Pictograms: Aspects of Contemporary Photographic Practice

About the exhibition
Pictograms brought together the work of nine artists working across photography, including with colour laser prints and slide installations. The exhibition focused on non-representational and non-narrative practices—areas of artistic inquiry that curator Helen Ennis identified as particularly vital in the early 1990s.
Challenging conventional expectations of photography’s documentary function, the exhibition concentrated on images that, by turns baffling and intriguing, resist easy interpretation.

Highlights included Geoff Kleem’s elegant photographs of abandoned factories, which presented as open signifiers; David Stephenson’s minimal colour landscapes of Antarctica—described by the artist as evoking ‘the total alien strangeness of the view, unlike anything one has ever encountered’; and Graeme Hare’s abstract imagery, foregrounding colour, texture and form over representational content.

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^{Image: Sue Ford, Yellowcake 1992, colour laser prints, 178 x 421 cm (overall). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased 1992}