While such people still existed before the journalistic profession was decimated then outsourced to AI, Greg Neville was an art critic. He specialised in reviews of mostly Australian photography through the late 1980s and into the 1990s.

Since my current interest is Prahran College photography of the pivotal 1960s and ’70s, it is relevant to note that its graduates were among those subject to his judgement; Jacqueline Mitelman, Julie Millowick, Christine Adams, Robert Ashton, myself, Christopher Köller, Bill Henson, Carol Jerrems, and those of the 1980s and ’90s; Rozalind Drummond, Claudia Rossi, Linda Jullyan, Polly Borland, Polly Borland, and Susan Fereday; and also College lecturer John Cato’s last major show Double Concerto of 1991.

At twenty he enrolled at Prahran College in 1971 and rented a room—the servant’s quarters—in the grand Victorian mansion Labassa in Caulfield where he lived for a few years, amongst other Prahran art students including photographer Peter Johnson. There Neville, then aspiring to be a film director, collaborated with fellow resident Andrew Lemon in writing a script for an unrealised ghost film set at Labassa in which Judith Cordingley was a woman being haunted by ‘the heroine’ who suffocated under a pile of roses in mansion’s tower.

It is in his photography of his place of study that we see an early emergence of Neville’s fascination with the audiences and reception of art…

However Neville found that “the course was confusing, it was not well designed as a curriculum and many students never finished,” including himself. Greg’s imagery from the period reveals his talent; in Lindy Farrell can be discerned the germ of a lifelong fascination with trace and erasure.

He restarted his Diploma of Photography at Photography Studies College over 1980-84. That’s where, when I was a tutor at PSC, I met Greg doubling as the College’s technician, and he also served behind the counter of their shop selling film, paper and chemistry…and also delicious take-away made by his partner which sustained us in these late evening sessions after my day spent teaching at a secondary school.

A self-contained, but ever-curious individual, he pursues his passions with a forensic discernment, whether they be photography, architecture, Bauhaus graphics or Penguin book cover designers.

It was during his studies that Greg participated in his first group show in 1984 Four Photographers at La Camera, a Chapel Street, Prahran, restaurant. His contribution to the PSC Graduate show was reviewed by Beatrice Faust, whose impression was that his “gross colour enlargements of Barbie dolls and other gendered toys…show the sinister side of stereotyping. At larger-than-life-size and in brighter-than-life colour, we see how much humanity is left out of conventional femininity and how crudely the remnants are distorted.”

Greg expanded on those works in a show Sex and Identity that he curated at the then famous Rhumbarallas, a café with a separate gallery space in Fitzroy. Director Shukri Girgis was eager to show “gutsy, radical work” and booked shows only six-months ahead, unlike the 2-year calendar of most commercial galleries, in order to ensure the freshest offerings. Neville’s fellow exhibitors were Litsa Boswell, Claire Jackson. Rodney Kuna and Robert Preston, and as the curator his theme was “the trauma of alienation from the body; the conformism of sex stereotypes; and the pathological nature of many of our social traditions.”

Teresa Zolnierkiewicz in The Age of 13 June 1986, singled out Greg’s own “sinister” photographs of Barbie dolls through which

“Neville examines female conditioning and the pressure to be glamorous. He describes his photographs as ‘hyper-real and fetishistic’. Even the process of buying the dolls confirmed his idea that “the Barbie doll thing is perverse … I wanted to show how devious it (stereotyping) is and how that mechanism works.'”

Already in Sex and Identity Greg was advocating for photography as art, as he was to do in his role as an art critic;

“People deal with photography every day in newspapers and advertisements and as factual records, and many people tend to be blind to photography as an art form. When you say the word ‘art’ people think of paint. To a person who has graduated in fine art photography paint is an anachronistic medium. People should be encouraged to negotiate photography as a medium capable of fine art expression”

Leaving PSC in 1985, Greg worked freelance before following John Riches and Tony Perry as they ceded from PSC to ambitiously set up the Australian College of Art, Photography and Communication in 1987 in Oliver Lane, Melbourne, near Peter Barr’s studio Fotografitti in Flinders Lane where two other Prahran graduates, John Brash and Julie Millowick were then working.

In May he exhibited with other staff of ACPAC, Vince Dziekan, Tony Perry, Merryle Johnson, John Riches, James McArdle, Heather Telford and Greg Wayn, but when in November that year the benign Beatrice Faust, feminist author of Women, Sex and Pornography (1980) took leave from her role as reviewer of photography for The Age newspaper, Greg, who since 1985 had been presenting the weekly Talbot’s Box on 3CR community radio, took over the column until 1993. He first reviewed three shows on the theme of portraiture, revealing that he wasn’t going to pull punches and would deliver plenty of pithy, topical content within a few centimetres of newspaper column.

Prahran graduate Jacqueline Mitelman’s bicentennial series of Faces of Australia of earnestly posed “benign and sincere cultural heroes,” he conceded were “professional and respectable,” but dismissed them as being old-fashioned 1960s-style commercial portraits; while the messages conveyed by Anne Zahalka’s Resemblance I and Resemblance II, in which she set out to deconstruct the genre by inserting what he termed “young upwardly-mobiles” anachronistically into Renaissance interiors, he found too obvious, thus boldly positioning himself as a Melbourne critic who would not readily swallow the hype surrounding “that galaxy of rising stars – Ann Ferran, Jackie Redgate, etc, so carefully promoted by the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney.”

With a nod to her knowledge of the history of design and particularly the innovations of the Polish poster, Neville found 1985 PSC graduate Chris Barry’s cibachrome collages layering portraits of family members with paint or other photographs, which she titled Displaced Objects, an intriguingly enigmatic response to the migrant dislocation, though concluded that the energy of her works was ‘unfocused.’

Likewise, his assessment of Prahran College as it was represented in December 1988 at a show of its graduating students is of unrealised potential through a lack of ‘pressure’ being applied. In its favour he notes that there was no ‘house style’ apart from a tendency toward “prettiness;” “stylistic innovation without intellectual rigour.” Counting six institutions then teaching photography he noted that “several of the most active participants in the renaissance of art photography in the 1970s are now in influential teaching positions, John Cato at Prahran, Ian Lobb and Les Walkling at Phillip [Institute] and Tony Perry at ACPAC …now passing on their knowledge, and taste, to the new generation.”

Neville’s reviews serve not just to record individuals’ development but to track the standing of photography within the visual arts. In January 1991, he sums up a year in which it achieved greater prominence in Melbourne “blessed by the fact that the reductive theologies laying siege to photography, particularly in Sydney, have not really succeeded here.” He notes shows in the medium at Artist’s Space, Linden, and City Gallery, its breaching of the walls of citadels of fine art—John Buckley’s by-appointment only venue and Charles Nodrum’s—and the “long-awaited” opening of the Victorian Centre for Photography in Carlton premises lent [temporarily, at 671 Rathdowne Street, Carlton] by the Melbourne City Council and “showing a range of work mapping out the domain of serious photography, from traditional uses to cross-media work;” and the Waverley Centre gallery at Wheelers Hill which opened in June that year “in a grand new building designed by Harry Seidler” but limited by “a collection policy that apparently seeks to reassure rather than challenge the public’s notions of art and photography.” He does predict, correctly, that Waverley despite being 25km and more than 30 minutes drive from Melbourne CBD, would be an important venue; it is now The Australian Museum of Photography. He notes also that the National Gallery of Victoria’s then new director, James Mollison, had moved the photography exhibition space to greater prominence on the ground floor, and that curator Isobel Crombie had mounted;

“a series of mostly polished exhibitions that have helped to remove years of neglect. The most notable of these was the long awaited Athol Shmith retrospective [October 21, 1989 — January 21, 1990; he died in November 1990] an extremely well-curated event that met the public’s expectations head on and gave a clear outline to the life’s work of one of our cultural heroes.”

However his viewpoint became jaundiced in the face of “joyless” postmodernism, and his optimism about the VCP, where in 1992 he had curated Critic’s Choice, after it became the Centre for Contemporary Photography, was marred by its December 1993 group show Reflex curated by Stuart Koop, “who works there” which confirmed for Neville that it had become “the plaything of an inner circle” who were exhibitors in the show, including; “Susan Fereday, the centre’s director (not the first time her work has featured in a gallery event) and Les Walking, who has been involved in the centre’s committee.”

He managed to find a place on its walls, though only in its open “Kodak Salons” in almost every one from 2004 to 2013, winning ‘Best Use of a Found Photograph’ (the prize being a $100 gift voucher from the CCP shop), with 1931.

Called 1931 it is from a snapshot of his late mother, a schoolteacher, with her students in rural Victoria in 1931. The blurring creates a disturbing distorted skull form and becomes a plaintive, personal memento mori. The image emerged also from his continual occupation with the fragile nature of the photographic print as a bearer of memory.

An ongoing series deals with people’s encounters with art, shot in galleries in New York, San Francisco, Sydney and Melbourne. Greg understands that there are precedents; Elliott Erwitt’s 1999 Museum Watching and Tim Davis’s 2015 Permanent Collection, but brings his own perspective, not only in, as he says, seeking “odd behaviour, coincidences, moments…humour plus sociology,” but also his candid perception of critical response by audiences to art, as far as that can be conveyed visually. Amusingly, in some instances, it is the art that would appear to react to the gallery flaneur!

That his interest in aesthetic reception is deeper than Erwitt’s is evidenced in his review of the 1993 ‘Felix H. Man Memorial Prize’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, in which he confessed to having [at a separate Magnum exhibition] timed how long people spend in front of pictures, noting that “it varied slightly, but the average time was three seconds!”

Neville has exhibited continuously, most often in group shows and frequently with his students. He was invited to submit to Your Documents Please shown in eight venues internationally, curated from the work of 270 artists from across the world. They were to produce small artworks derived from passports, and like a passport, the exhibition travelled. He chose one of his series Fade; Polaroid transfers made from his own passports and ID cards, rubbed back almost to the point of erasure.

Professor Tim Flannery in his catalogue essay for Digital Art: The World of Alternative Realities (2017) at Justin Art House Museum in Prahran where he exhibited with Daniel Crooks, Paul Snell, Debbie Symons, Tim Maguire and others, remarked that; “Greg Neville’s Gooo-og manipulates an image from google earth to create an abstract image akin to the ornate stone inlay seen in some Indian temples.” In his essay for the work when previously exhibited at Tacit Gallery in Abbotsford, Melbourne, Sean Payne’s sage interpretation is illuminating;

“He treats the images as found objects, stitching them together, upending the usual orientations around a central point. The repetition of the technique is another step in Neville’s long-held interest in found images and in automatic processes of generating imagery, whose outcome is only partly directed or predictable.

“The matrix irresistibly evokes Persian carpets, and like a magic carpet, we use it to fly above the world through a virtual sky. Looking down, human concerns blur into abstraction, another detail in the landscape.

After the closure of ACPAC in the mid-1990s, Greg moved on to other teaching roles at Chisholm and Holmsglen TAFES and well before he retired, held positions concurrently as course organiser and lecturer in Photo Media at Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE and lecturer in design history at Grenadi School of Design, while completing a Master of Fine Art at Monash University in 2009.

[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.]