Photography / The Texans 1972-73 by Judith Macdougall at PhotoAccess, until  September 13. Reviewed by CON BOEKEL.

In 1972 and 1973 Judith Macdougall’s toddler, Colin, came between her and her primary passion – ethnographic filmmaking in distant lands. Judith lived in Austin, Texas.

She picked up a 35mm Leica and took around 2500 analogue stills. The negatives were stored and largely forgotten for nearly half a century.

Judith moved to Canberra where she and husband David gained international renown for their ethnographic films. Two years ago Colin came across folders of negatives. He sifted through them, printed his choices, and curated this exhibition. On view are black-and-white prints of Texans being Texans at public events during 1972 and 1973.

The exhibition also features an archaeological layer of darkroom prints and proof sheets made by Judith at the time. The Leica is presented as if on a small altar.

The style is a mix of human trail camera, street photography with Judith as a detached observer, and, quite by contrast, Judith as a participant observer in the Carole’s Diner series.

What might an historian learn from the exhibition? The humans were festooned with Stetsons, stogies, mop tops, cowboy boots, flares, beehives, mascara, gold-link belts, and omnipresent cigarettes. They ate Foot Longs and fairy floss. They drank Coke and coffee.

The spaces around the public events were occupied overwhelmingly by whites.

The gender divide was wide and deep. The horsemen are horsemen. The ambulance drivers are men. The waiters are women. The two people in swimsuits are women. It is a woman who looks stonily ahead while being harassed by a carload of men. Carole, an Afro-American woman, captured while delivering a definite opinion, is the exception to many of the “rules”. She is the owner of Carole’s Diner.

Anne O’Hehir, curator of photography at the National Art Gallery suggested in her launch speech that Judith was able to take candid street shots because as a woman photographer she was invisible. By way of contrast, and highly visible, many of the images feature Marlboro men living up to the frontier settler society foundation myth while smoking their way to an early death.

The historian would also note the large range of candid facial expressions. There is a general sense of people confident in their bodies, in their time, in their place, and in what they are doing. Some seem more comfortable in their relationships with their horses than with each other. On the other hand, and this is perhaps a weakness of documentary photography, there is nothing to reveal to the historian that Texans were dying in the Vietnam War, then at its height.

Driving ethos? The events shown or hinted at were all in some way or another driven by both commercial and competitive motives.

Judith’s photography was at the conceptual and creative frontiers of the art. She explored capturing stills as stills, compared with extracting stills from movie footage. The creative processes were deliberate. The mix of slicing, construction, stillness, movement and blur are exceptional. As O’Hehir notes, Judith has that ineffable pre-requisite for great street photography: “a good eye”. The prints are aesthetically, intellectually and emotionally satisfying.

Unfortunately, Judith was unwell and could not be present for the launch to see Colin’s labour of love bear such wonderful fruit.

Living, laughing and loving in the ’70s