly descend into dystopian dysfunctionality: violence and madness never far under the surface.

This isn’t the only story. The suburbs offer also a place to build community, to walk its streets, play in its parks, shop locally in places where you stop to have a chat, to express individuality in its houses, its gardens, its nature strips. The suburbs offer up our environments at their most idiosyncratic. Canberra photographer, Barber walks these streets, the quiet (short) observer, peering over people’s fences, standing on the intersection and photographing the gardens with their strangely topiaried bushes, walks the streets at night, streets that seem surprisingly as unpopulated as the streets during the day, a lone skateboarder, the sound of a lone lawnmower, the only ones to disrupt the stillness, disturb the quiet. The terrain most often emphasises a flat unmodulated ground, the world seen truthfully, straight to the camera’s gaze; the energy, if it comes, is in the framing, coming from diagonal lines of roads and paths. It isn’t picturesque or nostalgic. Honest. Quietly observed moments as he moves about the streets.

The images will over time become ‘historic’, they will be ‘re-coloured’ with nostalgia. It is an image of the capital which the tourist board and civic mandarins would perhaps find embarrassingly low key and tame. This is Barber’s city, he grew up here, he knows the place as an insider. He has the time to see it as it changes over the course of the year. Few photographers in Canberra allow themselves the time to walk the suburbs and quietly observe the moments between.

Anne O’Hehir
Curator of Photography, National Gallery of Australia

This is Suburbia exhibition, 9-29 November
Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Queen Elizabeth Terrace
Opening hours: 11am-5pm Tuesday-Sunday
Find out more here.