Up Close

Editorial

When: 31 July - 31 October 2010
Where: Heide III: Central Galleries, Heide Museum of Modern Art
Gallery admission: Adult $12, Senior $10, Concession $8, children under 12 and Heide members Free
Details: (03) 9850 1500

Despite her middle class upbringing, there was never anything middle-of-the-road about Carol Jerrems. She lived an artist's life - pushing the edges of society, forever questioning propriety in her work and life. Her friends often became her lovers, while she and her lover, filmmaker Esben Storm, were perhaps too tempestuously similar to be friends. The pair's turbulent relationship ended after numerous affairs and an attempt to work together on one of Storm's films.

While many photographers have the urge to capture society's frayed edges, few have the tenacity to cross the dangerous threshold and be where the action is. Like a war correspondent (and despite her inherent shyness) Jerrems spent her time in marginalised, precarious places. Making a film about the sharpie gangs of Melbourne she was bashed and - in her words - narrowly escaped rape. She filmed or photographed while the sharpie boys discussed gang bangs, drugs and violence, or drew straws for which of them would take her first. She stayed, fascinated by their utter lawlessness and hooked on getting the perfect image.

Her best known work - and most of her work is generally not well known except among photographers - is Vale Street (1975). Statuesque model Catriona Brown stands topless staring at the camera, while two banal and wiry sharpie teenagers, also topless, look dully and dangerously on from the shadows.

Jerrems' work is contextualised alongside that of other significant photographers from the 1970s and 1980s, particularly those who shared her interest in sub-cultures. William Yang's celebratory photographs depict the perilously marginalised Sydney gay scene (taken before the Mardi Gras was a cool excuse for a trip in from the suburbs). Work by New Yorkers Larry Clark and Nan Goldin is also displayed, including Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, made for Frank Zappa's 39th birthday party.

Carol Jerrems died aged 30 from a mysterious illness. Never one to shy from an opportunity she documented her own demise as her body wasted, capturing each slow step toward the one threshold her camera could not cross.

Robert Stevenson, Citysearch

Image Caption
Carol Jerrems
Vale Street 1975
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant, 1982
© Ken Jerrems & the Estate of Lance Jerrems