Screen Space – Sue Ford

Part of Sue Ford’s iconic Time series 1962–1974 and her video work Faces 1976–1996, is displayed in Screen Space as a thematic part of That Seventies Feeling exhibition.

Ford’s images of her subjects taken ten, twenty and thirty years apart were a key photographic and a deeply feminist gesture which changed the way Australian photographers saw and conceptualised their work.

The intimacy of these images comes from Ford’s process, which was deeply collaborative and consensual. From the early 1960s her subjects were women in domestic settings, with children, at the hairdressers, in their gardens and their studios. Her subjects were close friends, though not always, and eventually those who stood for the politics of a quiet revolution—confident, defiant, determined and free. It was important for a photographer to work, and Ford structured her life and practice accordingly.

Ford’s career was marked by experimentation with photographic, film, print and multimedia techniques, all processes driven by her interest in what has been termed ‘the politics of representation’. The film Faces, one of the first films she made in the early 1970s, paralleled the photographic side-by-side method and included, once again, her friends and associates across two decades. For the 1996 part Ford collaborated with her son Ben.

The Time series photographs and the Faces video are on display together for the first time since acquisition.

Image credit: Sue Ford Time series 1 1962–1974 (detail). Silver gelatin photographs, 11 x 8 cm each (6 x diptych). State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased through the TomorrowFund, Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation, 2015, with the generous donations of: Linda Savage, Susan Adler, Lisa Baker, Tracy Blake, Karen Brown, Catherine Cole, Susan Cullen, Elaine Featherby, Lisa Fini, Alison Gaines, Kathleen Hardie, Anne Holt, Gillian Johnson, Carmen La Cava, Heather Lyons, Joanne Motteram, Susan Pass, Lisa Telford, Clare Thompson.