This post marks ten years—a decade—of onthisdateinphotography.com! There’s no better way to celebrate it than to consider progress on a new Australian institution devoted, as is this blog, to photography…

Vanessa Gerrans, Ballarat International Foto Biennale CEO, was the guest of Ballarat Arts Alive at its latest Arts Chat session, speaking on the new National Centre for Photography in Ballarat, in a meeting I attended at Craig’s Hotel in the provincial city yesterday.

In a voice clear, calm and steady over the music loudly emanating from the neighbouring bar, Vanessa discussed the relationship of the Ballarat International Foto Festival and the National Centre for Photography. Given its name, a main remit of BIFF is to invite international exhibitors whose work is a major feature, recruitment of whom will resume when the northern hemisphere returns from summer holiday, but the Centre will concentrate on Australian creatives.

An early question of Vanessa was “why would a ‘national centre’ not be hosted in Canberra?” In reply she noted that it is not unusual overseas for such organisations to be provincial, giving as an example the  Rencontres d’Arles, which has run since 1970 in the coastal Mediterranean city in Provence, in the south of France. There are many others: the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford UK; The Center for Creative Photography (CCP) in Tucson, Arizona, USA; The George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York, USA; Musée National de la Photographie, Rabat/Salé, in Morocco; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur Switzerland; Château d’Eau, Toulouse, France.

To our surprise Vanessa related that there is still a lot of debate with government departments about whether photography warrants its own space. Australia hosts a network of national bodies, highly influential state institutions, and dedicated creative programs that champion specific medium-based practices such as cinema, multi- or screen-media, printmaking, sculpture, and painting, and many intentionally exclude photographic arts, among which we can count the Contemporary Art Society branches in each state, Screen Australia, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), Australian Cinematographers Society (ACS), The Sculptors Society (TSS), the NGA Sculpture Garden, the Australian Ceramics Association, the Aboriginal Art Association of Australia (AAAA), Victorian Artists’ Society and the Art Society of Tasmania, and also—though more accepting of photo-derived media—the Australian Print Workshop (APW) and the Print Council of Australia Inc. (PCA).

There was an Australian Centre for Photography, now subsumed into Sydney’s Powerhouse around which controversy arose regarding Powerhouse Parramatta’s stewardship of Australian photography.  There is distrust of the NSW state-owned institution’s ability to preserve the independent legacy of the defunct Australian Centre for Photography (ACP). When the Powerhouse (Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences) acquired the ACP’s $1.6 million fund and archive in October 2022 to form Powerhouse Photography, the move was marketed as a grand rescue mission. However, it sparked intense skepticism within the arts community regarding whether a massive, highly politicized state apparatus could replicate the grassroots, artist-centric care once provided by the ACP, though that too was not free of perceptions that it was too Sydney-centric. The existence of the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) prompts some to question the need for a National Centre for Photography, though the former is specifically a museum and the Centre is, unlike MAPh, not a repository for a collection. Other state organisations remain; the Centre for Contemporary Photography clings bravely on in Melbourne, the Perth Centre for Photography (PCP) in Fremantle, and despite funding cuts and having held no shows this year, the Queensland Centre for Photography which once published small but lavish catalogue that I still treasure. There are no such organisations in Tasmania, the Northern Territory or South Australia.

The building

The organisation purchased the bank building in 2018 through funds from three philanthropic donations, and then, in 2021, received a state government grant of $6.7 million. Pro bono designs envisaged knocking down the rear building of the two three-story buildings on the site.

Having moved to Ballarat in mid-2022, after seven years as the Warrnambool Art Gallery director, Vanessa joined BIFB at a pivotal moment: to finish off the construction and to open the National Centre. A conservation management plan meant they weren’t able to demolish that back building as it is strictly heritage-listed. Consequently they’re delivering only the ground floor, because it’s taken half of the budget needed to finish the two upper levels.

The National Centre will be open in time for the Festival next year, which Vanessa is thinking of naming  ‘Reflex’, with reference to ‘single-lens reflex’, mirrors, doubles, twins, and chemical mix ups, in the hope of changing the look and feel of the Festival and expanding possibilities for people to interact through the Open Program, differently from what it was last time and the time before that.

The  first major exhibition will be a First Nations show with about eight artists in that space curated by a First Nations curator or co-curators, its concept still under discussion. That first exhibition will be August/September, next year. Before that, they’ll do pop-ups and activations.

I summarise here Vanessa’s discussion with the nine attendees:

The organisation faced considerable building and construction challenges due to strict heritage constraints on the two distinct three-story structures. Originally scheduled to open in January, the project has faced extensive delays. They are currently fixing a concrete floor that had a gradient error. Heritage Victoria wouldn’t permit demolition of the rear building in Bath Lane, so the entire plan had to be completely redesigned due to budgetary constraints, and consequently the opening will be phased, with only the ground floor being first. Finishing the upper two levels will require raising an additional $14.7 million.

The building is a maze of spaces large and small. The original bank vault remains intact (measuring roughly 3 by 3 meters), with another vault upstairs. The upper floor contains the former bank manager’s residence with fireplaces, a kitchen, and a window featuring graffiti scratched into it by the manager’s daughter, Winnie in 1886

To comply with Heritage Victoria rules to keep a heavy, dismantled fireplace they couldn’t store, workers interred it in the floor underneath the new toilets—complete with instructions on how to reassemble it.

During required archaeological digs, teams missed a massive 3×4 metre operational underground brick cistern, a vital piece of water infrastructure from Ballarat’s 19th-century gold rush, which sits between Craig’s Royal Hotel (originally built in 1853 as Bath’s Hotel by Thomas Bath, after whom the lane is named) and the Centre entrance.

When uncovered it was holding 18,000 litres of water. Inconveniently it was situated right where the main entrance to the Centre will be with its all-access ramp for which there is no space at the former main Lydiard Street entry. The cistern once served a gold smelter behind, and serving, the bank. It has since been pumped out, filled with stabilising sand, and covered over, as plans to make it a feature, lit up and under a trafficable glass cover, proved unfeasible.

Ethos

In broadening the creative identity of the Centre the organisation identifies more than  “just photography” expanding it to include all visual imaging and lens-based culture. This expanded scope incorporates everything involving light, including the medium’s digital evolution, gaming platforms, and VR environments beyond still photography.

To avoid redundancy the venue is “future-focused” and will complement Ballarat’s existing assets; they explicitly want to avoid duplicating the Art Gallery of Ballarat’s permanent collection or Sovereign Hill’s historical storytelling. It will encourage interactivity to make it a creative space for artists and communicators, with an inviting  “clubhouse” atmosphere for which a kitchen, a big hot-desk workspace with Wi-Fi, media labs, and photo darkrooms are in planning for the next stage of building.

Upcoming Programming & Activations

The first major official exhibition will be an August/September 2027 First Nations show featuring probably eight artists and led by an Indigenous curator, while the very first opportunity for the public to enter the space will be for a youth photography prize exhibition later in September. This event showcases the work of 13 local teenagers (aged 14 to 17) from their “Group Photo” program. Ahead of full operations, and as an attraction to audience and recruitment of members, the aim is to install a public photo booth inside the old bank vault and open the ground floor on weekends (Friday–Sunday) as funding allows.

The building features a dramatic three-story void space behind its glass facade that incorporates the freestanding brick facade of the rear building, which was preserved at great cost. The centre plans to utilise this for rolling program of commissions for large-scale hanging works, starting with a banner by controversial winner of the 2017 Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture, Justine Varga. Results of her experiments with aging  photographic imagery through aeons in a particle accelerator, will be displayed.

In sympathy with Varga’s unconventional approach, for the upcoming Foto Festival, plans include running a “film soup” workshop where film is cooked and cross-processed in cocktail mixtures put together by a mixologist. The process, from bar to darkroom, would be to have the mixologist craft a specific liquid cocktail, carefully balancing temperature (hotter liquid alters film faster but can completely melt the emulsion if unchecked), in which exposed (or unexposed) film is submerged  from a few minutes to several days. The film is then thoroughly rinsed in water to stop the reaction and remove sticky sugars. The souped film would then be cross-processed (e.g., developing E-6 slide film in standard C-41 colour negative chemistry) to maximise colour shifts. Photographers and their audience could then enjoy the effect while sipping the original cocktail…drinking-in the image!

Planning is underway  to launch a membership-tier salon series featuring intimate discussions between photographers and designers. They also intend to leverage visiting international Festival talent for unannounced, casual drop-in events, and the Centre will partner with the Prahran Legacy group on a publication initiative where members can have a limited selection of their own portfolio and projects printed and archived by the National Centre, and when 100 have been produced, they will be boxed up and sold in the Centre’s shop. This is envisaged as an alternative to an archive or collection, which the centre will not be able to house due to a potential overlap with the collecting initiatives of MAPh and the Ballarat Gallery and because space and staffing constraints would not permit proper management and access for such a collection.

Watch this space!