In optics, the lens closest to the subject is known as the ‘objective.’ With it, might we openly approach a foreign culture, or unmask memory?

Christopher Köller was born in England on 9 September 1943 at Rossington, Yorkshire. While still a child he emigrated to Australia in 1952, where he trained as a screen-printer. Inspired by the Beat writers with an irresistible wanderlust, he left Melbourne to travel extensively throughout the late 1960s and 1970s.

He returned to Australia to enrol in photography in 1978 at Prahran College under Athol Shmith and John Cato. I remember him there as excitable and mercurial and harbouring a metallic glint of provocative irony.

Eva Collins in The Age, 15 April 2005, provides further illumination of his personality;

“Chris Koller races against time. His speech is faster than the speed of sound; he probably sleeps standing up to get a head-start in the morning. Is this to compensate for being held back as a child? Nothing, except his mother’s love, was handed to him on a platter. Everything he’s achieved was earned through hard work and by sharpening his survival skills.

“His keen observations of the world started in 1946, when, aged three, Koller contracted a serious bone disease in his foot. He spent the next 18 months in a hospital in his native England. He doesn’t remember the treatment, but he clearly remembers the austerity of the place. His mother was only allowed to visit him for an hour a week, and the windows in the ward were always left open “to let the weather in”, no matter how cold it was outside.”

Noting his statement that “I’ve always been fascinated by people’s aberrant behaviour,” Collins wonders “whether that fascination started in the days when he lay in a cold metal bed standing on a fastidiously polished linoleum floor in the well-aired institution.”

Fellow Prahran alumnus Geoff Strong on the event of the death of their lecturer in 2011, quoted Köller as saying he believed John Cato’s greatest gift to his students was his encouragement to debate their own work;

“He was a great enthusiast for the medium and you couldn’t fool him with superficial work. He could see through bullshit.”

Graduating in 1980 with participation in a group show by the College students at Bill Heimerman and Ian Lobb‘s The Photographers’ Gallery in nearby Punt Road, he left to live and photograph in Japan from 1983-4, when he and his then partner Nanette Carter, an earlier 1970s graduate of Prahran, successfully held a show of their Australian work at Gallery Dot in Kyoto.

Köller’s fascination with Japan began before his visit in 1982, through personal connections and friendships formed during travels in 1975 and in teaching conversational English in Kyoto. Köller explored bonsai and dedicated his free days to photography, breaking a two-year hiatus; “I came to the point where I had nothing else to talk about and I didn’t take any photographs for two years. . . . So I lived in Japan and then I started to read and set things up.”

He describes his “preoccupation with, and attempts to understand, an alien culture and thinking.  My…purpose in my mind is not to document ‘objective’ thinking.” He remembers that “I read a lot of Japanese novels by Kōbō Abe and by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and also by Yukio Mishima and I would get ideas from there.”

On return, Köller firmly established his artistic credentials with a photographic series he brought back; Zen Zen Chigau, which translates as ‘completely and totally different,’ reflecting a deliberate rejection of cliché depictions of temples, cherry blossoms, and geishas. Their carefully staging only hints at a narrative and so teased Australians’ preconceptions of an enigmatic Japan and anxieties about its global economic and political power then at issue, as China’s are now.

Exhibited at the Photographers’ Gallery 13 October – 4 November 1984, it elicited an exuberant response from Bernie O’Regan in the Australian Centre for Photography Photofile magazine,  describing his ‘abundant pleasure’ in Zen Zen Chigau as

“both anticipated and unexpected … a reader’s Japan – the fantastic Japan of myth, philosophy, literature, film – it’s a Japan of the imagination”

Through twenty-three black-and-white photographs viewers accumulate impressions acquired by Köller, who lived in Kyoto for nineteen months, of Japanese novels, television, war history, news stories, and encounters with people, creating a conflicted but allusive portrayal of Japan.

His image of three schoolgirls is uncanny for its imposing an ambiguous point-of-view in which we question whether the girls join hands on a stage, or have tumbled onto hard ground from which the tattered photographer’s background paper cruelly offers no protection. They hint at hyped western mythologies of Japanese suicide cults and sado-masochism. Though Köller doesn’t specifically mention the influence of unique qualities of Japanese photography, the echoes of surrealist artists like Shōji Ueda and a certain visual choreography are certainly present in his imagery.

Indeed, Melissa Miles in her essay “Personal connections and global relations: Staging ‘Japan of the imagination’ in the 1980s” in Capture Japan (Bloomsbury) edited by Marco Bohr and released in 2023, identifies as particularly notable in the series an image inspired by the infamous crime of Sagawa Issei, a student who murdered and cannibalised his classmate in Paris.

Miles remarks that Köller’s approach to this subject involved stripping back the narrative to its visual bare minimum, a strategy received from Francis Bacon’s take on modernism, so that the series’ carefully refined tableaux, enacted by his friends and students, navigate complex themes through visual storytelling.  Miles considers that a particular value of the series is its wider geopolitical ramifications, challenging stereotypes and inviting viewers to engage with the riddles of Japanese culture.

Andrew Stephens in The Age as late as 2008 comments that Köller has long been exploring the seductiveness of the film still and cinema’s appeal to “collective imagination” and that his next series Before the Winter Gardens of 1988 “read as if they are bona fide film stills plucked, perhaps, from a Michelangelo Antonioni film. Or there is the Milano series (1999) that is also deeply cinematic, paying homage to other directors.”

Over 11 Mar–10 Apr 1988 Köller joined several Prahran graduates and lecturers, including Robert Ashton, Nanette Carter, John Cato, Paul Cox, Janina Green, Bill Henson, and Carol Jerrems, in the survey The Thousand Mile Stare at The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), a Victorian Centre for Photography (now CCP) bicentennial project showcasing photographic practice from the previous 25 years.

From 1 January 1992 Prahran Fine Art, under Gareth Sansom, was relocated and amalgamated with the Victorian College of the Arts, where the next Dean of Art was American-born William Kelly. As the VCA was not split into departments, it was the Prahran heads who were given the role in several cases, but as Cato had retired at the end of 1991 Christopher Köller, who then was teaching at Photography Studies College, applied and was made head of VCA’s new department of Photography. Eva Collins provides an insight into his approach in mentoring students at Victoria’s major art school was “to encourage students to follow their own voice’;

“I don’t believe in gurus; I don’t believe that there is this one person who knows it all and passes his so-called wisdom on to his disciples. I don’t want clones of myself – I want students to follow their own path. Technique isn’t something stressed at the school; it should be utilised to materialise the concept.”

While managing the course at the VCA, Köller completed a Master’s Degree in Fine Art at RMIT University in 2002 and remained at the Victorian College of the Arts until 2009, leaving to concentrate on his own practice.

Köller produced regular solo exhibitions of his photographs, installations and video works in various Australian cities and in Japan, England, Spain and Mexico, and joined group shows in France, Italy, Spain, and throughout Australia.

Engaging in a diverse range of media, he experiments with equipment and processes. In his photography he has used a vintage Diana camera, produced in the 1960s-70s in China and wholesaling at US$0.50c, which cost him $A7.00;

He thus creates a sensory immersion while at the same time holding viewers at a temporal and psychological remove from in the subjects and scenes. The result is a dreamlike nostalgia, or shared ‘false memory’.

Killing Time: A Video Retrospective was a curation by Amelia Douglas of Köller’s grainy, low-fi, single-channel camcorder videos of 2002–2009 shown at KINGS ARI, Melbourne over October 1-23 2010. In a panorama of sex, death, golf, and surfing, the exhibit introduced an array of nonconformist characters, ranging from sock fetishists to poets, film-noir figures and Japanese surfers inhabiting landscapes both historically loaded and poetically charged. The videos weave around both tangible and imagined social boundaries to illuminate the regulation and scrutiny of human behaviour and highlight the fragility of such constraints of societal control. The protagonists acts in escaping hegemonic judgments and mundane routines provocatively suggest that normality is a construct that incites dissent. In a nod to his professional past, and expressly for this exhibition, Köller produced a new, limited-edition screen-print.

Christopher Köller – A Time To Die [2005] from Christopher Köller on Vimeo.

In another creation, A Time to Die (2005), Koller delves into a fascination with film noir by reimagining three death scenes from his favorite films: The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), and The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946) by presenting the death scenes from the perspective of the person dying, departing from the typical vantage points of the disembodied spectator or the roving camera eye, defying the conventional cues of traditional filmmaking.

Köller’s work spans a wide array of subject matter, encompassing the politics of urban space in cities like Melbourne, Mexico City, and Milan, as well as exploring historic garden design, former children’s holiday camps from Italy’s fascist era, and the radical post-war architecture of Giancarlo de Carlo. Throughout, Köller infuses his chosen scenes with a moody ambiguity that invites multiple interpretations and readings over time.

The Visual Arts Board has awarded Köller two grants and he has been accepted for four residencies, the most recent being in Barcelona in 2008. Köller’s work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the City of Monash, Griffith University, the Bibliotheque Nationale of France and the Sata Corporation Collection, Tokyo.

His work is represented in both private and public collections in Australia and abroad including the NGA, the NGV, AGWA, Griffith University, MAPh and the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris. His portrait of ceramic artist Janet Beckhouse featured in MAPh’s celebrated ‘100 Faces’ exhibition in early 2023.

[Note: This is a repost from the blog prahranlegacy.org on Australian photographers, their education during the 1960s and 1970s at Prahran College in Melbourne, and their subsequent diverse and successful careers in the medium.]