Tracey Moffatt

Australia in the 1980s—Who Could Represent Race and Gender, and How?

Moffatt grew up in Brisbane and studied film at the Queensland College of Art. She has worked concurrently in photography, short film, feature film, and video montage. Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, made in 1989, screened in the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival.^*15From the late 1980s through the 1990s, feminism, postcolonial criticism, and debates over Indigenous imagery raised urgent questions about who photographed whom and which institutions circulated those images. The NGA notes that photography and performance became important means of examining gender in Australian art of the period.^*14The 1986 NADOC exhibition was among the first contemporary photography exhibitions devoted entirely to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander photographers, and Moffatt played a leading role in its organization.^*19As the 1988 Bicentenary, debates over the definition of urban Aboriginal identity, and protests over deaths in custody converged, photography was shifting from an ethnographic instrument that classified Indigenous people to a medium through which Indigenous artists staged and circulated their own images.

Why Staged Photography?—Reality Itself Is Understood Through Existing Images

Photojournalism conveys facts about discrimination, violence, and policy; autobiographical photography presents the maker’s experience directly. Viewers, however, understand those facts through roles and storylines learned from film, magazines, family photographs, and colonial imagery. Showing the photographed event alone leaves the image types that precondition its reception outside the frame. In a BOMB conversation with Coco Fusco, Moffatt describes building meaning from cinematic scenes and multiple references without presenting autobiographical facts as direct confession.^*12An NGA essay calls her staged images “believable fictions” and explains how glamour and clothing intervened in the politics of racial imagery.^*19The use of actors, costumes, cinematic lighting, and magazine-style captions recreates the familiar templates through which viewers interpret reality.

Something More—Creating Cinematic Gaps Across Nine Photographs

Something More, made in 1989, comprises six color and three black-and-white photographs.^*3A single emblematic photograph can fix the protagonist within familiar roles: Indigenous woman, provincial outsider, victim, or rebel. Moffatt separated nine scenes that suggest aspiration, sexual exploitation, violence, and death, leaving the beginning and ending open. MCA Australia explains that the nine images form an ambiguous narrative about hope being thwarted.^*3Colors and poses reminiscent of B movies, road movies, and pulp fiction prompt viewers to supply narratives of escape, social ascent, crime, and tragedy. The Art Gallery of New South Wales notes that each photograph implies an unwritten story and unsettles narrative convention.^*4Through the series, the stories viewers bring and the roles they assign the protagonist become part of the work.

Scarred for Life—How Magazine Photo Stories Shape Memory

Scarred for Life restages childhood incidents recounted by friends, combining images resembling Life magazine photo essays with short captions.^*7Monash University explains that scenes dated from 1956 to 1977 were reconstructed through period photographic techniques and magazine-like layouts, inserting familiar faces into a monocultural media space.^*7The text does not fully explain the image; it opens further questions. The Art Gallery of New South Wales likewise notes that the captions resist closure and locate enduring trauma in the distance between word and image.^*8

Up in the Sky—Refusing a Direct Reenactment of the Stolen Generations

Up in the Sky, made in 1997, is a twenty-five-image series photographed in a desolate town. A mixed-race infant, nuns, families, and the suggestion of violence appear in fragments.^*13The Art Gallery of New South Wales records Pasolini’s Accattone as a visual reference.^*5The series places conflicting narratives of pursuit, protection, abduction, and rescue alongside the history of Indigenous children being removed from their families.QAGOMA’s collection record identifies Up in the Sky as a portfolio of twenty-five photolithographs.^*6Because the work consists of twenty-five separate printed sheets, its sequence can be rearranged like fragments of a newspaper or film.

Film Stills, Hand-coloring, and Series—Separating the Work of Memory by Medium

Moffatt’s photographs have the force of individual large-scale works, but within a series, color and black-and-white, close views and distances, acting and empty landscapes alternate, asking viewers to supply missing scenes. The photographic sequence makes viewers use storylines learned from films and magazines as they imagine what came before and after the depicted events. AGSA holds multiple series—from Something More through Scarred for Life, Up in the Sky, Laudanum, and Invocations—confirming the sequence as a central form in her work.^*9Her video montages work differently, extracting embraces, insults, destruction, and other motifs from many films and turning individual plots into emotional repetition. The photographic series and the edited video distinguish between memories formed through missing scenes and those formed through recurring formulas.

Laudanum and Invocations—Translating Colonial Desire into the Gothic

Laudanum stages a nineteenth-century interior, relations between mistress and servant, drugs, and sexual domination in sepia-toned photographs. Invocations uses hand-colored photographs and images reminiscent of early cinematic effects; Matthew Marks Gallery introduced the work through its mixture of allegory, dream, and fear.^*18The body becomes the site where colonial power takes the form of fear and desire.

Montages—Extracting Emotional Scripts from Fragments of Existing Films

With Gary Hillberg, Moffatt made video montages including Love, Lip, and Doomed, extracting romance, dialogue spoken by Black women, and scenes of destruction from a vast range of films. The Whitney Museum presented these montages, alongside her photographs, as a central part of her critique of repeated cultural types.^*10Once the individual film narratives are removed, embraces, insults, and explosions appear as an emotional grammar learned through the culture industry.

Addressing Origin, Class, and Cinematic Fantasy at Once

Moffatt has been introduced internationally as an artist of Aboriginal heritage, while remaining wary of interpretations that reduce her work to an ethnic profile. The National Portrait Gallery records her role as a cofounder of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, a co-organizer of NADOC ’86, and the first Aboriginal artist to present a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2017.^*16Her works bring race, class, desire, and cinematic fantasy into the same scenes without fixing their characters as autobiographical stand-ins for the artist. Roslyn Oxley9’s artist materials likewise trace her engagement with race, gender, sexuality, and identity across photography, film, and video.^*17She acknowledges her background while resisting interpretations governed by a single biographical profile.

A Distinct Position Across Postmodern Photography and Film

Working alongside the staged photography of Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, Moffatt also challenged the premise that photographs directly record reality. Her sequences, however, tie Australia’s colonial history, Indigenous imagery, melodrama, and magazine culture closely together. In a conversation with Barbara London, she recalls Up in the Sky as a cinematic construction made from twenty-five photographs, clarifying its difference within the international field of staged photography.^*13MCA Australia’s collection of her photographs and films as one body of work also supports reading the still and moving images as equally central to her art.^*2

Producing Attraction and Fear Together—How the Critique Reaches Viewers

Saturated color, star-like poses, and cinematic lighting retain the appeal of the mass culture under scrutiny. In a Guardian interview, Moffatt said she becomes interested when an image grows a little frightening.^*11Removing attraction and leaving only a correct message would not explain why stereotypes recur. Her photographs make viewers experience both their own attraction and the violence carried by that desire.

Making Staged Photography a Meeting Point for Colonial Memory and Mass Culture

The staged photography of Cindy Sherman and others had shown that photographic personae are constructed roles. Moffatt directed this method toward the cinematic and magazine formulas through which Australian Indigenous imagery, class, care, and colonial memory had been understood. MoMA and MCA Australia collect her photographs, films, and montages as one body of work.^*1Photographic sequences ask viewers to supply missing scenes; video montages extract embraces, insults, and destruction repeated across many films. Together, these forms show colonial memory being made through mass-cultural repetition and viewers’ associations. AGSA presents Body Remembers as a ten-part series shown in Venice, indicating that the sequence remained central to Moffatt’s treatment of historical and bodily memory.^*20

The Role of Fiction Against Institutional Demands for Authenticity

Indigenous artists and women artists are often expected to speak directly and authentically for a community’s experience. Moffatt uses costumes, actors, cinematic lighting, and existing genres to create scenes in which multiple eras and memories overlap. The National Film and Sound Archive recognizes her Aboriginal and Irish Australian background while presenting her as an artist who challenges representations of race, gender, and history through film, photography, and video.^*15Fiction makes viewers aware that they understand lived experience through cinematic and magazine conventions. Omitted endings expose the familiar plots viewers bring to the work and challenge institutions that confine authenticity to a single mode of telling.