Contemporary Australia: Women

109 Jennifer Mills Australia b.1966 What’s in a name? (detail) 2009–11 Watercolour with pencil on paper 325 sheets: installed dimensions variable Installation view, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 2011 Photograph: Susannah Wimberley Image courtesy: The artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney I don’t trust photographs. Photos always seem to fix me badly, and maybe that’s my fault; when being photographed, I can’t help but roll my eyes and act rebellious. It is an admittedly childish response to what probably started as a childhood discomfort. My father was big on taking family portraits. In those pre-digital days my brothers and I would have to line up in the front garden and stand frozen until everything was brought firmly into focus. That was in the days before the internet. Now, we are known by profile shots, by our portraits and avatars. We show ourselves to the world in a series of self‑selected images that represent us in all the shades of our public–private–social–fictional identities. If society is a series of social relationships mediated by images, then these projections of ourselves in the corners of all our screens are in some powerful sense us. I found the other Jennifer Mills, the artist, when I was googling myself. In an image search, her drawings appear: mostly the cheeky and unapologetic faces of her animals from ‘Learning to Draw’. Among my awkward press shots and those of the American golfer, there is a hand-drawn vulture with a sweet, interrogative gaze. Then the other Jennifer Mills wrote to tell me about her project to draw the women who share our name and invited me to write a response to her work. We all have googlegangers — there’s even a word for it — but few of us get to collaborate with them. I jumped at the chance. Googling yourself is narcissistic, sure, but it’s also social and empathic: a fascination with the other as another potential self, or with the connection between yourself and strangers made possible by technology. The idea that in the mass of difference and differentiation you might have something in common with a stranger has a kind of dizziness about it. As a fiction writer who has trained herself to inhabit other minds, this is a familiar dizziness. It’s also a familiar paradox, since it highlights the truth and the lie in the idea that the internet brings us all closer together. What it does is bring our images closer together — our projected selves. And perhaps that is part of why we enjoy it so much. Part of the joy of the avatar is the ability to be fictional; to be bold, hyperreal, to live the dream of becoming what you desire. Of course, this is a capitalist dream, and we’re still constrained by structures of power in images, especially as women; constrained by the things that make us products. But now our self‑portraits have that wonky shoulder in one corner: we are holding the camera. If not, we are at least choosing the images. Is that so alienating? In googling your name, there is, of course, an element of pleasure, of voyeuristically spying on strangers who are at the same time spying on you. Most of these women address the camera. Many look back at you, the effect of which is somewhat startling. It is especially startling to see us together: a googlegang of hundreds of subjective Jennifers, of women gazing out and gazing back. Like the Home Girls in old Picture magazines, some of the Jennifers are exposing themselves. In some cases, it’s awkward — I want to hand a cardigan to the young Jennifer Mills with the T-shirt ‘open to try any position’. Others fade organically into the distance, becoming tiny suggestions centred in an expanse of white, with all the life (and hence mortality) of the drawn image. Something has happened to these pictures to take them out of that potentially alienated relationship. Despite Mills’s technical precision, these portraits are no longer photographs. They have become something new. Of my family portraits, my favourites are the failures. If photographs are uncomfortable, perhaps it is because they are dishonest, in the way that non‑fiction writing like this is dishonest. I think of a photograph as an essay, a drawing as a story. Photographs and essays argue with time, they attempt to fix a moment of the real world in amber; drawings and stories are in time, they acknowledge the fleeting nature of their voices. They admit and celebrate their own subjectivity and mortality. A photograph seeks to control the frame, Jennifer Mills Jennifer Mills Dear Jennifer