Contemporary Australia: Women

117 Therese Ritchie’s portrait photographs are mostly of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, particularly Darwin, where Ritchie has lived since the early 1980s. They are often titled using the sitter’s name, clearly identifying them as individuals. However, her works in ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ are far from ‘straight’ portrait photography. As a non-Indigenous woman with substantial social ties to various Indigenous groups in the Top End, Ritchie stands at a crossroads between black and white Australia. She has a far deeper understanding of the contemporary lives of the traditional custodians of the Northern Territory than those who journey north on short vacations or business trips; consequently, her images convey truths of life in this ‘frontier’ society. With her long-term collaborators at Green Ant Research Arts and Publishing in Darwin, Chips Mackinolty and Peter Cooke, Ritchie has spent decades working with these communities to address Indigenous health care, education, economic reform, employment and land rights. She focuses particularly on aspects of Aboriginal health, creating graphic imagery for community health poster campaigns to increase awareness of problems such as chronic renal failure in Indigenous communities. Ritchie’s interest in generating social, economic and political reform is at the core of her work, but her images are not those of a dispassionately analytical ‘straight’ photographer. Nancy and Kathleen 2011 is a double portrait of two elderly women who live in an aged care facility in Darwin. In a caption with the photograph, Ritchie notes: Nancy is the last living survivor of the Channel Island Leprosarium and the beginning of the history of Aboriginal Health Workers. Kathleen Vigona was stolen from Tennant Creek and brought to the Tiwi Islands. Kathleen and Nancy are inseparable. They call themselves ‘the coloured girls’. 2 Behind their age-worn, slightly quizzical yet serene faces, a deserted beach recedes into a stormy sea. Something about the light emanating from the women’s faces tells us they belong to a different time and space than this landscape. In a technique common to much of her work, Ritchie has used Corel Painter and Photoshop software to collage their faces against a photograph of a coastal landscape, one of their favourite picnic sites. Similarly, in Jeannie Kandiwirri, Church Camp (from ‘You know me’ series) 2011 3 , a woman squints out at the viewer, her hands raised to shield her face from the light. The background landscape of windswept trees and storm clouds is contextual, but not synchronous, with the portrait. Donald, Coles, Alice Springs 2011 is from a series taken during four days Ritchie spent in Alice Springs, getting to know locals at a shopping mall. As with all her portraits, she received her subject’s permission to take his photo, and paid him a fee for his time. Donald’s hands are clasped and his melancholy gaze is directed ‘off camera’, somewhere above Ritchie’s lens. His T-shirt shimmers with different coloured greens, almost like army camouflage, but the various patches are nuances of light rather than tone. To one side, a man and woman peddle bicycles in the supermarket carpark, reminiscent of a William Eggleston photograph of suburban life in small town America. However, Donald himself exists in a completely different register — not one of the random, even insignificant, instant, but a temporal register characterised by contemplation and reflection. Like many of her works, Our organs are Sacred 2011 features clear evidence of digital manipulation. In a scene borrowed from colonial artist John Glover (1767–1849) the central female figure, Jean Herbert Nungarrayi, stands in a coastal landscape of red earth and blue water, with six arms, each pointing at (or conjuring, perhaps) an organ — heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas. Each healthy organ sprouts a small flower and emanates a golden glow. The image carries echoes of the iconography of various faiths — Hindu depictions of the many-armed gods Shiva and Kali; or, in the Christian tradition, of paintings of the Virgin and the Sacred Heart, or early Renaissance depictions of the Passion of Christ. 4 Perhaps in this image we most clearly see the ‘painterliness’ of Ritchie’s photographs: highlights pick out the folds in the woman’s skirt, Therese Ritchie Australia b.1961 Pamela (from ‘You know me’ series) (detail) 2011 Inkjet print 50 x 140cm Therese Ritchie Therese Ritchie Photography at the crossroads 1