Pete Hay’s Speech at the Opening of Matthew Newton’s Artspace Exhibition, “Another Country”, 18 April, 2014
I’m the best person to open this exhibition because among my lesser-known artistic credits is this: I have spent many hours, in many strange places, serving an apprenticeship as a photographer’s go-fetch, a photographer’s dogsbody. And this apprenticeship was served in the demanding employ of none other than this very man – Matt Newton (or “Matthew” Newton as he prefers to style himself professionally – for mysterious reasons best known to the man himself).
I’m going to tell you a story.
I’m reminded of this day on the Huon River. Matt is taking photos: portrait shots of, I think, Jenny Webber. And Muggins here is his lighting gopher. So. We’re there on the banks of the river. I’m holding the light-pole. I look down. And the river’s right there. And it’s black and sinister. It’s racing along, and it’s bottomless. And Newty says: “Hazy, just go back a step”. And I say the obvious: “mate, if I go back a step, the last you’ll see of me is my hat racing off beneath the bridge at Huonville”. And Newty says: “it’s moments like this, mate, when you really find out who’s prepared to go that extra yard for their art”.
Now. I thought, yes, all very well, but it’s not actually my art that I’m being asked to go that extra dramatic yard for. But I sucked it down, scowled, stayed stubbornly silent, and Newty lets it go through to the ‘keeper, though for the rest of the day, at every available opportunity, the vindictive bastard has me standing up to my hocks in freezing mountain streams.
But back to the story’s punchline. That stuff about taking one for your art. Newts is a photojournalist – the finest exponent of his craft in Tasmania, and one the finest in the country. A few years back his photo essay on the forest blockades in the Weld and the Florentine went within an ace of landing him the Walkley. This very year he was shortlisted for the National Portrait Prize. Within his genre, this man is a heavy hitter.
Now, here we are in Arts Tasmania’s fine shopfront gallery, Artspace. But is what Newty does really art? Can you be a photojournalist and an artist?
Well, the first thing you should know is that we are not supposed to use the word “photojournalist” these days. “Documentary photographer” is now the preferred term, and the reason for this is that the latter is thought somehow to elide the difference between art and mere recordage – though for the life of me I can’t see how it does that.
Whatever you call it, it seems to me that the tradition in which Newts sits is one in which an image-maker strives – these are not my words – “strives to be an objective recorder of real events, and, thus, they don’t meddle with their pictures”. In her classic work on photography’s standing as an artform, On Photography, Susan Sontag famously made the case that the superiority of photography as a visual medium lodges within its intrinsic truthfulness. “The camera doesn’t lie” we always used to say.
We now know that that’s crap. With the coming of digital technologies the manipulative capacity of the photographic image has expanded exponentially. So, insofar as documentary photography is “concerned with the truth of the image as an objective marker of the moment” – again, not my words – it seeks to remain true to an older, simpler, one might even say “old-fashioned” idea of photography. One in which there would not seem to be much scope for the creative expressiveness that marks artistic endeavour.
And it is in this tradition that Matt Newton works. We could be justified, then, in concluding that this man might be a craftsman, but, as a mere recorder, a mere documenter, he’s not an artist, and Arts Tasmania’s gallery space should never have been given over to him.
Well – we would, of course, be wrong if we thought that.
I want to bring two ideas together. The first is that this sort of photography is inherently engaged, inherently political. It confronts – and it just does this; this function is built into the very essence of the enterprise. And the second is that it has the ability both to be precise – it’s recording function – and to contain an echo of something larger. And it is in this latter capacity that it crosses into the realm of art. In my view Sontag’s observation remains relevant. Through the camera’s lens reaching down below the prosaic surface of things, we can, when the camera is in the hands of an adept, a visionary, penetrate to truth, and essences, that can only be touched by the non-rational, ineffable processes of art. Art and radical change agendas in the real world hereby come potently together. When its potential is really being utilised, the camera takes us to the un-posed, the un-framed, the un-rehearsed – down there, in there, where shining nuggets of truth and beauty elusively lodge.
And this is what dear old Newty does. He observes, he looks deeply inward, and he finds the diamantine purity in the soul of a person, a place, or a fraught, anguished event.
He does that here. In these images, he himself tells us, he probes the “forgotten corners” – and their forgotten people. He looks through the cute and beautiful flash at the surface of things. And there, behind the faux tourist prettiness, he finds – as like as not – a deeper, more tenacious beauty. I’ve been in the bush with Newty. I’ve been down the Franklin with him. And I know that his senses are tuned to beauty.
The deeper truths to which Matt Newton’s documentary art penetrates can be grim. They can be tough – and they can still be beautiful. They capture the unbearable, ennobling beauty that alleviates even the most grim contests for existence.
These images take us out of Hobart and into the island’s distinctive and forgotten corners (forgotten, that is, by we who live in Hobart). Here we encounter the dignity of Moonbird Boy; the knockabout comfort of high country shacks under Winter snow; the appalling sadness of a net-caught, callously disposed of, baby dolphin; the sudden emergent shock of a Tassie devil on King’s Run (that was another one of my photographer’s off-sider days); we see the uncomfortable beauty of a storm raging in on the Roaring Forties to pummel Trial Harbour; the quiet endurance of the Zeehan “Peace Horse”; the spectacular, unstable rust colours of the Iron Blow, in startling juxtaposition with prosaic country dwellings; deer antlers incongruously – or is it incongruously? – contrasting with the red cross of mercy.
A man of vision and deft technique is at work here in the island’s quiet corners. A man who penetrates to the subtle soul of the very island. The man treats his volunteer labour like shit, but put a camera in his hand and he’s a genius.
