Vale Ian North

I knew Ian North for more than forty years. I knew him before I met him. In the early 1980s, as Australian correspondent for the Swiss published Printletter photography magazine I was commissioned to write on the Australian National Gallery’s (now National Gallery Australia) photography collection, where Ian was Foundation Curator of Photography. We corresponded by letter, many slow weeks in-between dispatches. I learned of his passion for, as a curator and photographer himself, the American “New Topographics” photography of Lewis Baltz, Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Robert Adams and others, of landscapes, urban-scapes and streetscapes, being a major influence at the time for photographers internationally, including my own practice, a Modernist genre soon to be dismembered and dismissed in Australia by the Postmodern fashionistas of the mid-1980s. Now nearly four decades later, apart from a few of the old guard of which Ian was one, the realm of Australian landscape photography materialises mostly through the dissimilar philosophical “lens” of Indigenous artists.

I met Ian North in person when he became Head of the South Australian Art School in Adelaide in 1984. Our rapport was immediate—not so much from me announcing my visits knocking on his office window from the garden outside thus bypassing rigid secretarial protocol (but perhaps that as well)—as through photography. As a “ubiquitous” photographic artist (Ian’s description) constantly exhibiting my work in Adelaide, through his unwavering generosity Ian seemed to be the speaker at every opening. His erudite remarks about photography’s place in the world of art were arresting and inspirational for us L-plated photographic artists. I thought at the time and remarked to him many years later that his speeches should have been published in a book, a worthy anthology of short essays about South Australian photography. About this time, I tutored several students in the SA School of Art Photography Department. One BA fine art student, now a Visiting Research Fellow in Art History at the University of Adelaide, showed me a rumpled mural-size chiaroscuro image of the Head of the SA School of Art draped in a white bedsheet pouring water from a jar appearing as “Mr. Aquarius” for her Men of Zodiac series. I gave her a pass.

In the later 1980s I went to Los Angeles to work for the Graham Nash Photography Collection while Ian received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in the US. Back in Adelaide I curated in 1988 the Australian Bicentenary project South Australia Rephotographed. Unlike other local photographers who strictly determined an exact positioning and framing of the original nineteenth-century archival photographs, I was curious at Ian’s response to the project’s re-photography premise by presenting his Pseudo-Panorama Cazneaux series, 1988, triptychs of copies of Australian photography pioneer Harold Cazneaux’s iconic 1930s South Australian landscapes and his own photographs with connecting gestural sweeps in oil paint.

Between 1992 and 1997 I created a series of digitally altered Australian historical photographs, the originals sourced from major national archives. This post-analogue imaging set out to undermine the long-held veracity of The Photograph, The Museum and The Archive, much to the annoyance of some critics who hijacked the meaning of this work, labouring over the usage of Indigenous photographs while rejecting all other fundamentals. Ian was the only critic in Australia to “get it,” writing in his catalogue essay “Blurred Boundaries,” of the paradoxes presented by computer-generated photography “turning on its head” photography’s presumptions and its “category of truth.” He maintained this strain of thinking with a further essay, ‘The Digital Corrosion of Postmodernism,” published in Visual Arts and Culture Journal, Australian Humanities Research Foundation, Sydney, of digital imaging’s subversion in “any lingering belief in analogue photography’s veracity.” Being ever the purist though, when I later showed Ian an earlier photography series from 1983-86, of urban and rural topographical panoramas, I was immediately interrogated whether I had enhanced the images by digital software, as all were devoid of the tell-tale converging vertical lines created by a tilted wide-angle lens!

Ian and I often met from the mid-2000s onwards, initially at the rejuvenated Adelaide Bowling Club bar or the local pub, both walking distance from his home where we would ruminate not only over art and the world in general, but also cricket—he being a Kiwi after all—our discussions embraced a friendly antagonism and mutual appreciation. Or so I thought. Perhaps the cricket banter was mine, as I was later advised that he had to google afterwards what I had been talking about. Ian was one of few people in Adelaide, or anywhere else I experienced in Australia, unlike the UK, US and Europe, where art, literature, cricket and more could be discussed on equal and engaging terms.

In 2007 Ian proposed the symposium “Visual Animals: Crossovers, Evolution and New Aesthetics’’ to the Contemporary Art Centre of SA of which I was director, presented at the Art Gallery of South Australia. The symposium and the anthology of presented papers edited by Ian and published by the CACSA, aimed to bring together key researchers in disciplines usually working at a tangent to each other, notably art history, analytic philosophy and bio aesthetics, to discuss new or revised concepts of art that may influence current approaches to the writing of art history.

Our professional relationship continued in 2010 when I invited Ian to exhibit in the multi-artist, multi-sited Adelaide exhibition, CACSA Contemporary; The New New, with his latest series of colour panoramic South Australian rural landscapes, A Short Walk in the Country, 2008-10. In an issue of Contemporary Visual Art & Culture Broadsheet magazine in 2013, I placed his painting The Wave, 2004, on the front cover, of a small ship sailing defiantly into imminent oblivion courtesy of a monstrous tsunami, the immensity of which stretched across the canvas. I remember Ian talking about the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami as inspiration for this work, but one could also sense this as a comment about life, illness and one’s stoic attempts in surmounting inherent difficulties.

When I relocated to Sydney at the end of 2015, we exchanged emails, reverting after forty years to the dispatch of the written word while occasionally gifting each other books and art journals, always precipitating frank conversations. His later emails manifested his strength of spirit, despite as he wrote, “my illness clips my wings a bit . . . like rust, never sleeps. I refuse to let it define me . . . I am making art as hard as I can go.” In his last years the emails ceased. I learned with much sadness of his passing 14 May this year.