Photography as an art form took off in the 1970s and Carol Jerrems’ star rose with it. Seen as a democratically accessible medium unencumbered by the vagaries of history and privilege, it shone bright with the promise of social and personal renewal through art. Consequently it had enormous appeal to those who identified with the counterculture, and art teachers set up darkrooms in schools and colleges across the country. Happily, my high school was amongst them. Absorbed by the meditative beauty of the darkroom and its processes, I began to appreciate the fall of light, the grain of the image, and its power to provoke thought and stir emotion. It was an early step along the path I took into filmmaking.

Perhaps because of this background, I’ve always loved the impact of the still within the medium of the moving image. In this context, its capacity to crystallise a thought or emotion often buried in the detail of 24 frames per second (or our everyday perception) is magnified. In contemplating a still on film, usually in the context of a narrative, the viewer imagines the action, the sound, and the circumstances surrounding this moment frozen in time, and works harder to interpret it. In so doing, they bring to it their own memories, thoughts and emotions. Because the most affecting cinema takes place less on the screen than in the minds and imaginations of its viewers, the still can be a powerful tool in the hands of a filmmaker.

I’d always loved the look of a good darkroom scene in a film, and wanted for a long time to work with stills, so decided to write a script about a photographer. The main character was to be a woman. I think I was partly influenced by the work and stories surrounding Nan Goldin, in particular The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and also Dianne Arbus. The work of these women is confronting and strikingly personal, and fascinatingly enmeshed, however messily, into the fabric of their own lives. To me, they’re challenging and inspiring in their transgression of the boundaries between personal and public, performer and voyeur, factual and fictional, and ultimately, art and life.

I set to work on my script, and when the writing became laboured I started to think about three images I’d recently seen at the Art Gallery of NSW. They were by Carol Jerrems and they’d stood out to me in an exhibition of hundreds of famous photographs surveying twentieth century photography internationally. The prints were very beautiful, glowing and soft, with a classical timeless quality to them. There was something haunting in the sombre beauty of those youthful faces gazing into the camera from within familiar urban settings.

I’d seen Vale Street before, but when I saw it there between Caroline Slade, the solemn little girl all but camouflaged in floral dress against floral wallpaper, and Lynn Gailey, smoking next to the kitchen table, tough, yet so delicate and vulnerable, I intuitively recognised and identified with something of the photographer behind those images. In hindsight, I can see how these three photographs together speak of the life and spirit of the young photographer who so instinctively pushed against limits, reveling in the risks she took for her work. She’d escaped an oppressive burden of middle-class parental aspiration and emerged wounded, yet defiantly independent, curious, open, courageous, and unabashed about her sexuality.

Intrigued, I set off to the library to search for more information about Carol Jerrems. First I found A Book About Australian Women, published to coincide with the International Women’s Year in 1975. It contained a selection of photographs by Carol, loosely associated with the personal testimonies of a variety of women, which were collected and edited by Virginia Fraser. The power of some of the photographs in this book touched me, but on the whole I was put off by the naïve feminism of this very 1970s project, which in 2001, seemed disappointingly worthy and dull.

But then I discovered the catalogue for the Living in the Seventies exhibition, a retrospective of Carol’s work, which toured the country in 1990, ten years after her death. The essays by Paul Cox and curator Helen Ennis spoke of a young woman like many I knew – adventurous, searching, troubled, moving from one share house to the next. But Carol was remarkable in that she’d believed in herself as an artist from the beginning, and had left a poignant record of her life and the people who’d filled it. They were mostly young urban people living in the margins of society – artists, Aboriginals, women, children, sharpies – all of them projecting a sense of struggle, yet of being in themselves. Carol’s work had also broken new ground in Australian photography formally, and influenced many who came after her. She had achieved all of this before the age of thirty, when she’d died after a long and mysterious illness. The tragedy of her early death heightened the potency of her story, pushing it towards the realm of myth.

It was in this catalogue that I first saw some of Carol’s photographs of Mark Lean and friends, and these in particular struck me with full force. They’d been taken in 1975, the year I’d turned 15. I’d grown up with boys like these, and had been looked at in very similar ways by them. That these photographs were in a river setting was hugely evocative for me, as all of my adolescent years had been spent in river towns. The river had always been the setting for the most dramatic and interesting incidents punctuating our otherwise dull lives. And these events always seemed to revolve around sex, or death by accident or intent.

Carol had named one of these photographs Rape Game, and it jolted my memory of the rape culture that had permeated those days. Menace had been part of the excitement, the taboo around sex. At school, the rumours of sexual violence surrounding a number of boys served only to heighten their mystique and appeal amongst the girls. I think now this culture was a product of the inevitable corruption of the early 1970s notion of free love. It was a strange and confused time, idealistic and questioning, but with a hard edge of brutality and violence.

I was overwhelmed with the sense that here in this catalogue, I’d stumbled upon the essence, if not the substance, of the story I’d been trying to invent. The parallels between them were remarkable, but Carol’s story was richer, more dramatic and more culturally significant. That there was potentially a great film in this material was blatantly obvious, and I was very excited.

I got in touch with Carol’s brother Ken, who was now the copyright holder for her work. He was happy to support any project which might bring more attention to his sister’s achievement. Carol’s other brother Lance, and his wife Linda, welcomed me into their home and gave me access to the boxes of Carol’s writings they’d stored away. Here I found letters, grant applications, darkroom notes, short stories, diary jottings, and the journals she’d kept in the last months of her life in hospital. They also had a box of Carol’s last negatives that she’d taken in the hospital but never printed. Carol had been a prolific and talented storyteller in a variety of mediums. For me it was an amazing gift.

Initially, I’d wanted to base a drama on Carol’s life and work, but the more I researched, the more I came to believe she was one of our great, but under acknowledged photographers. I compared her portraits with those of other photographers, and felt there was something uniquely emotional and compelling in her work, something that transcended the historical moment of its production. The photographs were beautiful in their framing and use of light, but their power seemed to lie in the frank and expressive quality of her subjects as they looked back at her, into her camera. The power of Carol’s photographs extended from her relationship with her subjects, at the moment of the taking of the photograph. This quality is an ephemeral and mysterious one, and I wanted to understand more about how Carol had so consistently achieved it.

Without doubt, the film I was making had to put Carol’s photographs on the screen. Much as I tried, I couldn’t devise a convincing way to work between the photographs and dramatisations with actors. Because there’d been so little documentation and publication of her work, I began to feel more and more strongly that I couldn’t take poetic license with her story. Carol’s body of work represented her life and her times with such poetry, intimacy and disarming honesty, I eventually came to the realisation that this film would have to be a documentary. It seems strange now, but it took me a long time to work around to this decision. Once I’d made it, and started talking to people about it, the film took off fast. With few exceptions, everyone I talked to about the idea embraced and supported it. The project attracted a lot of talented and dedicated people who gave generously to see it realized.

I spent many days at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), where virtually all of Carol’s work is housed. It’s a very rare, whole life archive. When Carol died, at the invitation of the gallery, her mother Joyce packed all of her work into boxes and drove it to Canberra herself. The NGA holds negatives, proof sheets, student-work, reject-prints, fine prints and various work-prints of Carol’s films.

More than anything else, it was the proof sheets that fired my imagination for the form the film might take. Carol’s proof sheets are works of art in themselves. She rarely, if ever, took a dud shot, and in the darkroom she was a perfectionist. She wasn’t satisfied until she’d produced a perfectly exposed and printed proof sheet. And there were hundreds of them here. Amongst the thousands of photographs they register, less than a handful of frames are landscapes or still lives. Carol’s proof sheets are brimming with the people she encountered in her life, with occasional frames of herself interspersed amongst them. Some of these are self-portraits in mirrors, others perhaps taken by her subjects, or done as self-portraits with a timer.

Carol had a cinematic eye for character, drama and sequence, and looking through the proof sheets I saw that here was a uniquely rich visual diary of a life lived with passion in the 1970s. It would be possible to tell her story visually with little more than her photographs. I made copies of her prints and the proof sheets, and pored over them for months, ordering them chronologically, then weaving them together with the stories I was gathering from Carol’s writings and from her friends.

At the last minute before the shoot, as I finalised the selection of hundreds of photographs for printing and filming, I suffered an intense bout of anxiety and doubt as to whether sequences of stills would in fact sustain audience interest for the duration of the film. When I’d seen Carol’s proof sheets, it was my recollection of La Jetée (1964) by Chris Marker that gave a foundation for my vision of the film that Girl in a Mirror might become. La Jetée is constructed almost in its entirety from stills, and watching it is a richly engaging experience. I found a copy and studied Marker’s sequences closely. It reassured me that in all probability this form would indeed work with Carol’s photographs.

The genesis of Girl in a Mirror and the path to its realisation was an extraordinarily serendipitous experience for me and the resonances I discovered between my own life and Carol’s, as I researched and developed the film, were surprising and profound. Perhaps these feelings are a projection, an inevitable part of the process for every documentary filmmaker as they choose, then invest themselves in their subject in the course of making a film. As Carol herself pointed out, “Any portrait is a combination of something of the subject’s personality, and something of the photographer’s. The moment preserved is an exchange.”[1] Girl in a Mirror represents an exchange that for me was deeply moving and enriching. I feel enormously privileged to have been entrusted with this work by Carol Jerrems’ family and friends, and by all of my collaborators on the project.

Vale Street extract from Girl in a Mirror is provided here with the kind permission of writer-director Kathy Drayton and producer Helen Bowden.

Endnotes

[1] From an unpublished interview by Phil Quirk, circa 1978.

Created on: Sunday, 7 November 2010