Mt Liebig, Northern Territory, 19741974
Jon Rhodes is a documentary photographer
and film-maker who has spent extended periods of time working with Indigenous communities around Australia. Rhodes’s work is primarily concerned with the physicality of place, and the way that people relate to the environment. Many of his photographs are portraits that locate his subjects in the landscape, but he also documents unpeopled landscapes and rural streetscapes. His photograph of Mt Liebig holds everything from the distant mountain range to the bushes at the photographer’s feet in focus. This has the effect of embedding the viewer in the scene, and emphasising that the landscape is environmental rather than picturesque.
Like many documentary photographers of his generation, Rhodes prints the frame of the film, which appears as a black edge around the image. This insists on the documentary veracity of the image – it has not been cropped – and also emphasises that the photograph is just one point of view on the world. Rhodes often likes to arrange his still images in series and sequences, allowing him to acknowledge movement and the passing of time. These sequences make human activity look capricious in contrast to the slow, almost imperceptible transitions of the physical environment.
(2014)
Gelatin silver prints are black-and-white photographic prints that have been created using papers coated with an emulsion of gelatin and light-sensitive silver salts. After the papers are briefly exposed to light (usually through a negative), a chemical developer renders the latent image as reduced silver, which is then fixed and washed. This technique was first introduced in the 1870s and is still used today. Most twentieth-century black-and-white photographs are gelatin silver prints. They are known for being highly detailed and sharply defined prints with a distinguishable smooth, even image surface.
