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54 55 ARTLINES 4 | 2020 ARTWORKS roaming the campus, producing a folio of six black-and-white images that responded to the following brief: The photographs were to be taken within campus and there were no limitations on subject matter which might include any human activities or natural or built objects or scenes. They were to have the highest creative and technical quality and were to express a part of the spirit of the University. 4 The resulting suite is fascinatingly austere. Instead of depicting the communality of campus life, Jerrems’s ‘vantage point is remote — she avoids the bustling busyness of university life’. 5 Macquarie University: University Court, Yellow Cake Day Balloon records political activism on campus at an anti- uranium protest. Though small, blurred crowds appear in the background, this work maintains the solitary feel of the suite, inferred by the lone foreground figure, head bowed. Jerrems has said of her practice: I try to reveal something about people, because they are separate, so isolated; maybe it’s a way of bringing people together, by showing them photographs of each other, a sort of communication. 6 She makes use of chance elements within her composition to extend the transmission of her ideas. In Macquarie University , for example, the upended balloon is suspended like a thought bubble above the protestor’s head. While the insight is quite literal, Jerrems’s greater mastery is evident in the way she suggests the deeper emotions of her subjects. A defining photographer of the 1970s — a time of significant cultural change — Carol Jerrems evocatively documented the rebellious, questioning spirit of her age. Michael Hawker is Curator, Australian Art. Endnotes 1 See Gael Newton, Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839 to 1988 , National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1988, p.142. 2 Natalie King, Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang [exhibition catalogue], Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2010, p.47. 3 King, p.47. 4 & 5 King, p.53. 6 King, p.55. Opposite Carol Jerrems / Juliet holding ‘Vale Street’ 1976 / Purchased 2020. QAGOMA Foundation / Image courtesy: Smith & Singer, Sydney and Melbourne Above Carol Jerrems / Vale Street 1975 / Purchased 2020 with funds from Paul Taylor through the QAGOMA Foundation